Kinda sucks :/ He used to be one of my personal heroes, before he got all weird. I miss Musk 1.0.
Maybe it doesn't have to be that way.
Maybe there is no necessity to believe that all of us mere humans are a weakness which must be transcended on the progressive path to some as-yet unknowable future.
But it feels like that undercurrent has always been in much techno-futurist thoughts which we can read in Musk's specific interests and grievances. Maybe that is just a problem with a view of history as the product of historical necessity- maybe it's just easier to see when the changes are specific technological changes instead of more abstract political or economic changes.
Anyhow, that's how Musk (and basically anyone who promotes implementing mass, top-down changes to the world) has always felt to me.
This is certainly true. At the very least it's obvious in terms of the attitudes that circle has been expressing over the last decade or so.
Less "Borg Queen" and more "stoner college roommate with too much money and powerful friends, who never learned to censor himself"...
However, it's also possible that there are finite families of ideas in the world which all have similar flavors and consitencies, and when we have seen many of them we can start to draw conclusions both about their obvious and more nuanced features.
We might consider that no one really has a "cohesive philosophy" into which our thoughts congeal:
we might not need someone to write a manifesto in order to draw some reasonable conclusions about their thoughts.
And, further, when the conclusions we draw about those thoughts (less so about being-of-people, if you will, but about thoughts) are validated, we might take that as data for how well we are listening to what folks are saying.
In the case of Musk, since I had been exposed to a lot of ideas about technology in the 90s and 00s, what he has been saying over the last 15 years or so has seemed both very clear and, to my ears, very consistent. And very authoritarian and very anti-humanist.
It does. All utopian ideals are at their core anti-human and authoritarian. The only way a utopia can realistically exist is by fundamentally re-engineering human nature, or killing everyone who doesn't get with the program. Eugenics or genocide. Probably both.
This Behind the Bastards two-parter was recorded before Musk went full Red Pill:
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/part-one-i-do-not-like...
The host off the bat says that he is conflicted about this episode because of Musk's contributions, but I am confident this would go differently now. Back in 2020 Musk could still pass for an "eccentric billionaire" and not a complete fascist-curious shitbag.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/03/media/elon-musk-testifies/ind...
Apparently, you can win a defamation suit by claiming that "yeah, I made it up and just said it".
I feel like at the time his celebrity carried him. Not sure this would play today.
Elon did not want to buy Twitter. He owns it because he was about to lose litigation that would have forced him to buy it or pay what would have to be an enormous settlement - enough to make Twitter's shareholders at least as happy as him buying it. He spent $100M on lawyers before giving up.
He spent what is likely to be his most readily liquid $30Billion. That's gone now. He probably thought he could flip it and come out close to even. But now his most accessible money is gone.
That's got to leave a mark.
Maybe not in the end, but he spent significant time, money, and effort in the lead-up to the acquisition. If he never wanted it at all, well, he shouldn't play those games with their board and the public =/
It's that kind of rash (and brash) thoughtlessness that seem to characterize his recent decision-making, in stark contrast to my former hero who built an entire freaking space fleet from scratch... so sad, too bad... power corrupts and all that, I guess.
That guy never existed, though. At best Musk hired a team of brilliant engineers who built a space fleet for him, and while that isn't nothing, people acted as if he was Zephram Cochrane building a warp drive out of junk in his backyard, by hand, alone. And by all accounts, he succeeds in spite of himself because his staff is able to handle and redirect his ego and bad judgement (exceptions like the Cybertruck notwithstanding.) That infrastructure just didn't exist at Twitter, where no one could stop him going buck wild.
But he's always been that guy, and I'm glad to see the edifice of Elon Musk torn down. No one deserved the kind of blind adoration and hero worship that man got, and still gets.
Musk has always been an awful person, but people like him sort of knew where the societal red lines were and kept their worst impulses under wraps.
Ever since we entered the "post-shame world", he is not hiding his awfulness any longer. He is actually proud of it.
Oh, and he is also convinced that he is absolutely hilarious.
The Twitter sale really broke him, didn't it?