Musk, the Movie
bleeckerstreetmedia.com
bleeckerstreetmedia.com
Maybe it's warranted maybe it isn't but it sure seems like Musk was right to be concerned.
and cite it as an example on https://grokipedia.com/page/hit_piece
As expected from MechaHitler themselves.
Oh please please please...
Maybe it's that you think "hit piece" means "illigitimate?". Documentary cinema is absolutely allowed to have perspective. Musk's own communication is hardly unbiased or coolly considered, and he's been known to engage in some "creative advocacy" of his own. Would you apply the same logic there?
My own opinion is that he's a complicated guy and a seemingly textbook bipolar case with a lot of good technical instincts and a really destructive egomaniacal streak. He could do with some hit pieces, honestly.
I have no opinion about this movie.
I said it's a "hit piece", not a hit piece. And I gave a definition for what I meant in the very next sentences. Because, obviously, the traditional definition is one that is going to be subjective and silly and not worth discussing. But the idea of documentary filmaking having opinion and perspective is important, nonetheless.
Yes, "presenting false or biased information in a way that appears objective and truthful" is an essential part of being a hit piece [1].
Sure. Which is why it's nonsense to prematurely conclude that "of course it's a 'hit piece'."
"Biased" is a weasel word when used in arguments like this. I really doubt anything in this film is actually materially false.
Like when he wanted to abandon UNIX for Windows NT at PayPal? [1]
That bit was wrong. He was wrong about lots of other stuff too.
But Tesla's product design and market fit was right on the whole. SpaceX was almost all right and not wrong. Starlink was almost 100% right. PayPal was a lot more right than wrong. Obviously you can nitpick about anything, but when you make that many great bets on things that other people tried and failed at, I think you need to at least nod that maybe his instincts were... good. Which is what I said.
The company he invested in, then sued to be declared "Founder" and now parades as his own, personal invention?
>SpaceX was almost all right and not wrong
Except about the things Elon opines on. Because he doesn't know shit about rocketry
>PayPal was a lot more right than wrong
He was kicked out of Paypal for all his stupid ideas
Overall an OK movie despite few bizarre directorial choices: letting interviewees speculate about things that are almost certainly not true in a few places, and “interviewing” an AI generated Musk on camera. Also it’s 4 hours long.
You might want to consider if you are out of the loop. I don't think Musk is "concerned". If anything, I wouldn't doubt this is partially his idea. It's just the latest iteration of "reality TV".
It's been over a decade that we've had this style of marketing popularized by Trump. It works very well. There's even an Elizabeth Holmes one coming out soon (You Can See Everything)! I'm actually very excited to see Nathan Fielder's take on this genre of unhinged drama.
Unpetty men aren’t constantly on social media.
It works beautifully on so many different types of ego. If you have power fantasies, you can either choose to live vicariously through the celebrity or immediately find your equally toxic anti-fan group. Everyone else at least just finds it entertaining to watch all kinds of people make asses of themselves.
Meanwhile, nobody ever really questions the basis for all of this. The public side of a celebrity is a brand that is indeed as carefully planned out as any other ad campaign.
The only difference today is that things must be done like this to get ahead of naysayers since everyone has a voice online. All the bad faith is now a feature, not a bug. As soon as they figure out all the ways something could be argued against, they have to pre-emptively find the dumbest ways to say it to cast doubt on the legitimacy of dissent.
It's like a Penn and Teller act. They don't even have to hide any of this for the illusion to still work.
> karma: 191021
It's a journey of maturation I haven't yet completed. I suspect neither has Musk (if he recognizes it as a shortcoming).
Anything that doesn't make Musk look awesome and support his PR goals.
"The Major Social Media Platforms Are All Rejecting Paid Ads for Alex Gibney’s ‘Musk’"
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/elon-musk...
> A YouTube spokesperson said the ad should be appearing soon, though as of late Saturday morning Bleecker Street has not yet been informed of any change.
> The Meta reversal is especially notable as the company had previously rejected an appeal by Bleecker Street, leaving it with few options to run ads on Instagram and Facebook.
> TikTok and X have remained quiet and continue not to run the ad.
I can think of 1000 things more worrying that ad money for a documentary not being accepted for whatever reason on private platoforms.
That irritates me a lot. Everything extremely difficult (or thought to be impossible) is a dream until someone (or some company) works hard on it and invests in it for a long time. Those that would criticize Musk & SpaceX for chipping away at this seem to be effectively saying "do not try."
Mars is just really far. You can send lots of robots. Human beings is a tougher thing
Through Tesla and his prominent advocacy for green energies, you don’t think his doing that?
That should be plural.
He also supports AfD in Germany, a party which like the R:s in USA clamours for oil and coal power while denying that climate change exists.
Musk has also vocally and monetarily supported Reform UK who also denies climate change and tries to expand fossil fuel production.
Same thing with Musk’s support for Javier Milei who calls climate change a “leftist lie”.
A man is known by the company he keeps.
So the first thing we'd want to do is activate a magnetosphere on Mars. I rarely see anyone talking about that[2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/science-research/heliophysics/real-mart...
