Comment by InsideOutSanta
1 day ago
Perhaps because disrupting things was the actual goal, rather than saving money. DOGE was highly effective in harming the entities meant to oversee Musk's companies, stealing information about union organizing and labor complaints, reducing the government's ability to collect taxes, and destroying its regulatory capacity.
Elon's still pumping his DOGE work and the Cybertruck daily on his X account.
That is just pathetic.
The purpose of a system is what it does
Or maybe the unelected moronic clown running it went in with a chainsaw like when he took over twitter.
Giving zero f*cks for the massive harm caused or the legality of it.
Well, for Twitter it's fine. It's a private company, and the shareholders can only blame themselves for the management they put in charge.
(From a broader society point of view, I'm a bit sad that they didn't actually manage to run Twitter into the ground. I think Twitter's a net-negative for humanity. But that's a different topic. People obviously like using it.)
Not just Twitter almost all of social media apps are net negative for humanity.
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Musk is uniquely stupid and arrogant for refusing to understand very complex systems before making radical changes to them. This behavior directly led to outages at Twitter after he brought it.
I don't think hanlon's razor applies to billionaires , unless the peter principle holds true all the way to the very top
Why wouldn't Peter Principle apply just because the magical financial threshold is crossed? This is Peter Principle in a textbook way, a promotion from managing companies to managing the government.
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This is the right take
This is disturbing.
They actually had competence at something..?
Disregarding the state, all data protection rules, and running amock; yes they are competent maligners.
I don't think that's right - although of course we are speculating about what's happening inside the head of Musk.
Musk strikes me as an juvenile and naive man, precisely the kind of man that would take a hatchet to a complex system while believing he is competently reforming. His experience with taking over Twitter probably reinforced his belief that you can move fast and break organisations and, despite all the moaning from liberals, nothing bad will happen in the end.
So Musk is exactly the man to honestly believe in what he was doing, and he was immersed in a right wing echo chamber, which for 50 years has been talking about government waste.
Don't ascribe to malevolence what can be explained by incompetence.
He did so the hyperloop just to stall trains. So there is precedent.
You underestimate Musk too much.
This was years in the making. He basically made a $200 million bet on the USG, one that translated into hundreds of billions. This was all calculated, and the veneer of government inefficiency was good enough to mask his actual objectives.
I can say this confidently because that's what I would have done too, and I'm not half as smart as him (given that I haven't built a Paypal or a SpaceX myself). That's what anyone in such a privileged position would have done. The upside to doing it that way was just that much massive.
Smart doesn't work like that. I have little doubt that you are as "smart" as Elon.
Usually what people mean when they say "smart" is actually more like meaning of the word "canny," which helps explain the distinction. A canny decision is one that makes you look smart in retrospect.
To put it another way, I might climb to the top of a hill. Climbing the hill doesn't make me taller, but it does get me the benefits of being able to see everything for miles around.
Perhaps after climbing a hill/Ent I see Saruman's army marching off to war, and realize that even though I may be a halfling, right now I could say a particular thing that would be "as the falling of small stones that starts an avalanche in the mountains." This is a canny moment, and like any canny moment or is filled with surreal possibility. But it isn't because Meriadoc is a tall hobbit and, not because only a tall person could do this thing that involves seeing a great distance.
Musk didn't build PayPal or spacex
> That's what anyone in such a privileged position would have done.
That’s what anyone who’s self-centered and morally bankrupt enough would do perhaps, but no, not “anyone”. Some people are committed to being good (or at least striving towards it).
Your take strikes me as sociopathic at worst, and misguided at best. Much like musk, to your point.
The idea that he is “stupid” or “naive” while also being the world’s wealthiest man by far needs to die
What he really is is a sociopath who uses the idea of “doing good” to infiltrate systems and setup laws and legal structures that benefit him and his companies
I don’t buy any of the goody-two-shoes “for the sake of humanity” persona and neither should you. But the worst thing you can do is dismiss his sociopathy as naivete or stupidity
His behavior after buying Twitter really is stupid though.
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I like how in today’s world and especially when it comes to Musk things cannot be as simple as incompetence. It has to be some 4D chess move. Like a reverse Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which might be/maybe/perhaps explained by 4D chess move. It’s like 4chan leaking all over the Internet. And Musk can keep his genius legacy alive.
is it really 4D chess to imagine that a man under investigation by the federal government would desire to benefit from being given express permission to reduce force and efficacy of agencies directly threatening him?
I don't think Musk having bad faith intent shows him to be intelligent, more just greedy and selfish, but I think it's actually more irresponsible to believe that he had absolutely no idea what he was doing
Under investigation for what? Like the self driving claims thing or something nefarious?
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Just because he is playing 4d chess, doesn't mean he is good at it.
Hanlon's razor is wrong to suggest an either or scenario when it is just as often some mix of stupidity and malice.
Never attribute to blatant corruption, "4D chess move" . There isn't anything sneaky or smart about what Elon pulled here.
There is a certain class of American that rides the knife edge between credulity and contempt in supporting and accepting the activities and intent of bad actors who pledge to get rid of the things they don't like and they people they detest. They're ever-ready to believe the barest of excuses and to hand-wave the worst excesses in this regard. Today's anti-woke are yesterday's McCarthyists, and history will note the echo.
> There is a certain class of American
The selfish kind. Unfortunately that seems to be the end goal of the American dream: "I got mine, fuck you." I can't tell you how many times I heard the "protect my family" argument from people I never thought would vote for that clown.
Also not exclussively American. Plenty of selfish assholes where I'm at as well, I suspect this is a world-wide phenomenon.
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They are typically uneducated victims of the largest and most well funded mass propaganda brainwashing campaigns in the history of mankind, to be fair. Forgive them, for they know not what they do. The perpetrators of the misinformation, however, know exactly what they’re doing.
I don't understand how people don't get this. There's a list of such agencies being gutted, but because it's compiled by democrats, the maggats just claim it's "biased".
> Perhaps because disrupting things was the actual goal
It surprises me if anyone thought anything different. I mean, how could you think anything else if yo know what group of cronies there people are?
It's like Americans forgot all about what was wrong with the Rockefeller-era oligarchy. Even the MAGA slogan is just a copy from back then.