This kind of behavior is not befitting of a company that will need to cultivate an incredible amount of trust from customers before they buy into the idea of a brain implant.
Elon is so effective as a leader he seems to break people’s brains. No other person could have started this company and had even half this success. There’s a reason all the most talented flock to his companies, despite “conventional wisdom” saying they shouldn’t. It takes a lot of self deception to ignore the reality that he obviously must be doing something right.
Well, you have hit the nail on the head. My misanthropic view is that most people are a deluded lot.
I'm sure there are. There may also be people with The Com background (https://cyberscoop.com/the-com-764-cybercrime-violent-crime-...) working on it too: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/teen-on-musks-doge-team-...
yea more known as the DOGE guy but worked at Neuralink before that. Imagine the potential for abuse.
And when people point out that they made this gesture their answer is usually not to crack jokes about how they made a Nazi salute in response.
We can maybe disagree about WHY he did it, there's room to discuss if it was genuinely a white nationalism thing or if he was just being an edgelord.
But it WAS a nazi salute and denying this is disingenuous.
Can we admit to ourselves that most edgelords are actually people infatuated with exact same movements and value systems? Literally all edgelords get angry and strongly dislike anyone left leaning. For example, you do not see them harassing right wing, but you do see them harassing perceived sjws.
Somehow, there is no such thing as left wing edge lord. And that is because when left wing people act badly, they are blamed as bad left wing people. Edgelord is just a way to not blame right wing people and attributing them benefit of the doubt never given to the center or to the left.
I mean, I'm a pretty staunch socialist/commie and there are plenty of hard-left edgelords out there "joking" about gulags and executing academics and so on.
You have put joking into quotes. Even in this comment, you are not trying to convince me that they are actually fine, that they are something less then Stalinists.
Your comment is absolutely correct; Musk and his ilk are just people who "joked around" on 4chan and essentially radicalised themselves doing it.
HOWEVER left wing edgelords absolutely exist. Look up (at your peril) the phenomenon of "tankies". They're not your average communist, but rather apologists for Stalin's genocides.
Maybe your comment is more about the terminology at play, but it's interesting to see that the left wing mirror image of the average 4chan poster absolutely exists.
But that is my point - tankie is someone who is a communist, hardcore pro-Stalin. There is no assumption that tankie is someone apolitical who is just joking around. There is no "he is just a tankie, doing things for fun, stop accusing him of being a communist".
Meanwhile, edgelord is someone who is supposedly just joking. A fine guy who just happen to draw swastika to get a reaction. Someone who you should let say and do movement things, because "deep down they do not mean it".
> there's room to discuss if it was genuinely a white nationalism thing or if he was just being an edgelord
This is what I reacted to. You cant replace "edgelord" by "takie" and white nationalism by stalinism in that sentence. It wont work. The "there's room to discuss if it was genuinely a stalinist thing or if he was just being a tankie" does not work, because tankie is literally a stalinist .
> Musk and his ilk are just people who "joked around" on 4chan and essentially radicalised themselves doing it.
Or rather, the were attracted to 4chan because they had the same opinions and values as those people. They did not just joked around, it was what they believed and who they were. And while both center and left pretended they are just playing, they meant it and managed to radicalize other people too.
https://x.com/ADL/status/1881474892022919403
There also doesn’t seem to be any corroborating data to suggest he’s a nazi. I’m all for calling a spade a spade if he is, but it seems that people are working backwards from the “I hate Musk” position rather than forwards from the facts.
The ADL these days mainly exist to shout "antisemite" at anyone criticising Israel. Their giving him a pass was sickening, and undoubtedly related to Republican support of ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
Other Jewish organisations have called it as the world has seen it. One organisation does not speak for a very diverse people.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/26/elon-musk...
"Sorry officer, I did not flip you off twice, that were both just very awkward gestures"
There is tons of data on how Musk became a far right supporter and sympathizer, like his support of UK racists and the German far right. You seem to still use X, you could just scroll through his posts there and try to not ignore the evidence you see with your own eyes
I struggle to see how doubling down on the hatred is going to convince anyone other than _already hateful_ people of the righteousness of your cause?
But you (and everyone else in this thread, with perhaps a few exceptions) hated him long before the salute, so to try to blame it on that is pretty disingenuous.
I think trying to justify your hatred of someone based on something the did after you started hating them is pretty "not okay", too, fwiw
As for his other views, Wikipedia can speak to it better than I can: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Views_of_Elon_Musk#Race_and_wh...
So which is it? It seems wildly inconsistent to me to intentionally make a nazi salute but verbally deny being antisemitic. I don’t think someone like him would need to rely at all on plausible deniability, given that everyone already seems to hate him and he’s been granted immense power without having been elected to any position.
