DOGE Said It Cut $232M from Social Security. It Was Only About Half a Mil

“Capable” and “credible” are two different things, and as much as hus record at Tesla may arguably support “capable”, it certainly goes the other way on “credible”.

(And “capable” often translates poorly between dissimilar domains, while a history of lying like a rug is more transferrable.)

> He said he was going to do huge, groundbreaking things and actually delivered on them?

How many huge, groundbreaking things that he promised has he _not_ delivered on?

And how many of those groundbreaking things have been accomplished by abusing people -- employees, customers, or even rescue divers?

> Because he built a massive electric car company, launched a new global satellite internet service with micro-satellites, and successfully launched reusable heavy rockets?

That's a non-sequitur.

> Elon is clearly capable but I get it, people disagree with his politics so they pretend he not credible at all?

Exactly wrong, and I'd turn that around and say that people tolerate his nonsense because they agree with his politics, and defend him beyond reason.

All I'm saying is people should be judged on what they say and do and the relationship between the two. They shouldn't be excused from lying, abuse and dissembling just because they're successful in business.

Tesla – Musk did not found Tesla. It was started by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003. Musk joined as an investor in 2004 and later took over as CEO. Tesla’s engineering and production achievements are the result of work by thousands of engineers and employees. Bought, not built.

Starlink is a project within SpaceX, which Musk co-founded, but the development of its satellite internet network has been carried out by SpaceX engineers and scientists. The technology and execution come from a large team.

Reusable Rockets – The success of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy reusability was achieved through the efforts of SpaceX’s engineers, especially Tom Mueller, who led the development of the Merlin engines.

Granting him the credibility associated with building and running some pretty successful engineering companies, in whatever the dimensions of that are deserved, is arguably warranted. Within that space the always coming next year or two FSD has proven to be hugely optimistic at best and blatantly manipulative otherwise however do some skepticism is still needed. The misrepresentations and lies he is telling as the defacto head of DOGE are so many and broad (and laced with such heavy personal and political bias) that the only pretending going on is when you say they are credible by default.

Those achievements were in a different domain. He has never had success in the domain he’s playing in now.

Also, his behavior smacks of arrogance that his past successes mean he’ll always be right.

That's beside the point; he's a compulsive liar, so it shouldn't be surprising when he lies.

I wonder if it is hard to be rich and too critical. After all you are just one exec order from being wiped out. This government can do anything now!

Related: Stock markets have caught up now and are spooked. There will probably be a recession.

I get what you're getting at, but that's not actually what I'm advocating for here.

I'm pointing out that multiple times a day a political post gets bounced off the front page, and it's frustrating that the conversations are being quashed. I'd just like to be able to talk about the stuff we know people want to talk about (upvotes are the simplest metric we have for this). And there's a very simple binary filter we can apply that costs very little overhead in terms of UX and engineering.

If I wanted to go somewhere else I would. I'm suggesting how we make this site better for users, or at least a sizable amount of them. And it would make almost no difference to the users who'd like to just ignore it. You can even have it off by default so only logged in members are able to see political posts and even then only opt-in.

I have zero expectation of this ever happening.

It wouldn't surprise me if Elon is using bots, he's certainly petty enough to do so.

Elon is a speaker at the Spring YC conference!