Elon Musk went from superhero to supervillain
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Baselessly accusing a hero rescuer of being a child molester for daring to call him out for showing up utterly unprepared and misinformed to an ongoing rescue attempt was the last straw for me. Then doubling down on the slander instead of apologizing just nails the coffin shut.
The thing is, you act like a dick often enough and that’s how people will think of you.
Refusing to admit when you’re clearly wrong. Being incapable of hearing criticism of your clearly incorrect behavior. Hypocrisy. Retaliation. Refusal to pay what you owe to your employees, your landlords, your business partners. Openly flaunting your violations of the law.
These all sound like villain behaviors. And not even cool villains, childish, petty and shallow villains.
He apologized and deleted the tweet.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/18/elon-musk-apologizes-to-brit...
> for daring to call him out for showing up utterly unprepared and misinformed to an ongoing rescue attempt
By telling him to put his sub up his ass? Is that how you call out people on their mistakes in your day to day life?
Why not?
And after that he also hired a PI (who also happened to be a convicted felon) to dig up dirt on the guy to try to prove he was a pedo: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/elon-musk-hired...
So yeah...
Your comment begins with dicks, continues with a rant, and ends with villains. My opinion of you couldn't be any lower right now.
Musk admitted to reacting poorly. He apologized multiple times including in court where he turned to the diver guy and said "sorry".
As for the sub, the Thai navy kept it and were trained how to use it. They said they'd use it for future rescues. There is no evidence of Musk aiming for a PR stunt.
It was a desperate situation requiring help from any angle possible. The Australian anaesthetist said later he expected some of the boys to die. The public attack from the diver on Musk was inappropriate and came from nowhere. He apparently had an attention-seeking agenda. He later tried to sue Musk for $190 million but was awarded zero dollars. The lesson is don't publicly attack people for trying to help, then try to get rich from the return fire.
Forgiveness is such a powerful, raw, human emotion. Forgive me if I bristle at a billionaire debasing the concept because they've never faced any real pushback a day in their lives. Just spitballing here, don't shoot the messenger, maybe they could focus on accountability and restitution rather than make excuses about reacting poorly? It comes across incredibly tone deaf. "But I apologized, why are people still talking about it?"
I'm not that invested in Musk vs any other billionaire like Bezos, but this is clearly a pattern of which you cherry picked one example. Has he said sorry for not paying contractors? Or rent? Reminds me of the joke about how narcissists "apologize":
That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal. And if it is, that's not my fault. And if it was, I didn't mean it. And if I did, you deserved it.
Attacking anyone online is never "personally asked for", nor makes great reading, particularly when there's no substance other than insults.
"This person is rotten", followed by a pattern of insulting memes, doesn't put you on higher ground than the target of your attack (OP's attack).
Sounds like you'll justify an attack if the target has a minimum celebrity status or wealth?
A team of people would have worked hard on the sub. If it turns out not to be useful, that's unfortunate for everyone, which is where it should end. It's not a time to launch personal attacks and accusations about PR stunts against the efforts of multiple people.
The diver chose to do a TV interview and volunteer his toxic opinion about Musk. Nobody asked for that bizarre distraction from the rescue efforts. Obviously the diver didn't like Musk before the cave incident, and used his "hero" status to amplify and unload his grievances.
He had never enabled the internet where they asked him to; he declined to do so, which is a subtle difference, but a difference nonetheless.
If you don't like a single billionaire being able to materially affect the outcome of a conflict between nation states, vote for nationalization of all ISPs and a strong bill of digital rights to protect it.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/10/europe/ukraine-starlink-not-a...
But the problem in this particular instance is not Elon. The problem is that everyone is going along with the system where we let Billionaires run the show as they see fit.
If you want this to not happen, you have to change the system.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/musk-says-he-refused-ky...
I mean Musk still says he talked to Putin, but I think he didn't make a terrible decision in this particular case, as much as I would have loved to see the outcome.
You'd be calling for his head just the same if Starlink fucked up and guided a missile into a refugee camp.
The US is more then happy to see there weapons used on Crimea as they have in the past repeatedly iterated.
Crimea is part of Ukraine not Russia.
What a villain
https://theconversation.com/im-an-mlk-scholar-and-ill-never-...
Here’s a key difference: being a lousy husband (I include sidelining his wife for sexist reasons) tarnished his reputation but it doesn’t directly undercut the civil rights movement’s primary success. It does call into question the movement calling for equal rights on race but being marginal on gender, and quite a lot has been written about that.