You are absolutely correct that modern Nazis are not really bothered by the Jews, but you have to remember that fascists just look for easy targets to hate.
Essentially, yeah, fine, he's not a card carrying member of the NSDAP. But he's a hateful individual pursuing a hateful agenda all the same, and he did the salute to signal to edgelords that he sees them.
That was a Hitlergruß, no ifs no buts. More over it wasn't just the once.
Does it make him a nazi? no.
But one has to question why the fuck he thought it was a good idea.
He's terminally online, he knows exactly what it is. He's seen the same memes as us, and knows exactly what that gesture means. So why do it?
That is the far more concerning question.
But thats irrelevant as he appears to be gaining absolute control over the executive.
As far as I understand, most of the leaders of the historical NSDAP (the Nazi party) / the Nazi regime were not Nazis themselves, insofar as they did not believe in whatever was written in Mein Kampf. Nazism was just a mean to grab and hold power. The true believers were basically victims of a con.
So... I don't care whether Elon Musk is actually a Nazi. I do believe that he is willing to use Nazism as a lever, which makes him much more dangerous.
Another example is Albert Speer (whose biography I've also read), where he initially was an opportunists but eventually became active participants in furthering the goals and believing the "mission" of the Nazis, even though initially (and afterwards) wasn't as convinced (edit: by his own accounts, many historians disagree with this today).
Characterizing the leadership/inner-circle/leaders as merely power-seekers who didn't believe their own ideology minimizes their moral culpability and misrepresents the historical record.
Probably not a good idea publicly. I'd say he slipped if he did do it. I do find NS to be very funny because it annoys/offend some people, most comedians similarly will find it funny.
I mean yeah, but he did it more than once, and it wasn't like it was an odd sort of wave, it was a full on parade standard Hitlergruß (thumpy on the chest hand out at the ascribed hitler angle). Which he then repeated to the audience in the front and the people behind him.
Monty python use to do it all the time, as did a number of other comedies. but the important distinction is that comedians aren't in power.
Musk arguably has more power than the president. So him thinking that it can't harm to try the old nazi salute, with unprecedented power isn't a healthy thing for democracy, regardless of who you think should be in power. Do you think he's going to give up that power willingly?
Now coming to the democracy thing - I'm not sure it's the best form of governance as is commonly understood, so I personally don't value it. I don't imply that the opposite of democracy is tyranny either. I suspect that groups exist that are outside of typical govts and personally I'd be a part of such group, than participate in a 'democracy' which caters to a relatively low IQ - the stuff that Monty Python highlights.
I would think that EM has already reached that stage of no wanting the approval of those easily offended people.
In this scenario, it is the people offended by the Nazi salute, and not the person doing it for outrage bait who are petty?
Brother, I have been accused of a lack of self-awareness, but man this is next level! In your own scenario you have all the power in the world; you dont ever have to weed out anyone, by definition.
He craves approval, the people that he crave it from are just as easily offended as anyone else.
Can you imagine the death threats if he pulled out a pride flag, or said he loved his transgendered kid?
>He craves approval, the people that he crave it from are just as easily offended as anyone else.
I would not make that assumption unless I knew him personally.
Hell, he tried to get the left's approval for years. However nothing he did was ever good enough to satisfy the loudest, most critical voices, which I think has contributed to his abandonment of the left as a whole.
It probably didn't help that he was outright snubbed by the previous administration numerous times. I think that blatant disapproval helped shape who he is today, too.
I'm mostly basing this on pragmatism, really. He wants to succeed, and if the left isn't enabling that, of course he'll try the right. They seem much more welcoming (ironic!), and much more supportive of his goals (also ironic, given Tesla's position opposing fossil fuels and climate change!)
https://www.jta.org/2025/01/21/politics/how-did-the-adl-conc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy#J...
> There also doesn’t seem to be any corroborating data to suggest he’s a nazi.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/11/22/ilnh-n22.html
> On November 15, a Zionist account posted a tweet attacking Nazis for being “cowards” and posting ‘Hitler was right.’” In response, a fascist account replied that “Jewish communities have been pushing... dialectical hatred against whites” through “hordes of minorities... flooding their country.”
> Musk responded to the latter post with the statement, “You have said the actual truth.”
Those, and so much more, are the facts. You cherry-pick the ADL, say "there doesn't seem to be anything else", and conclude everyone, including Auschwitz survivors who seriously have better things to do, just "hate Musk".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace
> Hare further claims that the prevalence of psychopaths is higher in the business world than in the general population.
One of the great examples of this is the infamous "Pedo guy" incident in which he showed himself as very unempathetic and petty the moment people dismissed him as he attempted to hastily insert himself into a tragic moment.
