On the ocelot question - he will cynically tickle them to death instead.
This is about as reasonable discussion as can be had on the topic of Musk. Which is sad.
- He has turned into a pro-Putin, right wing troll, regularly spewing out falsehoods on Twitter/X.
- How he has (mis?)managed Twitter so far.
- All the lying and broken promises regarding FSD and other shenanigans with Tesla stock (the “taking it private” debacle, the bitcoin pump and dump, etc).
- All the COVID conspiracy idiocy and non-sense.
I’m sure there’s plenty more I’m forgetting.
1) It lacks all nuance because your question implies that if a person provides benefits to [whomever] and it's greater than their antics/demons, then you should like them. And that's simply not how the world works. And
2) The comment even said they wouldn't want to live in a world without SpaceX despite his antics.
People are complicated and so too are the views individuals hold about other people. It's not a spectrum where people eventually just dismiss extremely concerning things because someone made something cool.
That's the matter of the question. Elon Musk has some significant achievements which shouldn't be dismissed just because he behaves less than perfect somewhere else.
You don't seem to understand me at all. elteto listed a few things, which can be agreed with, and yet which aren't enough to explain cryptoegorophy's question "Why people hate him". I'm reminding that there's another side of things - people in this discussion generally quite aware of that, and only some focus on a one-sided picture. You don't need to repeat that the question is flawed - you just have to correctly understand the question. That is, it's a reminder of another side, which is necessary for cryptoegorophy's question. It's true that it's a complex question, but you don't understand me if you think I don't leave the room for nuance. Or, in other words, you can just dislike a man - but to explain why people in general have a correlated opinion, you have to look at the whole perspective.
I get a kick out of Elon/Twitter schadenfreude as much as the next person, but I also have to consider that maybe the "growth at all costs" Wall Street mentality has permeated our society and psyches so thoroughly that it triggers a strong kneejerk reaction to anyone going against that grain. Here is a leader who is finally saying, to hell with the investors and the board and kowtowing to the advertisers, I will make the changes I feel are right, and we are rejecting it because it's "mismanagement." Where mismanagement is defined as not playing along with the public market incentives.
I'm sure it's a swing too far in the apologist direction, but you gotta wonder...
Have seen this claimed many times but nothing to back it
- How he has (mis?)managed Twitter so far.
Mismanaging a company is hardly unusual, nor a reason to hate someone unless you are a shareholder or employee
- All the lying and broken promises regarding FSD and other shenanigans with Tesla stock (the “taking it private” debacle, the bitcoin pump and dump, etc).
Tesla shares are up massively, so this is not a reason to hate him, even if you are a shareholder. It is a reason to hate him if you are a short seller, I guess. He has Tweeted about crypto, but there is no evidence he participated in any pump and dump
- All the COVID conspiracy idiocy and non-sense.
Can you cite anything for this? I assume it is just more of the same media hysteria about him being some kiind of right wing fascist with no actual backing.
Why does Starlink work in Ukraine?
This one is just baffling. He is literally the most important private person helping Ukraine right now.
He like once suggested that total victory maybe wasn't a viable goal and that at some point in time some compromise peace might have t be made. Something lots of political scientists have also predicted would happen.
That is a naïve take.
Fundamentally, my issue is that Elon does not have humanity's best interests at heart. It is incoherent to produce EVs that supposedly aid in preventing climate change, and have a space company that dumps carbon into the atmosphere (investments in natural gas), and a launch site the harms nature, and has goals to extricate humans from the planet. His technology encourages single use personal vehicles and does not improve mass transit. His technology has quality issues, but at every turn he blames his customers for any fault. I could go on and on.
I don't doubt that people are fans of his, but you can't say there are no reasons for concern.
This doesn't seem like a very serious criticism.
1. If I understand correctly, most climatologists think that humanity should eventually stop contributing carbon into the atmosphere on net.
2. It's unlikely that we'll completely delete all car dependency any time soon. (Will every person living in a rural area have a personal train?)
3. Electric vehicles already contribute less carbon over their lifetimes than gas vehicles do, and can theoretically be made to be completely carbon neutral.
So electric vehicles seem helpful to me at mitigating risks from climate change. I also don't see why caring about climate change would cause me to care about endangered turtles in Texas
Yes, that makes sense.
> It's unlikely that we'll completely delete all car dependency any time soon.
That is not the goal I am advocating. I would like more transit and less people driving alone in SUVs and living in overly large single family homes.
> Will every person living in a rural area have a personal train?
No, that would not make any sense.
> Electric vehicles already contribute less carbon over their lifetimes than gas
Yes, but expanding highways and stroads is not carbon neutral. Heating individual homes is not carbon neutral. Mining lithium is not carbon neutral and pollutes the environment. His ideas around hyper loops and Tesla tunnels under Las Vegas make no sense when we already have trains.
> I also don't see why caring about climate change would cause me to care about endangered turtles in Texas
Yeah that is my point. There is a link to climate change and habitat destruction. Elon moves to Texas and supports conservatives that do not care about climate change at all. They profess that climate change is not happening at all. Elon recently advocated more natural gas and oil production and drilling. It is all incoherent. I am not saying all of his ideas are bad, but I am saying he does not seem to make coherent sense.
He wants to go into the history books as the man who got humanity off earth. He wants to be space Christopher Columbus.
I hate Tesla as a company and won’t ever buy their products, but I will still benefit immensely from their work. Credit where it’s due.
For the sake of argument, you may be entirely right and, he may be entirely wrong. But your mode of argument still betrays an inability to understand that your view of humanity's best interests is not necessarily universalizable. Especially the fetish for mass transit. It has a use case, but is not a panacea for several reasons, many of which people who obsess over everyone living in cities choose to ignore.
The infrastructure around them (just one more lane and traffic will get better) is itself unsustainable. Our suburbs designed around cars are not dense enough to economically support them (roads, water, waste, etc) and the taxes required are bankrupting communities already. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0
To say they have a "fetish for mass transit" is both intentionally inflammatory and unnecessary. Also, it is essential for moving people around. Having personal vehicles sitting idle, worth $5K to easily $70K, for most of the day is a massive waste of resources, income, and more. Elon's imaginary robotaxis will not fix it.
Everyone doesn't need to live in cities but everyone needs to start paying for what they consume instead of taking (from cities) from others (the future generations). We would need several Earth's if everyone lived like Americans.
People keep saying this, yet technology keeps advancing, and the poorest people today live like the kings of centuries ago. Henry VIII didn't have an HDTV or a smartphone.
I think he's posting a lot of crap, and probably doesn't have much of a filter and is impulsive at times. Clearly he's got some mental problems that lead him to say and retweet stuff on a whim that he probably doesn't actually believe. I think we can all understand these imperfections.
At the end of the day, he's an incredible human being, flaws and all. No one's perfect, and he's cocky and pushy and rude and stuff. But he'll be in history books, and mostly for having done a whole lot of good for humanity, while pissing off a lot of humans.