Elon Musk is a twat

In cities and the like, great. Outside of that? eeeeek.

(i say this as someone who doesn't drive at all so no carbon emissions from me before i get accused of hating the planet or whatever)

Elon Musk did not invent the electric car. HTH.

Rewriting history is annoying.

Absolute nonsense.
The prius already existed. There was a consumer segment interested and actively buying electric cars. Musk spotted the trend and used his wealth to invest early.

If he was so interested in humanity he'd be channelling his super brain power to tackling climate change and pollution on a global scale, not earning £££ and planning his space escape when we finally end up in the age of Wall-E

Yes.

electric cars have become a thing g. Without them ford and VW would never have made electrics. Reducing co2 emissions by a staggering amount

starlknk has brought high speed communication to anyone anywhere in the planet for about £50 a month meaning humanity can stay connected wherever they are reducing pressure on cities and enabling better democratic engagement

soaceX has reduced the cost to orbit by more than 90% enabling space communication, the moon base and human boots on the ground on Mars

I often wonder what humanity would be like if all of us had access to the wealth of the likes of Musk. Endless money to invest makes inventing things much easier.

Can you explain how those particular ventures alone have changed the world for a better by incredible margins?

The biggest effect most average people have from him is how X now functions.

He is academically bright but he's not as clever as he thinks he is, narcissists never are. The fact that he hasn't worked out what's socially acceptable in 53 years is proof of that! We shouldn't give him a free pass just because he has autism.

He's literally changed the world, in at least 4 major, separate areas and moved humanity on by a generation. StarLink. SpaceX, Tesla. These things changed the world for the better by incredible margins. I'll put up with the rest of it, and not all of the rest is crap.

Musk would have low testosterone. High levels of belly fat in men causes a significant drop in testosterone. His weight coupled with his age mean he'd be very low for a man.

Agreed.

Dangerous man who will happily sell your soul to benefit himself. The fact he's putting so much money into Trump should say it all...

I agree with this, but add that social media has changed the landscape.

There is an interesting Triggernometry podcast this week with a guy from the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Whilst I disagreed with a fair bit of what he said, he made some good points about algorithms and the impact they have.

Apparently, the CCDH are less interested in censoring speech than in seeing laws introduced whereby companies are required to publish the principles that inform their algorithms. This way, advertisers and consumers can make informed decisions about which platforms they wish to use and can better understand the information presented on the platforms.

I am not sure if such laws would achieve what's intended, but it's an idea I can get behind.

Knowing the ways in which Musk is manipulating the information we see (how popular certain views seem to be, how strongly they are felt, how common certain events are etc.) would mitigate some of the risk that comes with the power he has through controlling X.

Selected Musk insights:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/16/elon-musk-antisemitic-tweet-adl

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna145020

https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/16/elon-musk-reportedly-donated-10-million-to-a-fertility-research-project/

I absolutely loathe the man. In my opinion he's got where he is through a combination of extreme privilege from the outset and a willingness to exploit others. He is no kind of role model and I'm not interested in those acting like he's some sort of unique genius just because he's mega rich.

I think he's very dangerous. He appears to be well brought into a range of supremacist ideas.

This idea about "low T" is straight out of the incel playbook.

He also regularly tweets and responds to "replacement theory"/anti-muslim stuff.

He has numerous children by surrogate or IVF, mainly boys, with an implication the embryos are prescreened. He bank rolls the pronatalist movement that is encouraging "free thinkers" to reproduce to improve humanity

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/may/25/american-pronatalists-malcolm-and-simone-collins

He's regularly using twitter to undermine different countries democracies including ours.

Don't know how much more clearly someone needs to say who they are before people believe them.

He’s very useful. We need people who will throw ridiculous ideas and statements into the ring to duke it out with reality. Sometimes we make massive strides as a result.

The court jester was someone allowed to speak truth and poke fun at power.

Rogues and mavericks are important in healthy society. They help challenge the universally accepted but wrong. It goes wrong if they get into authority. Musk is powerful but has no authority. That’s good.

What matters is that we don’t keep holding people up as all knowing.

What has happened to us that we’ve lost our ability to discern and just become Team Posie, or Team Labour, or Team Musk?

Everyone says dumb stuff sometimes.

I don't think anyone is suggesting he's stupid. They are saying - and I agree - he lacks wisdom and shows poor judgement. That's entirely different from 'stupid'.

It's the other common meaning of 'stupid', which is entirely different from intellectual and technical capability.

If you don't know clever people who've done stupid things you've never met many professors.

are you sure about this @Westea ?

I don't think anyone is suggesting he's stupid. They are saying - and I agree - he lacks wisdom and shows poor judgement. That's entirely different from 'stupid'.

I think he’s brilliant. And I think the people on this thread saying he’s stupid are clowns.

By existing on planet earth - you do, whether you like it or not. From the effects of Twitter, Tesla and Starling not to mention SpaceX, your life has been deeply and unavoidably affected, I'd say majority (not entirely) for good, by Musk.

Like everyone. Some of his ideas are insane, some are to be congratulated. It's as if the world is not a black and white place of heroes and villains.

Yes, I'd agree with all that. Even most bad impulses have a reason behind them.

Teens in general are very conformist, contrary to what they seem to think themselves, boys and girls. No society would do well without some social norms. I think men might be a little more inclined to challenge social norms but that is not always a good thing!

I think it makes women more likely to policeother women/"hold other women accountable" for "anti-social" behaviour. At one extreme that's bad, and leads to excessive purity spiralling. But at the other extreme it is good - e.g. If your friend abandons their child, or starts catcalling 15 year olds, or cheating on their spouse with gigalos, you as a woman will judge the shit out of them. Or all the men that were aware of the French rape case and didn't report to the police.

But men do care about what other men think and the consequences of not looking good in front of their friends. Hence other men awkwardly not saying anything when they think their friend is behaving badly. I think for men, the need for male approval comes more from a need for social status than for group safety. **

**obviously not all men are bad to that extreme. But anyone who has had a teenage boy misbehaving because their friends were will know males absolutely alter their behaviour to fit in with their peers at least as much as women.

I don't use Twitter either - but you can't argue that it isn't a powerful force in the feminist/TRA discourse. 4 years ago people were banned for telling the truth there, "misgendering" etc it simply couldn't be discussed and there was no way to raise awareness. Now they're not and the tide has turned.