You can watch the whole conversation with Andrew Ross Sorkin here. There’s a little bit more nuance in the full version, but I wonder if “X” competitors like Bluesky are kind of celebrating each new level of crazy behavior.
“If Elon Musk is any example — he’s supposedly CEO of three major companies — gerbil-on-a-wheel effort is crazy-making, not redemptive. Greatness doesn’t ensue. Burnout does, followed by mistakes, frustration and failure. A fate that is coming down the road for Elon Musk and Twitter. What he is doing now not only won’t work; it can’t.”
I thought that he was definitely getting a little flaky when he challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight. Time for him to become reclusive, before he self-destructs.
Unlike the advertisers – and so much of the public – duped into believing specific activists targeting the selling of their narrative by manipulating ad placements to make the narrative seem to be true when it’s not, Musk isn’t going to let X as a platform be blackmailed by them. Hence, the nuclear lawsuit, with all of Musk’s resources ready to back it because he’s absolutely right. Activists should not be dictating social media policy and deem what they will allow to be said on it.
In the meantime, well… it’s up to advertisers whether or not they’ll stay or go. In either case, the point Musk is making is that he will not cave to this overt blackmailing scheme and if the company goes bankrupt then that is cost advertisers will have accrued. When the court case is settled and the public finds out just how incredibly naive they have been going along with and supporting being manipulated and used to further the aims of certain activists, then they will judge whether or not Musk has lost his damned mind.
“… Activists should not be dictating social media policy …”
Oh, sure. The ADL should not be complaining about antisemitism on X ?!? X is a cesspool of hate, fueled by Musk, and he thinks no one has the moral right to pull their ads. And that if the company fails, it’s not his own damned fault?!?
That is the very definition of losing his damned mind.
Musk damns himself with his own tweets (or xits or xeets).
“Activists” don’t dictate anything. This is one case where something the little-known Media Matters wrote went viral, drawing the envy of activists everywhere. I suspect many of those advertisers were looking for a handy excuse to ditch X anyway, as its consumer audience has degraded under Elon’s rule.
Often the most damaging thing they can do to an ultra-conservative is quote them verbatim (or show clips) in full context: Most people don’t really follow their own politicians and are shocked to discover they want to “get rid of Social Security” or they believe climate change is a hoax or they want to ban all abortion at the federal level. (This doesn’t work for Trump, of course, who can brag about grabbing pussies and threaten the families of court officials without any consequences.)
I tend to wonder if the Media Matters report went viral purely BECAUSE Musk reacted so negatively to it. It wasn’t really news – fascist content on X – wha-a-a-a-t?, no kidding, everyone knows that. But Musk freaked about it and pretty much everything he does gets covered.
Then, the whole thing really blew up after Musk responded positively to an anti-semitic post at the same time. If he didn’t do that, and if he didn’t say anything about the MM report – how much mainstream news coverage does the original MM report really get on its own? It doesn’t go viral, anyway, imo.
Musk’s response is that it’s all MM’s fault, of course, when he really should be looking at his own actions. But narcissists freak out from criticism and are notoriously bad at self reflection.
Yep, hardcore nut. The US deified this individual because of his ability to accumulate wealth, created this individual who beleived in his omnipotence and overexposed him to the point his slide into insanity is documented by his desiree to recreate the world in his own wacko image.
Stop giving him a platform. When he opens his mouth, being uber wealthy doesn’t mean he’s automatically got anything worth listening to.
I like that he made an electric car company viable, and caught the attention of legacy automakers. Other than that, there’s nothing else he can contribute, and he seems hell-bent on promoting authoritarian regimes.
His behavior has changed enough that I’m leaning toward the suggesting that he’s “self-medicating” with some drug or combination of drugs (ketamine, THC, psilocybin, whatever).
This editorial appeared in my local newspaper a few weeks ago
———————————————————————-
Elon Musk is a genius who has done useful things for the human race.
He brought the idea of electric vehicles from harmless fringe tinkering to commercial mass production, and he may yet bring the cost of space flight down a thousandfold and get the human race out into the solar system for good.
Musk’s downside is he is a political idiot with the impulse control of a 10-year-old.
So, the big question is whether he gets the Starship/Super Heavy system up and running before his random political enthusiasms drive him into bankruptcy. That’s the real space race, between Musk A and Musk B.
It took about eight years from the Tesla IPO in 2010 to 5,000 vehicles a week off Musk’s first production line in 2018.
Space X’s first multi-stage rocket, the Falcon 9, reached orbit in 2012. Let’s say twice as long – 2028 – for the technically more challenging goal of getting fully functional Starships into serial production.