[2] https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/how-to-give-mars-an-atmos...
It's way beyond what we can do right now, but then again, at time of writing Starship has yet to have been in a circular orbit, so all aspects of a Mars colony are way beyond what we can do right now.
Let's just stop claiming he actually cares about the environment and that he just wants wealth and power and he saw a business opportunity taking over Tesla.
He's a car salesman doing what a billionaire car salesman does.
For me personally, things like this make me question the value of the businesses rather than the environment. Like, I'm not sure if it's true this year, but in several recent years you could correctly say Musk personally made more money selling Tesla shares than Tesla made lifetime net profit, and likewise could correctly say that if all government subsidies and artificial markets were removed Tesla would not have made a profit at all.
Carbon trading is the "free market" solution to getting businesses to price-in what would otherwise be a free externality.
I won't praise Musk for it (at best praise goes to the governments setting up the rules), so we're probably on the same page, but it did feel like you were painting him as a villain for taking part in something that at least solves one of the common criticisms of carbon emitting industries.
It may feel like that because it takes away Musks "at least he built the Autobahn" (even though the statement is of course also inaccurate for the original). But I consider it very dishonest to assign CO2 savings from electric cars to him, without also mentioning him profiting off of those emissions in other places.
Tesla isn't afraid of Chinese competition. They compete directly with BYD in China and win. Model Y outsells any BYD model. All other US automakers, on the other hand, are terrified. And for good reason.
Meanwhile, Tesla is still making a $25,000 EV. It's just not designed for personal ownership. Tesla is betting on autonomous fleets as the future of cars. But they're still electric. Shared fleets would be way more efficient than personal car ownership, so this is even better for the climate, actually.
And they're doing Semi and Megapack and Superchargers (open to all EVs) too. They're doing their own battery R&D at their own battery factory, their own lithium refining, their own solar cell production. Honestly ridiculous that you would try to paint Tesla as some kind of climate traitor.
BYD's sales are split across multiple brands and models. BYD sells more EVs than Tesla. Why is Tesla being outsold by BYD?
BYD is one of the global top ten automakers by sales. Why isn't Tesla in the top ten?
Why isn't Tesla selling 20 million cars per year like they said they would?
Why has the Cybertruck been such a sales flop?
BYD and Geely cars can charge 10 to 70% in 5 minutes on 1.5+ megawatt chargers. Does Tesla offer anything like that capability?
Cybertruck is a flop, no argument there.
The reason Tesla hasn't scaled further is that a few years ago they pivoted in strategy and are no longer heavily pursuing the consumer market with new models for personal ownership. For better or worse they are all in on autonomous fleet vehicles and Optimus. The pivot was probably a few years too early. Many think it'll never work and I'm sure you're among them, but time will tell.
Porsche's got wireless charging on their cars now. Does Tesla?
Any answer on why Tesla is so far behind on the hardware?
He is the man with a plan a certain ideology wants to see eradicated. His existence is a intro to what western society has missed out on while coasting on past success build by people like him. If you dislike him why not leave the west?
Getting Starship to be useful for Mars missions requires actually building industrial-scale Sabatier machines.
This is something he has known about, and talked about, for a long time; it's (apparently) why they're designed around methane.
However, we don't see any reports of work on such machines.
This is both bad for the environment here on Earth, and also an indicator that despite what he's been saying, Mars has been less of an interest for several years before he officially put the moon and space data centres ahead of it.
Starmind just happened to fit nicely with that and the current market desire for a lot more compute.
However, merely switching from Mars to the Moon isn't by itself a reason for the complete absence of any public presentations about progress with industrial-scale Sabatier machines.
There's a lot of good use for industrial-scale Sabatier machines right now, on Earth. Use renewables to synthesise methane, the main component of natural gas: (1) Hormuz less important; (2) those gas turbines powering his ground based data centres look a lot less bad (still bad, but less bad); (3) methane-fuelled rockets look a lot greener; (4) can sell to any nation with a lot of renewable supply that wants to get into petrochemicals (though I suppose "petro" is a misnomer if it's not from rocks…)
Like, it wouldn't be entirely nuts to say this is order-of a trillion dollar opportunity, if someone got it right. At least, assuming the same playbook as the SpaceX IPO for TAMs, which I absolutely do consider to look suspiciously like they gamed a metric that allows such gaming.
Please explain how any fuel type is "sustainable" that they're using in their rockets?
Also, please explain his plan and what "ideology" I have that makes me want to "eradicate" him?
I'm sorry I criticized your Tony Stark fantasy man
The actual founders of Tesla did; Elon did not.
In case people didn't know already, he was not a founder, he bought the company and demanded the title as part of the purchase.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster_(first_generati...
Ya'll need to stop with what the founders accomplished pre-Musk.
I have never owned, nor have any desire to ever own a Tesla or any electric car yet, but this sideline war is amusing to see.
The best-selling car in the world all-time is the Toyota Corolla. The Tesla Model Y was the best-selling car in a single year, 2023. Every other year since 2020, the best-selling car was a Toyota.
(Fanbois are weird.)
