Hacker News Reader

Comment by woah | Hacker News Reader

It's conspiratorial thinking to assume that everything that happens in the world is perfectly executed by omniscient villains with 20/20 hindsight. Maybe a formerly-brilliant but drug-addled rich guy just bought a social media platform with bad fundamentals at the height of its valuation and then mismanaged it while flailing around with other ventures and political adventures. Occam's razor.

View on HN

You are conveniently omitting his reason to buy it. Personal megaphone and shortly thereafter LLM training data are the simplest reasons.

I think the GP is suggesting a simple explanation of why it went badly, since that is the subject of the thread, rather than an explanation of why Musk bought Twitter. No need for conspiratorial accusations of conveniently omitting anything.

Maybe he just spent a lot of time shitposting on there.

He did not want to buy it. He took an arrogant joke far enough that the Delaware Court of Chancery forced him to do it. He never wanted it earnestly.

Buying a 9.1% stake in a company before making an unsolicited (but formal) offer to buy out the rest of it is weird behaviour for somebody who didn’t actually ever want to buy it…

> formerly-brilliant

When?

TBF going from the cobbled together roadster to actually mass producing cars was an accomplishment, as was giving his engineers the latitude to keep trying to land a Falcon 9 booster.

Then he started to think it was his brilliance that made those things successful. Cybertruck is his baby. So is Starship. He's telling his people to make it work with a little or no moderation of his concepts.

It’s not clear to me that he had any hand in the actual successes of Tesla and SpaceX. Stories abound of the lengths to which each company went to to manage his whims. He’s apparently burned through all of those firewalls and now both companies are exploding, figuratively and in literally.

That's what the comment you're replying to said.

Wasn't elonjet the turning point? There are some arguments around that he might not have clear cognitive distinction between verbal accusations and physical violence. Maybe that was the missed shot from rooftop for him. Elon before those events was a Steve Jobs Junior figure, that is to say, he was not problematic enough for the rest of the world including myself to focus on the crazy side.

I'd love to hear why this is being downvoted? Not agreeing is one thing, but it seems like a reasonable thing to suggest?

Because Musk has provided abundant evidence of his political orientation over the last several years.

He's provided evidence of being an impulsive fool for even longer. I defended Musk as a useful idiot for a while until be fully showed his true colors, but it has always been clear he's not a wise man.

(His vigorous and pathetic efforts to get out of the purchase also push against it being a big master plan, FWIW.)

Witness his entire Boring Company being a sock puppet project to derail California's High Speed Rail system.

Can you provide more about this idea? I see the Boring company as being pretty feckless, and at the same time extremely boastful. They have gotten hopes up in a number of places about solving city traffic problems, only to go dark when the rubber (should have) met the road.

But I don't see any of those having impacted the California High Speed Rail. Rather that has been harmed by lots of different groups throwing roadblocks up, sometime for ideological reasons (lots of this from State and National Republicans, sometimes with reasons, but often more political), and a whole lot of NIMBY (see: Palo Alto). What do you see the Boring Company having to do with that?

As a side note: there are some really poorly thought through parts of the project, for example they don't have a plan for actually making it over the mountains into Los Angeles. I still want it to happen, but...

It was the silly and obviously unworkable Hyperloop idea that was pushed as an attempt to stop CAHSR, according to Musk’s biographer [1].

1. https://www.disconnect.blog/p/the-hyperloop-was-always-a-sca...

Hyperloop was a stunt Musk spun up to mess with the HSR, and the Boring company to fight against subway type systems. I mixed the two up.

The CHSR thing is a bit apocryphal (no evidence, just according to his biographer) since hyperloop never really competed in any way with CHSR. He did, however, play a very big role in fucking up a potential Chicago connection between downtown and O'hare, as the Boring company actually did win the bid to use the abandoned cavern below the Washington Red/Blue line stop, promising to run a hyperloop up to the airport. It never went anywhere, and the cavern below block 37 remains abandoned.

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/elon-musk-ohare-airport...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Express_Loop

It never went anywhere because of the politicians. The Boring Company is opening new tunnels in Vegas without spending public money.

Those tunnels are, like other Musk projects, using plenty of public money.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-29/las-vegas...

> Last week, the Boring Company won a $48.6 million bid to design and build a “people mover” beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center. The payout represents the first actual contract for Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s tunneling venture. And Las Vegas, a tourist city that wants to be seen as a technology hub, will get a new mobility attraction with the imprimatur of America’s leading disruptor.

> “Las Vegas is known for disruption and for reinventing itself,” Tina Quigley, the chief executive officer of the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada, said when the partnership between the Boring Company and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) was announced in March. “So it’s very appropriate that this new technology is introduced and being tested here.”

https://assets.simpleviewcms.com/simpleview/image/upload/v1/...

> perfectly executed by omniscient villains with 20/20 hindsight

Is a strawman, to which the conclusion is also defied by the plain evidence of everything Musk has done on Twitter

> It's conspiratorial thinking to assume that everything that happens in the world is perfectly executed by omniscient villains with 20/20 hindsight.

Because the original comment isn't doing this. It's not talking about everything, it's talking about one specific thing in a very plausible scenario.

It wouldn't even need to be a very complicated or widespread "conspiracy": Just Musk and a few VC guys in a Signal or Telegram thread saying

> someone should just buy Twitter and downrank all these crazy leftists

> Hmm

> I'll help line up financing.

> Ok!

This isn't flat earth, chem trails, lizard people, or weather weapons. It's not even Illuminati, Masons, or Skull and Bones. We've seen some of these chats already.

You are missing the forest for one very odd tree. Yes, the tree is wacky, but

* Every private media company has beneficial owners * Those beneficial owners are rich * Rich people who own things for a living have incentives opposed to those of most people, who work for a living

These are not conspiracies, they are just basic facts of capitalism.

Better to put "facts" in quotation marks considering that is clearly a statement of opinion, and a fairly caricatured one at that.

I haven't downvoted you, I am curious. Why do you disagree? In what relevant ways are their interests aligned?

That there are a select few who own the capital, and that those people generally do not overlap with the people who work, is more or less the original definition of capitalism. And I don't think its controversial or a caricature to imply that those two groups will have different incentives.

From Wikipedia [0]: `The initial use of the term "capitalism" in its modern sense is attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850 ("What I call 'capitalism' that is to say the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others") and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1861 ("Economic and social regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labor")`

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#Etymology

Reply on news.ycombinator.com