He's already taken calls with Putin and randomly decided to announce Ukraine should negotiate peace with Russia, then lost interest and dropped it.
(Note, the way Elon "talks" in tweets would be sarcastic if it was someone younger, but remember he's middle aged and still calls things epic unironically.)
espcially since the us has sanctions targeted at medvedev by name, it's no joke
I'm not sure if he's personally sanctioned but the former president of Iran also strangely likes trolling American politicians and commenting on sports. Sometimes gets replies from their social media interns.
https://twitter.com/Ahmadinejad1956/status/10372992643161661...
https://twitter.com/Ahmadinejad1956/status/10521783680729456...
Actually I'm surprised Iranians are allowed to have Twitter accounts, does that not count as "doing business"…?
Providing support to Ukraine (via starlink) is not enough. Proper denunciation speech is paramount.
(I am being sarcastic.)
This is actually quite odd behaviour. Most high-profile people, confronted with something they don’t understand, will keep quiet; looking stupid is too much of a risk for these people. If the former PM of Russia drunkenly tweets about you, _you do not engage_, no matter how nice he is about you.
I know you have written eloquently about HN in the past, but I think that site is gone. And I remember because I've been on it for over a decade. I joined an early stage start up on it.
Sadly, they give no means for deleting your account. But thought I'd flag to you anyway.
Anyway, I will be abandoning this account, but it's maybe something for other HN old timers to think about.
I had similar experiences suggesting covid had natural origins. I'm not sure the culture that HN possesses is the same as the one it alleges it desires.
Anyway, last post from this account. I am sure this one will equally be nuked... :)
the way he tweets is pretty much distilled 2012-ish reddit
It's a pattern of pointless provocative nonsense by Musk, befitting a teenager, not the CEO of multiple multi-billion dollar companies.
I guess he's free to do what he wants, but people are free to read whatever they want into it as well. Dismissing it as humour is not a given.
(Yet I would not bet against him making a success of Twitter, as he has Tesla and SpaceX.)
And after all of it, here we are still talking about Elon, Tesla, and Twitter.
Come again? There are at least ten non-Tesla EVs that have a rated range of 300+ miles, and DC fast charging is everywhere. Look on PlugShare and filter out Tesla connectors.
Tesla is not the only game in town. And I say that as someone who recently bought a Model S Plaid.
I see people say this but I’m suspecting they don’t actually enjoy large road trips so don’t comprehend how terrible the difference is between 250 and 350 usable miles is.
What EVs can do LA to Salt Lake City with one full charging stop?
I don’t understand what you are asking.
>What EVs can do LA to Salt Lake City with one full charging stop?
I said that there are at least ten non-Tesla EVs that have a rated range over 300 miles.
LA to Salt Lake City is ~690 miles, half of which is 345 miles.
Few EV owners actually get their car’s rated range, and you’d have to be nuts to intentionally pull into a charging station with zero battery. Your scenario really calls for a car that has a rated range of ~400 miles, which, AFAIK, is currently limited to the Model S and the Lucid Air.
The longest range configuration of a Model S has a 405 mile rated range, though you’re not going to get that on a long road trip. The Lucid Air’s rated range is 516 miles. No idea how that bears out in reality, though I suspect it’s similarly less-efficient at interstate highway speeds. (Actual speeds, not speed limits.) I’ll be test driving one soon.
Whenever I think about Tesla I wonder why a company that had such a head start with electric cars doesn't basically own like half of the car industry now. He had a massive stock price which could have enabled huge growth.
There's a strong argument to be made that Musk has bungled it.
If he got paid for us talking about him, that'd be great. But he doesn't, not even on Twitter where advertising revenues were better before all the fuss. (There are people who get paid mostly from being famous, it's just they tend to operate well below "world's richest man" level, sell content or consumer goods considerably more mass market than the Model 3 and tend not see their net worth crash at the time their celebrity status goes mainstream)
Cause and effect is actually the reverse: the media started thinking his antics were interesting enough to cover because he'd already been very effective at promising spaceships and cars and organising people to deliver enough of his promises to earn him the status of maverick genius (and a lot of money). Nobody cares about your 420 jokes if you don't own a rocket company. He did the hype-man who delivers stuff well enough to more-or-less get away with dumb stuff that didn't exactly win the sort of headlines that sold Teslas (there is such thing as good free publicity; but they involve hyping his achievements and multiplanetary plans, not defending himself from libel actions). Then at some point he probably started reading his fans' takes on how his real genius was getting attention and so losing a board seat over a joke was actually 5D chess rather than a mistake to learn from, and now he's busy spending his fortune on being talked about...
