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Comment by browserman | Hacker News Reader

The most bizarre part of this whole saga has been the legions of online commentators who evidently take Elon at his word when he says he is trying operate in the public interest, or that his actual aims are what he says they are.

It seems patently obvious to me that all of the actions he's taken over the entire time he's been in the public eye have shown him to be an incredibly vindictive egomaniac and serial liar interested only in his own aggrandizement. I find the apparently deep well of credibility he has with the public to be completely baffling.

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> It seems patently obvious to me that all of the actions he's taken over the entire time he's been in the public eye have shown him to be an incredibly vindictive egomaniac and serial liar interested only in his own aggrandizement.

I still think the world, and the USA in particular, would be better with him at the helm than the current biased leadership.

Would be more fun too!

He's a vindictive egomaniac and serial liar with a sense of fun, a good dose of perspective, and a ton of panache. I might not trust him, but he's great entertainment.

I think people exaggerate about him way too much in each direction. He's not the smartest man alive, and he isn't a fraud on par with Elizabeth Holmes. He's a businessperson who's clever at times and childish at times, like most people. I have yet to see a politician or company head that is infallible. All that being said I don't think he'd make a great politician-- just because you're a brilliant engineer doesn't mean you're gonna know how to run a country

I think he appeals to the people who want him as a politician for the same reason Trump appealed to his supporters: they're dissatisfied with politics as usual, they want change at almost any cost, and he's a middle finger at the people they dislike. That's not good justification for a gamble with the whole country, but these people see it as time for a Hail Mary. Sometimes I feel that way too; then I put down my phone and take a walk.

This is very well said. People who can create a cult of personality and offer simple, but uselessly vague, solutions to complex problems are in vogue these days.

>Sometimes I feel that way too; then I put down my phone and take a walk.

Thats because you can. What about the people trapped in terrible dying towns with no prospects for the future? People whose friends and families are drowning with opioid addictions. People who twice voted for newcomers like Obama and are now considered racists/traitors for trying something...anything to stop the bleeding.

The US is currently run by vindictive egomaniacs and serial liars. At least Musk has a sense of fun!

How have you experienced bias from the current administration?

There's countless examples. A big one from the 2020 election was banning any organization that tweeted about (at the time candidate) Biden's son Hunter's infamous laptop: https://nypost.com/2022/03/18/how-big-tech-media-and-dems-ki...

Clearly that was bias to suppress negative information about potential corrupt dealings of Joe Biden's extended family and likely him as well.

A more recent cultural example would be banning the satirical website Bablyon Bee for a joke article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2022/03/21/the-babyl...

Because that contrasts with the leaderships own personal beliefs, jokes like that are a bannable offense. But, an equally crass joke about Lindsey Graham being a homosexual because of his accent by Jon Stewart would be perfectly fine: https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/politics/243250-why-...

So this affected you personally? You were banned from twitter?

Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.

>So this affected you personally?

I hate this line of reasoning, and I also hate that it's so prevelantly used in our legal system (we have a legal system, not a justice system FWIW). This same flawed line of thought has prevented lawsuits against the government for their illegal spying. Since "no one can prove they were harmed", and "proving you were harmed is against the law" we're stuck.

Consider the following: A pending meteor impact harms absolutely no one until right before it impacts and harms everyone.

I mean, yeah I can see that. That's an analogy you can make.

How did the administration force a private company to make a choice here? I'm not following that part.

How did our corrupt, evil government force XYZ to happen?

I’m sorry but your entire logical structure comes off as absurd to me.

We have a fundamentally evil and absurd government, and you’re asking me how anyone was “forced” to do anything? Really?

I'm appalled that more people aren't pissed the fuck off about the laptop story. It's literal election tampering, but no one gives a shit because it's their side.

We really are cheerfully walking ourselves straight into 1984.

>current biased leadership.

Instead the leadership would just be biased towards Elon's whims. It would definitely be entertaining, but I'm not sure why people assume it would suddenly be more free and open. He already blocks many who disagree with him. I doubt he would have let the kid stay on who was Tweeting his public jet movements.

Patently obvious? I think there are multiple plausible explanations. Building things people want gives credibility.

I find it more bizarre people have such passionate anger towards others.

I don't have 'anger' towards him, although I certainly have an opinion about whether he is trustworthy or genuinely civic-minded, as I do about many other incredibly powerful political-business operators who collectively set the terms of public life.

Of course, I'm also baffled that people credit him as being a 'builder' rather than an extremely successful marketer and financial engineer, especially at the expense of all the people who, you know, actually do the building...

