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Re:Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors by astrange on Tuesday April 05, 2022 @08:30PM (#30926932)
> His power is in blood diamond money from mummy and daddy during apartheid.

It's weird that people made up a fake biography just because they don't like when he tweets on Ambien.

In particular I don't think this was an advantage, I think it was a disadvantage, and at most he started with no more privilege than any other Stanford grad. (Which is a lot!)

> I wish I could find the article describing his efforts to get the model 3 production fixed. Endless issues because the robots weren't assembling the cars precisely enough. He was told they needed to go back to workers assembling the cars. Ran around screaming profanity at people, demanding they fix automation. Bunch of people got up and quit to his face.

I read that article and it was obviously made up. It claimed people were being sent through the air by machinery exploding like they were DBZ characters.

Re:Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors by heavyset_go on Tuesday April 05, 2022 @10:27PM (#30927801)
Emeralds from a mine in Zambia, a country that had similar apartheid laws stemming from the fact that they were ruled by the same Britain that ruled South Africa, isn't exactly lying. The OP's details were just a bit fuzzy.

The Musks lived in the biggest house in the richest neighborhood of segregated Pretoria, and Elon was able to avoid the draft from the same apartheid South African military that his father engineered for.

You'd definitely need to have a certain amount of privilege to do that, and to leave adolescence with anecdotes about selling pocketfuls of your dad's emeralds, like this[1]:

> A teenage Elon Musk once walked the streets of New York with emeralds in his pocket. His father, Errol Musk, had a casual attitude towards the family’s considerable wealth, including the stones that came from the Zambian emerald mine in which Errol owned a half share. Elon, by his father’s recollection then probably 16 years old, and his brother Kimbal, decided to sell emeralds to Tiffany & Co. on Fifth Avenue in New York – one of the world's most famous jewellers – as his father lay sleeping. "They just walked into Tiffany’s and said, ‘Do you want to buy some emeralds?’

[1] https://www.businessinsider.co.za/elon-musk-sells-the-family...

Re:Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors by astrange on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @12:13AM (#30928381)
And none of that matters. He has a lot of money solely because PayPal investors gave it to him for no real reason, just like Peter Thiel. But nobody pretends Thiel is some kind of racist old-money villain. (Although they do call him a vampire and he is a lot of other things.)

Btw, now that he's rich because Tesla investors keep on wanting to give him a lot of money for no reason, seizing/nationalizing the company and giving it to the poor wouldn't work, because those investors don't want to give _them_ money.

Re:Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors by heavyset_go on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @01:49AM (#30928869)
I was addressing your claim that the OP was a lie and that Musk had no more privilege than others. Those facts do matter when addressing your claims.

Who said anything about seizing the company? And what do easily duped retail investors have to do with anything I posted?

Re:Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors by mlindner on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @11:24AM (#30933125)
> Emeralds from a mine in Zambia, a country that had similar apartheid laws stemming from the fact that they were ruled by the same Britain that ruled South Africa, isn't exactly lying. The OP's details were just a bit fuzzy.

Zambia wasn't apartheid.

Re:Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors by heavyset_go on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @04:57PM (#30937341)
> Emeralds from a mine in Zambia, a country that had similar apartheid laws

Notice that I said similar here, because Zambia did have laws that were similar to apartheid laws in South Africa.

Re:Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors by mlindner on Sunday April 10, 2022 @03:25PM (#30980752)
Zambia notably had an African (black person) president though.
Re:Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors by inglor_cz on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @06:25AM (#30930437)
So why is Kimbal Musk a nobody, while Elon isn't? They grew up in the same house, shared the same privilege, are children of the same parents etc. If all this matters so much, Kimbal should grow up to be someone like Elon.