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Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

He's cancelled car orders of journalists: https://medium.com/@salsop/banned-by-tesla-8d1f3249b9fb

He's tried to get a teen to take down a Twitter account that follows his private jet: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-jet-tracking-teen-...

He's fired anyone who disagrees with him: https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-elon-musk-ruthlessly-f...

He's fired employees for YouTube videos: https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-employee-self-driving-...

He's fired people for walking too close: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-reportedly-terrifi...

He refused to pay severance to the Tesla founder unless he took down a blog post: https://www.wired.com/2009/06/eberhard/

He blocks people on Twitter: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1279326187559374849?lang...

Sure, he's never censored people the same way he could on Twitter, but he's also never had the chance.

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I don't know much about Musk so I was interested in reading your links. First one starts with:

>Dear @ElonMusk: Thank you for reaching out to me. I heard from our phone conversation that you feel that my post, “Dear @ElonMusk: You should be ashamed of yourself”, was a personal attack on you.

Do you really think this is journalism, and that you have to serve a customer who treats you like that?

Second link:

>Mark Goldberg, a Morgan Stanley banker that helped take Tesla public in 2010, told Higgins that Musk repeatedly threatened to fire bankers from Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs before Tesla's IPO launch in 2010.

Poor bankers. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, very sensitive people I'm sure. Also, the linked Twitter thread shows one event described with Tim Cook was denied by both of them. It looks like a typical poorly sourced attack rag.

>https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1421150913075503112?s=20

First Amazon review of the book:

>I'm always somewhat skeptical when it comes to accounts of what transpired in meetings behind closed doors; especially when the accounts are largely from people that left Tesla on bad terms.

You can imagine at this point there's no need to go through the rest of the list, and that list would actually have the opposite effect of the one you intended.

> Do you really think this is journalism

Yes, it could be. Need to read the rest of the article to know whether it was merited or not. Elon has done lots of scummy things (Tesla battery swap scam for one).

> and that you have to serve a customer who treats you like that

You don't have to, but when you are pretending to be the paragon of free speech, it is an important data point.

Not at all. The whole thing about freedom is that people should be free to say what they want because they should also be able to listen to what they want. Nobody ever made the point that free speech means you should not be able to block people. This is dumbfounding. The point about freedom is that communities can gravitate towards the moderation that suit them as opposed to a centralized one decided by an elite that has no counter-balance since they banned everyone who rebutted them.

And no, it doesn't really mean "then Twitter is right to ban everyone because they are private" since we're far from being in any kind of free market. Existing regulations, powerful existing lobbies and de-facto monopolies mean we should strive towards a complex balance.

Tesla is a private company, Musk firing people is not the same thing as a community self-organizing and gravitating towards moderation that suites them, it is literally one elite person making decisions for the entire rest of the company.

I personally believe that freedom of association is an important part of the First Amendment and while I think that Musk has a thin skin and is abusing his power to censor his employees, I also think he has the right to do that. But at the same time, it's ridiculous for anyone concerned about public censorship to compare entirely personal blocklists to firing someone from a company or banning them from a place of business.

Musk has (some) right to censor people at his companies and he has a lot of right to choose who he does business with, but I also have the right to call him a hypocrite whenever he waxes poetic about censorship ruining people's livelihoods, as if your boss firing you because of a Twitter post is somehow worse or in any way different than your boss firing you or denying you severance pay because of a public blog post.

> And no, it doesn't really mean "then Twitter is right to ban everyone because they are private" since we're far from being in any kind of free market.

If you think that Twitter should have different rules because it's big, then the answer to that is to either break it up or nationalize it. Certainly, the answer to "this thing is too big to be bound to the whims of one elite person" is not to privatize it under one elite person.

Most of those are examples of him curating his own life. Not curating yours or mine. If he does, it will be a problem.

There is zero percent chance that a guy with an ego as big as his won't build Twitter in his image. These guys are playing God.

Precisely this. It's incredible how naive HN and the online community in general is being about this.

Is this a joking response? I can't tell.

Uninviting someone to a party would be curating his own life.

