By the way, I absolutely despise the man and his antics, but I don't want to live in a world where SpaceX fails, just to spite him.
On the ocelot question - he will cynically tickle them to death instead.
This is about as reasonable discussion as can be had on the topic of Musk. Which is sad.
- He has turned into a pro-Putin, right wing troll, regularly spewing out falsehoods on Twitter/X.
- How he has (mis?)managed Twitter so far.
- All the lying and broken promises regarding FSD and other shenanigans with Tesla stock (the “taking it private” debacle, the bitcoin pump and dump, etc).
- All the COVID conspiracy idiocy and non-sense.
I’m sure there’s plenty more I’m forgetting.
1) It lacks all nuance because your question implies that if a person provides benefits to [whomever] and it's greater than their antics/demons, then you should like them. And that's simply not how the world works. And
2) The comment even said they wouldn't want to live in a world without SpaceX despite his antics.
People are complicated and so too are the views individuals hold about other people. It's not a spectrum where people eventually just dismiss extremely concerning things because someone made something cool.
That's the matter of the question. Elon Musk has some significant achievements which shouldn't be dismissed just because he behaves less than perfect somewhere else.
You don't seem to understand me at all. elteto listed a few things, which can be agreed with, and yet which aren't enough to explain cryptoegorophy's question "Why people hate him". I'm reminding that there's another side of things - people in this discussion generally quite aware of that, and only some focus on a one-sided picture. You don't need to repeat that the question is flawed - you just have to correctly understand the question. That is, it's a reminder of another side, which is necessary for cryptoegorophy's question. It's true that it's a complex question, but you don't understand me if you think I don't leave the room for nuance. Or, in other words, you can just dislike a man - but to explain why people in general have a correlated opinion, you have to look at the whole perspective.
I get a kick out of Elon/Twitter schadenfreude as much as the next person, but I also have to consider that maybe the "growth at all costs" Wall Street mentality has permeated our society and psyches so thoroughly that it triggers a strong kneejerk reaction to anyone going against that grain. Here is a leader who is finally saying, to hell with the investors and the board and kowtowing to the advertisers, I will make the changes I feel are right, and we are rejecting it because it's "mismanagement." Where mismanagement is defined as not playing along with the public market incentives.
I'm sure it's a swing too far in the apologist direction, but you gotta wonder...
Have seen this claimed many times but nothing to back it
- How he has (mis?)managed Twitter so far.
Mismanaging a company is hardly unusual, nor a reason to hate someone unless you are a shareholder or employee
- All the lying and broken promises regarding FSD and other shenanigans with Tesla stock (the “taking it private” debacle, the bitcoin pump and dump, etc).
Tesla shares are up massively, so this is not a reason to hate him, even if you are a shareholder. It is a reason to hate him if you are a short seller, I guess. He has Tweeted about crypto, but there is no evidence he participated in any pump and dump
- All the COVID conspiracy idiocy and non-sense.
Can you cite anything for this? I assume it is just more of the same media hysteria about him being some kiind of right wing fascist with no actual backing.
Why does Starlink work in Ukraine?
This one is just baffling. He is literally the most important private person helping Ukraine right now.
He like once suggested that total victory maybe wasn't a viable goal and that at some point in time some compromise peace might have t be made. Something lots of political scientists have also predicted would happen.
I think he's posting a lot of crap, and probably doesn't have much of a filter and is impulsive at times. Clearly he's got some mental problems that lead him to say and retweet stuff on a whim that he probably doesn't actually believe. I think we can all understand these imperfections.
At the end of the day, he's an incredible human being, flaws and all. No one's perfect, and he's cocky and pushy and rude and stuff. But he'll be in history books, and mostly for having done a whole lot of good for humanity, while pissing off a lot of humans.
Tesla / Space X are already amazing in almost ever respect, it doesn't need all the silly hype machine on top of it. Yes, it is neat to think about Mars bases eventually but that should be a stretch goal not pushed as "It is 4 years away!".
Starship is an incredible achievement already and I suspect it will come together quicker than we anticipate (less than a decade, probably in the next 2-3 years) but Musk had always promoted time lines and ambitions that were silly. Like point to point public rocket travel by 2030. The thing cannot land yet and they are already thinking 50 steps ahead with a stated date. That doesn't detract from Space X's achievements but it does cast a shadow over them as a whole.
You do know that the next Artemis mission is in 2024? According to your timeline it would be delayed more than the much hated space launch system which actually went to the moon
Starship and access to orbit, as well as Starlink (which cheap access to orbit enabled) are indeed insanely powerful geopolitical tools. Many of the existing geopolitical engineers would hate to see him not be firmly subordinate to themselves.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the FAA’s decision is being used as a bargaining chip here. You don’t get to do things like this in the USA unless you play ball 100% with the existing people who control access to orbit.
Nobody is richer or more powerful than the people who presently control the satellite-based weapons and surveillance systems that the US operates. Nobody will be able to be in a position to replace or supplant them without some sort of negotiation with them.
