Comment by halfmatthalfcat
2 years ago
It's interesting to see these tech influencers and their lag time on giving Elon the benefit of the doubt before they've had enough. Will Elon ever have a "coming to jesus moment" and realize that he's alienated so many of his peers that he is, in fact, in the wrong? Or is he so delusional that he really does believe he has the answers?
Musk seems to be speedrunning into Howard Hughes status.
He has so much wealth that, like Hughes, he could alienate every business contact and still spend the rest of his life making leftfield investments and watching movies naked in a dark hotel room. (Well, replace watching movies with tweeting, I suppose.)
This to me feels like the right analogy.
It’s both possible that Musk is a genius and that he’s cracked as many geniuses do.
His embarrassment in no way erases his accomplishments of the past decade and warrant a “he was never smart”.
But his downright pathetic demeanor the past few months do eclipse and ruin what could’ve been an incredible legacy.
Not sure his recent behaviour ruins his legacy. It’s likely far more will be remembered of say SpaceX than of this Twitter debacle. At least - to date.
But overall yes agree a great achiever (never sure about that genius tag) who has lost the plot.
There are press articles that say that Musk showed his friends the benefits of MDMA, Mushrooms, psychedelics, marijuana.
I dont know if he does drugs, but sure he seems to behave strange.
Just a reminder that just because liberals are freaking out, doesn’t mean it’s a shared opinion. I see this happening on HN constantly where over time the hivemind shares their in-group responses to articles blasting whatever their current enemy is (yes it’s heavily liberal here).
Then after a few weeks of this, you start seeing funny comment threads like this. Where there’s this sort of this tactic to take control of the narrative, and make it seem like everyone agrees that X is bad.
It works really well because of course even if only a few people leave Twitter in rage, now we can share that as proof of status quo and keep building the narrative.
Just a reminder - this is only a view shared by the extremely online / tech / liberal bubble.
As an example, on more conservative discussions boards you see the same thing happening on the opposite side. Until threads are literally fully premised on the fact that everyone agrees that someone or some org is “speedrunning Y” or whatever.
My feedback is this: don’t write like this. It makes you look daft, because it shows ether you don’t realize you’re in an opinion bubble, or you’re a willing participant in gaslighting for the only purpose of back patting / narrative control. I see this stuff all the damn time and usually ignore, but nice to have a chance to clarify this.
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He'll go well beyond that. Hughes stopped at self destruct. Musk is likely to take a lot of people and institutions with him on the way down.
With the bigotry and cars I tend to think Ford, not Hughes.
Very likely the only people who can reliably send that message to Musk are $TSLA investors. Until he has the cushion provided by $TSLA stock price, he is pretty much going to continue doing whatever he wants to.
Everyone shrugged off the "pedo guy" episode as a lapse of judgment and not a glimpse into his real personality.
Musk did publicly apologize to the diver and the courts ruled that Musk was not liable, so lots of people considered it a settled matter. I considered Musk a cool tech person before that event, then a weird tech person after that. Since 2020 though he has turned into just an awful tech person.
Apologies and atonement are one thing but I think it takes a certain level of emotional deficiency to even have the impulse to use your position of power to lob such petty insults. It's grossly abnormal. Same thing for people like Kanye West or Will Smith. They can tap dance between insane behavior and apologizing but like why would they ever do the things they do in the first place if they were decent people.
Elon has been in the middle of his "come to Jesus" moment for a while.
He is running Twitter like an autocratic dictator. He is restoring extremist right wing accounts. He is banning open conversation and dissent. He is peddling QAnon conspiracy theories. He was against all covid measures and called for Fauci's arrest. He has cozied up to China and middle eastern dictatorships while putting up the "free speech" charade against democrats in the US. He was most recently hanging out with Jared Kushner in a private box at the world cup final.
Why are people still doubting who he really is?
You're assuming that Elon isn't doing what he intended to do, turn Twitter into his own personal, right wing echo-chamber with political influence.
Those have never done well. They want the angry/upset reaction they can't get in an echo chamber; the Parlers, Truth Socials, Gabs etc. will never give them this.
They're already asking Musk to stop lefties from being able to even block them; it's the same phenomeon as incels. Free speech was never enough; they want an audience guaranteed, too. https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1604052966839062528
There's this shading in free speech absolutists from "I have a right to say what I want" to "I have the right to the audience I want".
That’s simply not true, per the policy:
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...
> At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL…
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As much as I dislike Musk and what he's done to Twitter, I suspect he didn't intend that. I just think that's the natural outcome of his feelings, his position in society, and his relentless self focus.
David Roth did a good job looking at the dynamic: https://defector.com/the-eternal-mystery-of-a-rich-mans-poli...
And Adam Serwer has a useful take as well: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/legal-righ...
He's tweeted out some pretty hard right wing talking points and advocated voting for conservatives. It seems pretty intentional.
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You're being downvoted because HN is a lolbertarian paradise, but this is correct. He wants the Parler audience.
>HN is a lolbertarian paradise
The idea that HN is some sort of libertarian paradise is ridiculous. This is definitely a liberal haven.
