What I do care about, though, is hypocrisy.
I don’t doubt that we actually need electric cars, the important question is just whether that’s all we need or whether we need other transformations (radically fewer cars and less space for cars in cities, for example).
This second goal is something Elon has actively worked against, for example with his Hyperloop bullshit.
This is such a terrible mindset.
So we're going to allow the rich to do whatever damage they want to the environment, personally, if they construct widgets that are slightly less harmful than the next best widget?
It's this sort of hypocrisy that prevents people from buying in to the environmental movement: celebrities lecturing the rest of us while they don't alter their lifestyle one iota. The proletariat will never accept it.
He probably could be this or that potentially
> What I do care about, though, is hypocrisy.
Turns out, you should care about both. First of all, his private jet costs as much as a yacht, plus he doesn't own a yacht just because he rents them...
> While Musk famously owns a $70 million private jet, he hasn't sprung for a yacht of his own (unlike his space rival, Jeff Bezos). Instead, the group chartered a vessel — called Zeus which rents for over $7,000 a day.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-yacht-photos-greec...
EUR 750k to 2mil per week is the sort of pricing I see for charter.
In comparison, Bezos' yacht is 127 meters long.
"If you buy your own boat you will only be happy twice in your life. On the day you buy it and then on the day you sell it."
And renting a yacht for $7k is actually super cheap. I know people who spend more on champagne in a club in a single evening, and no, they are not billionaires.
Even if this yacht was rented 365 days a year, which I do not believe, this would be $2.5M / year.
Even if this absolutely worst case (I don't believe for a second that Elon is partying on the yacht for large part of the year) you could still rent it for literally hundreds of years and still not match the cost of just buying your own large yacht. Forget about insurance, maintenance and staffing costs.
If you want to pass judgment on what is and what is not frugality when it comes to billionaires, you need to expand your views a bit and stop thinking like a poor person.
> If you want to pass judgment on what is and what is not frugality when it comes to billionaires, you need to expand your views a bit and stop thinking like a poor person.
Also :-)))
We're not talking poor here. We're talking "makes more money in 1 month than the richest lawyer you know" rich.
First, I am not your dude.
Second, please, read the comment before you respond. I addressed it.
$70M is a drop in the ocean when you are in tens of billions of dollars especially when it is your work tool that lets you move fast between locations and save couple of hours on each trip.
Maybe you are?
Is it insulting?
> stop thinking like a poor person.
The last boat I rented charged $200 for a 2 hour session and had a capacity of 12 plus you had to drive it yourself, so his would be a definite step up, but it's pretty modest for a billionaire.
You ask others to imagine what it’s like to have location shared without consent. But, you’re ignoring all the shit Elon does as well as all the ways he voluntarily forced himself into the public eye.
Elon wants the luxury of saying and doing anything he wants without accountability. This is a tiny way for the public to push back. No sympathy.
Prove it
Musk is doxxing someone while having banned the jet tracker he accused of doxxing (which was using public information... ) AND multiple reporters just reporting the story.
If the private jet of a Shell manager is seen to fly to a Phillipine island a few times in a month, and the private jet of a manager of a Phillipine drilling company then flies to Amsterdam, it's likely that Shell is going to buy, build or anything over there.
Secondly:
Twitter is in San Francisco, Neuralink is in San Francisco, Tesla is in Austin, The Boring Company is in an Austin suburb, SpaceX is in the LA metro area.
I'm quite sure there are regular commercial flights each day between Austin, San Francisco and LA.
Let's be real here, he just uses a private jet because it's cool and convenient.
Otherwise he's just an uber-hypocrite.
A plane is not an individual.
I'm trying to figure out if all of the people repeating this line are social media bots, or what.
This information is public and it's widely available on many other apps (I was getting ads on Twitter for alternatives last night).
Banning the Twitter account doesn't do much, and through the Streisand Effect will just direct ne'er-do-wells to alternatives.
That’s also why he is even firing the kitchen staff and selling their kitchen appliances. He is so desperate for money to keep this company from bankrup.
Which is also probably the reason why he plays with QAnon stuff. I think he is speculating on someone to take twitter away from him. Maybe.
he failed to do any due diligence before signing and failed to include any outs in the agreement in case he changed his mind, but that's just stupidity or laziness, not being forced into something.
