That tweet was a very typical Muskian joke, goading the supporters of what he sees as an obviously crazy conspiracy theory. (See "Tesla bankwupt" for a more developed version.) It's probably the best indication he doesn't have anything to do with anything in Bolivia.

Besides the fact that even proponents of the theory can't come up with any better connection than "one of his products uses lithium", of course.

At some point, he needs to decide if he wants to be a CEO or a comedian. He can't be both.

The idea that CEOs tend to become inhuman is a bad thing, not a good thing. If we say they should be come inhuman machines then they will, and all the corporations will be led by inhuman machine-like humans. So yes, he definitely can be both, and more CEOs need to act like him, not less.

They don't need to become inhuman machines, they just need to understand that their words have effects beyond the obvious.

You might not want to joke about blowing up the plane while you're standing in line at the X-ray machine, and you might not want to joke about conspiracy theories (or stock prices, or buyout offers, or pedophilia, or Kanye's presidential campaign, or...) when you have reason to believe that people will take you seriously. If recent history has taught us anything, it's that large numbers of motivated morons are nothing to fuck around with.

I’m not suggesting he had anything to do with it (though I wouldn’t rule out the possibility). The question was just what he thinks of it, and I thought his response wasn’t funny in the slightest. The coup in Bolivia is horrible. Not even remotely funny. It’s tone deaf and insensitive at best.

I am not in favor of the US interfering, to whatever extent it may have, but it seems that for Morales to run in the first place was unconstitutional due to term limits. His party tried to overturn the term limits in a referendum, failed, and then presto, the Supreme Court ruled it was a violation of human rights.

So if he has a case for it being a coup, it seems like the opposition has a comparably good case that he was moving towards what people call an "autogolpe" or self-coup.

This is not to say the current government is preferable.

I have not been paying attention to Bolivia recently, like most Americans, so my information is from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Bolivian_general_election

Glenn Greenwald has been covering the situation since the coup occurred:

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/23/the-u-s-supported-coup-i...

I tend to avoid The Intercept since the whole Reality Winner thing sensitized me to possible Russian connections. Without knowing what the true relationship is, I have written them off as providing a manipulative propaganda line. Of course, sometimes propaganda is written by the best; I was just reading about Eric Blair's wartime efforts for the BBC, and how he tried to avoid damaging his credibility as an anti-imperialist.

I understand the election irregularities in the Bolivia election are controversial, and I don't take a side on whether that was a pretext to get rid of Morales. My point was only that the act of running in the first place was questionable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner

>Russian connections

You say it like it's something bad.

That's shorthand for Russian government intelligence; I didn't mean to cast aspersions at the Russian people.

I hesitate to declare it worse than being a CIA front.

But in any case, I think it's better to look for other sources of information and never, ever, trust them with your freedom or life, like Ms. Winner did.

That was an obvious joke. So many people get "woosh"ed by him so much. He obviously takes pride in doing it to people who believe in things that are obviously nonsense.

pretty sure that was a joke.

Really? What makes you say that? It’s not a funny joke coming from someone in a position to fund a coup for lithium... It’s a super insensitive thing to say if nothing else. The right wing government that took over Bolivia murdered innocent civilians.

Musk doesn't have a particularly compassionate sense of humor, nor much restraint on Twitter. It's cost him a lot of money in the past.

But my guess is that he knows very few details about that coup, which allows him to joke about it. It wouldn't surprise me at all if he knew as much about it as most people in the US, including myself: nothing.

> It's cost him a lot of money in the past.

It actually made him a huge amount of money as the stocks he bought have increased in value by quite a lot.

It did cost him the position of chairman at Tesla however.

Your lack of a sense of humor isn't Elon's problem. Offense is taken, not given.

Oh fuck off.

(Are you going to take offense at that?)

I don't know about OP but I laugh at your words. They mean nothing.

Should we have a sense of humor about Latin American countries being overthrown so powerful interests can exploit their natural resources? What you call a lack of humor is IMO genuine compassion for people who have suffered a great loss.

> Should we have a sense of humor about Latin American countries being overthrown so powerful interests can exploit their natural resources?

I personally think we should have a sense of humour about everything.

The Russian reversal is one example of finding humour in darkness [1]. I found Elon’s joke to be in the category of the “be careful, or America will bring you some freedom” jokes that were popular during the Iraq war.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_reversal

IMO it's a bit different when you're someone who financially benefits from the dark event. Like a random American joking about invading a company for oil, vs Dick Cheney saying that the invasion of Iraq will be great for Halliburton. There's a point where it stops being a "joke" and is just a sad fact.

> it's a bit different when you're someone who financially benefits from the dark event

Fair enough. I prefer to have more room for humour. And I bet this joke did more to educate Americans of Bolivia’s history than serious discourse has. But a reasonable point on which to disagree.

Educate Americans of Bolivia’s history? By saying he supports a coup against the leader? The New York Times already did that, only to later retract their story That suggested the election was fraudulent. The tweet has no informational content which could serve to educate anyone about Bolivia.

It was a joke, and he followed it by stating that Tesla gets most of its lithium from Australia.

I did find it a tasteless joke though, and a foolish thing to publicly say. But then again Musk is known to TUI (Tweet Under the Influence) quite often. Rocket man gets hiiiiiiiiiiiiigh...

Even if they don’t use Bolivian lithium at Tesla, more lithium in the market reduces the cost of Australian lithium. Tesla directly benefits from this if the coup government isn’t ousted.