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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

For me the better precedent for Elon's eccentricities might be someone like Henry Ford. Ford was an undeniable genius and innovator in a way that inspired broad admiration, but he was also troublingly paternalistic with his workers--providing above-market pay and benefits but expecting them to live up to his moral standards in their personal lives. He was also a massive sponsor of anti-Semitic publications and, prior to Pearl Harbor, a Nazi sympathizer.

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Howard Hughes feels like a better comparison to Elon Musk.

Brunel would be my pick as a predecessor who Musk emulates.

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

Brunels' achievements spanned both civil and naval engineering projects, and much like Musk he didn't so much invent something completely new, but innovated on existing systems. His work on propeller screws is very much in the same vein as Musk and the Raptor engine. Probably fair to say he was a larger than life figure in his day and a driving force during the industrial revolution.

Fascinating! He even helped get a pneumatic railway built, which failed, and reminds me a bit of hyperloop. If I had to bet on a Musk project that would fail it would be that one. Something about it just feels wrong to my engineering intuition... too tight of tolerances for a civil engineering project.

What the hyperloop set out to achieve was a worthy goal. The cost of high-speed rail in the US is astronomical so any solution that cuts that cost dramatically is a good thing. His plans for the LA-SF route was very much like what Brunel engineered for the GWR with a series of tunnels and bridges to minimise the gradient and allow for high speed and volume. I caught an InterCity125 a heap of times back in the early 80's while living near Chippenham running on the same line Brunel built.

I think with Musk, it's the lesser known achievements like the big battery in South Australia that elevate him to the level of Brunel.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/tesla-big-battery-outsmarts-lumb...

Elon doesn't like the Howard Hughes comparisons because Hughes innovations didn't change the everyday experience of people. See this story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNG6ZzDh9C8

I think the comparison between Elon Musk and Henry Ford starts to break down a bit towards the end of your comment. Elon Musk tweets plenty I don't like, but he's far from a Nazi.

he? maybe you should read again the post of your parent....

I'm actually much more confused by your comment than the parent of yours.

I think that's an ungenerous interpretation of the parent comment. Saying they are comparable are not saying they have the exact same vices. But while they both did great things, IMO they also have done some pretty awful things, but more importantly, the awful things they did were given undue deference because of their greatness in other areas.

That's certainly true and I don't think you can compare magnitudes.

This is definitely a hindsight is 20/20 moment.

In an age where radio was new, where televisions were even newer, where transcontinental news took hours, days or even weeks to travel, the knowledge that the Nazis were engaging in mass murder was not readily available.

When allied troops liberated the concentration camps they filmed everything that they saw because they were concerned that without footage no one would believe them. Why? Because it was a shock, a shock so unbelievable in writing that only video and photographic evidence would suffice.

Wait, are you saying that people didn't notice that Nazis were mass-killing people until 1945? What had they been doing since 1939?

The Nazis were in power for six years before 1939 and existed as a political movement since 1920.

And they started mass-murdering people in 1939. The news were full of it.

Most of Henry Ford’s Nazi sympathies took place prior to 1939. In fact it might be fairer to say that the Nazis were the ones inspired by Ford’s open promotion of anti-semitism.

Yup. In fact, there are various stories of people in late 1930s who tried to get the word out to the wider world about what's starting to happen in Germany, and they were generally ignored. The world truly didn't learn about the camps until Nazi Germany was conquered.

Possibly, but the knowledge that the Nazis were engaging in mass murder has been readily available once they declared war on the rest of the Europe and went through with it. You didn't have to wait until discovering some camps to change your notions of them.

That's a bit of revisionist history. It wasn't the age of Twitter. Until the discovery of the camps, this was just a world war. The other side was seen as just a regular enemy (+/- usual war propaganda), not as genocidal maniacs.

Reports about what's happening in concentration camps had been coming to Allied intelligence agencies since 1941 ([1]) but obviously they did not include any video footage, so they were hard to believe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilecki%27s_Report

Mass Media was also... Not a thing. At least nothing like we understand it to be today.

In hindsight being 20/20 it's hard to comprehend the blurred optics of the past era.

Moreover, the blood libel of WW1 was still a fresh memory, and so many who did hear about Nazi atrocities were skeptical.

The world would be different today if not for the photographic and video evidence.

Information about mass murders may have been lacking, but the general antisemitic attitudes were certainly no secret at any point.

Either way, that's not really my point. There are probably better "eccentrics" to compare Elon Musk to, that aren't so dramatically worse than Elon Musk. Perhaps Howard Hughes? There are some problems with that one too, but I think the rift between Elon Musk and Howard Hughes is probably narrower than that between Elon Musk and Henry Ford.

The slow ethnic cleansing and land theft being perpetrated by a close American ally, supported by many of the biggest American corporations and capitalists, seems a comparable situation.

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