There are days I wait for it, but I imagine one of these days the top is going to pop on South Africa and we are going to not like the skeletons we find there.
Wait do you mean any day now we could be confronted with the revelation that South African mining companies under apartheid weren’t exactly top of the class in business ethics? But how
He didn’t get rich from the emerald mine. Its a real thing, but he only made around 400k (in 2021 dollars) on his roughly 200k investment. He didn’t own it either.
Any actual riches were something else.
Not to say that 200k is nothing, but it’s not the source of any rich level money his father had.
They got rich the same way rich people everywhere get rich - by exploiting impoverished and disempowered labor to the max. The only difference with the Apartheid-regime (to whom Elon owes his riches) was that they were pretty overt when it came to who it was that got to be the impoverished and disempowered labor.
To be clear… that hasn’t really changed all that much in South Africa. But, then again, it hasn’t really changed in the US, either.
I feel like this is an example of the dangers of surrounding yourself with a monoculture. Maybe Elon was always exactly this way, but he was seemingly previously tempered by the notably distinct moderation policies at Twitter. Once he owned it and stripped that moderation, there’s nothing holding the pendulum anymore and he swings pretty far the other direction.
I can’t tell which is the bigger influence but he has certainly gone down the right wing rabbit hole and also insulated himself from all critique as a billionaire who has everyone he talks to regularly on his payroll or otherwise benefitting from him. A bad mix.
I've noticed that a lot of these people will lean left for a minute, because they hope that it will get them a get out of jail free card for being problematic in specific ways.
They find out quickly that the left doesn't do that. I can support your stance on XYZ while still disliking you and not wanting to do business with you because of ABC.
So then they switch to regressive stances, because those people will cheer you on for being awful.
Same thing happened to Reagan. He created the EPA as an executive agency to avoid Congress creating and empowering an independent entity that the executive wouldn't be able to control. He thought it would get him votes from the left. It did not, and he pretty much immediately stated that he regretted it because lefties didn't buy his bs.
Same thing happened to Reagan. He created the EPA as an executive agency to avoid Congress creating and empowering an independent entity that the executive wouldn’t be able to control. He thought it would get him votes from the left. It did not, and he pretty much immediately stated that he regretted it because lefties didn’t buy his bs.
Wait, what?
The EPA was created by Nixon in 1970, 10 years before Reagan was elected.
It’s an independent government agency, to this day. The administrator is appointed by the executive branch and approved by the Senate, but it’s not an official cabinet position nor part of the executive branch (but frequently involved in cabinet meetings).
Reagan tried to dismantle it by appointing Anne Gorsuch, who was very pro-business and anti-“big government”. She ended up slashing their budget by 22% and was held in comtempt of Congress for refusing to provide subpoenaed documents explaining why.
And Reagan won reelection in one of the largest landslides in US history in 1984.
And why democracy is important as a form of error correction. People can have their opinions, and inevitably we all get things wrong (magnitude of things we get wrong varies a lot). But when someone has a large concentration of power we all have to deal with the fallout from their malfunction. Companies the size and import of Twitter, Facebook, Reddit should be democratically controlled, some kind of cooperative.
Fully agreed. The authoritarian institution of shareholders and CEOs makes large companies prone to arrogance and short-term decision-making, democratic control of these large companies would make the economy much healthier.
Maybe he was always this way and not public about it, but things changed for the worse right around when his trans daughter came out.
Between that and covid I think he went down a rabbit hole further entrenching things and turned into a MAGA type as that rabbit hole does to those that go down it.
And now he won’t even listen when his brother and the chair of the board of Tesla tells him he’s hurting the brand.
Edit: just to clarify, “the woke mind virus” is what thinks took his daughter away, and now he is hellbent on destroying it, not realizing it’s him who’s been infected by hate and bigotry
You might always lean a certain way, but before, he maybe didn’t really care about trans people one way or another. As soon as his daughter came out as trans though he becomes faced with a choice.
Some people when they are faced with the choice, even if they might seem like they’d go against their child, don’t.
He doubled down unfortunately and made the wrong choice.
He doubled down unfortunately and made the wrong choice.
No, that’s not the choice he made. The status quo rewarded Phony Stark for being a right-wing douchebag - long before he even had a daughter . He chose to remain a right-wing douchebag because he was rewarded for it. He simply made the choice the vast majority of the rich either has made or will eventually make.
So once he wouldn’t get in trouble for openly being a bigot, he openly became a bigot?
He owes his entire life to apartheid and slavery in all senses that matter. And even when he was everyone’s hero and a real life Tony Stark, he threw a temper tantrum when divers chose to rescue children and not stroke his ego. To the point he accused one of the divers of pedophilia, ran an investigation, and used a team of lawyers to protect himself from any consequences.