Imagine it: with a working Starship, Musk could replace GPS, Keyhole, and whatever the rods-from-god system is codenamed, in a matter of months (or perhaps weeks, if the payload design work is already underway), for anyone on the Earth who he thinks would benefit his goals. A lot of the leverage that exists against him (and can presently be used to constrain him) would be gone, never to return. It’s already fairly obvious that the geopolitical status quo on Earth is not very important to him.
The latter is possibly dismissable as "Well, that's just your opinion, man..." but he gives muscle to his opinion by making business decisions with strategic policy implications (e.g. turn off Ukraine starlink service at strategig moments..)
The twitter vandalism is very clearly "his works".
Can you back that up, with actual data, and not the politically motivated articles from democrat aligned media?
The only specific cases of this I’ve seen was an actual bot network saying the n word a lot when Elon took over, which was obviously a coordinated attack.
Other than that, where is this racist hell hole that twitter has become apparently? Where is the proof?
Twitter is irrelevant; he is doing product (read: design for manufacture) design on electric cars, battery systems, rockets, internet access satellites, brain computer interfaces, solar, humanoid autonomous robots, and tunnel boring machines, in approximately that order.
Twitter is like 20th on the list, but it’s a great target for narrative-based outrage (“the bullied one gets rich and buys the playground” etc). Also note that if you truly believe in freedom for one-to-many publishing of all legal speech (as I do) then an increase in racist publishing is naturally going to be a consequence of that. Freedom of expression for all is far more important than censoring racists (which doesn’t stop them from being racist or stop the spread of racism anyway).
What version of Elon Musk are you thinking of here? Read literally anything he says and it's immediately clear that he's always been the bully. He wasn't some underdog who was bullied and pulled himself up by his bootstraps to prove everyone wrong, he's the son of an apartheid emerald mine owner who made some good business bets and has now figured out how to scale up his bullying to a national scale. The already-rich bully bought the playground so that nobody could stop him from bullying everyone even more.
> Also note that if you truly believe in freedom for one-to-many publishing of all legal speech (as I do) then an increase in racist publishing is naturally going to be a consequence of that
Ah, the old "I'm free to publish racism but you're not free to call me out when I do so". These free-speech "absolutists" always abandon their morals as soon as they get the opportunity to censor someone who is making fun of them for being a douchebag. It's always about wanting a spout-racism-free card, never about the inalienable rights of mankind.
> but you're not free to call me out when I do so
in the GP post, literally or in meaning. So... I think you're at least exaggerating too much, at least in some places.
However I do see your point.
People who actually value personal freedoms understand that there are always tradeoffs: you cannot simultaneously have freedom-to-bully and freedom-from-bullying. It's a difficult problem. People who claim it's simple are not actually interested in solving it. The people who say that freedom-to-bully is infinitely more important than freedom-from-bullying (as all "free speech absolutists" are inherently claiming) are, quite obviously, bullies that want to get away with bullying.
> I've never seen a counterexample
Perhaps that Voltaire's "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" was made too much in jest and didn't really correspond to some real events, before or after. Or people like Vaclav Havel, who got to the power from the power's opponents, didn't have opportunity to refrain from silencing a political adversary. I don't know.
Which is petty and stupid. But AFAIK he has not censored political content he disagrees with, so I much prefer it to the previous regime.
And FYI, if your 401k has some index fund exposure you're probably the partial owner of some cobalt mines in Congo that have questionable labor practices.
Social media has always been cancer, some people just want it more preferenced to their sort of cancer by a centralized system.
But otherwise I see little evidence it's actually stopped anyone from using it other than people giving heartfelt anecdotes on HN and lots of talk about Mastodon that unsurprisingly died off quick.
This makes absolutely no sense, yet people keep repeating it
TWZ: Do you trust Elon Musk?
KB: (Laughs) In what sense?
TWZ: There was the discussion over Walter Isaacson’s book excerpt and whether Musk shut off Starlink to prevent a Ukrainian attack on Sevastopol last year, or whether as he claimed he denied a request to provide it.
KB: Look, [Starlink] is a private property of a private person. Yes we really very widely use his products and services. The whole of the line of contact talks to each other to some extent using his products and services. The only thing I can say here is that without those services and products it would be a catastrophe. But it is true that he did turn off his products and services over Crimea before. But there's another side to that truth. Everybody's been aware of that.
TWZ: So he did turn it off?
KB: This specific case everybody's referring to, there was a shutdown of the coverage over Crimea, but it wasn't at that specific moment. That shutdown was for a month. There might have been some specific cases I'm not aware of. But I'm totally sure that throughout the whole first period of the war, there was no coverage at all.
TWZ: But did he ever put it on and then shut it off?
KB: There have been no problems since it's been turned on over Crimea.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/exclusive-interview-wi...
That's my point though. I am not judging the content of his opinions. I am concerned about the fact that he is voicing them with little care. Everybody has some weird opinions and half-baked ideas. It's very different to have these thoughts in your head vs sharing them with friends and family or to to voice them to 160 million followers. He can think in private whatever he wants and I wouldn't care or judge him unless it starts to impact other people. I think lots of weird shit, but it just makes my wife roll her eyes. Nobody is gonna die from it.