The wealthiest of society pump up those like Elon Musk and they wreak havoc
twitter.com
twitter.com
Similarly, the SpaceX Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon are huge successes. But the valuation of SpaceX is largely based on Starlink becoming a global telecom giant, and that, in turn, is based on 2nd gen satellites which can only be flown on Starship.
What Musk's brief time at Twitter has shown everyone is that he can fail on a scale of tens of billions in less than a month. Betting on LEO telecom and robotaxis, nevermind tunnels, brain implants, and Mars colonies is high risk, and the last person you will hear tell of those risks is Elon.
One of the things the journalist and Elon Musk discussed was government, or rather, governance... politics. What is the best way to run a country? For Elon, billionaires were where they are because they are extremely good at resource allocation and so on, they're visionaries, they're creatives, they're excellency. And so, it his view that it should be these people (of course, himself included) that should be running the country.
Now, it seems pretty clear that a lot of these skills are not transferable. But this elitism that we encourage props the egos of people and imo makes them unable to take advice. In many ways, I think, the failure of the elites is precisely their inability to acknowledge that despite all their abilities, they are average at more things than the number of things they are good at.
Chile is a country that has been run by technocratic elitism for a while, the conception of the educational, political and societal system can be resumed as follows: "If I'm good at reading markets, and everything is a market, then I'm good at reading everything.". I think this sums up the vision of people like Elon Musk very well.
But let's not pretend that these people understand the idea of personal sacrifice or [shudder] PUBLIC SERVICE. This is not how they are wired. Keep them as far away from a democratic government as possible. And that's another thing, the authoritarian vibe is strong.
This is an extremely hyperbolic account. Yes, him calling a guy a "pedo" on Twitter during a back and forth spat was a mistake that reflected badly on Musk, but well within the realm of sane and forgivable behavior.
Musk has never said anything "transphobic", and the author's claim that he has speaks to the kind of totally intolerant speech-compliance she demands.
It speaks to someone too sensitive to tolerate views that deviate from those of a narrow ideological narrative, which explains why she 1. protects her tweets to not have to face criticism, 2. characterizes restoring free speech to Twitter as "wreaking havoc".
for a brief but memorable moment in history, Mario got his say!
The only thing that's narrowly ideological is the blind idolization of the so called tech cult ehm...I mean thought leaders in SV.
4 times this guy went to speak at TED and 4 times he produced lies and exxagerations.
It's fair to ask that the apex individual in the public sector (the POTUS, Senators and Representatives) and the pinnacle individuals in the private sector (the Forbes 400) behave with decorum.
Musk has less decorum than Trump and it takes a whole lot to beat him in that category.
You wouldn't even bat an eye if this wasn't Musk, and if Musk hadn't become person non grata amongst the circles that the author travels in. Of course TED talks are going to be aspirational, and present goals that are never realized.
This extreme vilification of Musk is utterly disingenous and clearly motivated by something other than the content of his TED talks, and that "something" is his goal to restore free speech to Twitter, as the author alludes to with her "transphobic" and "wreaking havoc" references, which point to her wanting Twitter to be her safe space, with her own ideology's conception of things, like gender, being the only allowable basis for how people communicate.
Given what Musk has achieved, he deserves credit, and not this bad faith hyper-critical lens that the author and her anti-"rich white guy" (her own words) ideology see him through. People like her, with her false accusations and extremist and ideologically motivated smear campaigns, need to be pushed out of polite society until her crowd realizes that it's not an acceptable way to behave as an adult.
No it's not, especially given Musks position and influence, and also hiring a supposed private investigator.
His behavior in the spat did reflect badly on him, but considering the kind of behavior that is regularly ignored and forgiven from celebrities still in the good graces of the social justice crowd, the insistence that it should lead to his social ostracization is insincere, and motivated by an ulterior agenda.
And what does the social justice crowed have anything to do with this? Bringing them up and their hypothetical behaviour is just some whataboutism, it's got no impact on Musks behaviour.
Society doesn't need to be infantilized, with important people speaking like politicians lest they influence an allegedly impressionable and undiscerning public.
Ok, Elon Musk is not a genius. And he definitely has the impulse control of a teenager, or of a teenager with impulse control issues. He may treat his employees like garbage (although probably not all of them, I hear he took about 50 Tesla engineers to Twitter's headquarters to check their code, those guys are probably well treated).
But he does things that other people don't. Most other people would have been happy with Tesla at the Roadster stage. Luxury sports cars, in small volumes but large margin. Just like Koenigsegg or Lotus. Why risk a bird in hand for two in the bush? Because he's driven. He's not content. He's willing to bet the house.
People who know how to take calculated risks get rich. People who are unwilling to take risks find this unfair. And they complain those who get rich are not anything special, they just happen to be luckier, or they exploit the work of their employees, or other stuff like that. Silly things like out of 1000 people who flip coins 1 will flip ten heads in a row by pure luck, but will claim he has a special talent to flip head (after the fact).
Musk, and other people like him, are not coin-flippers. Well, Sam Bankman Fried is. But Musk, Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg, those are not coin flippers. They have lots of qualities that people who are not close to them find easy to discount. They are not in the top richest club by pure chance. In a parallel life, they could have been less successful, but they would have been maga-millionaires too.