He's also regularly sued people exercising their free speech to comment on or criticise his financial interests, knowingly attempting to drown influential people he doesnt like in legal fees and frivolous lawsuits.
In the past he has participated in doxing governmental employees who might cause him financial damages, often encouraging his followers to harass beuraucrats and lawyers who are just doing their legal jobs.
There are plenty of examples of Elon regularly engaging in bullying of others who may not have access to the resources he does, its not just limited to these few examples.
In my eyes, any measure of success or wealth will never excuse how a person conducts themselves in public. And I think Elon no longer thinks that the rules apply to him as so many are willing to overlook his behavior due to worshiping his money and influence. Elon's nazi salute is the perfect example of this.
So my original statement still holds. Neuralink has a very large mountain to climb when it comes to consumer trust. Products in the Healthcare industry can massively impact people's lives, especially when they dont work as intended. Any company that participates in this space is morally and ethically required to be empathetic to the lives that they impact. And this level of empathy is not something that I see coming from the man behind neuralink which I think should disqualify it as a company with the potential to impact a lot of people.
Is this legal in the US?
This makes it rather galling that Elmu is seeking to shield DOGE employees from such accountability, but understandable when people on Reddit are openly advocating their assassination.
Is this standard of shielding government employees from accountability applicable only to DOGE employees, or could we also have applied it to the many employees receiving death threats from Elon's fan base? Consistency on this would be welcome.
Briefly, in the firearm age, respecting the popular vote was a Nash equilibrium, because if you lost the vote, you probably wouldn't be able to field enough riflemen to win on the battlefield either, so your best option was to lick your wounds and make do under the opposition party until the next election. Despite the resounding defeats of the US by masses of riflemen in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and of the USSR in Afghanistan in between, that equilibrium seems increasingly unstable in the drone age. The first warning signs of this were the staggeringly unequal death tolls in the US's first Iraq invasion, reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa. Recent examples of this instability might include the US's successful initial invasion of Afghanistan, the US's successful eventual defeat of Daesh in western Iraq (despite the relative hostility of current Iraqi leadership to the US, which counts as a sort of defeat), Israel's utter dismemberment of Hizbullah, Israel successfully stymieing Iran's nuclear weapons program, and Ukraine's surprisingly successful resistance to the invasion by Russia's much larger army. Also Hamas doesn't seem to be doing very well at defending Gaza.
Unfortunately the literature I could recommend to you on this topic has mostly been flagged as wrongthink, so I won't recommend that, but Slaughterbots is probably still safe to watch. It contains the memorable line "nuclear is obsolete", a riff on Putin's remarks at Valdai in Sochi 11 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA
It's fiction, of course, but thought-provoking fiction, scripted by leading AI researchers to be as realistic as possible, and it may have more truth in it than we would like.
As written about by Sam Harris recently and discussed in the (now dead) thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42716926
Musk is a terrible person, but also a deeply dishonest and selfish one.
In the grander scheme of things, the US voters do indeed have the right to vote for not providing foreign aid. Which is sad of course, but is a valid political position.
Those are just two of very many recent examples.
If the guy has demonstrated anything, it's that he wants total control.
But — despite all the things that should've (but didn't) set alarm bells ringing in my head at the time — until just after he bought Twitter and immediately starting making harmful decisions with its new rules, the output of his companies looked kinda like it was helping improve the world.
With SpaceX, humanity was finally unlocking that cheap spaceflight the Space Shuttle promised but didn't deliver ever since Rockwell started building the Enterprise-née-Constitution in 1974, which is one of the few areas where their work is still going great.
(Buuuut even then, for Mars missions to be viable they must have a working Sabatier plant that fits in the payload bay and can produce 330 tons of methane every 2 years from a Martian atmosphere and irradiance level, and I've not seen any sign of this actually getting worked on by any Musk-group company; such machines would be really useful for Earth's environment, and it's a requirement for his Mars plans as otherwise the Starship vehicles can't return to Earth).
With Hyperloop we were finally getting high speed transit to compete with polluting flights, but TBC has completely failed to do anything noteworthy, not even when it is news-worthy.
With Tesla, we were finally getting non-polluting cars, when the competition was hydrogen vapourware, milk-floats, an excuse for ongoing corn subsidies, and the occasional slow news day when some back-yard inventor made a car that was propelled by springs and/or hamsters.
This sort of blindness is a major reason liberals can't properly respond to the rise of MAGA or Trumpism. They refuse to understand it. Understanding something doesn't mean you agree. You can't properly criticize something you don't understand, nor can you provide an alternative that answers it.
Go back in time to the 1990s and 2000s.