If you're genuinely curious, and can't wait to watch the film, here's a starting point: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-lists/elon-musk...
That's the truth and that is what is being said here; it is not a denial that the chipping away is happening, it is a characterization of the why and how.
The second thing is to point out that Musk may not be entirely honest about trying to colonize Mars, just as some politicians may campaign on a promise to make a country great again while robbing blind the rubes who vote for them.
[1] Although I think Mark Zuckerberg still beats him in the deadliest tech CEO race, given the role that Facebook plays in the Rohingya genocide.
Also, Mars is a pipe dream of people who know more about Star Trek than space exploration.
It’s all bullshit to provide air cover for his sociopathic behavior and ambition.
Most of the examples I've ever seen tend to be purposeful misunderstanding, his timing being off (clearly a flaw, but common to most ambitious projects), vibes, or just factually incorrect.
He clearly has flaws, but his critics always seem to be far more flawed.
18 mile hyperloop between downtown Chicago and O’Hare Airport
Humans on Mars by 2024
SpaceX would be flying private citizens around the Moon by 2018.
March 2020: "probably close to zero new cases" of covid-19 "by the end of April."
Summon an autonomous Tesla from New York to LA by 2018
Saying Tesla Autonomous by "next year" over and over for a decade https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufbxvRo2rnY
A Tesla with 1,000-Kilometer range by 2017
You are the sucker.
Even if you were correct on the facts, the right thing to do in the face of changing circumstances can of course be to change the plan. In an alternate reality where they had sold preorders for a solar car, making it right to the customers combined with not going out of business is the better plan.
oh god oh no
I feel like we're all required to declare fealty to a billionaire warlord and latch to their propaganda.
The selective outrage from posters is funny to me.
facepalm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_filmography
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/54065/did-elon-...
Even then history isn't terribly objective, it just tends to be better than what is said when those who say things can gain or lose advantage based upon what they say.
Musk appears different to different people. An insight into what, if any, represents the real person, and in what contexts Musk presents a persona, and why?
Perhaps I was harsh on historians, they do strive for accuracy, but they themselves will tell you how much perspectives of the day colour the representations. In many respects, it is similar to science. The answers that history give us are not the guaranteed truth, they are just the best answers that we have a consensus on at the moment.
I don't think we can have the Ken Burns series until Musk is dead. He's remade himself too fully since Covid, and that means we can't really predict what the man today will do based on what he was before.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SipsTea/comments/1vhe955/everything...
The postpandemic moves would then be less extreme than before (one commenter went so far as to say that they were already zero)
Sam Altman's upcoming midlife crises are more worrying. This other man has been surfing his.
The space laser thing was (unsurprisingly in different ways to different people) just a minor readjustment..
Altman has a life partner by his side. Musk does not. That really stabilizes a person. (Particularly, it seems, a man.)
If Altman pulls a Bezos and trades for a younger Oliver, yes, we should get worried. Given the low-key maturity with which they seem to pilot that relationship, I'm not.
(Better compare Altman with Thiel, yes, low-key maturity, children, more relationships under the belt(?), detachment from operations.. but also more worrying than Musk because of the access to influence/sophisticated "team-play". I wonder at the chatrooms/mailing lists that now have Thiel+Altman+Zuck+Karp but not Musk)
Thousands of hours of video about the companies and their products, hundreds of hours of interviews with Musk, thousands of tweets by Musk, financial filings of Tesla and SpaceX, you can test drive a Tesla for free in most parts of the world, you can use Starlink in most parts of the world, you can ride a Cybercab in Austin, you can watch a rocket launch livestream or in person, you can watch videos about people who had their lives changed from Neuralink, etc.
I can't think of another person of similar prominence who has been as accessible as Musk. Partly due to the internet, but also due to his choices. I don't see Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates or the Google founders sharing their views & debating them with adversarial reporters on a regular basis. Perhaps Palmer Luckey is on track for becoming somewhat akin to Musk.
(1) Test drives are free everywhere. WTF?
(2) Tesla sells cars in about 40 or so countries; Toyota sells in more than 170.
(Fanbois need to learn that the best, most successful car company in the world is Toyota.)
Knock Down the House(AOC Documentary) was done really well and it actually followed the subjects as they were making history. You obviously watch it looking back but it takes place during the events that it describes.
Fahrenheit 11/9 is not hiding its political leaning but asks a question at the beginning ("How in the hell did this happen?!" (Donald Trump being elected)) then presents the story as a series of multiple sub-plots that are completely disconnected from each other but then become connected into an underlying finale as the story progresses. It takes you on a journey that is as captivating as a non documentary but also enables you to have a light bulb moment about the point the author is really talking about. Thats the point of a movie. You have the undivided attention of a person for two hours. How often does anyone be able to do that? Not even Trump can muster that too often. If you don't manage to capture their imagination in those two hours, you have wasted their time.
I remember a friend watching a Tony Blair speech coming up to Iraq saying "I disagree with everything he's saying, but the language and sense of authority is strong enough that it feels like it is convincing me anyway"
Like I'm genuinely confused who they think is going to sit through this.