(I guess you could still chalk that up as a win if you figure he always cared more about being noticed every day than stuff like going to Mars, but I don't think that's the case)
OTOH, I get the feeling people are being overly judgemental due to text being hard and 280 character text being even harder.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ake44z/elon-musk-vladimir-pu...
https://www.businessinsider.com/musk-spotted-pro-putin-russi...
And of course, the one you're responding to: "Musk praised a truly insane Russian propaganda tweet, predicting the fall of the west"
That’s the intellectual level we strive for?
There's a bit of a conspiracy theory going around that Musk was trying to get out of buying Twitter by publicly aligning with Russia/sabotaging Ukraine a bit. The idea would be being enough of a thorn in the US' backside that they might let him walk away from the deal.
It's a funny one in that Musk has done enough bizarre stunts by now that I don't see this as completely implausible on his part, but given that the US government isn't a dictatorship and has separation of powers I don't think such a deal would be possible even if some part of the US government wanted to take it.
At this point it just seems like he doesn't have any friends though.
What an absurd characterization. Don’t you have something better to do than wake up and post lies on the internet?
He said they should negotiate an end to the war, that’s not “pro-putin”.
It really bothers me when people like yourself post these blatantly false statements, and I can’t say I’m surprised this post is still up/not flagged.
People are trying to end this war and the next one. Anyone who believes Putin will back down after success in Ukraine isn't paying attention. Furthermore, the people who should be particularly quiet about what to do in Ukraine are those who swore that Russia would not invade in the first place, because they don't have a clue what makes Putin tick. The people who saw this war coming from a mile away are the ones who deserve attention now, and that's not Musk.
You don't understand, this time Russia and Putin will actually do what they agree to in a negotiation. Its not like Russia already agreed to never threaten Ukraines sovereignty already and decided they didn't like that agreement so they threw it out the window /s.
At the very least making 'ambiguous' comments as he has done in the past AND WHICH HAS BEEN USED IN RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA is the absolute HEIGHT of irresponsibility. You surely must condemn that? You seem to be playing this down entirely.
He has repeatedly attacked the Ukrainian continuation of the war with his utterly ill-informed commentary on the subject which he has never rowed back, part of the 'twitter files' were about alleged bias in favour of the Ukrainians and he's literally had zoom calls with Russian leaders.
A lot of your post is, and I genuinely don't want to be mean, but a bizarre post-hoc rationalisation. Are toyota an anti-Russian force in the world by building EVs? I mean come on.
The only point you have there is star link, an action that was so clearly a PR move (effective one at that), which received a TON of govt funding, denied aggressively by Musk and his sycophants but very clearly played down (yes he did donate money but it's not nearly as much as he claims).
Also large swathes of the network were turned off and he complained deeply about having to fund it, before quoting a majorly increased price for the service. He only backed down on that after significant pushback (are you noticing a pattern here?)
Occam's razor applies. Look to the guy's actions, stop believing the myth.
But I stand by the analysis that Musk's ventures are (so far) opposed to Russian interests. Who knows though? He's pretty erratic over the last couple years. Maybe next year's Tesla model will switch to gas, with a preference for Russia-supplied gas? Am I joking? Mostly, but not 100%.
1) Cite an example of his statements used in “Russian propaganda (as if that’s even his fault anyways)
2) He said they should negotiate a peace and end the war, which is correct. This was in the context of preventing the escalation to nuclear weapons which would be a disaster unseen since WWII.
3) Twitter was extremely corrupt at pretty much every level, and his “Twitter files” only showed what we all knew was happening
4) He’s had “zoom calls” with Russian leaders long before the war, this information came out during the war and has been parroted incorrectly ever since
5) Starlink is a private service that SpaceX donated to Ukraine (a huge mistake IMO). Basically everything you’ve posted about starlink is wrong. Starlink was shut down over Russian territory, but what is/is not Russian changes rapidly and the system does not always update fast enough. While it is true the US gov paid for a small number of starlink terminals for Ukraine it is not paying for the service. SpaceX should not be responsible for bearing the cost of this alone (not that they ever should have gotten involved in the first place)
6) Garbage in garbage out, when you start with completely false information it’s no wonder your conclusions are flawed. You need to reevaluate your media diet as your sources of information are misleading you.
https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/ukraine-uses-over-11000...
