This is from the Wall Street Journal this morning:
I'm not picking on the Journal here. They're just one of many. My question is: Why does Elon Musk's every utterance seem to get news play?
In the case of Donald Trump it's understandable. He was president of the United States and might be again. But Musk is just a businessman who likes to talk a lot. Why should anyone care what he thinks about Star Wars or DEI or trans people or immigration or any of the dozens of other subjects he blathers about?
We've been through other phases like this with other people. Sarah Palin. Glenn Beck. Michele Bachmann. Tucker Carlson.
What is it that makes us periodically train our sights on someone and suddenly become desperate to pay attention to everything they say? And why are these people always conservative?
In your list of people that we've done this to I would include both Warren buffet and Bill Gates. And neither of those are conservatives as defined today.
Not sure I recall hearing much about those two's views on movies, race relations, or much of anything outside the fields of economics and technology.
I like Warren Buffett and agree with his feelings about taxation of wealth (there needs to be more), but he's a sharp allocator of capital, and that's it. Charlie Munger, his long-term advisor/partner, was a significant factor in Buffett's success, although I can't deny that Buffett was smart enough to listen to him.
Buffett is homespun and quotable. That's nice. I enjoy his quotes. I wouldn't be substantially worse off if I heard fewer of them.
Yeah...no. I hear tons *about* Buffet but nothing from him. All I hear from Gates is things about his personal charitable causes. Seriously, this is a real what-about-ist stretch
Warren Buffet is the private equity that is ruining a lot of industries. For all his folksy charm and nominally liberal politics, he and his ilk are why the Democrats don't go harder after hedge funds and other private equity.
Gates was/is a monopolist. He actively acquired/crushed competitors. I appreciate that he is trying to some good with his money, but he's Andrew Carnegie or John Rockefeller.
I have no idea. Tho his behavior on DEI and trans people actively makes people's lives worse since he moderates a platform all the government agencies broadcast to.
But it's especially pointless with interpretive articles like these - they're almost always wrong.
I would imagine the reason for all the vitriol is one of his children from his first marriage transitioned from male to female when she became an adult. She changed her last name to her mother's maiden name and cut off all contact with Elon. I'm sure he blames DEI, liberals, etc. for that.
To quote Scott Galloway, we as a society, have somehow decided that billionaires have insight around life. Musk appeals to the incels of the world because he's a socially inept geek who managed to make a pile of money and has women throwing themselves at him to create more of his genetically superior babies.
Which is to say that Musk has a wide following among gold diggers and men who wish they were the target of gold diggers.
Elon Musk was a liberal until 2022 when he got tired of the left's hostility to free speech.
Elmo was never a liberal, and you were never a good guy. You were both born trash.
Musk has never been a liberal, has always been a bigot, and doesn't care about free speech, as evidenced by his constant need to shut up anyone who says anything critical about him.
Exactly. His platform rather in 1984-like method defines 'cisgender' as a hate word while allowing hate groups to proliferate their harmful tropes and dogpile people.
Free speech never included freedom from responsibility of speech.
+1000
If he’s pro-free-speech why are Tesla buyers signing NDAs?
Star Wars is space and Musk is space. That's it. Musk says a lot of things that aren't reported on.
And as it happens I sort of agree. Disney focused on DEI over story. But it's not zero sum, at all. Had Disney cared they could have used their racially diverse cast to tell a good story, but they did not bother with a good story and the nonwhite cast were just corporate check boxes after a conventional but effective start in Star Wars 7.
So they did DEI but not story when they could have done DEI AND story because they only cared about the superficial level.
Star Wars was a B-movie on a big budget. A morality play, a decent story arc and comic relief.
After the original trilogy, it kind of turned into a caricature of itself. DEI had nothing to do with it.
Too right. ROJ was the start of the slide. That's early on. But the remasters and the director's cuts just sealed the deal.
True. The last one in the main franchise (Rise of Skywalker) was super-lame, but that was because of a dumb story with no verisimilitude and sloppy execution. It had nothing whatever to do with a multi-racial cast or anything remotely connected to DEI.
As someone who is supportive of DEI in general the main issue with the Disney Skywalker films is they are shit. Solo and Rogue One are both great and Andor is the best Star Wars property since Empire.
There was more than one Star Wars movie? Surely you jest. What's next, are you gonna tell me there was more than one Indiana Jones movie?
Citation not included, of course.
The citation is I watched the films and am not an especially big Star Wars fan.
The Phanom Menace, which is easily the worst of the franchise and just a deeply awful movie on so many grounds had absolutely fuck all to do with DEI. So, try again.
I watch Phantom Menace occasionally with my kid and it’s miles ahead of Rise of Skywalker. It has a coherent storyline that makes sense, the pod race is well executed and the Darth Maul battle at the end of it is great. Rise if Skywalker is a shit show from start to finish with no redeeming features.
I really don't understand how that applies to anything. Phantom Menace is not a great film for some of the same and some different reasons than Disney Star Wars. I think it is a better one though, but low bar. At least it was actually trying to say something however mangled it did it.
