Why does market standard practice “whattaboutism” need to defend the despicable? This is hacker news, is it not? Let’s celebrate the bold and call out the lies. Not pander to the mediocre.

Musk's ambition enables GGP to post on HN from Western Mongolia, but he is derided because his company used to offer an even better option once.

Enables it for 30 days. Such a massive cut in usability on top of tripling in price for existing users does deserve derision.

This is what happens when there is no competition. There is no better alternative, and if demand goes up...

Before starlink existed, there was also no competition.

So what, nobody is allowed to launch any product unless it also has a competitor?

I don't know how you got there but no that's not the implication.

Thread is complaining about starlink having no competition.

It is, but it's not complaining in the weird way you interpreted it.

What? I'm confused by your reply.

I meant that Starlink adjusting prices shouldn't be surprising, if anything it is still cheap (IOM).

I got a mini on sale at HD for ~200, paid 0/mo -> 5/mo now $10/mo to keep online as a backup. Amazing tech IMO and cheap.

Thread was complaining about starlink having no competition. That's like complaining AWS had no competition a couple years after it launched.

> Musk's ambition enables

It's so weird to me the attribution of collective efforts to a single individual.

> his company used to offer an even better option

Yes, it's a degradation in service not unlike a bait-and-switch.

I just don't understand how you can hold your mental model of the world.

>>It's so weird to me the attribution of collective efforts to a single individual

Yeah, totally never happened with Steve Jobs and Apple.

Yes, and that was weird too, to anyone not a blind fanboi.

I mean neither of them are physically assembling iPhones or Teslas, but I do think Apple and Tesla/Starlink/Whatever would be different companies without them.

>It's so weird to me the attribution of collective efforts to a single individual.

Why didn't you reply to the guy blaming Musk personally for the plan changes?

Sib will certainly switch to the first good alternative when it becomes available, any day now surely

If one appears, one of the reasons will be that people complained about the existing one, signalling the market.

This "just eat your gruel and be grateful" attitude on Hacker News is becoming very common now but remains surprising. This is the attitude of serfs, not hackers.

Man, kind of a shitty comment, sorry.

That’s the thing about kleptocracy, Musk has artificial barriers constructed by the government, making competition nearly, if not literally, impossible.

What barriers would those be? There are well-funded competitors in every domain he competes in. His products are just the most competitive. HN has totally jumped the shark on Musk.

Being allowed to circumvent SEC rules for one, which gives access to huge amounts of capital, which then feeds exclusive government contracts. HN is way more pro-Musk than the average human. He’s hated.

The enforcement of SEC rules over small issues (e.g., the 420 tweet) have not given him access to huge amounts of capital. He has access to huge amounts of capital because he has repeatedly produced giant profitable businesses that people want to invest in, including many very sophisticated investors in private offerings.

JUMPED. THE. SHARK.

Yes, that he’s not in prison like he should be for constantly and knowingly offering fraudulent projections has indeed granted him access to capital. Again, he would be in prison were the rules enforced.

I don’t know what you mean by “JUMPED. THE. SHARK.”. Maybe you’re accidentally replying on the wrong thread?

So it's not OK to compare things in relative terms, but we should only compare them in an absolute sense? Pretty lofty ideal. (The appeal to emotion is very inspiring though, not gonna lie.)

What does the competition even offer here?

This is HN, where anything less than the commenter's idea of perfect is a crime against humanity

Especially when it's Elon Musk.

I did not say it in defense of Musk, rather to damn terrestrial internet providers along with him.

"musked" isn't a thing, reply is spot on in my opinion.

I think it might be, Tesla, Cursor, Twitter/X have also been notably user hostile.

No, they haven’t? Relative to their competitors, all three have been excellent.

Twitter is not “excellent”, it’s a sewer. Cursor isn’t even really a thing anymore. Claude Code and Codex killed it. Tesla charged just discontinued their garbage can on wheels and promised (and charged for) fake “full self driving”) for years.

All Reddit bullshit.

Cursor: $4 billion in annualized revenue. https://presenc.ai/research/cursor-usage-and-revenue-statist...

X: 550 million daily users. https://twtdata.com/twitter-statistics/

Tesla: "Fake" or not, 1.74 million active FSD subscriptions with record growth: https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/4862/tesla-fsd-hits-record...

I don’t know what “Reddit bullshit” is, I’ve never even used Reddit. $4B revenue (and dropping) is nothing today.

X is a sewer, quite a bit smaller than the other social networks too!

Yes, “full self driving” is fake. Compare any of the numbers you’re quoting with the fraudulent valuations behind Musk’s scam companies and you’ll see why the SEC should throw him in prison, were we living in a functioning society.

Subjective, Bluesky is also a sewer, reddit /r/all is also a sewer.

It's purely because of his politics. Everyone loved Teslas before he moved to the right.

> he moved to the right

If by "moved to the right" you mean "he fell off the far end and if he were a politician his politics would be considered radical extremism", sure.

Yeah, only to the chronically online left.

It's not only chronically online folks who have a strong distaste for Elon. For one thing, everyone knows what an epic and highly visible failure DOGE was. That's widely acknowledged and not even controversial as far as I'm aware.

>>widely acknowledged and not even controversial as far as I'm aware.

In the New York Times, maybe. Everyone seems pretty pleased that USAID isn't wasting taxpayer money.