Can we please stop with the conspiracy theories and/or acting like Musk is smarter than he actually is. The fact that Musk tried to get out of buying Twitter is proof that there was no grand plan to take down Twitter. If you have a plan to buy Twitter and tear it down you don’t go to such lengths to weasel yourself out of buying Twitter. And if you have a plan to take down Twitter you also must have a reason to take it down. I can’t come up with a reason beyond pettiness and I somehow doubt anyone would spent billions out of pettiness. Even Musk in his pettiness to buy Twitter tried to get out if it.
The one other reason I could think of is trying to silence specific people, but then it makes no sense to tear down Twitter. What does tearing it down accomplish? The people you want to silence will move to a different platform and the other people who are the audience to those specific people are also driven to other platforms. You don’t spend billions to annoy people into using a different platform. You spend billions to drive away the people you don’t like and keep the audience, then it won’t matter if those undesired people speak up because there’s nobody to listen to them. If the goal is to silence some people then tearing down Twitter accomplishes nothing.
The more realistic explanation is that Musk isn’t smart and doesn’t know how to run Twitter.
By the 1930s, the new Nazi government needed that technology — and recruited IBM for the job. Tabulating machines made tracking lines of Jewish descent possible, even if a German citizen’s family had married out of the religion or converted generations ago.
I dont agree with hate even 1% but some of the companies are the pot calling thee kettle black
Yeah, remember exactly 1 year ago with the huge frenzy around twitter going to shut down because of Musk’s take over, the shutting down of some server capacity and the firing of more than half of the workforce. 365 days later Twitter didn’t collapse, it retained most of its user base and it is still going just fine. those companies will be back when the dust settles just like how mastodon refugees went back after changing their twitter handles to mastodon ones.
At this point, if anybody asks, I never had a Twitter account. It’s way too embarrassing to admit otherwise.
No normal public figure/organization would ever to be associated with this disgusting behavior, but this is the inevitable results engagement centric personalized algorithm, as conflicts create the highest amount of user engagement for the platform.
Most public organizations/figures should really think about running federated social media accounts on their own server, because having control over the server is the only way to 100% ensure your freedom of association online.
I’m honestly not going to do business with anyone who still maintains a presence on that platform much less advertise on it. Cheers to IBM for stepping up.
Consensus from those with closer experience is that he’s always been kind of an asshole, just not a crazy asshole. Also, the whole “Elon’s a Tony Stark genius” was literally a marketing campaign and he used to have a really good PR person. He fired that person some years back (want to say around '17-'18?) got on twitter and let that fully rot his brain.
I think this is a fairly predictable outcome when you fire anyone who contradicts you and seem to spend your whole day hotboxing your own farts with a legion of minions in tow who will stop at nothing to tell you what a great experience that is.
Musk is either trolling, a complete idiot or playing 4D chess. I don’t understand why he would make statements like this. He is a business man no ? He must understand that what he says may have an impact on his business.
I think it’s much more likely that he’s just a bigot with way too much money and an ego so large that he cannot even accept the possibility that he might ever be wrong about anything.
That one falls under “idiot”. To be a bigot when you have all the physical and intellectual resources of the world at your disposal requires either a deliberate effort to remain ignorant or the lack of mental capacity to process facts.
Those are just two different flavors of idiocy, and they typically go hand in hand.
Musk is either trolling, a complete idiot or playing 4D chess.
This one is easy to answer: he is a complete idiot.
He must understand that what he says may have an impact on his business.
He has fuck-you money and there is nothing he can do that negatively impacts this, so he doesn’t have to give the littlest of shits. That’s what being absurdly rich means.
I don’t know why you’re giving him the benefit of the doubt here. What in his history over the past few years has given you any evidence that he is not a complete fucking moron?
I’m always open to explanation. He did have success with many of his company. Just saying he is an idiot that got lucky does not feel all that satisfactory but hey, we all look at the man and see an idiot so maybe he is. Or he has so much money that he just doesn’t care to blow a couple billions. Afterall, you can live very comfortably with just a few millions dollars.
I’m pretty confident in saying it’s not 4D chess. His big mouth cornered him into having to buy Twitter for meme stock prices, then over the course of a year he managed to shit away more than half of it’s value, LOSING more than 20 billion dollars.
He’s not trolling, trolls don’t throw 20 billion dollars in the fire just for a giggle.
He’s a full on idiot. His greatest accomplishment and largest positive contribution to society is all the work he’s putting in day after day to abolish the myth of Billionaire Exceptionalism.
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