I think that Musk has an evolved version of Jobs' reality distortion field. The cult of personality is more important than the actual output and he is definitionally "cool" to his followers.
Pretty much everybody I know loves SpaceX and the technology and doesn't give a shit about US politics or the SEC or whatever other crap people in the US get worked up about.
I don't really have an opinion about mr Musk or his intentions, but I truly fail to see any downside with this deal. Either he does in fact make the twitter platform a generally more positive/useful/pleasant/... experience, or twitter's function will eventually be filled by other apps, maybe even new ideas.
For one, Trump seems to finally be receding into the background, and I can guarantee he gets his account back when Musk takes over. That alone is enough to view this as a net negative.
Worst case, he runs it into the ground and we live in a world without Twitter. Win win.
I have a tough time imagining the other worst case not prompting regulation.
Maybe it overthrows our political system! I don’t know, there are certainly some politicians who command from Twitter and will be hurt or helped by Musk. (Probably, invariably, helped.) But that seems less likely than Congress creating a rule book and regulator for social media.
Why would it? People have been complaining about facebook/twitter/etc for ages and competitors haven't turned out to be less harmful. Why is the idea that Musk forces his values into Twitter and that this makes the platform worse not a possibility?
Who cares. He delivers.
I’ll take the guy who delivers, with possible ulterior motives, over someone who really cares, but uselessly. The latter describes most of our leadership to date on EVs and Mars.
Would it be nice if the genius came without the bullshit? Sure. Am I convinced those are inseparable? No. Is this relevant if you don’t care about EVs or Mars? No. But a lot of people do, and for us, he’s worth the tradeoff.
You act like Musk is some kind of genocide dictator. Oh my god, he fights with the SEC therefore he must be shot in the head.
> Musk has shown time and time again that his ideals of climate change or whatever are not genuine.
Literally based on what? He has been consistent for 20+ years. Given tons of talks and has literally changed one of the most conservatives industry in the world to a much, much greener industry.
Why did he do Tesla? Do you think he thought 'What a great businesses idea?'.
> He wants to get to play with cool toys, make bold but undeliverable promises, and get as much attention as possible.
When he started SpaceX he was not famous. You can go back to inteview where he was a mostly unknown (at least by people who don't follow Silicon Vally startups). And he already talks about all those things.
The idea that he build a rocket company because he wants to 'play with toys' is just nonsense.
And even if it was, so what? SpaceX achieved what it did, no matter the reason.
> And yet, people look up to him as if he’s some saint bestowed upon us.
He is a successful entrepreneur and engineer. I defend him from people who just make up a bunch of nonsense because they don't like him as a person.
> I truly feel letting a billionaire like him take one of the biggest megaphones in the world private as a personal playground is one of the worst things that could have happened.
Sound like you lived a really privileged life if you think that.
And he already did use it as a megaphone, that is literally what Twitter is.
What exactly are you suggesting would happen?
> And it’s all because he wants to say what he wants to say when he wants to say it, even though he has a history of bullying and trying to shut up people who disagree with him.
Twitter not being owned by him has not prevented him from saying anything. The SEC doesn't care who owns twitter.
My read is people find reasons to hate him due to ego, they see someone running like 6+ successful companies when their lives aren't going so well, and go looking for all the moralistic things he must be doing wrong.
He’s doing cool things, it’s impossible to deny that (especially with SpaceX). But you only need to look at his Bill Gates related tweets this weekend to see why people think he’s an asshole and it’s nothing to do with jealousy. He acts like an edgy 14 year old and it’s really cringey.
I really don't care if people think he is an ass.
But what happens is that people think he is an ass and then they adopt this culture of downplaying everything and making shit up.
'Rockets landed in the 70s', 'He is just a marketing guy', 'Tesla is fake company that is doomed' blablabla
I will never disagree with people who don't like Musk, only people who then start to make dumb arguments about him.
I don't think it is all just ego or jealousy. He has made some questionable comments in the past. He keeps going on that this particular purchase is about free speech. He consciously has chosen to be very public with some of his more questionable opinions (especially regarding Covid) on his Twitter.
