This now the modal Elon Musk tweet:
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 4, 2024
I know I've asked this before, but what the hell happened to the guy? His feed these days is nothing but an endless firehose of retweeted lies and conspiracy theories, and not even remotely believable ones. It's just made-up Alex Jones level lunacy about immigrants and FEMA that's meant solely to outrage the true believers who will blindly accept anything he says. Nobody else over the age of five believes a word of it.
But why? It's self destructive, makes him look like a moron, and persuades no one. At least Donald Trump does this stuff because he wants to win an election. What's Musk's motivation?
He wants a friend? Elon, much like Donold, needs constant praise, it's a way to get it.
I too am bewildered. My guesses are:
1. Musk wants political power and Trump is readily for sale. Musk is foreign born and cannot be president. A cabinet post or advisor to a readily persuadable fool is his best path to political power, or,
2. Musk (and JD Vance, lapdog of Thiel) want to dramatically increase the value of crypto by controlling its regulation via access to Trump and with bribes of crypto positions given to Trump. Crypto taking over a small percentage of the role of the US dollar as a reserve currency would vastly enhance Musk's and Thiel's net worth. Can happen if they set up Trump to profit on Crypto.
My question: Why do some billionaires invest in travel to Mars? There must be some profit earth-side in dong so. What is it?
After your first billion or two (let alone, 2nd-hundred billion), I doubt making a monetary profit is a major motivator. Power, prestige, admiration, etc. are likely far more important.
I really don’t know, but a part of me thinks it has something to do with his time as a beneficiary of apartheid. That maybe set the basis of his psyche and now that he’s richer than anyone else, he’s aggrieved by people who don’t listen to him.
What RAB said. Elon is desperate to feel loved, and his money allowed him to become an adult without learning how to be a real human being. So most people look at him as a crazy monster and are repulsed, and the small number of people who aren’t repulsed embrace him solely for the money, and both those reactions make him more desperate to be loved so he doubles down again on the crazy.
"..and his money allowed him to become an adult without learning how to be a real human being. ..."
He became an adult before he had money.
He was born to rich parents and went to elite schools. Elon has been rich since the day he was born and lived a life of sheltered privilege ever since. He may have entered a different level of rich after becoming an adult but he has never been anything but rich.
"... but he has never been anything but rich."
If Isaacson's biography is to be believed this isn't true.
Isaacson is a fanboy, so take that biography with a large grain of salt.
He wasn't rich as child, and neither were his parents.
Solid upper middle class, sure, but get rich quick schemes do not, on fact, make one rich.
He didn't grow up with anything close to the fortune he has now, but definitely into upper middle-class privilege at the very least.
"but definitely into upper middle-class privilege at the very least."
Which puts him in the same category as tens of millions of americans, which means it isn't an explanation for why he's this weird now.
Wikipedia: His father, Errol Musk, is a South African electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant, emerald dealer, and property developer, who partly owned a rental lodge at the Timbavati Private Nature Reserve.[14][15][16][17] Elon has a younger brother, Kimbal, and a younger sister, Tosca.[13][18] Elon has four paternal half-siblings.[19][20][21] The family was wealthy during Elon's youth.[17] Emphasis mine. Tell me that a guy who gets paid to "consult", owns a rental lodge, or develops isn't in the upper class. Just a hard working joe, really?
"...The family was wealthy during Elon's youth. ..."
The source of this claim is his father who (according to Isaacson anyway) is an unreliable narrator.
That assumes that being given control a billion dollars doesn't affect someone, and... that's evidence that doesn't seem to exist.
Clearly it does, but it affects different people differently (see e.g. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates), so I think the question as to Musk requires some further explanation.
Gates is pretty weird, he doesn't believe EVs work. 🤷♀️
This is your brain on drugs.
👍👍👍👍👍
No, he was posting this stuff back whenever he was stressed before.
The drugs excuse is just a way to let the military-industrial system exclude those it doesn't approve of, which this is an exception, but usually targets minorities and working class folks instead.
"The drugs excuse .."