Firing people is a lot more than that lol

Firing people at a private company is not anything near the same thing as censoring someone on what is said to be run a public square; and for example if he wants to allow Trump on, ideally with conditions or full-time oversight, if Twitter employees can't accept that and cause problems internally - who are then going against company policy - then they should be fired, no?

> Firing people at a private company is not anything near the same thing as censoring someone on what is said to be run a public square

Being fired is exponentially more impactful and harmful for the average person than being banned from Twitter and has a much higher chilling effect on free speech than Twitter censorship does.

I don't understand the logic being twisted around here -- Musk himself has complained about ruining people's livelihoods over political/social disagreements. Getting people fired because of their social media is one of the chief complaints people have about "cancel culture."

If people aren't going to criticize Musk for attacking employees over blogposts, then it's going to be real hard for me to take them seriously whenever they talk about Twitter mobs.

You're conflating arguments here.

I'm arguing that firing people over social media reveals a far more censorious attitude than blocking someone from a social media account, and it showcases that Musk primarily cares about freedom of speech in the abstract and is largely naive/hypocritical about what censorship is and what its effects are.

I'm also arguing that it's silly to say that it's an existential problem for Twitter to do moderation because it's a public square while simultaneously saying that there's no problem with denying critics access to a place of business or firing them from their jobs. I will point out that "denying people access to a private place of business" is literally what Twitter does when it bans people.

Musk has the right to fire employees that argue against company policy, but firing critics is an obvious characteristic of someone who does not actually have that radical of a view about free speech and mostly just likes to think to himself that he does. If you want to understand someone's views about free speech, don't look at how they react to far-away political discussions that largely don't affect their life, see how they react when the speech hits them closer to home. Every time that Musk actually takes offense over speech, I see him immediately lash out in a way that is uncharacteristic of a free speech advocate, and very often that takes the form of trying to financially or reputationally harm critics -- both of which are actions that are a heck of a lot worse than banning someone from Twitter.

Nice, I'll fire my employees under the guise of curating life. Yas queen'ing the shit out of livelihoods

None of these are censorship. Petty, retaliatory, and abusive, sure. but not censorship.

It’s examples of Elon taking any advantage he can find to retaliate against people that personally piss him off. There’s no reason this wouldn’t extend to Twitter

The reason is because he has a stated principle that he would have to violate to do it through Twitter.

He didn't violate any of his stated principles with his earlier actions.

If he goes a year or two without taking such action, will you reverse your opinion?

Firing an employee for posting a video of a FSD beta-enabled Tesla is not only, as you said, retaliatory, but it is also censorship. He used that employee to set an example for others, effectively causing people to censor themselves in the future.

So is firing and even suing an employee for disseminating your proprietary code, but few would argue that that is censorship, in the free speech sense.

If someone was a purported free speech absolutist, then yes that would be censorship. It would be a violation of copyright law, but copyright law and censorship can easily be argued to go hand in hand.

Which is partly why free speech absolutists cannot exist. Eventually, everyone draws a line in the sand. In the case of Elon Musk, that line in the sand seems to move depending on whom does the censoring.

Who ever said he is an absolutist? I have only seen that claim from critics making a no true Scott's an argument. At a minimum he said he will regulate illegal content.

He's literally referred to himself as a free speech absolutist [1]. I don't know how much more explicit it can get here. Unless you want to argue that he's a hypocrite and his words have no meaning or something, in which case that's precisely the problem a lot of people have with him and his 'free speech' stance.

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1499976967105433600?s=20...

It could be argued that dissemination of someone else's speech isn't your speech, and thus there's no hypocrisy.

Sure, and neither is Twitter banning people. The argument is that Musk will silence or get retribution against people through Twitter ownership, just as he does in other contexts.

That's a more refined argument then I've heard. Yeah, I think it is possible that he might fire Twitter employees who are vocal critics of the company position. I think a lot of people still see this Petty personal retaliation as a step up from silencing people based on arbitrary politics. I am much more skeptical that he will be banning politicians from the platform or disagreeable positions

He should fire those people. In fact from day one for the first few month the objective should be cleaning house, hard. Reduce head count by 50%. In fact dig through who came up with idea to ban Babylon Bee and just fire everyone who saw that decision and was not opposed.