You think he didn't build anything? He wrote the code for his first startup and is the Chief designer at SpaceX. Listen to some of his interviews, especially by everyday astronaut. He is indeed the Chief Deigner.

I don't think he is a good marketer - he is more middle of the road. I think people say that to discredit him. Have you watched any of his full length presentations. He is terrible. What he is good at is having a vision he believes in. He sells that well.

Musk is an engineer. That is just a fact about him. There are repeated comments to this effect from people who have worked with him, including famously well regarded engineers. If you watch his 3-part Starbase tour with Everyday Astronaut it is incredibly obvious. Some quotes to this effect, though certainly not all, have been collated at [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...

Do you think engineers are fundamentally/inherently "trustworthy or genuinely civic-minded"? If not, how does this concern browserman's point?

I was addressing the second paragraph, not the first.

The word "engineer" does not appear in browserman's post except to say Musk is one, and "builder" is not a synonym of "engineer".

Now this is just playing semantic games. Nobody has ever claimed Musk is building Tesla's cars or SpaceX's rockets by hand. Obviously those are built by the factories and the people employed their for that purpose.

There is no way browserman's point was legitimately something not contradicted by the quotes I linked.

> “He’s not afraid to get his hands dirty,” Mueller said. “He’s out there with his nice Italian shoes and clothes and has epoxy all over him. They were there all night and tested it again and it broke anyway.”

>Of course, I'm also baffled that people credit him as being a 'builder'

I'm on the other hand baffled that so many here are willing to spout off opinions like this without even so much as having listened to the man talk. He is _clearly_ an engineer's engineer.

This topic really highlights the people who form their entire mental model of reality around news headlines.

I agree that he is great at talking.

> Building things people want gives credibility.

nope, it generates hype. That's all there is.

Up until very very recently they were losing money on every car they made and only a pandemic killing enough factory workers worldwide to create shortages have they managed to break even. What Tesla made money on is regulatory credits.

A year ago

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a36266673/teslas-q1-2021-e...

> The company had an income of $438 million, including a $101 million "positive impact" from the sale of Bitcoin, and $518 million from selling zero-emission regulatory credits to other automakers. That means Tesla continues to lose money making and selling vehicles.

The Boring Tunnel Company barely have built anything and what they did build is a deathtrap.

Hyperloop is completely impossible.

SpaceX's Starlink satellites are involved in about 1,600 close encounters between two spacecraft every week, ~50 % of all such.

Also, Elon Musk already committed a federal felony as a twitter user and it is beyond bizarre he is a) not in jail b) allowed to bid on it.

>Also, Elon Musk already committed a federal felony as a twitter user

Surely he is innocent until found guilty. Just because you think he committed a crime doesn't mean he actually did.

You think he would've settled for $40mil and heightened personal scrutiny if he was innocent?

He talks about this in the latest TED talk. Supposedly banks were refusing to give Tesla loans unless he settled with the SEC

It's very surpring that he wouldn't admit being guilty and would find excuses instead :)

Yes, Elon was unlawfully pressured to settle with the SEC against his will or best interests.

At the time Tesla was in a "precarious" financial position with the Model 3 ramp up. The banks told Elon they would suspend his lines of credit/hold loans if he did not immediately settle with the SEC.

He chose to settle with the SEC and admit to lying when he did not in order to save Tesla from going bankrupt. All of this aligns with publicly known information.

If we lived in a functional open society this claim would result in a special counsel investigation into the SEC and the responsible banks, with multiple bureaucrats ending up behind bars.

It sounds like "the banks," who would be in an even more privileged position to know if the $420 offer was legitimately secured, also thought it was not. Doesn't really help Elon's case. It is also not the story he told in 2018 when he was still fighting the charges.

> a special counsel investigation into the SEC and the responsible banks, with multiple bureaucrats ending up behind bars.

lol

>It sounds like "the banks," who would be in an even more privileged position to know if the $420 offer was legitimately secured

Speculation. What's not speculation however is that the company suffered material harm as a byproduct of malicious prosecution.

If I, as a government employee, open a public investigation into someone whom I know to be innocent and cause that entity harm I have incurred liability. The SEC knew Elon had the funding, they used weasel words to imply he did not. The SEC would have lost in court. _All_ contracts have contingencies, this was no different. Saying that because a contingency existed the funds were "not secure" is horsecrap.