If Russia can hack SpaceX's systems and divert them to ensure they do not provide service over Ukraine, why wouldn't they? Or brick all terminals by sending a malicious update? Similarly, dealing with electromagnetic interference.
Thinking Russia is completely benign would be an incredibly naive take.
This experience has allowed them to launch "Starshield", but it definitely has not been cheap.
That didn't happen as far as I know.
> Or brick all terminals by sending a malicious update?
That didn't happen either.
> Similarly, dealing with electromagnetic interference.
For which there is no evidence at all, in fact the only reason Starlink ever suffered an outage was for reasons which had nothing to do with the Russians.
> Thinking Russia is completely benign would be an incredibly naive take. Or simply blinded by Musk hate.
No, I'm totally not thinking that Russia is 'completely benign', and I'm sure they'd love to do all of those things and more. But without any evidence that it is actually happening it is as far as I'm concerned fantasy.
> This experience has allowed them to launch "Starshield", but it definitely has not been cheap.
So what?
Really, I can't make heads or tails of your comment, that's probably on me though.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/pentagon-impressed-by-starlinks-f...
Are you in the denial phase or the ignorance one? If the former, why would the government take part in a conspiracy to pretend that Starlink didn’t require special support to work in that environment? If the latter, why would you even boldly claim “there is no evidence at all” without even doing a cursory search?
The fact is: the Russians have to date been unsuccessful in suppressing Starlink signals, for a variety of reasons including some countermeasures.
But let's not pretend that the main cost is in that aspect of operating the service. The main cost is in making and launching the satellites and once those costs have been sunk further use of the system assuming the terminals are bought and paid for.
As time goes on and parties are getting more inventive likely there will be some more defenses against countermeasures. But a LEO based satellite system has a number of advantages over a GEO based one and those operate in war zones all the time.
Because you are not looking. The fact that spacex is having to spend engineering time at all making improvements to operate in an actively jammed environment means software and possibly hardware engineering resources not being spent on scaling the network, working on their next gen constellation, etc. For a company that runs as lean as SpaceX on engineering headcount (based on reading Blind and Glassdoor reviews), that opportunity cost is easily tens of millions of dollars.
You’re also drastically misunderstanding the lifetime and duty cycles of LEO sats. Those things have to have time to dump heat and charge their batteries. Serving in Ukraine means worse coverage in America 90 mins later. It’s not just a magic mirror in the sky that costs nothing to cover the ground.
This is the first result when searching for it.
> But Musk says it's been a difficult environment. "Starlink has resisted Russian cyberwar jamming & hacking attempts so far, but they're ramping up their efforts," he wrote(opens in new tab) on Twitter Tuesday (May 10).
> According to a Reuters report(opens in new tab), which Musk also shared, a coalition of countries have said that Russia backed a cyberattack against satellite internet systems that ultimately pulled tens of thousands of modems offline shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine Feb. 24.
> British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said the attack against Viasat's KA-SAT network was "deliberate and malicious," Reuters stated(opens in new tab), and the Council of the European Union said the hack caused "indiscriminate communication outages" in Ukraine and several member states. The attacks were confirmed by the United States, Canada and Estonia, Reuters added.
https://www.space.com/starlink-russian-cyberattacks-ramp-up-...
Of course, there is an ongoing effort. Simply because it seems like they have not breached Starlink does not mean it has been cheap to ensure that.
Russia has, like all nations with power ambitions, a history of cyberwarfare.
If anything, SpaceX/Starlink has an easier time of it because their signal levels are much higher and the satellites can use phased arrays to pinpoint the receivers (in fact, they have to because they aren't geostationary and very low).
The fact this was upvoted despite that makes me feel like returning to commenting very infrequently is the right choice.
Hope you have a nice day.
FBI warned Twitter about Russian adversarial actions, which is known and documented by anyone not blinded by their made in China maga hats
This article discusses the interplay: https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/10/13/musk-carlson-trump-midt...
> (as if that’s even his fault anyways)
Maybe if this were 2016, but how Russian propaganda works and the role prominent/influential Westerners play in reinforcing Russia's narratives is (or should be) well known to highly connected and influential people like Musk.
