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Comment by kranke155 | Hacker News Reader

Why? Because Elon like many people is extremely smart on narrow fields, he is not generally smart (he can’t fight for example, which is a form of intelligence. He also struggles with being honest, demonstrating potentially low EQ).

That’s not to say he’s dumb - it’s just that there is no one (!) who is generally smart - there is no generally applicable intelligence, experience always matters, and you always learn by doing.

It’s an illusion of the high IQ crowd that high IQ will means you will always succeed.

He is also always taking high risk bets. The X/politics/Trump bet paid off, in a way, but it also has its blowback.

edit also having said all this, it’s extremely unlikely that Europe will be successful at this. The future is US-China dominated.

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> ...it’s extremely unlikely that Europe will be successful at this. The future is US-China dominated.

I think the events of the last few weeks have been a wake-up call to many people around the globe who now see the value of not having their entire economy (or telecommunications &etc) be vulnerable to the whims of one person, be that the richest person in the world or a president nobody in Europe voted for.

I suspect there's a lot of really smart people who were previously happily living/working in the US who are now looking to emigrate to other lands, Europe could easily allow them to go over there and practice their skills on a Europe First initiative. Could also rope in the Chinese to help as they also aren't too happy with the current state of affairs.

> or a president nobody in Europe voted for.

Are you talking about the European Commission, which we didn’t vote for?

Your head of government appointed a member of that commission, though. For better or worse, it's similar to that same head of government being appointed by the people you actually voted for in a parliamentary system (but two steps removed).

Sure I’m just saying Europe is not a place. Europe is not a giant coordinated economy. I’m “European” and I know how hard coordination problems are in the continent, since I’ve lived through its mismanagement my entire adult life.

> the value of not having their entire economy (or telecommunications &etc) be vulnerable to the whims of one person, be that the richest person in the world or a president nobody in Europe voted for.

> Could also rope in the Chinese to help

This is pretty funny. That's just switching who you rely on.

> Europe could easily allow them to go over there and practice their skills on a Europe First initiative

In Europe we prefer unskilled labour from third world countries so that they can do uber eats for cheap

Britain tried voting themselves out from under the influence of a politician in Brussels that nobody in Britain voted for, but found that removing that influence was a lot easier said then done.

He’s surrounded himself with idiot sycophants. It’s a well-known failure mode of the rich and powerful that he should have seen coming ten years away.

He had little choice but to defect to Trump's side. If Harris had won, the damage due to supporting Trump would have been finite and likely fixable. However, a Trump victory would wreck essentially all of his companies if he'd gone all-in for Harris. They have massive dependencies on Federal government support.

No way to hand-wave the Nazi salutes away with game theory, though. Those were just stupid. Safe to say that nobody including Trump expected him to go that far.

It would be interesting to hear this refuted rather than simply downvoted, by the way. What are some alternative explanations?

What do you mean? He’s obviously got a point? Even Steve Bannon thinks so. He says Elon was just ahead of the curve.

How much of Elon’s conversion was genuine vs mercenary is impossible to know, but it’s likely.

Stay out and distance yourself from either camp? You're absolving the agency of the richest person in the world. And I get that might hard when one has got a crippling social media addiction and can't help but run their mouth. But again, let's not absolve the agency of the richest person in the world.

Traditionally that's what most public-facing CEOs and other business leaders have done, keeping their politics to themselves in order to avoid needlessly alienating customers and to maintain business continuity as administrations come and go.

That won't work with Trump. Not if you built your businesses on sectors that he is targeting, ranging from EVs to space exploration and research. Musk had to pick a side. Neutrality was never an option.

Few if any of us, regardless of wealth, have any real "agency" with Trump in office. There's nothing he can't fuck up and no one he can't fuck over. This is not an attempt at justification or absolution, just a simple statement of fact.

Your whole argument rests on excluding the middle, which could have been tepid support instead of appearing on stage to throw Nazi salutes, giving out money to voters signing fake Orwellian pledges about "supporting" the Constitution, and threatening to primary non-maggot congressional candidates. You've essentially set up a Roko's Basilisk, based around one small hateful man rather than superintelligence.

And I think I addressed the salutes (and implicitly his other actions) as being completely irrational and inexplicable. Musk does that sort of thing a lot.

If you're under the impression I think any of this is a good thing, that would be grossly incorrect.

I get that you're not in favor of the destructionists, like anyone not still drinking the increasingly-adulterated Kool-aid. I just think your argument veers into the territory of absolving Musk, and for no reason. It might work for Bezos or other business "leaders" that fell in line to kiss the ring but have otherwise have stayed mum, but not Musk.

Musk's all-in fervent support wasn't necessary. He doesn't get a triple pass from having to support the fascist candidate to avoid being put up against the wall, and then again for his natural tendency to embrace things and go hardcore, and then again for working to destroy/loot our institutions because it's just lucrative business. This isn't some British comedy sketch where someone is trapped by social pressure in an increasingly escalating role - at a certain point he is just a neonazi (or "sparkling autocratic authoritarian" for the "akshually" simps).

If it turns out that Musk was showing so much support as a cover for acting behind the scenes to oust Trump, I will happily change my opinion. But given Musk's longer trend of spiraling into debilitating social media addition, I'm not holding out hope.

Yeah, I don't disagree. No idea what Musk's deal is, but he's pretty messed up. He evidently lacks the slightest regard for how his words and actions play out in history.

It would probably have worked just fine if the richest/biggest CEOs didn't jump to be first in line to appease Trump?

Again: you guys are missing my point. Whether you like it or not, or agree or not, they had no choice. Being rich as hell only leaves them that much more vulnerable to Trump.

If your business relies on the USPS as much as Amazon's still does, you want to have a seat at the table when the administration decides how they're going to kneecap the USPS. Same with tariffs, when half of the crap they sell comes straight outta Shenzhen. See also NASA and Musk. Being locked out of the rooms where these decisions get made is potentially fatal for them.

Jeff Bezos seems to have made a few minor genuflections in Trump's direction and is otherwise unaffected (except for the wreckage Trump's tariffs are likely inflicting on Amazon.) No, Musk's decision was a choice. And now he's stuck with that choice. There is almost certainly no way that things "just go back to normal" with a future Democratic administration.

Torpedoing the Washington Post wasn't what I'd call a "minor genuflection," but whatever.

  for Jeff Bezos - it is.

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