1. Evolution of Musk promises cuts to federal expenses:

- October 2024 - $2 trillion per year

- March 2025 - $1 trillion per year

- April 2025 - $150 billion per year

Independent sources put the savings around $10 billion per year (1/200th!).

2. Very important example of conflict of interest AND harm to the government: independent sources expect IRS workforce cuts to <<reduce>> federal revenue by <<$198 billion over a decade>>.

3. To your direct point

- most of USAID’s money was spent through American organisations, not sent abroad directly (>80% of companies holding USAID contracts were American)

- in practice USAID ran important early-warning systems: famine warnings and perhaps even more importantly disease surveillance (ever heard of... pandemics?)

Cut the nose to spite the face.

Did Musk/DOGE cut military spending? Healthcare spending? He went after politically convenient, and even worse, personally convenient targets.

Like that joke about looking for the wallet not where you lost it in the dark, but where the light is better...

You'd think the average well educated HN commenter wouldn't fall for such easy to sport propaganda.

Ah yes, the $30b (FY2024) a year that funded things like the World Bank, UN World Food Programme, Catholic Relief Services, Family Health International, and Gavi the Vaccine Alliance.

Do you know what soft power is?

It's so funny seeing American left derided as some radical ideology.

I dunno man, giving kids sex changes and having open borders seems pretty far left.

I’m quite sure his overt white supremacy and fascism is considered far-right extremism by everyone who is also not on the far-right. Ironic since he’s quite possibly the biggest welfare recipient of all time.

>>overt white supremacy and fascism

Lol.

Yeah, it’s super funny that the richest person in the world believes in replacement theory and spreads white supremacy propaganda everyday. Do you realize how normal people view this?

> chronically online

We are witnessing the death of irony: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=gadders

LOL at this being downvoted :-)

I see you posting this same opinion again and again, week after week. People keep explaining their issues with Musk which go far beyond "he votes differently!", yet you keep insisting there's literally no good reason to dislike him.

Have you ever considered that you might just be part of the terminally online right?

I think we're past that point and these kinds of comments should just be flagged.

Always leaping to censorship, predictable.

Yes, low-effort spam should be censored, because it makes insightful discussions much harder.

This site isn't your personal far-right soap box. If you want to keep posting the same low-effort takes again and again without meaningfully engaging with counter-arguments, platforms like Substack are a much better address.

Who are you talking to?

What are you asking?

Just curious why you directed that essay at me, you can just say you're pro-censorship.

I'll out-debate you and OP, which I'm doing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50451333

Life is too short, though, for wading through swamps.

I feel like this is a false narrative I hear a lot. “Everyone” didn’t love Teslas, it was a niche product and the Musk exposed himself as one of the worst people on earth, and the market shrank even more. It’s a strawman to claim Teslas were loved by “everyone” (implicitly or explicitly often stated as people with a left wing bent).

As I remember things, a lot of people turned on Musk (or were already against him) in 2018 when he called the diver who rescued children trapped in a cave in Thailand (and "stole" a moment of glory from Musk and his mini-sub) a "pedophile".

Long before he announced he intended to vote Republican in 2022.

Yeah, I think that’s when people went from having no opinion on Musk to actually disliking him and it’s been all downhill from there.

Nobody said "everyone" meant everyone ever. In all statements like that, there is an implied "everyone with feelings on Tesla"

Musk fanboys are hardly “everyone”.

I said nothing about Elon specifically.

Let's not forget stunts like the cave rescue sub that was incredibly unfit for purpose and him calling one of the actual heroes of that moment "pedo guy"

He's always been a piece of shit, it's just that the last several years he's been a far more obvious piece of shit.

He fired his PR team at Tesla[0] who were doing a sterling job of polishing a turd. Since then he has been more obviously a dope-addled con manchild.

[0] https://electrek.co/2020/10/06/tesla-dissolves-pr-department...

Hardly. Starlink uses monthly contracts and they change their terms all the time. Go talk to a sailor who has used it for a couple of years.

We could use a description Musk would not approve of and say the problem here is capitalism.

Except that SpaceX relies on government handouts and regulatory moats. Pretty much the opposite of capitalism, not that there aren’t myriad of problems with that too.

Gov't handouts and moats are provided to lots of companies. All over the world. Especially in the rocket & satellite biz, which are seen as top priorities for national prestige/security/infrastructure.

But somehow, those handouts and moats have produced exactly zero credible competitors for SpaceX and Starlink.

If you hate Magnus Carlsen, you can talk about how much time he gets to practice, and imply that is cheating and the secret of how he beats all his competition at chess championships.

Just don't expect anyone who know much about chess to be convinced.

> Gov't handouts and moats are provided to lots of companies. All over the world. > But somehow, those handouts and moats have produced exactly zero credible competitors for SpaceX and Starlink.

Almost no companies in the world get the same level of gov subsidies that starlink/spacex gets. If you exclude other big gov contractors (no reason why you should do that, just to illustrate the point I guess) the number is basically 0. Also, there are several other companies that are direct competitors with Starlink but they haven't been as successful. I don't know if that's due to a funding issue or something else, but I doubt it's due to lack of technical ability. Not sure the Magnus comparison is too relevant here..

We could also say that capitalism was a solution problem solved by starlink.

Not just internet providers; every company that exists or has ever existed. The rug pull is a well documented and practiced business strategy, and also the more fundamental driver behind things like enshittification and many of the other global crises we have been facing.