Politically motivated or not, he stands to dramatically increase profit margins, at least in the short term, by getting rid of people.

> Sure, he's never censored people the same way he could on Twitter, but he's also never had the chance.

What you're doing now is far worse than Musk trying to manage his own private companies and reputation, you're fear mongering; "what if he's the boogie monster!"

Managing a private company is not akin to managing free speech on a "public square" - and Elon seems quite aware of this. He's also quite aware of the risk and threat of tyranny if the general population doesn't have a place they won't be censored by systems toeing the line for domestic or foreign bad actors/interests, whether they're for-profit industrial complexes or authoritarians.

It's a private company. He is legally free to delete/block/censor whoever he wants from his platform.

Yeah, I know, but he claims to be a free speech absolutist who is doing this because he doesn’t believe in censorship. That’s the point I’m making.

Yes he's free to lie too if he wants...

If your defence is... "He is a liar", then we are in agreement!

No, I'm taking a shot at the projections you're making.

So then he'll be doing what he said he didn't want to happen, just now to the people he doesn't like?

Until yesterday the projection was that this is a pump and dump and elon didn't have any plans to buy it to begin with. Some also said he's doing to ban the jet tracker account. Now the projection is he doesn't care about free speech. You are free to make any projections you want if that brings you peace.

But the first amendment is just about the federal government not censoring people.

Twitter is a private platform, that now belongs to Elon Musk. If you don't like it, build your own.

Free speech is not just the first amendment. It’s a moral value that exists by itself.

OP was ironic restating verbatim what “conservatives” have been told over the last four-five years when they got ostracized for disagreeing with “liberals”.

“Build your own Twitter!”

“Build your own ISP!”

“Build your own DNS”

“Build your own copper lines!”

And now Chomsky has gone as far as to say that people who disagree with him (vis a vis vaccines) should be put in a desert and build their own societies. When asked if those people wouldn't die of starvation he shrugged it off.

"Conservatives" also believed that there is a "liberal bias" in social media. Pretty ridiculous seeing that there is an rise of autocracies world wide.

Citation for Chomsky?

I think you meant, build your own with a healthy serving of govt financing?

Musk's purported reason for buying Twitter was because he wants it to be an outlet for free speech. In his words (well paraphrased), he was calling it the new town square of democracy. Instead of building his own, he bought it.

That’s a lot of BI articles.

More power to him for those things, also, they don't violate the first amendment.

What? He behaves like a first class grade-A asshole. Elon is not your friend unless you're in the 10x+ billies club.

@prvc while you do this volunteer fanboy work of defending him, given the opportunity he'd just as soon eject you out the nearest airlock. It's sad really, he's essentially a Borg with a malfunctioning emotions implant.

I still fail to see the problem.

You don't perceive people in powerful positions being assholes as a problem?

It isn't our fault we are better than you.

It isn't a crime, it is the American way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrgpZ0fUixs

Yes, it isn't your fault that your parents have money/connections and your ego knows no limits.

No, that doesn't mean you're better than anyone.

When was grace in power determined to be a useless quality?

I grew up in an orphanage.

Then statistically speaking, you aren't in a position of power.

I doubt that you even are. The "we" you used earlier was certainly a mischaracterization of your supposed "power".

> of your supposed "power"

At the very least, they aren’t resigning and relegating themselves to be a victim of Elon Musk. That’d be weakness and the opposite of “power”.

If you aren't resigning, show us what you're doing. Because you probably can't do anything other than voice your useless opinion.

You are as weak as anybody else, don't have delusions now.

I literally resigned from a half million dollar year job in FANG and turned a few others. I’m just happily unemployed now. Here’s what I can do. I say whatever TF I want without worrying about financial dependencies or an employer’s opinion. You can’t do the same for me cause I don’t need a tech job lol. Be in a position where you don’t have to worry about paying bills. That’s power over people. Voicing ones opinion without having to hide like a coward with a throwaway for fear of losing one’s job. That’s power.

Sure, our opinions are equally useless, but there’s varying degrees of being able to take action on that opinion.

Elon Musk can afford Twitter and do whatever he wants with it. You can’t.