> The SEC knew Elon had the funding

Do you have proof - or even evidence - that Musk had funding, let alone that the SEC knew he had funding, other than Musk's own statements?

This is sort of exactly the thing I mean. Even if you don't agree with me that Elon is a serial liar, I don't think you can dispute a more generous characterization of him as having a long history of optimistically interpreting the facts in his favor. Why on earth would you take this claim at face value?

Why on earth would you believe an industry that’s committed to serial mistruth?

Reuters today disgraced themselves, it’s beyond embarrassing.

People settle all the time even if they are innocent. There are a variety of reasons such as the cost of the lawsuit and the negative press from the trial.

>Up until very very recently they were losing money on every car they made

For others in the crowd, this phrase is extremely useful for spotting a short seller (or someone who was primarily influenced by the short-n-distort crowd from 2016-2019).

This statement is a lie, and was never true. Every car Tesla made was produced and sold at a profit. Their high margins fed crazy growth. You can only get to these bullshit statements by counting their reinvestment into factories as "loss".

For example:

-Make car for $40k

-Sell for $50k

-$10k/per car profit

-Make $xM in profit from cars for that quarter

-Raise $1B to grow based on the above

-Spend some of that $1B on factories, such that the total spent of that $1B is more than $xM

-Short n Distort campaigners argue that because you spent more than you made, you are "losing money on every car".

I never ever trade individual stocks , that's not for ADHD people. My savings rest in unmanaged index funds.

Musk has a long history of just saying what he means. He often fails to deliver on things that were too ambitious, or pivots to better ideas in time, but that's entirely different than what you are suggesting.

He has a long history of outright lies that he presents as visionary ambition. For example, at the time he was promising that Tesla's with full self driving, available one year from then, would act as robotaxis and bring their owners enough money to recoup their investment in a year, he was obviously lying through his teeth - he knew full well that nothing like that will ever happen.

Similarly, his lies about starship being used as an earth-to-earth mass transportation system are equally transparent.

Not to mention the time he lied about financial plans for Tesla with the express purpose of manipulating the stock price, such as the Twitter thread that cost him his nominal role as chairman of the board.

I'm not a fan of Elon Musk, but I think his greatest flaw is hubris. I don't think he was consciously lying about things like Tesla FSD. I think he thought he would actually do it in the time he predicted but he overestimated his own abilities and domain knowledge.

Having said that, after so many past exaggerations one would hope he would have more self-awareness by now. I guess not.

> I think he thought he would actually do it in the time he predicted but he overestimated his own abilities and domain knowledge.

If he truly believed that a Tesla would recuperate its value in one year by the profit it would make as a robotaxi, he wouldn't have sold any Teslas, as they would make MUCH more money by running a robotaxi fleet than by selling cars.

You're not totally wrong here. However the same is true of computers - a computer "fleet" makes much more money than the profit on the components, but Intel is not out there operating AWS-style datacenters.

I think there's such a thing as "core competency". It's possible that Musk views Tesla's core competency as building vehicles and vehicle software, not running a logistics-heavy operation like a robot taxi fleet.

That strategy gives you better margins. It doesn't give you better revenue or profits. The biggest problem Tesla had as a fledgling car company was cash flow, and the solution to that is scale and sales. FSD can be converted to immediate revenue by just charging for it, which is more cash-flow efficient than running a centralized taxi service. They have announced they have a dedicated rideshare vehicle in the works, and it's likely something of that nature was always in the works.

Underestimating the complexity of autonomous cars, overestimating his abilities and domain knowledge, continuous lying about it (even if not consciously) sound pretty stupid to me. Like, textbook Dunning-Kruger.

The most bizarre part of this whole saga has been the legions of online commentators who appear to be persistently outraged, say they will leave Twitter if Elon buys it. It amounts to throwing a childish temper tantrum in my book. Free speech doesn’t mean one side gets to decide what’s speech.

For years liberal billionaires have been buying traditional media (newspapers), but as soon as Elon who slightly offends their political and personality identity attempts to buy what is currently relevant media they lose their minds. Smell that hypocrisy?

“Free speech” can have a few meanings.

There's the 1A one, where the government isn't to restrict your speech, and you can argue about absolutism (fire in a theater, etc.)

And there's the suggestion everyone should get a free platform, and suffer no consequences for whatever they say. In other words, acting like a ten year old (or not even that. Some 10yo are much smarter than that, and realize their acts have consequences)

Nobody is suggesting you shouldn't have consequences for what you say. People are saying you shouldn't be banned for things that legal.