When you say X and then X is used by a genocidal regime to support their war of choice, maybe it's time to stop saying X.
> 2) He said they should negotiate a peace and end the war, which is correct. This was in the context of preventing the escalation to nuclear weapons which would be a disaster unseen since WWII.
The geopolitical stalemate that has staved off nuclear war since the Cold War era has been MAD - mutually assured destruction. The idea that anyone should cede territory to an invading nuclear power at the mere threat of using nukes is to abandon MAD entirely. In this new framework, any country with nuclear capabilities will be emboldened to wage conventional war, and they can be comfortable knowing that if they disrupt western life enough and threaten the end of the planet with nuclear Armageddon, they don't risk any retaliation by the West whatsoever. In fact, quite the opposite, the West will be happy to capitulate under the guise of "peace". But really all that has happened is that bullies are empowered to bully.
If Putin gets what he wants in Ukraine by threatening nuclear war, what happens when Putin turns toward Moldova and starts threatening them? If Putin is appeased, what stops him from demanding more? Does Putin just get whatever he wants now, as long as he threatens to use his nukes?
Putin doesn't need to be placated to deter him from using nukes. It needs to be made clear to him (and all Russians) that Russia will be vaporized in the case Putin uses nukes against Ukraine. That is the deterrence.
> 3) Twitter was extremely corrupt at pretty much every level, and his “Twitter files” only showed what we all knew was happening
The Twitter Files show you what Musk wants you to see. Case in point: Musk released the tweets that Biden wanted taken down (Hunter Biden dick pics) but won't release the tweets the Trump admin wanted taken down. It's no wonder you conclude corruption, when you're being sold half the story. Selective disclosure and narrative building have been the hallmark of the Twitter Files. Ask yourself: if the point is transparency and exposure, why isn't all the data available for anyone to peruse?
He's a dude posting on twitter, he has no responsibility for anything.
With great power comes great responsibility. To judge Elon by the same standards as a 12 year old is a bit too simple.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/elon-musks-strange-s...
If you don’t believe it condemns more people to be colonial subjects and the be redeployed to destroy Ukraine, I can see the confusion.
A lot of tycoons aren’t commenting about the war at all if the fear how the judgement will affect business.
Then he eventually sleeps, gets a bunch of "we're getting hammered by the public" emails when he wakes up and says "ah, but it's all engagement you see. This is my business genius."
Ignoring that the reason that sounds right to him is because it excuses him from the idea that he's ever done anything wrong.
Assuming they live long enough. Look at what's left of the cities that Russia has withdrawn from.
Then a few weeks later regime approved voices said we should consider peace and it was no longer considered propaganda.
Russia is a Mongol horde. Suing for peace against tribal border raiders (cooperate) is a rational strategy. If they know you'll always cooperate, then their best strategy is to always come back and attack (defect). Each time you achieve peace you lose land.
So, rational strategies are bad. You want to adopt an irrational strategy where you appear to be a crazy person willing to hurt themselves to get revenge - now attackers won't risk themselves in the first place.
This is why societies develop an "honor culture" and why NATO has that mutual defense clause.
In real life Putin changed strategies in a way that made his country worse (turned into a Mongol horde) but personally improved him (gave him more power over the country).
It seems his push for peace is always one sided in that all his ridiculous plans end with Russia being rewarded for aggression and Ukraine losing territory.
He said the people in those regions should be able to decide which country they want to be part of and that the result should be enforced/respected by both sides.
It’s a stupid opinion, but he didn’t say what you said he did.
Framing that as enemy propaganda is propaganda that you have fallen for.
Saying "EPIC THREAD" is just his style of praising something, not mocking it. He had to add extra tweets to mock it five hours later because of the backslash.
I don't understand the thesis that Musk is somehow pro-Russia. Generally his ventures are against Russia interests:
SpaceX, launched in the aftermath of Russia being uninterested in selling a leftover rocket to Musk, now dominates the launch industry to the detriment of Russia, among other things halting the cash flow from NASA to Russia to carry astronauts to ISS.
Tesla and former-SolarCity, reducing use of oil, while Russia is a major oil producer.
Starlink provides communications capability to the country Russia is attacking.
However, a likely macroeconomic slump in (electric and other) vehicle demand and Musk’s erratic way of running Twitter are real problems. I think these get the blame for stock issues, rather than the bizarre Russian thing.