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Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

> This is ironic if you consider all the complaining that Musk does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to)

It’s not ironic or remotely unexpected if you’ve taken notice of any of his actual actions involving freedom of speech.

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It's starting to feel like Musk is playing this political game to me.

Pretending he is championing the little guy, that he/twitter/everyone is somehow being repressed and they/he is fighting against it. His recent tweet on how 'activists' are the cause of twitters recent revenue drop for example.

Even with the blue check marks, he is framing it as it being open to all and the little guy taking the power back, all you have to do is pay him $8 a month for it. Viva la revolution indeed!

It feels like social engineering to me and the same game that has been played very successfully in division politics.

It is quite common for some kinds of politics (you can deduce which ones) to create an enemy of the common people from thin air, and use it to justify your actions.

This happens on both sides of the spectrum.

For the left the common enemy is often greedy exploitative capitalists. For the right it's often socialists and/or communists.

Yes, it's orthogonal. Lately, it's "the people" vs "the elites"

For right, it is libs and anyone who treats transsexuals well. Or people who want abortion.

Or people who believe in democracy and voting lately.

Elon is heavily dependent on politicians keeping taxes low for billionaires, and policy that pushes NASA and other government agencies to hire private companies.

Crony capitalism it’s called colloquially.

Marc Andreesen was tweeting a few months about the pressure from DC to curtail behavior that the politicians felt was undermining them.

Around the time Powell began raising rates, memes in finance changed to “save”, banks raised rates on savings accounts to get people to park cash they can leverage rather than get free cash from Powell they can leverage.

Pulling cash out of the economy means fewer lattes and avocado toasts; being a bit glib, but those are the workers most likely to be hurt long term.

So yeah it’s basically division politics. The only reason it works like this is because of memory this is how it works.

NPR reporter literally just said employers offering higher and higher wages is what’s creating inflation, and they want unemployment to go up to bring inflation down. Manufacturing consent by repeating “truth”.

Behavioral economics runs the country. Politicians prefer behaviors like fealty to politically correct traditions. They are protecting the net worth class based system that keeps them from growing potatoes and determines which families thrive or die.

Or maybe he is just a dumb guy who believes his own bullshit but ultimately doesn't know what he is doing. How much do we have to hear about the chaos behind the scenes at his companies before people start to realize this whole thing possibly isn't a well orchestrated plan?

Distinction without a difference in this case. When you are as rich and powerful as Elon Musk, you usually get away with your own stupidity and it will ultimately turn to your benefits no matter what. The law of the accumulation of wealth also applies to social capital.

I think it's healthy to calibrate one's own beliefs to reality. So maybe you're right and there is no difference in outcome.

But strictly for my own mental model, I think it is far more accurate to model this as "super rich guy makes shit up on the spot and has no master plan" rather than "this is part of a massively complex plot that relies on second- and third-order psychological effects planned years in advance."

It is really human to over value intentions at the cost of the outcome. Even our legal system does this to a pretty large extent. However when looking and trying to grasp the amazing amount of share stupidity the rich folks do, we have to ask: „how does this much stupidity yield so high rewards?“

IMO it is way more damning to us as a society that people can be this stupid and still become so insanely rich, then if someone had an evil masterplan to manipulate others into making them more and more.

But at the end of the day, this concern is dwarfed by the fact that in either case we let them get away with it and ultimately reward them with insane wealth. This is the true damning of our society that these people are given all this wealth and power in the first place, and after the fact, honestly they can do whatever they like. And what they do isn’t pretty at all.

It is because you should separate the style of execution from the target effect: Musk sounds like a bumbling idiot but... he s halving payroll... it's gonna reduce the load tremendously for a while and if he stops innovating, swallow a loss compensated by paying customers for a while, it might end up surviving enough to provide him some returns.

The difference between me, clever socially but idiot as an entrepreneur, and Musk, the definition of asshole but with good instincts, is enough I suppose ?