That’s how long Musk has to stay alive and solvent in order to carry the Starship project to a point where it can continue in the hands of others even if he goes broke as the result of some reckless financial venture like X, formerly known as ‘Twitter. Five more years.
His continued presence at the head of Space X is necessary because the development project involves learning by doing. That involves lots of failures in the form of spectacular explosions and “rapid unscheduled disassemblies” in the course of reaching the goal.
Compared to the traditional government-financed rockets built by NASA and its Russian and Chinese rivals, this approach works out faster and cheaper in the end. But there’s a very high burn rate of cash until success is achieved, and that requires boundless cash and boundless investor confidence in the developer.
Musk has managed to create and maintain that confidence and the cash keeps flowing, but it’s still a high-risk way of working. One really bad crash that involves a large loss of human life could bring him down. So could a bankruptcy elsewhere in his empire, most likely in X.
Getting Starship/Super Heavy onto the market in multiple copies is important. It will revolutionize everything to do with space flight, because the cost of getting anything into orbit will drop from $60,000 (NASA’s space launch system) to $10 a kilo (Musk’s Starship).
If Musk is over-promising and the real cost is ten times higher, it still would be a thousandfold cut in the cost of lifting a kilo of anything to low-earth orbit.
So, if you want to send human settlers to Mars (Musk’s dream), this is the vehicle that could take them there. Sooner and of more practical importance, you can build immense arrays of solar panels that harvest perpetual sunlight in space and beam it down to Earth for energy.
You can start mining minerals that are rare on Earth but may be plentiful on the moon and various asteroids. You can build orbital factories that exploit zero gravity for various chemical and pharmaceutical processes. And there’s no pollution involved, because the fuel used is methane, which burns cleanly with oxygen leaving only water behind.
We could have had all this technology by the mid-1980s, but the two countries then financing space flight, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, lost interest after the U.S. won the race to the moon and détente de-escalated the Cold War.
Until and unless space flight becomes a widespread and commercially viable business, a shift in the political winds could stall it again. That is what makes Musk the indispensable man for the moment. Without him the momentum could easily be lost again.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist based in London, England.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lQ_MjU4QHw
https://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/2022/11/17/23464145/elon-musk-twitter-extremely-hardcore-work-environment-burnout
“If Elon Musk is any example — he’s supposedly CEO of three major companies — gerbil-on-a-wheel effort is crazy-making, not redemptive. Greatness doesn’t ensue. Burnout does, followed by mistakes, frustration and failure. A fate that is coming down the road for Elon Musk and Twitter. What he is doing now not only won’t work; it can’t.”
I thought that he was definitely getting a little flaky when he challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight. Time for him to become reclusive, before he self-destructs.
The answer I think is no.
Unlike the advertisers – and so much of the public – duped into believing specific activists targeting the selling of their narrative by manipulating ad placements to make the narrative seem to be true when it’s not, Musk isn’t going to let X as a platform be blackmailed by them. Hence, the nuclear lawsuit, with all of Musk’s resources ready to back it because he’s absolutely right. Activists should not be dictating social media policy and deem what they will allow to be said on it.
In the meantime, well… it’s up to advertisers whether or not they’ll stay or go. In either case, the point Musk is making is that he will not cave to this overt blackmailing scheme and if the company goes bankrupt then that is cost advertisers will have accrued. When the court case is settled and the public finds out just how incredibly naive they have been going along with and supporting being manipulated and used to further the aims of certain activists, then they will judge whether or not Musk has lost his damned mind.
“… Activists should not be dictating social media policy …”
Oh, sure. The ADL should not be complaining about antisemitism on X ?!? X is a cesspool of hate, fueled by Musk, and he thinks no one has the moral right to pull their ads. And that if the company fails, it’s not his own damned fault?!?
That is the very definition of losing his damned mind.
Lately the definition of “activist” seems to be anyone pushing for ideas that are different than the person using the word activist.
Musk damns himself with his own tweets (or xits or xeets).
“Activists” don’t dictate anything. This is one case where something the little-known Media Matters wrote went viral, drawing the envy of activists everywhere. I suspect many of those advertisers were looking for a handy excuse to ditch X anyway, as its consumer audience has degraded under Elon’s rule.
Often the most damaging thing they can do to an ultra-conservative is quote them verbatim (or show clips) in full context: Most people don’t really follow their own politicians and are shocked to discover they want to “get rid of Social Security” or they believe climate change is a hoax or they want to ban all abortion at the federal level. (This doesn’t work for Trump, of course, who can brag about grabbing pussies and threaten the families of court officials without any consequences.)