Maybe some people can use drugs without harming themselves but lots of people have wrecked their lives with them. Including rich people like Michael Jackson or Hunter Biden.
The vast majority of people who use drugs come to little or no harm. Permit me to recommend a book, "Drugs and Drug Policy" by the late Mark Kleiman. (Granted, he wrote the book before the opioid crisis, but that particular drug had corporate marketing behind it so the dynamics are rather different, as Kevin has pointed out.)
Yeah, that's what I was thinking of.
Mere hoarding of money is obviously insufficient, but, when you have that much, what else is there to do? There are other avenues of social validation, but when your only criteria is money, and you have that much of it, what can you say about anything? It's like he's floating in intergalactic space.
That much money is as bad for the person who has it as a single person having it is for society in general.
Elon Musk is the richest and most powerful Apartheid-American in history.
Super rich Elon has nothing left to strive for. More money? He already owns several very valuable companies - X excepted. X is his plaything that has morphed into a gigantic cesspool that only sh*t eaters can read regularly. I can't wait for him the take off for Mars. Do the world a favor and leave, soon.
I guess I've just been assuming he's angling for an administrative position in the Trump administration. Rich guy going into politics.
Ketamine dreams, weed confusion, having surrounded himself with nothing but paid and/or freely-sucking-up adulators in his own personal echo chamber, daddy issues, all built on a foundation of apartheid unearned entitlement, yielding solipsistic megalomania that appears to be spiraling inward and hence with accelerating velocity. For a start.
BTW, his Wikipedia writeup includes the fascinating tidbit that before he migrated to South Africa, his Canadian grandfather was heavily involved in a movement that was actually called Technocracy-- I'm not making this up-- which held that politicians only screw things up and the world should be run by engineers. Elmo always, always talks about himself as an engineer. I remember some doubt a few years ago about whether he actually graduated as one, so maybe there's some overcompensation going on too.
"But why? It's self destructive, makes him look like a moron, and persuades no one." No one except maybe the moronic fan boys that hang on his every word. The adoring multitudes of weak men who see strength in equally weak men like Musk and Trump.
For the same reason the Alan Dershowitz's of the world jumped on the Trump train. They recognize a fellow criminal and think he'll help them cover up some crimes.
I like this one from yesterday:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1842041476424798645
=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=
Unless something is done about the bureaucratic smothering of America, humanity will never reach the stars.
That is my biggest showstopper issue for why Trump must win, as the alternative is continued expansion of oppressive big government, making progress impossible.
Unless we become multiplanetary, it is simply a matter of time before a natural or manmade calamity destroys life on Earth, just like what happened to the dinosaurs.
This election is existential for life as we know it.
=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=
> WE MUST BECOME MULTIPLANETARY <
Eight years ago Musk spoke at a gathering with the topic: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species
There's a one hour YouTube (SpaceX channel) if you're interested. At the start, Musk dismisses all planets except Mars - which has been an obsession of his.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7Uyfqi_TE8
The reality is that it takes a long time to get to Mars and there is the enormous complication of transporting humans (with their needs and vulnerabilities). Ain't gonna happen until at least 2100 (my guess, which might be too optimistic).
The lifting costs of a project that might actually survive a few generations on Mars would be so enormous that it would probably bankrupt the remaining people on Earth. Musk for sure doesn't have sufficient resources to pull it off, regardless of how much like Croesus he is.
That's nonsensical.
It may be hyperbole, but Musk's "theory" is utter nonsense. Mars is *already* orders of magnitude less hospitable to human life than Earth would be after a massive asteroid strike. Or after a nuclear war, or climate change, or any other disaster you can imagine. Aside from that, at least for asteroids, it looks like deflecting them for relatively low cost may at least be theoretically possible.
There are more than a few 'disasters I can imagine' most of them have happened to the Earth in the past, where having an entire solar system populated would mean humanity's continued survival.
See, there are these rocks in orbit around the sun, and they sometimes collide...
None of that makes colonizing Mars feasible unless you're huge Musk fanboy.