Yes I am very glad that he has started SpaceX and Tesla. I despise the criticisms of billionaires "Wasting" their money on Space. But that does not absolve him of criticisms of him personally outside of those companies.
I would much prefer nuclear over wind/solar/battery. But I know if I argue against wind/solar nuclear isn't magically gone happen.
So its fine if you want to argue that US shoud invest 100+ billion in public transport or bikes or whatever. Those things are not gone happen just because EVs don't happen. You are probably right, but EVs are not preventing that from happening.
EV are absoulty 100% a huge improvement over other cars and its not close. Even outside of the environment it would have eventually happened, they are just better cars.
I agree I do have concerns that things may be changing and his original goals of humanitarian goals (EVs, solar, storage, space travel) are now getting caught up with straight power plays (twitter). I wonder if he has been caught by the twitter validation loop.
They give a shit about a lifestyle brand they are emotionally invested in. It's no different than buying a Gucci handbag or a Bulgari bracelet. They believe purchasing the right brands will give them the social status they crave.
But even among the people I know who work at SpaceX, the draw was "I want to work with Musk" rather than "I want to work on rockets."
As Eric Berger states in his book. Engineers don't want to spend 10 years being responsible for the quality control of a single screw on the F-35 program.
At SpaceX you are producing rocket faster then anywhere and you always develop next generation technology.
That is why engineers want to work there.
As for the mission - seems mostly legit though I don't think Elon is motivated by climate change otherwise he wouldn't be using Natural Gas for fueling his rockets more for ability to create self sustaining energy off planet.
There is a quite interesting inverse effect too, though. Musk's actual output is undeniably pretty impressive (I challenge you to watch a rocket land on a drone ship and tell me otherwise!), yet there is a veritable army of people online waiting to suggest in the comments on stories like this that he's just all about memes and personality. Maybe two opposing reality distortion fields with Musk suspended somewhere in the middle?
A big challenge is that Twitter's problems aren't engineering problems. They are sociology problems. Musk has demonstrated that he can hire engineers to solve engineering problems. How well will that translate into sociology problems?
I can't wait to see!
Either he improves Twitter, which is great because it's in really bad shape, or he destroys it, which is great because something else can fill the void.
Good luck to twitter I guess.
He genuinely wants to make a difference to humanity.
A lot of us who agree with him, do so in alignment, because as individuals we also want to make a difference to humanity, and .. in so doing: we see the problem with the commons.
If we do not fix the commons, it will be weaponised against us all, and that is in fact the situation.
So, from a fanboix perspective, in all honesty, this seems like Elon has added a 3rd option to his list: iii) stop humans from killing each other in the meantime.
Delusion and narcissism don't get things done.
A) FSD has been coming for a while now. The historical record seems to indicate that he was either delusional by at least years, or knowingly lying. I would bet on the prior.
B) he stood in front of everyone at Boca Chica and with a straight face said that the very early Starship prototype behind him was going to orbit. Again, I actually believe maybe he thought it. Which is kinda weird/scary?
To be fair, it is arguable that Musk has accomplished more good-for-the-species stuff than any one human, ever.
Is this a serious take? He has worked in EV cars and rockets. Cars are something we should be moving away from and not towards. How have those things benefited even a fraction of the global population? Even in the U.S., inequality has continued to rise, poverty has risen, education has decreased, and several other poor indicators. Musk has used a huge portion of public funds in his companies, funds that could be used to solve these very real problems, and he’s done nothing to return value back to the general public.
Well there are lots of things humans should be doing, and never do. But I do believe Musk already did accomplish Tesla’s goal of accelerating electrification of the planet. Combustion is just less efficient. The ball is now rolling. Resistance is futile.
I believe it is arguable that some of the more damaging climate change scenarios are possible. So anyone moving the needle there could be extremely beneficial in the long run. Musk moved the needle more than anyone in modern history, hasn’t he?