I tend to wonder if the Media Matters report went viral purely BECAUSE Musk reacted so negatively to it. It wasn’t really news – fascist content on X – wha-a-a-a-t?, no kidding, everyone knows that. But Musk freaked about it and pretty much everything he does gets covered.
Then, the whole thing really blew up after Musk responded positively to an anti-semitic post at the same time. If he didn’t do that, and if he didn’t say anything about the MM report – how much mainstream news coverage does the original MM report really get on its own? It doesn’t go viral, anyway, imo.
Musk’s response is that it’s all MM’s fault, of course, when he really should be looking at his own actions. But narcissists freak out from criticism and are notoriously bad at self reflection.
Yep, hardcore nut. The US deified this individual because of his ability to accumulate wealth, created this individual who beleived in his omnipotence and overexposed him to the point his slide into insanity is documented by his desiree to recreate the world in his own wacko image.
Stop giving him a platform. When he opens his mouth, being uber wealthy doesn’t mean he’s automatically got anything worth listening to.
I like that he made an electric car company viable, and caught the attention of legacy automakers. Other than that, there’s nothing else he can contribute, and he seems hell-bent on promoting authoritarian regimes.
That and Starlink. I just hope that survives because it’s the only useable internet I can get out here.
I wonder how long it will take most people on earth to forget “X” ever existed?
Hey, it’s a very useful letter!
Okay, I got a good laugh out of that
His behavior has changed enough that I’m leaning toward the suggesting that he’s “self-medicating” with some drug or combination of drugs (ketamine, THC, psilocybin, whatever).
He definitely seems ‘affected’ in that clip. Not fully there. Could be drugs, but I’d say lack of sleep is also highly likely.
This editorial appeared in my local newspaper a few weeks ago
———————————————————————-
Elon Musk is a genius who has done useful things for the human race.
He brought the idea of electric vehicles from harmless fringe tinkering to commercial mass production, and he may yet bring the cost of space flight down a thousandfold and get the human race out into the solar system for good.
Musk’s downside is he is a political idiot with the impulse control of a 10-year-old.
So, the big question is whether he gets the Starship/Super Heavy system up and running before his random political enthusiasms drive him into bankruptcy. That’s the real space race, between Musk A and Musk B.
It took about eight years from the Tesla IPO in 2010 to 5,000 vehicles a week off Musk’s first production line in 2018.
Space X’s first multi-stage rocket, the Falcon 9, reached orbit in 2012. Let’s say twice as long – 2028 – for the technically more challenging goal of getting fully functional Starships into serial production.
That’s how long Musk has to stay alive and solvent in order to carry the Starship project to a point where it can continue in the hands of others even if he goes broke as the result of some reckless financial venture like X, formerly known as ‘Twitter. Five more years.
His continued presence at the head of Space X is necessary because the development project involves learning by doing. That involves lots of failures in the form of spectacular explosions and “rapid unscheduled disassemblies” in the course of reaching the goal.
Compared to the traditional government-financed rockets built by NASA and its Russian and Chinese rivals, this approach works out faster and cheaper in the end. But there’s a very high burn rate of cash until success is achieved, and that requires boundless cash and boundless investor confidence in the developer.
Musk has managed to create and maintain that confidence and the cash keeps flowing, but it’s still a high-risk way of working. One really bad crash that involves a large loss of human life could bring him down. So could a bankruptcy elsewhere in his empire, most likely in X.
Getting Starship/Super Heavy onto the market in multiple copies is important. It will revolutionize everything to do with space flight, because the cost of getting anything into orbit will drop from $60,000 (NASA’s space launch system) to $10 a kilo (Musk’s Starship).
If Musk is over-promising and the real cost is ten times higher, it still would be a thousandfold cut in the cost of lifting a kilo of anything to low-earth orbit.
So, if you want to send human settlers to Mars (Musk’s dream), this is the vehicle that could take them there. Sooner and of more practical importance, you can build immense arrays of solar panels that harvest perpetual sunlight in space and beam it down to Earth for energy.
You can start mining minerals that are rare on Earth but may be plentiful on the moon and various asteroids. You can build orbital factories that exploit zero gravity for various chemical and pharmaceutical processes. And there’s no pollution involved, because the fuel used is methane, which burns cleanly with oxygen leaving only water behind.
We could have had all this technology by the mid-1980s, but the two countries then financing space flight, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, lost interest after the U.S. won the race to the moon and détente de-escalated the Cold War.
Until and unless space flight becomes a widespread and commercially viable business, a shift in the political winds could stall it again. That is what makes Musk the indispensable man for the moment. Without him the momentum could easily be lost again.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist based in London, England.
Gwynne Dyer. Good stuff.