I can afford to be unemployed while traveling nonstop for years on end. I can work on whatever TF I want. No BS meetings or a boss. That’s freedom, and freedom is power. You probably can’t. Do you have a boss? If you do, that person is already more powerful than you. I’m probably more powerful than your boss, since I report to no one except the government. I can afford to not work for employers who values I don’t agree with, or just don’t feel like working for. If you are enjoying being a wage slave, be our guest.

If you’re so smart, don’t be poor. Don’t be delusional for me. The world is pretty fair for people with good ideas and the ability to actually execute on them. Talk is cheap. You can also short or long Twitter or any stock too, if your opinion had any economic merit. At the very least, don’t dread Monday. That sounds awful. Bet you have student loans too. Can’t relate.

>I can afford to be unemployed while traveling nonstop for years on end. I can work on whatever TF I want. No BS meetings or a boss. That’s freedom, and freedom is power.

What freedom do you have in stopping Musk from buying Twitter? Everything else is irrelevant.

>You probably can’t.

Another assumption.

>If you’re so smart, don’t be poor. >Bet you have student loans too. Can’t relate.

Next time you go out on a date, I suggest you show them this comment.

>The world is pretty fair for people with good ideas and the ability to actually execute on them.

I'm happy that you haven't had any significant pains in achieving your financial independence. But just know that, if you want to make it to the big leagues, you will have to recognize the advantages you were given in order to fully make use of them. Musk, Gates, Buffet are priveleged, to be sure, but they are smart. They are in tune with the reality of their privilege. They are grateful for it, and that is essential to why they made it. Only because they are in tune with their reality, can they can shape it.

Good luck.

great that you keep up with hn at your age. I believe the last "orphanage" in the US closed in the 1960s

> great that you keep up with hn at your age.

Passive aggressive intolerance and ageism. Aren’t you supposed to be virtue signaling?

> in the US

Explains why an American team winning American “football” are deemed “world champions”. Why did you assume OP spent his youth in America? Even if they are in America now, they could have been adopted from an orphanage in a different country. Logic.

Looks like a bunch of privileged people with the victimhood mentality are downvoting you, the actually disadvantaged person who proved otherwise.

Nobody in the 0.001% (the "we" this troll identifies with) made it there through sheer will and determination.

If you grew up in the slums you might make it out with a good, stable, comfortable life through good planning and will. But becoming rich enough to buy Twitter? To influence people on a global scale? You're not going to do that without the approval of the incumbents. And you are deluding yourself to think they are meritocratic. Consider how long it took -it is taking- for people with tattoos to not get written off as gang members or no lifes.

Kindly refrain from assuming people's privilege and mentality. You don't know shit, sorry to say.

Bet you enjoy pumpkin spice lattes from Starbucks, a company with more than 2x the market cap of Twitter and founded by a person who grew up in government subsidized housing.

You’ve just moved the fencepost to a random percentile. WE could very much mean anyone who owns companies, or at the very least the non-working class who controls land, labor and capital, as opposed to being the labor and barely owning land nor capitalz

>Bet you enjoy pumpkin spice lattes from Starbucks

Another assumption.

>as opposed to being the labor and barely owning land nor capitalz

What the fuck kind of misanthropic sociopath are you?

Are you seriously implying that people who don't own land or capital are just dumb? Have you considered that they simply don't want to deal with the headache or that they don't want to commodity the work of other human beings like you?

EDIT:

You are closer to the slums than you are to Musk. You have no grasp of the magnitudes. $500k is nothing to them.

It seems to me you're defending this reasoning because you think you are "we". You're not. You can't put satellites into space from out of your own pocket.

I think someone coming from the mud can obtain their own capital and land. But that doesn't make them able to affect humanity on a global level. To someone who can, their power is nothing.

Your life must have been incredibly hard for you to be so hard hearted. I hope you eventually find happiness and become a kinder person.

Or maybe you are just a troll and I am falling for it hard

That's very nice of you. Or possibly just incredibly condesending. Maybe you're an asshole too and you just don't know it yet.

I try not to be and there isn't any other response I could have given you. Everything else felt unnecessarily aggressive. I want more kindness in this world and I think everyone is able to contribute to that mission. Eventually. And I am willing to wait for people to come around.

