Musk, Zuckerberg deeply unpopular among U.S. adults in new survey

Source survey from mid February: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/19/how-ameri...

Some discussion then:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119573

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43126485

zuckerberg's turn to be "masculine" after trump got into power is so shameful and cringe that i get second hand embarassment just seeing him.

that's why the survey makes sense even though elon might be doing more "damage" in real life.

Would be great if this lack of popularity for sociopaths applied more generally. One can hope!

From my perspective[1], there is no concern with what Mark Zuckerberg has done lately. By all accounts he had a good upbringing and is very sharp, but he reportedly had controversial people coming at him after college like Sean Fanning and Bill Gates who were not the greatest. He had to figure things out as he went along. A lot of those young peeps also wanted to "change the world just like Steve Jobs," but believed only the young could do it and therefore did not bring in the right older people to their inner circles (in fact, it was truly "old Steve" that changed the world --"young Steve" was famous but Apple ][, Lisa, Apple ///, OGMac and NeXT were flops with his raid of Pixar being where he made his real fortune.) I think Mark Zuckerberg will be fine, but not sure he is going to remain at Meta as long as Larry Ellison has been at Oracle. (Oh yeah, and thanks to Sean Asshole Fanning, there was a body of case law created that made software companies legally liable for the illegal use of their distributed computing applications, thereby killing the private equity market for investment in them and destroying my pre-Lotus-Notes-era peer-to-peer system that effectively did the same thing as what Facebook would eventually do using centralized data centers. How is that for irony?)

Elon Musk is a more complex case. There is a reason that large parts of the US government are running on IBM 360 emulation. There used to be an expression in the 1980s "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." Well, there also used to be a lesser known expression "There are certain things you just don't do and selling faster computers to the government is one of them." DEC, for example, was run by a famous Mormon named Ken Olsen. Mormons have incorporated the US Constitution into their religion. Their loyalty to the US is unquestionable. Of course DEC had cost-effective VAXclusters and client/server relational database software (Larry Ellison's Oracle and Sybase which sold to Microsoft and SAP) way back in the 1980s, so it wasn't a question of having to buy the latest expensive IBM mainframe (or even an IBM 370) when affordable mini-computers and later PC servers were available. It was that the computer companies were not willing to vend at market rates to certain parts of the US government because, as US President Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'” Now comes Elon Musk, all these decades later and he's portrayed as uniquely qualified to go in and do what IBM, DEC, ORACLE, SAP and the army of Windows Server vendors would never do. Elon's team is reportedly also volunteering their time to do it! Is it because his xAI may train a model on all of the data of the entire federal government and offer it up via satellite to organizations that he's reduced to being totally dependent upon his operation? It only takes about one second to transmit a mag-tape worth of EBCDIC or 7-bit ASCII data through Low Earth Orbit to a remote location anywhere on Earth for storage, indexing and training. Why would Trump let him? Because Elon's efforts promise to lower interest rates by reducing the National Deficit and we're running low on other ways of accomplishing that feat. Elon's endless controversies (many obviously a result of his claimed "Asberger's Syndrome") are also keeping the Opposition preoccupied while Trump quietly pushes an even more controversial agenda. Trump's team is ignorant to the danger here that was well known to Ken Olsen, Lou Gerstner and many others like Michael Capellas, Mark Hurd, etc. who were in a position to improve government efficiency many decades ago. Maybe Elon Musk will start out building a special "gov cloud" like version of xAI to absorb the data, but sooner or later, someone is going to have to maintain that thing (and its football fields worth of NVIDIA chips) and who better to do it than the company that created it?

--- [1]-grew up with a lot of geniuses because Soviet threat to families of Defense workers caused us to have to live in close proximity