> But strictly for my own mental model, I think it is far more accurate to model this as "super rich guy makes shit up on the spot and has no master plan" rather than "this is part of a massively complex plot that relies on second- and third-order psychological effects planned years in advance."

B.b.but a bunch of his PR guys convinced a lot of Redditors that he's the real-life Tony Stark who's saving humanity as we speak. What have you done? How could the PR not by true, if so many people repeat it?

> When you are as rich and powerful as Elon Musk, you usually get away with your own stupidity and it will ultimately turn to your benefits no matter what.

I'm yet to see how that idiotic "pedo guy" episode turns out to benefit Elon Musk.

How the accumulation of wealth works statistically is that when transacting with less wealthy players, you have a lot more to win and a lot less to loose, while the other player has everything to loose and—relative to you—hardly anything to win. Over time this results in gradual accumulation of wealth.

I see the accumulation of social capital no differently. This particular transaction might not have benefited him, he might even had lost some from it. But over time, other transactions more then made up for that mistake, and this one became irrelevant, which really is to his benefit.

All publicity is good publicity when you're in the game of monopolizing the world's attention market, c.f. the constant publicity stunts of figures like Trump and Kanye.

He's the poster child for Dunning Kruger...

> Pretending he is championing the little guy

Are you just noticing this?

Step two is whining endlessly and loudly. Step three he figures out a way to game government subsidies while whining about government.

SolarCity and Tesla did step 3 years ago.

I have never in my life thought that Musk would champion the little guy. If anything, Musk will run the little guy over 5 times in the quest for interplanetary domination.

To champion the little guy has nothing to do with rhetoric, right? In my exprerience it's the uneducated masses that pretend to champion the little guy but don't understand that their actions have unintended consequences that often produce the opposite result. I would think people are starting to understand the inverse correlation between words and actions, at least where power politics are at play (not to mention specifically in corporate entities that make their dough by brainwashing)

Elon is the type of person where action and words tell a very different story. In that way, it's expected. It's still ironic as hell, given his words.

I would say he (and other billionaires like Thiel) is immature in a very classical sense: he goes through the world like a child without appreciation for how difficult it was to create a society in which everybody could (say) engage in discourse safely; he sees some flaws in the system and thinks that because he is a special person and he saw what he thinks is a flaw he is entitled to pull it apart. But there is no methodical improvement being proposed. People like this are simply destroying the work of their forebears (of creating a stable pluralistic society) for personal benefit. It is not the behavior of responsible humans, much less leaders.

What does it mean to engage in discourse safely?

You don’t get tortured for criticizing the current administration for one.

Is that something you see as a danger because of Elon taking over Twitter?

For Twitter users in other countries? Yes. Twitter had been the best of the social media companies (though still not perfect) at resisting subpoenas and other measures from the US government as well as authoritarian countries, but all the personnel involved in that have been fired.

Twitter's legal and human rights teams were more valuable than is commonly understood.

I don't know if this is necessarily true. There are plenty of people sitting in federal prison for criticizing Biden's legitimacy and his policies. I'd consider that torturous if I was in that situation.

They're in prison for actions they took, not voicing criticism.

And calling that “torture” is abusing language. The US did it in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay and it was a massive scandal because it’s against our values. Torture and executions happen routinely in some countries with no consequences or reporting.

What actions were those? Protesting? Isn't that criticism?

A vast majority of protestors aren’t in jail. Entering the Capitol building and attacking police officers are two actions that caused many of the hundreds to be put in jail.

Bullshit. I highly doubt that 69-year-old Pamela Hemphill was attacking police officers. According to her court case, she was accused of “ demonstrating, parading or picketing in the U.S. Capitol building.” Or, in other words, criticizing the government.

Many of these people have been sitting in prison for two years without being charged with anything, and many of them who have been charged have only been charged with minor misdemeanors. Feel free to go look at ALL the cases, not just the handful cherry-picked by the Ministers of Propaganda.

Sorry, I meant and to be inclusive as a couple distinct examples, not that they needed to be both. She was in the Capitol building illegally.

