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Comment by brtkdotse | Hacker News Reader

Normally, I’d agree. But on the other hand Musk has been working overtime the last few months to wreck his personal brand.

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Which actions specifically do you think contributed the most here?

I'm sure everyone has their own place, but for me it was in general tiwtter, and the final straw was this:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519735033950470144

Given the presidency of Trump, I don't see how anyone in good faith can say the right hasn't moved -- unless of course you believe the right was always as racist as Trump, the only difference is he said it out loud.

He claims to be "balanced", but I haven't heard him say anything negative about the right, or far-right, except generic statements.

A cartoon about the political center moving to the left? That’s destroying his personal brand?

(The far right has always been bad. They just used to be better at packaging it. Remember Nixon and Kissinger?)

That cartoon that Musk made famous is from Colin Wright, a blogger who considered himself a leftist until gender politics reared itself. Yet Musk and Wright both seemed to forget about the Tea Party revolution and how it morphed into the birther & then Trump 'movements'. His blog's title is 'Reality's Last Stand' - a title of bracing shamelessness considering its political roots. He's quite a fit for Musk, surely.

More like the area Party got co-opted by the same forces that would later give us birthers and Trump. But the Tea Party itself was actually started as more of a mainstream and sensible movement which gave us politicians like Justin Amash. Who, like this cartoon, suddenly found themselves out of alignment with their party. Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have moved away from center: a trend since the creation of CSPAN, I would argue.

Attempting to buy Twitter in order to (let's face it, there is no other reason) un-muzzle Trump. That alone would be enough to get 10,000 oppo researchers on his case.

And let me be clear. I do think Musk has a few screws loose and that was obvious back when he was trying to buy ICBMs from Russia. He is also absolutely responsible for the creation of the new space race and for every major car company having a great EV. In our current political climate it's become impossible to take the good with the bad. There is only space in public discourse for him to be a hero or a villain. We demand absolute ideological purity from our public figures these days and many folks on the left feel betrayed that he could be anything other a progressive champion.

Money, more than anything is an amplifier, and it has amplified a neuro-atypical man with an unbalanced ego and actual political opinions you might not agree with. He is a real person with massive accomplishments who has enough money to firmly grab the wheel on the ship of our country, not some cardboard cutout of good or evil.

I prefer the version where this whole thing started with the elonjet kid wanting a Tesla to take the account down.

Trump says he doesn’t want to be on Twitter, even if Elon let him back on. That possibility is just being used as a political scare tactic now.

Otherwise pretty spot on comment. Thanks.

I very much disagree that we should take what he says at face value. That has never been a good strategy for predicting his actions in the past.

I'm also not sure what I think of the Twitter purchase. It's been good fun to gag people I don't agree with so I don't have to listen to them, but whenever I get into a (self?)uncensored space I feel the anger and resentment boiling over all around me. I'm pretty sure we can't keep the Overton Window closed this tight for long.

I block early, block often. Keeps my feed manageable. But that's an entirely different thing than the company itself deplatforming people based on supposed "misinformation." Twitter banned doctors who suggested COVID was airborne in 2021, and public health professionals who called for universal mask wearing in 2020. Being able to voice counter-narrative or non-mainstream opinions is exactly how science and society progress, and how we keep our elected governments in check. If Twitter is indeed the "new public square"[1] then I think Elon has a solid argument for keeping it open to all as a free speech platform.

[1] I don't think this is true, btw. Twitter is a bubble, like Reddit and HN. It just happens to be a bubble that includes a bunch of politicians and world thought leaders. But only a quarter of US adults are on Twitter, and many of them use it for niche purposes too.

The Covid BS posts starting a couple of years ago. An especially harmful one was promoting HCQ as a cure-all for Covid.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1239650597906898947

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1239776019856461824?lang...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/06/hydroxychloroq...

That's a bit unfair on HCQ. He just said maybe it was worth considering it back in Mar 2020 when there were no other treatments or vaccines and the studies on HCQ were unclear.

Yeah and there was a reasonable mechanism for considering it plausible (zinc ion affinity), unlike later touted miracle cures. It was very reasonable to ask “why isn’t this being studied more?”

(It turned out to be useless, but you need to actually do the study to find that out.)

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