I also do buy into the long-term goal of making Earth’s life spread beyond Earth. I happen to believe that complex lifeforms are extremely rare volumetrically. It does seem worth it to me, and I truly cannot think of a greater goal. SpaceX has revolutionized orbital boosters with F9 and FH already dropping costs by at least half. If/when Starship and Superheavy are up and running, then the economics of getting to space may be 10x better.
On the other hand Musk is not omniscient and scares the crap out of me sometimes.
The boring company plan for West LA didn’t make sense beyond paper and pencil prototyping.
I got banned from multiple Tesla forums for being upset about Tesla’s proof of work crypto investment. Eventually Musk came around on that too, but why did it take so long? How did this even pass muster?
The scariest thing is Neuralink though. The goal is to give humans a fighting chance to compete with a possible future AGI by greatly increasing our i/o bandwidth. Ok, but assuming AGI is created, then it’s fair to assume that it will be possible to increase the AGIs speed using various methods. Maybe we will have a chance to compete up to some point, but that time will pass as AGI develops further.
We are trading a fleeting advantage against a possible future threat in exchange for giving read/write access to our brains to the governments, corporations, and NSO Groups who we all know and trust. Would love to be talked down from that one because this appears to be monumentally dumb to me right now.
This is not to excuse Elon - or indeed any of us. The expectation that any human being is free of these kinds of moral sins, is unreasonable. And such parody is exactly why, indeed, [1] the imperative to make humans multi-planetary - i.e. with strategically enhanced survival potential, is important.
Unless of course you are in the 'humans are dumb and must perish' camp. Jump you to [1], human!
Because what has Musk done for the "good of the species"?
I mean you have guys like Fritz Haber, whose Haber-Bosch process is responsible for the production of nearly two-thirds of the world's foodstuffs and literally feeds half the world.
Or Stanley Norman Cohen, father of genetic modification. Whose patents touch nearly every other biological field today. You literally cannot calculate the number of lives he has potentially saved.
Elon is telling lots and lots of bullshit, but his worshippers are still telling that his different and he meant something different.
The rapid and visible progress towards the construction of a viable space age, not so much.
As for what he has to say, for every one of your tabloid moral arguments .. there are at least 25 things Elon has said, with which I would completely agree.
This ideology of moral superlativity is taxing. It doesn't actually get things done. Maybe the reason Elon gets things done, is he is fine with saying stupid shit, but doing very, very good things.
I mean, where does this argument lead? Does taking Elon down at a character level, produce some vital substance or circumstance, for the species?
I couldn't care less what happened with the Thai submarine. And, neither should you.
There is a frickin' viable space age about to happen. Can we stop killing each other so easily - and maybe just get on with bringing a peaceful resolution to the worlds resource problems?
Because that's what the space dream is really all about.
Infinite sky. Narcissism and Delusion don't get us there. Like, seriously.
So I should just ignore as irrelevant the Twitter feed of the person who is currently attempting to buy Twitter? I'm sorry, but that's just doesn't make sense to me.
So .. are you seriously saying you don't think Elon is going to improve Twitter?
Because, factually he has already done so, just by making us have this conversation.
That's simply not a statement of fact. It's a subjective opinion.
> are you seriously saying you don't think Elon is going to improve Twitter?
Yes. In my opinion, Elon Musk's ownership could conceivably make Twitter worse.
> Everything people are worried that Elon will do to Twitter, has already happened.
This seems, honestly, like a ludicrous claim. _Everything_ that _everyone_ is worried about has already happened? Come on now...
we've got this cultural veil of cynical nihilism that keeps us from thinking people could think like that. You're suggesting that someone is a good person? OMG no way. and he's some rich arsehole? can't be
Terry Pratchett called it "crab bucket" thinking.
It may be worth the risk of buying into some Musk hagiography just to have a break from the common popular despair.
How can you look at his compensation package at Tesla that he negotiated and claim it was not to "get rich"? It's not like he did it for free.
and he did that with paypal. not everybody wants to stay with safe and boring stuff.
everybody knows that sooner or later the combustion engine goes the way of the dodo, cause there won't be anything to put inside it...
the odds of succeeding with an EV company are not extremely low but exactly the opposite, it's the future, guaranteed. but of course it's not an overnight project and one needs to do better than introducing models 5 years ago that are still not being manufactured (roadster).