As just one example, not intended to be partisan: the elderly husband of the Speaker of the House was violently attacked and a sizable portion of the country either tacitly or openly endorses it. That is not a safe society. And it's very, very well-documented by now that social media in which violent / hate speech are not moderated are a key factor driving the increase in political violence and extremism. For people in positions of great power to ignore the complexity of what's happening to society, and to lean on populist (and reductive/misleading) arguments about censorship and freedom of speech for personal gain, comes across as either unintelligent or profoundly irresponsible.

Nancy, or Paul, Pelosi weren’t even engaged in any discourse on twitter with his attacker. It sounds like you’re saying in order for discourse to be safe, people with power over communication needs to regulate other people on our behalf? The big question is how do they decide? We do have some laws about direct threats, spam, fraud and negligence, but I’m not sure where your definition fits in. It seems like it is extremely difficult to get right and very easy to get wrong.

It's not particularly ironic if you just set as your prior that he is being dishonest, unless there is clear third-party proof otherwise.

Everything Musk does in the public sphere is a performance. He's putting on a show, and the show is always crafted according to whatever he thinks will sway the public in the direction he wants them to go.

This is a really tired take since it's not something that could possibly ever be known by you or anyone else not immediately close to Elon, and it's impossible for anyone else to refute it because they have the exact same lack of insight into whether Elon is putting on a performance every time he leaves the house.

The dude ran around saying he is a founder of Tesla which is provably false. He is no stranger to making things up to craft the image he needs.

Tesla was worth, at most, a few million dollars when Elon became their largest investor. They had no products. They had no sales. He turned a $2 million company into a $700 billion company, but he's not the founder because he wasn't in the paperwork for the first year of its existence in which very little happened? Ok.

Additionally, a settlement was reached to literally call himself a founder. At this point it's boring semantics of what "founder" means.

But go ahead and keep trying and failing to poke holes to push your unfounded narrative.

"He paid someone to not dispute his lie" is not the defense you seem to think it is.

You are completely incapable of having an honest conversation about this

The same could be said of Ray Kroc and McDonald's, but it typically isn't because the McDonald brothers aren't the ones who made McDonald's ubiquitous on a global scale. Most of the time, Ray Kroc is considered the founder of McDonald's because he was the one to lead its global success.

Except in the case of Ray Kroc, he actually was the founder of the company that became McDonald’s. He didn’t pay the McDonald’s brothers for the rights to pretend he was the founder.

He bought the franchise for $2.7 million and paid the McDonald brothers a percentage of profits. I don't see a difference between Musk and Kroc in this regard. Without Musk, Tesla wouldn't be what it is today just like without Kroc the McDonald brothers' business would have remained regional and small.

The difference is precisely that Kroc is the founder of the company that is McDonalds while Musk is not the founder of Tesla.

It’s a fact that Musk turned Tesla into what it is today. It’s possible to get that point across without falsely claiming you’re the founder of the company. Words have meanings.

I disagree with your criticisms as you’ve stated them.

I’m confused. The parent shows one company was founded by the person. While in the other case, it wasn’t.

It's entirely valid to be allowed to judge other's behavior, and guess at their motives, especially the (former?) richest man in the world. Mental models of other people are a core part of being conscious.

There's a difference between an intelligent and meaningful observation of behavior to guess at motives and just outright calling someone a liar and manipulator without any real basis or evidence because you don't like them as a person.

Dogecoin is plenty of evidence. There is more.

What illegal actions did Elon take that classify as "manipulation" for Dogecoin?

These comments were discussing whether Musk has been manipulative, not whether he broke the law. You just made that part up.

Who brought up illegal? Why would that matter? This is about morality.

> You are completely incapable of having an honest conversation about this

Yeah only other people have that issue!

I think Occam's razor applies here. In other words, it seems the more likely explanation is just that Musk is an egomaniacal rich guy. Imagining that Musk is playing 3D chess with the public psyche is overcomplicating things.

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