Until we can establish a successful, long-term settlement on the moon, any plans for a settlement on Mars are pure nonsense. It's an even more far-blown fantasy than his whackadoodle hyperloop idea. Now, I'm not sure it will take as long as 2100, but the enormity of challenges that a Mars settlement presents will certainly make it a project over a few decades, rather than years.
I'd be surprised if we managed it by 2200. Humans adapt very poorly to low gravity. Get outside the earth's magnetic field, and you have horrible radiation problems. And lifting all of the resources needed for a Mars base out of the earth's gravity well will require something close to a large-scale, free energy source.
Then again, I'm also the curmudgeon who thinks that we never will get out of the solar system.
We could solve every problem on earth or less money and time than it would take to establish a functioning colony on Mars.
+1
Obvious truth.
(assuming ".. For less...")
Correct. My keyboard is wearing out.
Solving problems on Earth include securing the resources of the solar system.
The locust model of humanity. I hope we're better than that.
Ehh, no: The Earth had most of its heavy elements sink into the core.
Stuff in the solar system are sorted differently, which means some have each element on the surface, where it is readily harvested.
The more metals we have access to, the cheaper a cyclical economy becomes.
Best done by robotics. I grew up on SF, and for some of us the idea of being a spacefaring species is appealing, but we’re quite unsuited for it.
No such robotics exist. And we can't get around time delay limit of the speed of light.
No, they don't. The impediment to solving our problems is political, not material.
Of course, but solving Earth's problems would allow all humans to thrive. Interplanetary migration typically has a eugenics motive.
I have no idea why we'd want to bother, even if the Earth were doomed. Humans beyond Earth will evolve independently of humans on Earth, and will quickly become a different species. I have no interest in diverting resources away from today's humans, future humans, and all the rest of Earth's creatures for some unknown future species that may be actively hostile to us.
That's, gross eugenics, dude.
I'd say it just ain't going to happen. Period. End of a very stupid fantasy. I can find endless links, but here's just one: https://www.yahoo.com/news/4-experts-explain-why-elon-120902203.html
There is also an entire book on why it's, effectively, impossible to colonize Mars. Given that reality I very much question why we would ever even want to send humans to Mars at all being that the most common justification for doing is that it is the first step to colonizing the planet.
Oh, I found the book I was thinking of: https://www.amazon.com/City-Mars-settle-thought-through/dp/1984881728
Consider the possibility that he was always this way. Born and raised in SA, family owned the emerald mine, probably lived in fear the whole time, and I'm also guessing he's never gone back because of course there's nothing to go back to, he's sure the family home has been overrun by savages, they'd kill him and eat him the moment he got off the plane, etc... and he's probably got decades of pent up anger/entitlement that's just been stewing away
What kept it under wraps (I suspect) was at Tesla / PayPal / SpaceX there were high-level managers who'd been around from the beginning when he first showed up on the board, people he trusted and who were then in a position to be able to manage him (and thence create entire teams devoted to this task), keeping him occupied and diverting his more insane impulses so that the company could get on with its business and make money, build cars, launch rockets, etc...
... the difference with Twitter is (1) it was a hostile takeover and (2) it was after he'd become the Richest Guy in the World. Anybody there who who would have had enough throw-weight to handle the Managing Elon role (which was exactly nobody, see (2)) would have been the first to be fired. and with Twitter being primarily a communications company, here he is, he suddenly has access to the biggest megaphone in the world, and he's CEO, so there's no filter....
.... what did you think was going to happen?
This seems like the obvious answer.
He was always sorta this way, the people close to him knew it, but you (the public) did not. Now you know.
'Family' - his estranged father who his mother divorced and moved halfway around the world to get away from was an investor in a mine.
There's no 'family home" to go back to, unless you mean Canada.
Of course telling simple lies about someone isn't particularly useful for explaining why they've gone off the deep end. But he's always posted stupid, easily debunked stuff when stressed out at Tesla.
Rich people are especially blind to their weaknesses because their egos often are inflated and fragile, requiring a coterie of yes men.
I think in the last post on this, there were some pretty good answers (not so much this one).