16 Psyche HQ is established, and humans are engaged in a pact of cooperation and union, against all elements, against all odds, to end all wealth.
Starships drop from the sky with supplies. The whole planet is growing, there are no more reasons for the borders.
We have instead, the infinite sky.
We could get way, way more from it than SpaceX and Tesla.
Dreamy fantasies are the only reasonable response in such circumstances.
My understanding of the human condition, led me to exactly this moment, 'mmkay?
If that's not okay with you, I understand. But nobody is fixin' for some poison.
We want to stay free. You know, as a species.
There are zero good reasons not to put all our industry into building things in space, and returning Earth to a garden.
I mean, if you wanna get weird about it...
Pretty interesting subject though, eh? Hope the first colony isn't "USA™", you know what I mean?
It'll be pretty hard for Earth beligerents to be genociding when there are Starships dropping in on the starving villages and keeping them alive.
Yes yes, there is still a lot to be done before we can manufacture a Tesla on an asteroid, and land it back on Earth wherever its needed.
But, if you think about it, its definitely a better way forward than to just stay here and keep killing ourselves over what is .. admittedly .. a pretty small planet.
Ideally, he'll move to mars and take twitter with him.
How so? I hadn't heard of Twitter, or any media (social or not), preventing him doing exactly that already? Quite the opposite.
Censorship is a very real threat to scientific research but it tends to manifest as the state restricting research or pulling funding from politically unfavourable topics like climate change, as is seen in many American state governments and on a federal level under the previous administration. Scientific publication isn't exactly known for going through the channels of mass social media.
I talked about flow of information. Science isn’t done on twitter, and twitter is not for scientists or those able and willing to read papers. Twitter is for the 90% who rely on groups, and the more tooling we implement that incentivizes those groups to devalue intellectual depth, the more we restrict the flow of actual information at scale. Policing who is able to distribute which data is, simply put, harmful to the organism.
Improving signal quality != fire walling signals as a whole.
And that question is another one than "does twitter censor climate change-discussions?", right? My point was: yes, it does.
The only "legitimate" alternative is the legal process and that's too slow.
Personally, my lack of imagination makes me say we don't have an alternative right now.
I don't know how to interpret this, in that case.
But it might also be much, much smaller.
Currently, SpaceX is blocked from doing the first starship orbital test. Not for technical reasons, but for frankly totally bullshit bureaucratic reasons. A free speech twitter might be the right way to fight back against this government overreach.
I would argue the opposite: moderation reduces paid corporate shills (when done correctly).
How about pivoting away from a system where shouting “toxic” is a means to silence uncomfortable speech, and to a system that gives users better tools to focus on what they’re looking for?
He didn't make speech more open and free when he canceled a car order because someone pissed him off nor when he tried to get that flight tracker shut down.
He is building Starlink and refuses any form of censorship on there.
He sent several containers full of terminals to Ukraine (responding within hours to request for help from the Ukrainian government) to restore connectivity as the country is being attacked by Russia.
If you really believe those “he didn’t give one guy a car because he was pissed” propaganda stories, go ahead. People are easy to program.
He said Starlink had been jammed in Ukraine then a few weeks later said it had never been jammed.
Enlighten me, why did he cancel that car order?
Let us take it for granted that people will disagree with us regardless of what we say, and let us also take for granted that we cannot control or take responsibility for the emotional stability of others. A disposition toward trying to control the emotions of others is not something I want to promote in the world.
What are you referring to? Even his lamest company (TBC) has delivered some stuff. When it comes to reducing fossil fuel use Tesla has achieved more than the USA Green Party, and with regard to expanding space access SpaceX is beating most national space agencies combined.
People invest with Elon because he has, objectively, an extraordinary track record of success.
- SpaceX's market capitalization has surpassed $100 billion [1].
- Tesla's market cap has topped $1 trillion, eclipsing the combined value of all other automakers [2].
- Elon's latest venture, The Boring Company, is currently valued at $5.7 billion [3].
