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Comment by zarzavat | Hacker News Reader

> the index funds be forced to purchase SpaceX

SpaceX is a fantastic company full of the smartest engineers that has brought fast internet to the most remote regions on Earth. Even if it wasn't for index funds, investors would buy the shit out of it.

xAI has built an almost-frontier model. It's not Anthropic or OpenAI but it's also not valued like Anthropic or OpenAI either.

Twitter is doing OK, despite predictions. It found a niche with obnoxious right-wing assholes instead of obnoxious left-wing assholes. Twitter does seem to be less excited about getting people fired for wrongthink than before which is a societal improvement. It did succeed in buying Musk influence at the highest levels, but he threw it away. Mixed success.

I know Musk gets a lot of hatred on here for his behavior and beliefs, including from myself, but that doesn't imply that his businesses are all scams. Hugo Boss was a Nazi too and his business is doing fine.

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Elon has made multiple comments in the past about how much keeping SpaceX private, makes it easier to run, and achieve it's goals of colonising Mars.

He has given up on that, he has abandoned the Mars goal, and he is sacrificing the company to the whims of the public markets, just so he can have a payday.

xAi raised $45 billion and Grok loses benchmarks to Chinese(GPU sanctioned) open weight models.

I'm overall positive about the Twitter acquisition, I mean it was terrible financially, and Elon has made a lot of unforced errors in it's management, but yes, it does feel like the idpol witch hunts have died down a bit since.

>yes, it does feel like the idpol witch hunts have died down a bit since.

You don't seriously believe that was because of the Twitter purchase and not due to a coinciding social shift, do you?

I think the causation is multivariate, but at least partially because of it, yes.

After the Musk acquisition, the identity politics ultras quickly moved to mastodon and bluesky. Regular people were slower to move if at all because of switching friction.

Social media is an amplifier: most of the users are passive consumers or retweeters, and only a smaller minority drive the conversation.

Traditional media also loves to get stories from social media in order to "get the pulse" of society and because journalists are lazy and desperate for narratives. A relatively small social movement can therefore use social media to catapult its message onto traditional media and thus onto society at large.

By isolating themselves from the amplifier, the identity politics ultras were no longer able to push their political message (and witch hunts) to such a large audience, the message stayed confined in spaces that were basically invisible to the average person, and the message faded away.

Yes it wasn't just because of the Musk purchase, but it was definitely a factor.

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