I also understand he sucked the gravity of the praise there with news articles mostly mentioning him and I understand how divers who risked their lives might feel constantly being asked about the sub.

This diver was rude, but if he’s been asked this constantly I don’t blame him really.

This is one moment where he should have kept quiet on twitter and it would have blown over, but he fired back which is in poor taste, but still not too bad.

But the second he called him pedo...that was the lowest point of Elon Musk ever. It was petty, narcissistic, rude. His teen fanboys will no doubt harrass and dox this hero, he’ll have this moniker on him forever, and it’s just because Elon was attacked. Whenever he feels unfairly attacked he always attacks back, sometimes very very rudely. I hope he gets sued for millions. I don’t blame his journalism attacks because they were fairly justified, but this was really messed up.

He may have been trying to help without consideration for how the world thinks about him and his companies, but it became PR the moment he tweeted about it (if John Doe tweets he’s donated to charity X, i consider that PR for John Doe, too. If he just wanted others to donate, he could have tweeted “X does good stuff and needs money” without mentioning his own good deed)

One of the replies to his tweet made me change my opinion a bit too. Government officials who make the decision what to do should listen to the experts, but if famous people come the govt officials might listen to them instead and it could have been a disaster. She was saying how in these situation, rescue workers hate celebrities coming because they have to fight against their usually erroneous opinions, making it harder for the workers to get through to the decision makers

Hopefully Unsworth sues him for libel.

Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Elon Musk needs a serious figurative punch in the gut, to get back to the actual outlook of a collaborative problem solver and away from pumped up competitive douchebag. The world already had enough of those.

Well said. All of it.

If that's the case, and some of his episodes bring this about, he really does need to either recognize this in himself, and exert some self-control, or straight up have someone else check it over.

This is especially dangerous because, since his companies' valuations are so intrinsically tied to his 'cult of personality' (I'm using this term neutrally - I believe 'both sides' will agree that a large percentage of Musk's companies' valuation does come from his bombastic personality and presence), this behaviour can only damage his work, which may put him into a negative feedback spiral, with each subsequent outburst plunging it all further down.

“I have made the mistaken assumption—and I will attempt to be better at this—of thinking that because somebody is on Twitter and is attacking me that it is open season,” he said in an hour-long interview with Bloomberg Businessweek for this week's cover story. “That is my mistake. I will correct it.”

It seems like Musk ought to be smart enough to generalize from "Twitter" to any sort of media (I don't think Unsworth is on Twitter), but I guess maybe he's still working on it.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-13/-the-last...

If there's anything the media loves more than building a hero up it's tearing that hero down. It was only a matter of time before he started saying things that would get him in trouble.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Zdx_Qw...

Doubling down

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qsVGLi...

Why is sfgate making an issue about this prior to doing that?

Yeah, IMO that's pretty stupid and Musk would do well to take a break. :/

Pity, because I think he overall did the right thing with that sub idea - it was a good plan B and what was done in the end was pretty similar to it (strap the kids into stretchers with positive pressure full face masks). But calling one of the team a pedo doesn't help anyone; better to just shut up.

He's clearly implying that the diver fits the stereotype of old white men who retire in Thailand to have sex with young Thai boys/girls.

We have in French an expression "il n'y a pas de fumée sans feu" (there is not smoke without fire) which means that since a random person (Musk in that case) said a random thing (his tweet), there must be something behind.

In the past it was a village gossiping, worst case one could envision leaving and making his life somewhere else. Today, he is dead socially because "who knows".

Musk should be punished for such words. oit punished by a few millions because this is not going to teach him anything (beside the fact that having a lot of money is cool) but rather denying him for 5 or 10 years the possibility to communicate on Internet (à la Mitnick) and denying him the possibility to be a CEO/engineer. Just so that he understands how painful this can be.

Honestly, I'm surprised this one blew up more than the time he called a guy from South Africa a 'chimp'.

1. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1018513369404493824