In contrast, most of the damage Musk has done to his reputation has been undercutting the things he’s supposedly good at by demonstrating that he isn’t. His sexual harassment or family feuds are salacious but they didn’t spoil his companies’ reputation the way things like Tesla autopilot or basically everything at Twitter had done.
I did, which is how I know you didn’t. There really wasn’t much there - even Taibbi eventually admitted that – and it requires some real dishonesty to come up with a “hard left” label.
5th circuit court of appeals just had a ruling that this indeed violated the first amendment.
https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/23/23-30445-CV0.pd...
You'd think this would be much more prominent in the news.
I note that you aren’t citing examples for a reason. That’s because we both know that’s not accurate way to describe some federal government officials or campaign staff alerting Twitter to posts which clearly violated their terms of service, especially when there are other examples shown where Twitter said no without consequences.
> 5th circuit court of appeals just had a ruling that this violated the first amendment
No, they didn’t. What they did was remove 9 of the 10 injunctions a Trump appointee issued earlier this year:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.18...
The one point they did allow was substantially trimmed back, too: “So, the injunction's language must be further tailored to exclusively target illegal conduct and provide the officials with additional guidance or instruction on what behavior is prohibited.”
I think it’s important to remember that this is one of the most conservative circuit courts in the country with a history of activist rulings, and this case is an election year move by some prominent Republicans to help their party’s presidential candidate, who appointed one of the judges. The fact that even that court trimmed things down so dramatically doesn’t suggest it’s anywhere near as strong as the conservative commenters whose analysis you’re repeating would like.
>5th circuit court of appeals just had a ruling that this indeed violated the first amendment.
"A group of social-media users and two states allege that numerous federal officials coerced social-media platforms into censoring certain social- media content, in violation of the First Amendment. We agree, but only as to some of those officials."
That's on the first page for reference.
Edit: Site says I'm posting too fast, but the provision 6 is a very important provision (pp 69) and the remaining defendants are quite a long list. It seems the plaintiffs named everybody they could think of and the judge whittled it down to the ones that are actually violating provision 6 (pp 72-73) and are still under injunction. If that is correct, this is certainly not a "nothing burger" as many in the media are reporting and the government was actively violating the first amendment. Defendants who violated provision 6 and are still under injunction include members of the White House, the FBI, the CDC, the Surgeon General, and others.
Musk's pre-Twitter and unexagerated legacy is luxury cars and some vague stuff about space.
MLK Jr is a human rights icon who was assassinated.
Musk is still eligible for his legacy holding a science victory. For example if he can get something more substantial to happen on the moon/mars or kick start asteroid mining.
Right now his legacy is proving billionaires aren't geniuses and that meritocracy is a lie.
I do. I think a lot of people just like bitching and Elon is the current hotness. Bitchin' for clicks. I wonder if these people analyze their own mistakes as critically as they do others'. I'd be surprised if that was so.
>Elons bad behavior is his legacy now.
Yea, that won't age well 10-20 years from now, look at Steve Jobs' legacy. He was a huge dick at times, but people still buy Apple stuff like crazy. Who remembers the names of his critics? I sure don't.
Also, what adult uses terms like "superhero," and "supervillain" to describe a real person in professional journalistic writing? Too many movies. They should take their job more seriously. It's as if they can't think outside binary good/evil like a toddler. There's some criticism from me. They can take it as seriously as I take their's.
PS: Notice me too got ignored by the press as soon as Biden got accused? It died faster than Disco. Funny that. Unfortunate, but such is politics.
Edit: my point in arguing this is that hn’s audience would worship anyone who has done a tenth of what Musk has - but the slightest bit of political nonconformity makes him a “supervillain”
Give be $5 billion, I’ll hire smart people with it, and binge Elden Ring.
- the internet
Having a decent life for all humans and minimizing the damage we do to the only habitat that supports human life is a vastly more important goal than crossing a void to reach an inhospitable rock.
We will gain knowledge and technologies in pursuit of space exploration. There are benefits. But humanity has higher goals.
Seeing Twitter, euh, x under his active leadership makes me doubt his skills a bit more.
Who is the highest profile heterodox person you can think of who isn't a "supervillain"? You might conclude, based on that, that heterodoxy is villainous behavior.
Or, alternatively, you might conclude that you are being manipulated.
I asked: who is the highest profile heterodox thinker you know of who is not regularly portrayed as a villain in ostensibly neutral media? Do you find it hard to think of one?