He seems to have had a serious personal crisis when his eldest kid disowned him, coupled with his wealth increasing by a factor of ten and his cult of personality going super-sized. That made him liable to drift off into strange directions and obsessions, and unlike most people (including even most billionaires) he had nothing to "socially normalize" him - he's increasingly surrounded by nothing but security guards and uncritical Yes Men who laugh it up at all his terrible jokes and comments on Twitter. He doesn't seem to have any real friends or close family members, just folks who are living off his largess either directly or indirectly (I'm including his brother in this).
If anything, it's actually worse than that - he's got an unchecked ego from his success, which likely makes him even less likely to self-doubt or check his drift into insane stuff. You see the same thing with Bill Ackman, who drifted off into Trumpist weirdo territory very quickly when he had a crisis over his inability to suppress plagiarism allegations against his wife.
EDIT: I thought this from the other post was really good:
This, exactly.
This on top of his 4chan-style posting has left him unable to self-correct, and surrounded by people who's income depend upon being uncritical of any nonsense he spouts.
Drift - a while back, when we were ... discussing ... Musk's reproductive output as it were, I recall you implied that the 11-12 children he's had were still no more children per-woman than those women would have had on their own.
https://jabberwocking.com/why-do-we-care-what-elon-musk-thinks-of-star-wars/#comment-173819
Per https://www.space.com/spacex-elon-musk-california-texas-headquarters-lgbtq-legislation it seems to be 12 children by three women. Four per woman. Well past replacement rates.
Autism spectrum bullshit.
https://www.axios.com/2022/04/15/elon-musk-aspergers-syndrome
Quirky
Autism is why he's weird and badly spoken.
It's also why he dives into the internet instead of people around him.
But it doesn't explain his conspiracy theory embracing. Autism correlates with a bunch of things, but conspiracy theories isn't one of them.
I vote for 'drugs are bad' but some other takes.
1) He knows the Trump can be bought but the Dems will abide by the law if they win. So if Trump wins, money will flow for whatever whim Elon has (Mars!). If Harris wins, contracts will continue to flow to SpaceX...no problemo.
2) He's a bigot who wants to say bigoted shit and discriminate against people. But he can't...poor Elon!
Much the same as Trump or indeed Vance: they found themselves with lots and lots of money and became convinced that they must have earned it, making them geniuses above the law.
In Musk's case, the longtime business strategy was to lose money until a sufficient base made EVs profitable, even inevitable. That was clever, as well as ethically motivated, in effect making EVs a cause. But then he found that, even with a bust of a company, his share was worth a fortune, so he could sell and be rich, in effect at the expense of shareholders. Trump can declare bankruptcy ad nauseum and still, in his own mind and that of his TV audiences, be a financial genius.
All businesses lose money to make money, there needs to be more than that.
But yes, he's merely lucky; his company got bought by a comoany which got big and bought him out and then he put that money in two more companies which also got big.
Of course, but a unique business strategy wasn't my claim or my point. Of course most accept losing money at first, and with electric cars one had to be determined to do so for some time. But not every CEO finds himself rich along the way and has an inflated ego and a sense of a business genius thereby.
I think you need to talk to more CEOs. They seem to have inflated brain disease at a higher rate.
But why? It's self destructive, makes him look like a moron, and persuades no one. At least Donald Trump does this stuff because he wants to win an election. What's Musk's motivation?
Why is Kevin so continually puzzled by this?
(1) Like a lot of rich people, Musk thinks a Trump presidency would be better for him personally.
(2) Musk thus is trying to help Trump win. Again, not puzzling in the slightest.
(3) Musk fancies himself a person of huge influence. And, while he no doubt is a bit delusional at times, in fairness he's the world's richest person, and he owns a social media platform, that, while tarnished because of his piss-poor management, is still pretty important.
(4) He may not care if he "looks like a moron" to a lot of us. Musk has an ego the size of the Rock of Gibraltar and like a lot of such people, he thinks the fact that he's mega-rich validates his intelligence.
(5) And sure, if Trump wins, Musk will hope to get a favor or two.
