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Comment by nicenewtemp84 | Hacker News Reader

Definitely doesn't make it a good idea. But it's still interesting that he's playing with one of the most talked about sites on the internet without really affecting his finances at all. Of all the random things to do with your money, it's not even that bad of an experiment.

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He’s just a rich kid pulling the legs off an ant.

I actually find it perverse.

He's not a kid using his parents money. He's using his own and his personal name/reputation to secure money. He's not hurting an ant. He fired people and let them go find other jobs which seems pretty fair instead of for example reducing their pay drastically and forcing them to quit, or paying them minimum wage and profit sharing. Which still would have been pretty fair IMO. Not every ceo or company owners needs to be operating a charity like the previous Twitter CEO was.

It can be done without being an asshole (for example without insulting a handicapped person) https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/elon-musk-gets-involved-...

Note: he did not insult a handicapped person. At no point did he attack his disability. That was a cruel twisting of facts by the media.

Further he was misled by someone feeding him incorrect information and promptly apologized for the confusion. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1633253950198624257

He found out Twitter would need to pay him 100M. That is a big incentive to backpedal.

There's no evidence to support that statement.

Given he continues to talk with the man at times (he replied to one of his tweets the a few days ago) and there's no evidence to support the idea that he did it for monetary reasons, other explanations are much more reasonable. Namely that it was a simple mistake.

Honest question: why do you see it as your job to defend Elon Musk online? I see a lot of people doing it and I find it strange. Why do you care?

Some of us like sticking up for people of similar temperament to us. I'd stick up for the average person that gutted a company he bought and kept it running just like I would Musk.

I like Musk because he doesn't appear to be a woke tool. Is he a tool of a different kind? Probably. But I don't like woke, so I stick up for the non-woke. Is he perfect? No. None of us are.

What does woke mean? Elon seems like he’s always talking about woke stuff. Like trans people and pronouns. He might be denouncing those topics but he still seems to cover them a lot.

Why do you care? You’re here engaging all the same. If anything, he’s speaking the truth (no he did not mock anyone’s disability) and those attacking Musk are lying. Yet you question the person being factual. So why do you care?

A couple of reasons:

1. I care pretty strongly about the truth. When I see people actively spreading incorrect information whether through malice or their own misunderstanding I think it’s important to correct it to prevent the deception of others, especially when it’s happened on such a wide scale. He himself doesn’t seem to understand that it’s important to correct this type of thing early so there’s no other option.

2. I care because a lot of the future depends on the success of Elon’s companies and people use tearing down Elon as an excuse to attack his companies. They’re doing amazing things for the future while being constantly attacked for it.

So it’s a double-whammy of self interest and my own internal mental obsessions.

He was certainly fine making accusations in public about this person. When he found out he was given misinformation why didn't he name the person and fire them? Why did he air it out in public in the first place? The whole saga is criminally ignorant and Musk is to blame.

When people make mistakes under him, he never names them and instead takes ownership of their mistakes. Naming and firing them would be in fact a bad sign and a sign of a bad leader.

The public accusations against this person’s character? Are any other CEOs lambasting former employees online?

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