And do you often feel unnecessarily aggressive towards internet strangers? I guess those who can't, preach. Much easier to judge others than work on yourself.

How am I judging you? You yourself admitted to being an asshole supporter at the least

You yourself admitted calling me, a person you know nothing about, hard hearted and damaged by life the least unnecessarily aggressive thing you could muster.

Is honest introspection not part of your more kindness in this world mission?

Supporting assholes is pretty hard hearted dude. You are literally condoning them harassing other people by abusing their significant amount of power. And if you didn't get here by having a hard life then I think I am wrong in assuming your basic nature is not hard hearted.

So yes, neither honesty nor introspection is on offer.

> Supporting assholes is pretty hard hearted dude.

Nowhere did I write I support anybody. And you don't know my gender / dudeness.

> You are literally condoning them harassing other people.

Nowhere did I condone anything, neither literally nor figuratively.

> abusing their significant amount of power

Nowhere was abuse of power discussed.

You asked me whether I "perceive people in powerful positions being assholes as a problem?" and I said no. You don't know my perception beyond that, the only information you have about me is that my perception differs from yours.

In response you very rudely and judgmentally insulted me in a condescending manner. You mentioned that you experienced unnecessarily aggressiveness towards me. Your own words.

You claim you are all about kindness but then you proceeded to gaslight about being judgmental. And now you're digging in and just making things up and acting like a jerk.

Phoney kindness selectively extended only to people you find agreeable is no kindness at all. It is how you treat people different than yourself that reveals your true colors. You are simply a bully.

Sure buddy. I'm the bully.

I wonder if you imagine you were kind in this exchange.

> he's essentially a Borg with a malfunctioning emotions implant

He was bullied as a child, and your comment is probably true about many autistic people.

I'd say Elon is using free speech for populist reasons and will not deliver a Twitter with true free speech (he is too insecure and besides almost nobody would ever use a platform like that), but no need for personal attacks (it just points at your own insecurities).

Don't bother, nobody has any sympathy for autism here.

Should we just excuse every shitty thing Elon does, just because he has autism?

He managed to become a billionaire even though he's autistic so I think it's fair to criticize him on the same level as we do others.

There are plenty specific actions of his that we can criticise without getting into possibly unalienable traits that he may not have chosen to have.

Holy epic strawman there, Batman. No of course not. I didn’t say that. Nobody else said that. I don’t agree with that. I don’t know anyone else who agrees with that. I’ve never heard anyone say that.

Ever since he dropped that he has autism I have heard this being used as an excuse, which really frustrates me.

If you don't do that, perfect.

I wasn't aware Musk admitted he has autism, I don't really follow him but read one article where childhood bullying was mentioned. (It probably caused insecurity which is part of the reason for his success and part of why I would expect him to attempt to use Twitter ownership to influence public opinion.) Autism was just a guess from sparse observations that I have.

Having autism would not be an excuse, by the way. It's just orthogonal and isn't something people are assumed to have say in, like their skin color. Attacking that (calling emotionless Borg and so on) actually hurts any point about specific problems with his actions.

Sorry, I got something wrong. He actually has Asperger's, not Autism[1]. It's not used as an excuse from serious people, but you maybe are aware of the fanboy-armies on social media who dismiss every criticism against their Savior. Since he admitted that he has Asperger's I saw this being used as an excuse in very weird ways.

I misinterpreted your "Don't bother, nobody has any sympathy for autism here" comment as a way of saying "People are so hard on him, even though he has autism", so my bad.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57045770

Asperger Syndrome is autism spectrum disorder. It’s an outdated term but would have been the label used when Elon was diagnosed as a child.

The existence of fanboy armies is entirely orthogonal to any discussion we’re having here. Their existence should have no bearing on how Elon is judged by a neutral observer.

Sure, agreed. But neither does banning people on Twitter. That’s the point.

He never said he was against banning, and none of that has anything to do with whether Twitter is a "de-facto public square". Most "gotcha" comments I have seen are relying on a straw man definition of "free speech" (i.e., you must tolerate any behavior whatsoever or else you're a hypocrite), but this is an absurd criterion to use.

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