He could have bought parler, truth or whatever for far less and already been closer to his goal.
Twitter was/remains? a geopolitical & cultural instrument. The precise reason why there is a fight over who gets to say what on Twitter is because it is a powerful platform for propaganda and agitprop. You can organize uprisings on Twitter. That is why it is such a hot potato. (It is not about utility. think Payless vs Prada.)
Elon apparently bet on the fact that the establishment could not stomach the idea of reconstructing that high visibility platform elsewhere. Everyone knows it is not simply about technology. Twitter remains "the clown car that fell into a gold mine". He will probe on how far he can go but will promptly retreat (ex: EU).
My guess is that his strategy is to prolong this period of uncertainty. Things like PG's decision may signal a consensus that they need to reconstruct humpty dumpty elsewhere.
Watch for trends in use of twitter as a news source in establishment press. If that significantly declines, the political class will follow.
p.s. It is upsetting to think that one of the immediate beneficiaries of Twitter itself being 'deplatformed from polite society' is the relief it offers regimes like Islamic Republic. They are happy, that much is fairly certain.
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I doubt Parler would have sold to him at the time, Owens and Farmer are probably still stoking Ye to make some ludicrous bid on it again.
Musk, on the other hand, needs the audience.
It'd be missing the political influence though, those don't have any influence and nobody would be paying any attention to what he does there.
There's this weird thing where a principal might be deluded about their own intentions. It's useful because it allows them to give inaccurate information about their future behavior without 'lying'. If a sincere/passionate person's actions regularly mismatch their words, suspect this.
So, like, Truth Social, only without, well, the main attraction? Hard to see much of a market for that.
I like how people always assume there is some genius underlying plan. All I'm seeing is an egomaniac going on a tantrum with something he didn't even want. What you are describing is what Trump wants with 'Truth Social' who himself wants nothing to do with Twitter.
> You're assuming that Elon isn't doing what he intended to do, turn Twitter into his own personal, right wing echo-chamber with political influence.
He simply unbanned accounts which were wrongfully banned. Accounts which simply communicated legal to hold opinions. There is nothing wrong or morally objectionable about this. I’d rather say it commendable.
If Twitter is becoming a right-wing echo-chamber it’s because left-wing accounts are leaving and nothing else.
So why are they? Are they afraid of having an argument where they can’t have the opposing view banned?
Cmon! You can do better than this.
> There is nothing wrong or morally objectionable about this.
Depends on the opinion. "We must kill all the [insert ethnic group]" is a legal-to-hold opinion. But I'd say it's both wrong and morally objectionable to provide a platform for transmitting that opinion. Which is why Twitter banned people like that.
And even for those without a moral sense, I should point out that it was also bad for business. Twitter had a business choice to make: they could keep all the blatant racists or they could keep the non-white audience they targeted plus the white people that don't like open racism. Even if you're a-ok with open bigotry, it's pretty obvious that the right financial choice is to boot most of the open bigots, so that the platform feels safe enough to everybody else.
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In a large number of cases because they've been banned.
The internet has a short memory. No one's going to care in 6 months and everyone will be back on twitter.
I highly doubt that.
Elon has right-wing reactionary brain worms. In my experience, most people who fall in never get out. I don't have much hope that a billionaire will be an exception to that.
Elon Musk's peers are people like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Mohammed bin Salman. He's not alienating them.
Not as long as Elon continues his trend of acting progressively stupider. At least to me, there’s a stark difference in his public appearances. He used to appear intelligent, thoughtful, and nuanced. Now he’s disjointed, often tired, and quick to deflect with jokes or political controversy. Doesn’t seem like the same man.
I've seen people that were super intelligent and compassionate go on drug binges and come out like Musk. Just as intelligent, but now no longer able to empathize with others and using whatever intelligence was left for malice and damage.
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Flip the script: what evidence do we have that he's smarter than eight billion people?
Hm on the one hand we have survivorship bias, plus the fact that capital accumulates more capital near-automatically at some point, as well as his relative lack of qualms with committing fraud (that he's gotten lucky about going un/under-punished).
But on the other hand, he built some impressive companies, he is the richest person in the world, and he has a lot of gumption, y'know?
Well, when it comes to Elon vs 8B people, money could be one metric.
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Please explain what "smarter than eight billion people" mean? What is the smartness of eight billion people, is it some new aggregate? Do you sum it or get the mean? Are eight billion people by default always right? I am curious how it can make sense.
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Terence Tao is on mastodon. Beat that!
It's simple to realize 1. People have finite capabilities to master subjects. 2. Elon is a master in hardware engineering businesses. 3. Twitter is not about hardware engineering.
He's probably wrong but "previous Twitter" was not right either.
It's funny how "Twitter is a private company they can kick who they want from their platform" is suddenly not so popular over the crowd that used to parrot it. Hypocrites from every side, unsurprisingly.
Anyway, I can't believe his grand idea for Twitter was the botched "Twitter Blue", and the next version doesn't seem to make sense either.