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/tsla/key-statistics/
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/21/elon-musks-boring-company-hi...
Many many people on twitter would happily pay for it. It's not like Facebook where you have to rely on ads because 90% of users would never pay, and the ones who would you don't want to charge bcause you make $200+ per year off them.
I think Elon understand both these things because of the way he says it's become the defacto public square. It really has for thought leaders. But thought leaders are a completely different market to most social networks.
maybe that's the key. $15/month subscription to post, free to read.
As a person, I really don't care about his personal opinion on most things. I really don't want him in charge of Twitter especially since I can see the first thing he does is unban Trump. So I am hoping if this does go through an alternative quickly springs up and gains dominance.
But when it comes to Space... I am a strong believer in SpaceX. The facts with how they are performing. Especially after how bad the SLS is going. We basically needed SpaceX.
Tesla? I mean I am glad he did it when he did it. Thankfully we are now seeing most (if not all?) car companies working on electric and I don't think that would have happened without Tesla.
why? what would the other car manufacturers do when there is no more oil to put into the combustion engines? just lie down and die? everybody can see the writing on the wall. sure, tesla might have sped it up a bit. but to be solely responsible for that? tesla is not even the first EV company or the first prototype.
I more meant the timing of it, I think if it wasn't for Tesla we may be looking at another 5-10 years for electric vehicles.
It is entirely possible another company would have come out and taken Tesla's place. But I just don't see the main car companies having tried it yet if it wasn't for Tesla (or another well funded EV that was that bullish).
Twitter is a private company and do whatever they want to do. It is their platform.
They actually aren't a private company, yet, but it sounds like they probably will be soon.
Just because they can do something doesn't mean they should. A huge amount of our public discourse flows through platforms controlled by companies. If you want those platforms to start to ban everyone who disobeys some set of rules, who would you like writing those rules? Are you comfortable with them making them up as they go along?
To answer your question, yes. Rules (like laws in government) change overtime. Twitter helpfully has a section outlining their rules https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules . It also clearly states that they can update these rules at any point.
As far as who sets the rules, Twitter. It is their platform. How is that a question?
In case it's not clear, I don't claim that Twitter doesn't have the legal right to moderate their platform. I claim that it is a problem for society that more and more of our public discourse happens on platforms with this type of arbitrary moderation.
Just because something has become a major player in communication, doesn't meant these companies should be obligated to turn a blind eye to content that they find disagreeable.
Also, I have yet to see a case where anyone has been "arbitrarily" restricted. They conform to the rules as clearly stated on their website. If anything I have seen that they are not doing as well as I wish they were at enforcing their rules. But it largely makes sense that the bigger you are the more scrutiny you will have on your tweets.
It isn't like just because you have an account on twitter you can't have an account on some alternative.
Since each of your replies ignores this and focuses on individual issues — unrelated to my comment and uninteresting to me — like which platform(s) a person chooses to use, whether Twitter has the right to moderate, or whether they have historically used their arbitrary moderation power in a way that you find acceptable, I'm going to disengage from this thread at this point since I don't think we can enlighten each other in any meaningful way.
SpaceX is cool...
Gotta love any company that has a banded Flame Thrower --- the Borning Company....
All of that said, I follow Musk because he He does what he wants, public perception be damned, Media be damned....
I am tried of Political Correctness, anyone that stands in the face of that has my support, even if I disagree with them politically as I often do with Musk.
Investors are here for the money. While some will favor some companies over others for ethical reasons, no one invests to lose money. In the case of, for example, Tesla, the reasoning is usually that governments all around the world want to move away from fossil fuels and because Tesla is in that market, it will eventually make shittons of money.
That Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter shouldn't have an impact on the potential profits Tesla can make, Elon or not, Tesla will continue making electric cars in a world that demands electric cars to move away from fossil fuels. As for SpaceX (the "interplanetary" side), it is private, so you can't invest.
I've said it before but Twitter is like a cancer, it begins to grow in some poor unfortunate souls irrespective of wealth, knowledge, or privilege, and slowly overtakes their whole being.