Comment by onethought | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onethought | Hacker News Reader

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Can you provide details of the order cancellation? That’s a new one.

Wasn’t the car telemetry only published because it went to court? Why are you upset with Musk when someone tries to defraud Tesla and they prove them wrong with data? No one else’s telemetry has been published. Meanwhile Uber have “god-mode” and can track every driver globally in realtime… and it was abused to stalk people.

SpaceX donated starlinks to Ukraine, and they did it ridiculously fast… Meanwhile Globalstar did nothing. And you’re upset with SpaceX for having some conditions? What were they that were so egregious?

What are the examples of banning? That are vastly different from pre-musk twitter. Do you mean the part where he banned people for releasing his real-time location? (After warning them, explaining it would get them suspended, and then doing it… and then reinstating them).

This super-villain narrative of Musk is hilariously comical. Where is it coming from?

- The other space companies are way worse than SpaceX and no one said anything

- The other car companies are way worse than Tesla and no one said anything

- Do we all remember Cambridge Analytica? But Musk cost cutting, and exposing internal workings of twitter is terrible for man kind.

It honestly feels like some kind of explicit narrative in a “Manufacturing Consent” kind of way. Why has the world turned on Musk?

“Why has the world turned on Musk?”. You seriously don’t know? He behaves like a dick. In public. Maybe the other space companies and car companies are worse, but Musk flaunts his dickishness. They do it on the quiet, with PR companies to whitewash their actions. Just because he does it in public doesn’t make him less of a dick though. Just makes him a very easy target.

Bezos acts like a dick too. His space company is materially worse in every way. Amazon is famous for being a shitty place to work. We don’t even know what influence he has on the Washington Post, because he does it in secret.

It’s weird you prefer it to be PR-whitewashed rather than just see it for what it is.

Not indulging one asshole does not mean you support the other one.

But pretending Elon is deserving of this attention is just lazy journalism… like he’s screaming from a megaphone what he’s doing… and journalists aren’t even looking at other billionaires/space companies/car companies that are up to worse activity than anything Elon is responsible for. (I’m not saying it excuses it, but it’s wasted attention)

He, and his companies deserve every bit of attention. You could argue others deserve just as much (and I'd agree). But no harm in exposing him for being a bigoted man-child, who control unproportional amount of wealth.

Amazon is shitty in shitty contexts, if you take Italy then every employee is unionised with benefits, in US you have this thing where you don’t want the government to be able to regulate but then expect companies to be good samaritan and foot the bill for maternity, sickness, public health, without paying taxes for it. Amazon is a good place, just need to regulate it

Bad people are actually good they just need more police???

Or everyone is bad - police are what make people good?

I don’t know how to parse your statement.

Companies aren't people. Companies whilst run by people are not acting in the best interest of people as a whole only a small subset of people(stakeholders). Just like criminal gangs and how they lead to some small subsets of people requiring policing(criminals), the same applies to companies(some companies and how they act towards the societies they operate in if regulations were better made and policed adequately would certainly be classed as criminals).

Musk is in my face is all.

A very easy target of what?

Just giving you some more info on that order cancellation, it's been a few years but from what I remember, a blogger/columnist complained pretty strongly about something that I can't remember like build quality and I think he did it in a way that bothered elon personally so he had the columnist's order cancelled.

Just found the post: https://medium.com/@salsop/banned-by-tesla-8d1f3249b9fb

> This super-villain narrative of Musk is hilariously comical. Where is it coming from?

For me it came from Musk downplaying COVID for financial gain.

Other than that, he's become proficient at discrediting himself as a reasonable, trustworthy person and presenting himself as a detached from reality lunatic who doesn't know when to stfu and how to behave.

When people like this have a lot (too much?) power that's when the super-villain vibe comes in.

So do we all pick our own billionaires now? Like Musk is the villain of the Left and Gates is the villain of the right?

I reckon people should focus on fixing a system that allows individuals to amass such power/wealth. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

To fix the system, you have to hate both.

To break the system. To fix the system you need to know what you are doing and even then it's not guaranteed.

Downplaying COVID was the only thing Musk was right. See Sweden not following WHO orders had small bump in excessive deaths. Also average age of dying with COVID was 84. There are no factory workers at Tesla that old.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...

>Why has the world turned on Musk?

I agree with everything you said but the reason people have turned on him is because he tweets like a dick too often and is really wealthy with lots of media exposure, not a small amount of it anti-Musk. Anyone that wealthy is going to get dragged in the media and when you mess with very powerful people's profits (Russia, defense contractors, American car manufacturers, and gasoline producers), you're really going to get dragged in the media. Plus the tweets.

Musk runs his businesses like a dictator. Well, OK, it's no secret multi billion companies is not where socialists go to hide. But he can't have it both ways: if he chooses to run his companies this way, he can't complain we pin the bad stuff on him. He is not only responsible, also clearly involved in making those choices and decisions.

I think part of my point is: In the context of each of his businesses, there isn’t really much bad stuff, in fact his businesses are much better across most metrics than his competitors.

Twitter might be the exception here because its early days.

I don't think it is the company CEO/Exec side that is drawing the heat- it is the " over-exposed, not behaving like an adult in public " part that is getting him in the cross-hairs. And he seems to have disarmed the folks around him from helping with this. I'm 99% sure I would dislike larry ellison more in person than Elon Musk, but the latter is on social media doing attention seeking stuff most days of the week. So I know more about what I dislike of Musk and any bad actions are front of mind.

As opposed to Bezos who will make or break careers by replying to an email with a single question mark?

> This super-villain narrative of Musk is hilariously comical. Where is it coming from?

That's easy: people who disagree with his recent political shift. It's extremely obvious, because I see it primarily among the progressives in my circle.

I would hazard a guess that the billionaire class’s political views are not the same as regular people.

I don’t agree with what I understand Elons politics to be, but I can empathise. Tesla got screwed over by Covid restrictions in a completely arbitrary way in the US, which to me explains some of the anti-covid/right-wing-in-US stuff.

The US is caught up in a bit of polarised political environment that makes little sense from looking outside in.

The Republican party is a Fascist party (Support for a Fascist President and supported a failed Coup) and Elon has voiced support for the Republican party, thus, Elon is a Fascist (AKA, Super Villain). It's does not take much to draw a line between the two.

Yeah no, you don't get to dismiss half the population as "fascist".

> Yeah no, you don't get to dismiss half the population as "fascist".

The Republican Party isn't half the population, and, even if it was, it is quite possible for half or more the population of a country to support fascism. Popularity isn't a rebuttal to accusations of fascism.

Popularity is a rebuttal to dismissal, although it is not clear to me whether that's actually what was going on.

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