That’s life. No one should have sympathy from Elon for making bad financial decisions. He’s smarter than that.
If people have a problem with the carbon footprint they should be promoting all around higher energy use taxes. Not using a strawman against someone they hate.
For example, twitter’s former head of trust and safety had to leave his home recently because Musk told his fawning followers that he was a pedophile. It’s not even the first time Musk has called someone a pedophile unfounded.
Uh no. He simply posted a screenshot from the guy’s thesis.
When a very powerful man with a large following “just posts a screenshot”, he is supposed to be unaccountable for the actions his followers take, even if his additional context dog-whistles to his fans that the guy is a pedo.
When a relative nobody “just posts already-public information about a physical object”, suddenly that’s not just worthy of a ban, but of a nuisance lawsuit.
https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/dy79wm/elon-musk-yoel-ro...
See what I mean by the irony?
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603190155107794944?s=20...
That is BS. Musk posted it with this false comment, which he knew would enrage his followers (and it did, I saw tons of "all pedophiles deserve to die" about Roth after this):
> Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis.
Which is, unsurprisingly, the exact opposite of what Roth was arguing for. Here is what the DailyMail (not exactly a liberal rag) said about Roth's thesis:
> Roth wrote that, as underage youngsters use the app anyway, an age-appropriate version should be created to offer help to LGBT youth
In other words, he specifically wanted to separate kids from an app that was intended for adults.
Now, people can definitely debate in good faith whether Roth's argument is a good idea or not - I think it's most definitely not. But it's not because of the absolutely false trope that Roth wants to make kids available to adults, which is basically what Musk has deliberately whipped up his followers into a frenzy about.
And now he is helping to spread racism and anti-semititsm:
* https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3709609-racist-antisem...
It's possible to think he has done good things in the past, but is doing bad things in the present. And to believe/worry that his present (and future) actions may cause his 'net effect' on the world to become negative.
https://www.tumblr.com/numberonecatwinner/701567544684855296...
I never understood the point of the cake story, and it all might be total BS, but the longer this current saga goes on the harder it is to totally disregard the bit about "managing Elon".
With enough moneyed people making bets, a few of those bets will pan out. Elon shows that the lucky moneyed person doesn’t need to be good.
And a lot of people believe whatever NYT or The Hill says, when they are obviously out to get him.
/s
Seriously, this is just blind hate. He's a deeply flawed individual and I definitely think he's a jerk, but he's at least he's taking risk on creating something actually new.
The richest people I know made money on "safe" industries like civil engineering and plastic bag manufacturing.
Pushing the aerospace industry? Challenging the petrol status quo by making EVs viable? Credit where credit is due, he put in the investment and pushed people to make it happen. Obviously not single handedly, but surely accelerated it.
If not, doesn't it indicate that CEOs are pretty important in the business scheme of things?
Yes, a lot of scientific advancement comes from exactly that.
I'd much rather he wasn't behaving like a douche, but until he stops, I'll continue to refer to him as ... a douche.
I was never VC-backed but I did a couple runs (combination of bootstrapped and angel investment) and I worked like crazy all the time. I never really thought about the amount of work I did until after (I was too busy worried about failing). I never discussed the amount of work I did with anyone, especially not publicly, because I never felt like it was anything to brag about (I still feel this way). This post is probably my first public mention of it TBH. :)
Looking at history, I can't imagine there's any useful technological advance (or adoption thereof) that depends on any individual - if EVs were meant to be successful I believe they would've been with or without Musk. Same goes for anything Space X does. Same goes for anything _anyone_ does. If you believe the world would be notably different without any one individual in it, that's what you chose to believe, I see no evidence from history for that.
Does he have valuable skills? I'm sure - if nothing else marketing and persistence. Was he involved in important stuff? Evidently. Did he get lucky? Absolutely. Does whatever perceived or actual good he did excuse the perceived or actual bad? Not in my opinion.
Naive people and children fall victim of hero worship.
Adults and people who can think for themselves are beyond that and understand that it's humanity which progresses forward, humans just make a fuss and all sort of drama to be the person who gets the merit and gets to sign off the progress do jour.
Musk got to sign off the peculiar niche of EVs and rockets which are niches nobody else wanted because they dependant upon political support.
Reap what you sow.