The shuttle program was winding down. The only way to get humans into space currently on the market was the Russian Soyuz program, which is ancient Soviet technology. The only human habitation in space was the ISS, which everyone knows is a good engineering experimental platform but otherwise a dead end. The DC-X (first vertical landing rocket) was cancelled. The Venturestar was cancelled, and it may not have been a good design anyway for several reasons.
A lot of people are writing about this as the end of the space age, that the whole thing wasn't a good idea to begin with and there is no future there.
Then along comes SpaceX and within a few years they go from small orbital rocket to functional first stages that land themselves and now they almost have a fully reusable super-heavy capable of refueling in orbit.
Now look at cars. Common wisdom in the 1990s and 2000s is that affordable long-range cars are impossible without fossil fuels. There's a popular site called The Oil Drum that pushes the narrative that all motorized transport will end if fossil fuels are depleted. There are hybrids, but they still run on gas, and nothing much has happened to ICE technology since fuel injection in the early 1980s.
There are some EV efforts but they're early and half-assed.
Then along comes Tesla with the roadster and shows that EVs can be not just viable but cool and actually faster with better torque and acceleration than conventional cars. Since then many other car companies have caught up, but I still believe the whole industry would not have moved without Tesla kicking them in the arse.
If you really hate Musk, the question you should be asking is: why does the human race seem to need people like this to advance?
We had the technology to build the Falcon 9 and Starship in the 1990s, maybe even the 1980s. The problem wasn't money. The total cost of Falcon 9 development was comparable to two space shuttle launches.
The situation wasn't as absurd with EVs, but we definitely could have built a commuter EV at least a decade before we did. Look into the GM EV1 from the 1990s, which pre-dated the Nissan LEAF -- the first mass market EV, which did beat Tesla on that front -- and it had similar range and performance. The EV1 was killed in spite of demand becuase the conventional auto industry hated EVs. Some still do, like Toyota.
It really does seem like nothing big happens in human history without some manic unhinged asshole pushing it. We have everything -- ability, intelligence, technology, money -- but we don't do it without one of these people. Why?
Maybe we'd need "visionary" CEOs less if we had an over the counter amphetamine-like drug but with less addictiveness or other side effects.
Why do we need this to advance?
We had everything we needed to build the Falcon 9 in 1985.
We will keep suffering Hitlers until we can build the Autobahn without him.
Many yes, but certainly nowhere near all. So that would seem to invalidate your hypothesis.
In my view, Elon's spent most of his good will reputation capital. Of course, we still do have the super-fans who are willing to look past his petulant behavior and give him a pass for his bone-head business moves.
The other take is that he's a genius and a hostile takeover of Twitter was just a checkpoint on the way to making US government his puppet state. Congress is twiddling their thumbs while Musk is apparently preparing to siphon off taxpayer dollars into Space X, Tesla or other ventures.
Either way, it's bad. I loathe the man and fear what could happen.
It's sad, but damn the man could play... once... I guess I can listen to the old albums.
It's like that.
Unfortunately rock stars on the spiral don't generally destroy democracy.
Musk fans keep insisting he should get more and more control of my life as an individual who has no interest in buying his products or using his businesses because they aren't good products for me.
They keep insisting that I AM WRONG for being upset about an outright asshole forcing himself into my life.
> The situation wasn't as absurd with EVs, but we definitely could have built a commuter EV at least a decade before we did. Look into the GM EV1 from the 1990s, which pre-dated the Nissan LEAF -- the first mass market EV, which did beat Tesla on that front -- and it had similar range and performance. The EV1 was killed in spite of demand becuase the conventional auto industry hated EVs. Some still do, like Toyota.
Could we have actually built an affordable commuter EV a decade earlier?
Eyeballing this graph, batteries were about 6x more expensive a decade before Tesla actually started delivering the Roadster: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
OTOH, perhaps the extra demand would just have made prices fall sooner, given the other graph in the link shows the relationship between market size and price, rather than year of price…
He has access to a lot of money so maybe these people working on it should continue to work for him. Maybe he wants to charge an outrageous fee for it but ultimately at some point down the road if he can do it others will to and it will be common place for those who need it and probably common place for those who don't need it but want it.
I'm sure he wants to sell it to those who need it, but I don't think that this means he cares that much whether it's successful as a medical device. He generally cares whether some device appears to work well enough that he can sell it, especially to investors, and far less about whether it actually solves a problem/doesn't introduce worse problems.
Tesla FSD is the best example of something he's been selling for at least 7 years now without it actually working as advertised. Cybertruck was sold long before it came out, and now they're producing only a trickle. Roadster has been sold by the tens of thousands and it's not even in a design phase yet. Solar Roofs was presented to investors as a working product when it was a plastic mockup. There are probably others.