Because his name drives clicks. It's a well worn trope by now to tag Elon on stuff that has nothing to do with him, because millions of stupid people who will click on anything follow him and follow news about him.
This is not a serious article. It's clickbait.
WSJ is trying for a viral trifecta here with Elon+StarWars+Rasicm
But why does it drive clicks?
Because there are dumdums who follow him who will click on anything.
This is how Crypto scams find their marks. Find a stupid person with a big following. Why do they have that following?
Doesn't matter.
A lot of their followers are also stupid and will, again, click on *anything*.
It drives
Clicks
Exactly. It used to be people would tag Bitney Spears, Miley Cyrus or Katy Perry on things that absolutely nothin to do with them. It guaranteed a much wider ranger audience.
Political and financial are different forms of power, but power's effect is regardless of its form. Some people always have more power than others, and that's okay as long as the powerful aren't the "do as I say and not as I do" kind of people. Spoiler alert: Trump and Musk are that kind.
Musk is... not that kind. He definitely walks the walk. He lives in a tiny house, he drives electric, and he doesn't joyride in rockets.
But it also means he doesn't actually work to prevent racism at his factories, and he's not careful about spreading disinformation himself.
Enables others to joyride in rockets, has 12 (?) children (and counting I assume) in houses of who-knows-what-size, wouldn't be at all surprised to learn he flies the globe in a private jet.
.SpaceX hasn't flown any tourism missions, the one on the schedule just got canceled. They have flown missions for Polaris Dawn (Inspiration4) which was the highest orbit since Apollo and Axiom Space (Axiom 1-3) to the ISS but both of these are attempting to develop commercial human applications beyond tourism in orbit, so they're training missions.
...He has a world-spanning company, of course he flies in the company jet.
And what does it matter where his kids live? Their mothers would exist whether or not Elon did, and they would most likely also have children.
Geez, the things people believe about this asshole.
Even if he was a complete asshole (I do not follow what he does enough to know, nor do I particularly care), he has made our lives better by starting Tesla, which put more electric cars on the road faster than we expected and thereby massively reduced carbon emissions, and by starting SpaceX, which has massively driven down the price for the use and exploration of space (which I think is a Good Thing).
To be honest, it's hard to think of a business man who has done more to make the world a better place. Perhaps Bill Gates for his philanthropy work, which has done a lot of good in the world.
fyi: He bought into Tesla with his PayPal payout. He certainly pushed it to go big. At least early on, it earned a lot of money selling MPG credits--i.e. it was dependent on government regulations.
He didn't 'buy into' - Tesla didn't have any money, no products, no facilities, no staff when he showed up.
He split his first dot-com winnings (zip2) into paypal, those into spacex and Tesla, and that into all his other companies.
The only company he bought was Twitter.
His kids would exist whether he did or not? Because the mothers exist? Is that the way it works?
He does fly the globe in a private jet. Remember when he got all mad because a teenager started posting Elon's Jet location by using public FAA data?
I had a higher opinion of Musk until he got into social media. He's more than just "not careful about spreading disinformation" ... he's actively spreading conspiracy theories. Why? Because he doesn't care about the unnecessarily negative effect his behavior is having on the social system. If cells in your body were doing to you what Musk is doing to the social system, you'd be diagnosed with cancer.
The good philosophy: "I think, therefore I am making potentially erroneous but testable assumptions." Musk is not that kind.
The bad philosophy: "I think, therefore I am right, and therefore anyone disagreeing with me is wrong." If the shoe fits, Musk is that kind.
Definitely agree, but not sure the difference with 'not careful' and 'doesn't care' is.
It's not hard to not spread disinformation, but Melon Husk can't seem to stop doing it.
It requires you to be smart enough to know, plus actually caring.
Here's my theory...
It's an outgrowth of how humans create communities through socialization processes. As Jared Diamond observed years ago, communities beyond the extended family derive from us figuring out how to domesticate ourselves.
Domestication involves humans supplanting an animal's "natural" leadership hierarchy with humans. Applied to ourselves, we define our communities, in part, by selecting their leaders. The selection process takes many forms, including formal elections, but the informal selection processes are widespread.
Once someone is selected as a leader, many people tend to pay heightened attention to everything they say. Which is, in a complex culture, ridiculous...but apparently baked into our psyches.
Many years ago, as a teenager, I remember Joe Namath being asked during the 1968 elections who he thought should become the next President. I remember thinking at the time "Who the f**k cares what Joe Namath thinks about that?!? Sure, he's a great quarterback. But that doesn't give him any special insight into choosing our next President." 🙂
That's not what's harmed the recent Disney and Marvel movies, what's harmed them is that all the wrong people seem to be in charge of them, and they're trying to please every numbskull with a vague thought.
For the content, it's this.
I always thought it was that they focus too much on scenes that look good and not on making sure those scenes have a satisfying narrative through line.
Not every challenge needs to be about the end of the world, sometimes it's just one character being pulled or pulling themselves, from adversity.
Why does everyone the media fixate on turn out to be conservative? Because stories are requested and selected by a relatively few people - the Managing Editor (or equivalent) for each newsroom.