Fire in a crowded theater, xenophobic comments to a trigger happy crowd…

I'm not sure what are you getting at?

Is that not a consequence? Private business and all that

I think everyone should leave Twitter whether Elon buys it or not. It's a platform that often amplifies people's worst tendencies. Changing how much free speech Twitter allows won't change that.

It's rare, but not new; Steve Jobs was also worshipped as some kind of infallible God-King. It seems to me there is a lot of overlap between their two flocks.

What lies? Let's iterate through them.

If you're referring to the funding secured thing, that was true. Watch his TED talk from yesterday where he explains that he was forced to concede by the SF SEC.

"L5 autonomy by the end of the year" (since 2019 or so)

By this logic, every company that fails to meet its goals is a liar.

Repeatedly, with a background of stock manipulation, yes.

Elon's "fans" are legion, and are not driven by logic.

Where are they? I see them failed against multiple times a day, but only see the complaints about them, and not the actual subject of those complaints.

I'm an Elon fan. I keep trying to buy SpaceX stock (it's privately held) and don't even care if I lose the money. I just want to be part of the action.

Thankfully the same SEC hellbent on taking down Tesla is protecting you from investing in SpaceX!

You sound fairly rational to me. Do you, in fact, worship the ground he walks on?

>> It seems patently obvious to me that all of the actions he's taken over the entire time he's been in the public eye have shown him to be an incredibly vindictive egomaniac and serial liar interested only in his own aggrandizement.

Sounds remarkably like Jack Dorsey.

I want the zealots at Twitter who don’t believe in free speech to leave.

Musk is right on this one, I hope he succeeds in taking it over.

HN also has fairly strictly enforced guidelines. Do you think dang et. all 'don't believe in free speech'?

A lot of people here on HN are anti free speech.

I'm not who you are responding to, but I think it is a different scenario.

HN has a very specific and limited topic range that is allowed and documented. There is some subjective things in what is allowed, but it is generally understood. People are not complaining about that. Nobody is suggesting HN should allow general sports news for example.

Twitter on the other hand is a general forum and so it should allow a broad amount of topics. If Twitter was a specific and targeted platform for cat pictures nobody would have an issue if they banned politics.

This is not even about the topics. HN has very clear moderation rules about tone of comments for example, rules against astro-turfing, rules about accusations of astro-turfing, and many others. Comments have to be substantive, otherwise they are voted down. Comments must not encourage flame-bait, otherwise they are removed.

HN is very highly moderated and you could even say tone-policed, and that is a major part of why many of us here like it.

Even Hacker News restricts abusive behavior, whether or not it's technically on topic. There are limits above and beyond an acceptable range of topics. Maybe I could get away with more here than Twitter, but not all behavior is permitted.

"Free speech" as in no restrictions, and if Twitter gets overrun with spam and child porn then so be it? I suspect that you (and Musk) actually do want some restrictions, just different ones than Twitter currently has.

He's gotten results where others have provided only talk.

You see this sort of comment a lot.

It's a non-sequitur that seems the be the answer to any criticism of Musk and his actions.

He's built an electric car company and cheap reusable rockets. Nobody else has.

What have his critics accomplished?

Yep, that's the one I was thinking of. The guy I replied to was a weaker version of it but yours is essentially canonical.

Elon Musk has a cult of followers. Obviously SpaceX and Tesla have done incredible things but it doesn’t justify blindly following whatever Elon wants to do.

Honestly the hardcore Elon orthodox is annoying. It reminds me of the obnoxious atheist who has to always tell everyone how wrong and dumb they are. It only detracts positive outcomes and causes more resistance.

> it doesn’t justify blindly following whatever Elon wants to do.

Actually, it does. When someone starts multiple impossible companies, and makes big successes out of them, it's not random chance anymore. I'm willing to bet on the man.

Bill Gates pivoted Microsoft 3 times, each time led to orders of magnitude increases in the company's value. 3 times is no longer chance, it's the man.

Ditto for Steve Jobs.

So Elon Musk is gospel, no skepticism towards any decision he makes. Sorry, I can’t get on board with this, it’s fanaticism.

Let's take Michael Jordan. He wins 3 seasons of basketball in a row. Would wanting him playing on your team be good sense, or fanaticism?

My bets on Gates, Jobs, Bezos, and Musk continuing to be winners has so far paid off.

Hell yes I’d want him on my basketball team. Do I want Michael Jordan dictating a social media platform that has influence over the world? I don’t know?

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