This is what happens to a guy with lots of drive and ambition but a dearth of self-discipline. Remember how Alexander Hamilton went off the rails once Washington was no longer around? Drugs, surrounding himself with yes-men, and having so much money that he can bat away any effort to hold him accountable unless it's coming from a large government (like Brazil) are all contributing factors here... but lack of self-discipline is the ultimate root.
internet anonymity shields assholes
so does money
Do you have any idea how hard it is to be a billionaire in America? The restrictions imposed by the "nanny state" are so onerous that the really, really rich often feeled compelled to form their own techno-libertarian utopias (on private islands; on the moon),
Do you know that billionaires in America are not even allowed to own slaves? They are forbidden from drinking the blood of children (even poor children) to stay young? Ordinary people are allowed to criticize them No wonder all we hear from billionaires is grirvance and bitterness. Their situation is intolerable.
Once an edgelord, always an edgelord.
This is just what happens when an edgelord has billions of dollars.
The new financial role models of the 21st century
Rewriting the old warning to young folks- "Don't be a loudmouth making idiotic statements or you'll wind up broke and flipping burgers."
That's because that advice was always nonsensical.
Read Paul Krugman. He has a theory of why the uber-rich develop these psychoses (not all do). In a nutshell, they believe they're uber-rich because they're uber-beings, and as such, everyone should do their bidding. They become petulant when the rest of the world doesn't do so.
I don't think you nEed any theory like that.
Some (maybe most) of people behave properly because they feel obliged to, but some people behave properly only because they are worried of the response they will get. Very rich people don't have to worry about the response, so those of them that don't feel obliged to behave properly don't.
Shorter version: poor assholes may try to keep it hidden, while rich assholes don't need to.
So this lying, racist, misogynistic, egomaniac, piece of shit owns and controls (a) one of largest car companies in the US, (b) currently the only manned access into space for the US, and (c) one of the main communication / social media company's in the world.
Doesn't sound like a problem to me. And his Orange deity could be reelected in about a month (or after SCOTUS throws him the election after 2 months of hell).
What a fucking country we live in. Unfortunately, the only other country that I would be guaranteed immediate citizenship is currently a living hell, with a government even worse than what Orange Jesus would reign over.
What country is that?
Everyone has an unconscious circle of concern and an actual circle of influence. "Mature" is the name we use to describe an individual with a circle of influence encompassed within the individual's circle of concern. As a child grows up, the child's circle of influence expands in a stepwise fashion. An insufficiently mature individual has a circle of influence that has expanded beyond the individual's circle of concern. The most serious personality problem is a "me, myself, and I" circle of concern in combination with a global circle of influence. Little Elon is one of a too-large number of people with that serious personality problem.
What's his motivation? Your unconscious circle of concern is your perception of the social system. A within-system conflict is a dilemma in need of being resolved (if and when it's worth the effort), and an extra-system conflict is a threat in need of being reflexively neutralized. In other words, he treats people who disagree with him the way you treated the fly that landed on your kitchen counter.
He started out as Howard Stark, turned into Henry Ford, now he's becoming Howard Hughes. I wonder how long his fingernails will be when they find his corpse in his bunker.
Unlike Thiel and Bezos, he didn't buy an island or build a bunker.
Maybe he'll go into a conference room and no one will check on him for days like that poor woman forced to work in an empty part pf a building who died and wasn't found for four days.
it's nice to see the trump campaign choosing their pics for the nytimes
their editorials call him a threat to democracy, their pic on the front page says 'what a great guy'
visual sanewashing
The saying is “If you are so smart, why aren’t you rich?”
So, if you are the richest you must also be the smartest.
As I see it, Musk, like a lot of people, supports Trump because there is no personal downside for them. If they support Harris there will likely be policies that would cost them money/power/influence. But there is extremely little chance of Harris taking personal revenge. Their companies will be treated fairly. If they support Trump they will likely be able to influence him into adopting policies that will benefit them personally and/or their companies. There is a very good chance that Trump will take personal revenge against them/their companies if they support Harris.