Managing Editor is a high-ranking position, filled by selection from the publishers. Publishers, who are already all rich, tend to install people who they vibe with, who tend to be older, whiter, and more conservative. So the most successfully hierarchical people are selecting who they want us to hear, and surprise! their preferred voices are rich and conservative.
Add to that the normal media herd instinct, and the desire to please the boss, and we get innumerable media whiteouts over conservatives, and virtually none over progressives. The last lionized liberal was Obama, and the news landscape has gotten much more conservative since then - so many new red rags started during the Tea Party phase. It's almost impossible for non-conservative ideas to get traction.
This, so much. It's the money people.
Well, it seems the thrust isn't so much what Elon Musk thinks about Star Wars, but what his thoughts about Star Wars say about his vision of the future. So the headline/question aught to be "Why do we care about Elon Musk's vision of the future?"
The man owns a fairly important piece of the Press infrastructure...
Just saying.
An outlet like the WSJ, which is focused on the business/employer/financing side of the coin (as opposed to the labor/employee), has always worshipped people they consider to be successful, with monetary wealth as the sole indicator of success.
You already know this.
Too many righwingers listen to him, and more importantly, unlike your local crazy man yelling at a bar, if Musk wants to propose any policy or plan, right wing politicians up to Trump pick up his calls and listen to him. That last bit should be enough for people to pay attention to what he says.
If only they did, we'd be driving electric cars and shipping things with electric trucks.
But instead they only cared about the got-mine part of his message.
Musk doesn't really care about electric cars from a policy point of view. Same way he doesn't care about the financial well being of X. He is an angry child that wants to go back to the era of feudalism where rich white men ruled the world without question, and that is what he pushes and promotes when he talks publicly or with politicians. He wants a world where there are lords and serfs, and where lords get to dictate how the serfs live their life while no one tells the lords how to live theirs .
See, you're asserting what you want onto him, rather than taking him as a real person rather than a caricature.
Slow news day and idiots with cash seem to always make the headlines.
Who's "us", white man?
Just tune this nonsense out. See the headline and skip it. Or, better yet, stop reading whatever rag thinks publishing nonsense like this is what they should be doing.
It got Mr. Drum’s attention and then he got attention from his readers. I think they call it clickbait.
On similar lines, why do left-leaning websites run almost daily posts about Marjorie Taylor Greene's latest rant? I've never received a coherent explanation. It seems that some public figures grab the public imagination for reasons nobody understands. One might as well ask why an idiot like Jesse Watters commands a large audience on cable TV, whereas that Uber driver who says much the same things struggles to make a living.
Well, MTG is an elected public servant, so by category alone it is justifiable to cover her.
Exactly.
In the early 90s, a New Yorker cartoon showed Satan in a scarf, ice skating, with the caption "The Day the New York Times didn't mention Michael Ovitz." Ovitz later did something incredibly stupid, taking a position at Disney subservient to Michael Eisner, and effectively ending his career.
This is the bubble reputation of Shakespeare, which has been well-understood for centuries: see Mr. Merdle in "Little Dorrit," a wealthy stock speculator whose advice is sought on every conceivable subject, even though he has nothing to offer.
Merdle turns out to be a fraud, of course. As was the real-life Ivar Kreuger, who committed suicide in the 1930s as his pyramid of fraud collapsed. Kreuger is the closest modern analog of Musk. All the same components are there: a man of the new age, pushing the envelope in multiple industries, making a surprising amount through deals with governments, eagerly sought for parties, and worshipped by thousands upon thousands of useful idiots among the press, celebrities and general public.
We need these people, for some reason. It could be the desire for a great father or guiding presence in the world, who has somehow made sense of it and knows what's going on.
You're saying Musk is a pyramid scheme salesman?
Which... what pyramid scheme involves putting internet to every corner of the planet and producing half of all electric cars in the US? Because those are things that Musk, no matter being a bigoted asshole who actively does harm on social media, has actually done.
I don't care about Star Wars.
I don't care what Elon Musk thinks about Star Wars.
I don't care that the Wall Street Journal reported what Elon Musk thinks about Star Wars.
I don't care about Kevin Drum's observations about the Wall Street Journal reporting on what Elon Musk thinks about Star Wars.
I don't even care about this, my own comment about Kevin Drum's observations about the Wall Street Journal's reporting on what Elon Musk thinks about Star Wars.
Don't. Care.
And yet you wrote it, and pressed 'post', so you do care. Just a little.
It's due to the recurring theme of America's inane focus on celebrification. Partially blame Hollywood and Companies for extolling individuals as uniquely special and thus confer on them capabilities and knowledge they don't actually have.
That's how we got the Terminator for a Gov and a game show host as a President. Why we end up with big talkers in Congress, rather than administrators and policy wonks. It's why we have CEOs making absurd pay, rather than the CEOs of the past who were at their heart regular managers. Thanks and FU Carl Icahn.
It's why we, for some dumb reason, care what actors and athletes think about politics and such, though their skill sets and knowledge have nothing to do with the subject matter.
In my opinion, this kind of story is an effort to gather hate clicks.