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Comment by FrustratedMonky | Hacker News Reader

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No, it's that you started a massive offtopic generic flamewar tangent on perhaps the single most repeated topic of the last couple years, nothing new or interesting can come of which. That's exactly what we're trying to avoid on HN; we want curious conversation about interesting things, and this is the opposite of that on all counts.

Not that your comment was by any means the worst example of this! But it was guaranteed to spin off into the off-topic flamewar that it did.

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41830516.)

Honestly, I didn't realize how fast and far it would go off. Maybe I'm out of touch.

I was actually just wondering if Musk didn't care about Politics and all the political maneuvering was still with the goal of getting to Mars. Space and Politics are like peanut butter and jelly. Hard to separate these subjects.

It's hard to understand why people care so much about someone's personal political opinions.

This is especially prevalent when working in places like Seattle and SF. People ostracizing their coworkers because of wrongthink.

MDS like TDS is real. It's extremely toxic and it needs to stop. People's political beliefs are their own and connecting that to work is a recipe for disaster.

The man in question personally has more wealth than many nations, co-opted one of the most popular American social media networks in the country and is a massive hypocrite when it comes to free speech.

Musk isn't just some guy near your cubicle complaining about Mexican cooks.

He isn't a co-worker. He's a billionaire that can fund entire campaigns. It is a lot more like if my co-worker was really my boss, and he really cares about my political leanings during a performance review.. Thus I also care about his.

"Metastable deexcitation spectroscopy (MDS) and thermal desorption spectroscopy (TDS)"

I really don't know what you are talking about.

Musk and Trump

Derangement Syndrome

Is what the acronyms refer to. Its a meme for the obsession around them specifically.

My two cents is that there are other billionaires doing significantly more harm than those two. They just keep quiet or own news media platforms.

Is it so hard?

See if you can try and steelman the argument as to why people care about the political opinions and actions of the world's richest man.

> It's hard to understand why people care so much about someone's personal political opinions.

People care because he has power and money, which he uses to shape the world in alignment with those political opinions.

The same is true of anyone else with power - Xi, Putin, Gates, Thiel, Zuck, and the countless others with influence over business and government. A lot of money is spent to analyze and alter their political opinions.

What's hard for me to understand is why this isn't plainly obvious to you.

We've had decades of absolute liberal control of tech companies but you don't see threads like this every time Google announces something. Some 25% of tech is conservative, it shouldn't be that weird that a few of the billionaires are too.

You've never seen someone question the motives of the leaders of big tech on HN?

Both. A single person can be great in some areas and a malicious loon in others. In fact, great success in one field can provide the self-confidence and capital to be a catastrophe in others.

But also keep in mind that Musk isn't personally designing and building everything SpaceX does. The staff at SpaceX deserve more credit than they get, especially Gwynne Shotwell.

It's become an absolute meme on the left-leaning internet to say SpaceX isn't Elon and Shotwell is doing all the work. You can't go to a thread on this site or reddit etc without it being brought up.

Really I am pretty sure it is just coping to deal with the uncomfortable fact that Elon (bad guy) is doing something great and clearly is skilled. Ask anyone at SpaceX or Shotwell herself and they will all say Elon is very important to its success.

Maybe that's a meme, but obviously I'm not saying that.

The problem is that people watch these videos and it's all ELON ELON ELON. Most of them don't even know Shotwell's name.

Everyone who cares about SpaceX, and not Elon-hating, know Shotwell's name. My nine year old does, and he knows that Gwynne got into engineering because she liked another engineer's shoes!

That is true, but it’s also true of Blue Origin who are far behind spacex in so far as flying real hardware. The difference is Musk maniacal zeal and yes leadership. I’m frustrated with Musks politics too, but his drive can’t be denied.

But why are you frustrated with Musk’s politics? The fact that one of the smartest people chooses to demonstrate their view is very remarkable. It does warrant critical thinking and examination. After all he could have kept quiet and ponder to both parties equally.

Elon is into politics because it’s politics who stood in his way of progress first.

He’s imho afraid and rightfully so, Twitter was a clear example of why.

Nonsense. Governments been very kind to Elon. For years Tesla subsisted on selling regulatory credits.

How does your argument counter what I wrote? Nonsense is sometimes but only projecting onto a mirror.

I never knew the name Tim Cook before Steve Jobs died.

The general public does not know the layers of corporate staffing and their names. That doesn't mean they don't realize there are a lot of people at the company contributing. Nobody thinks Elon is in the back room doing drafting, and doing every job.

Yes. Musk is complicated person. Maybe that is what I was trying to ask. Does anybody have any credible insight into where is head is at. Is he turning into a wing nut, or is this all just a ploy to have more control over the government to further his goals of getting to Mars. Like if Trump wins, he can just phone him up and say, lets put a man on Mars.

The general public generally does, in fact, massively overestimate the importance of the CEO to the company, especially celebrity CEOs.

> Is he turning into a wing nut

Back in 2018 the "cave diver pedo" incident made it abundantly clear that Musk, while possessing many admirable qualities, is also a malicious clown.

SpaceX is not Musk. It may be executing his vision, but it's a team of thousands of skilled and hard-working people, all eager to work on a Sunday for a chance to pull something like this off.

And Apple isn't Steve Jobs? Apple would have turned around on its own without Jobs?

I think we all know these big companies have thousands of people working for them, and a lot of them are pretty smart.

That doesn't change the influence the top guy has.

But he’s the catalyst for it all. There are other billionaires in this game too, why can’t they replicate his success? Why can’t they hire his engineers? Why can’t they deliver the results?

Twitter is not Musk. It may be executing his vision, but it's a team of thousands of skilled and hard-working people, all eager to work on a Sunday for a chance to create a propaganda arm of Trump party.

Why is it hard to reconcile that he’s both extremely intelligent/driven, and believes free speech is critical to democracy and at risk?

Musk is just a front man. He's just an actor like Trump. God knows who is behind them. Banks, "The Matrix" , can anyone fill it in ? The front men are certainly just reading scripts, it is obvious.

Musk bought SpaceX and Starlink just like Twitter.

This technical term for this is "false".

Are you perhaps thinking of Tesla? SpaceX was founded by Musk.

Where did this meme come from? I’ve seen it twice in 2 days and it’s categorically false. Has the left wing echo chamber really brainwashed itself into believing Musk purchased all his successes and deserves no credit?

Even the “he bought Tesla” meme is lame. He invested in a tiny electric car startup and built it into the massive success it currently is.

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