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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

There was an article the other day that quoted someone saying, "the greatest minds of our generation are focused on making people click more ads."

And I think there's a lot of truth to that. If you work at Facebook or Google or other companies, you've been convinced that you're the best of the best. The brightest of our generation. But ultimately all your work leads to selling ads.

That's what's so attractive about Musk. He's a bizarre, often unhealthy mind. But he's dead focused on numerous businesses that have a considerably greater point than boosting ad impressions.

And I think he continues to poorly communicate that frustration: way too little of our high tech industry is focused on true innovation for the betterment of humanity. I wish there were more non-Musks we could cheer for.

My takeaway from his musings is that too many strong minds are funnelled into industries that don't push the envelope in more directions.

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I think that is a great point.

And I agree with musk's general point on finance. I did my M.S. in finance, I work (somewhat) in the industry still. It's a ridiculous amount of smart people basically wasting everyone's time to magically make money.

Nothing of any real value is being done.. After these many years I don't find value in people spending SO MUCH TIME AND ENERGY into "making more money out of money". That's all it is. We can talk all day about making efficient portfolios and all this bullshit.. Sure there is some value, but 99% of it is utter bullshit that is solely designed to make the rich richer. And not even just the super rich- it is even to keep the upper middle class above the "rest".

/disillusioned person related to finance

I think finance plays a tremendously important support role in creating new wealth. But it's kind of promoted itself to a primary role and you can see that in all the creative ways money is made.

It's ruthless pursuit of efficiency has also caused harm, like yielding brittle supply chains.

> He's a bizarre, often unhealthy mind.

I find him very human, as flawed as the rest of us.

>If you work at Facebook or Google or other companies, you've been convinced that you're the best of the best. The brightest of our generation. But ultimately all your work leads to selling ads.

This may be somewhat true, but on the bright side these companies have made immense contributions to open source software. And that ultimately has a positive impact to humanity on a broad scale.

I think a cure for COVID-19 would be 10,000x more valuable than reactjs.

first you're going to have to teach me how to cure covid by writing JavaScript

I guarantee you someone is using MapReduce or Tensorflow or Kubernetes to fight COVID-19 right now.

I don’t believe the contribution of react (alternatives are available) outweighs the undermining of democracy and personal privacy, or the creation of a giant surveillance operation.

I mean, Vue.js seems ok so I think I’ll just have that and not the surveillance state bit thanks

For a $1B endowment, Mr Musk could fund 20 seed rounds a year — personally.

Mr Musk won’t put 2.5% of his money where his mouth is. If he genuinely thought there was a problem to fix, he’d fund a demonstration of the solution.

The US government already spends $2B a year funding small business innovation across a range of industries. What more can we do?

Elon believes that only problem humanity is facing is how to establish colonies on Mars. He also believes that no one else is going to fund it, so had to acquire tons of money to do it.

I think it’s BS, but those are pretty much his believes.

Well, to be fair to Musk, there's also the whole "switch to renewable energy and transportation, since putting all this CO2 into the atmosphere is a dangerous experiment that must stop, or the future will be terrible."

Somewhat closer to Earth and immediately necessary for civilization's future.

Ads served by Google and Facebook reshaped many business areas. Industries dominated by giant, vertically oriented corporations where 20 years ago, today get constantly disrupted by small enterpreneurs. I've lost count of how many success stories have I heard from people in my closest social circles, that started by baking cupcakes in their kitchen or sewing bags in their living rooms. I have several friends who earn their living by some kind of therapy-like help they advertise on Instagram.

Does all of this really have no value for society?

I'm sick of tech being more scared of a man playing sound effects on CNBC than their thousands of paying customers.

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