THEORETICALLY the government has _some_ restrictions against monitoring US citizens (https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/soci...), and it sounds like none of those are deemed to apply if you're using a VPN, per the original article.
What changed is he took the mask off. He was always the sleaze that he is today, but a lot of us were fooled into believing he wanted to do something good.
He brought good things due to high-conviction bold moves though, like democratizing EVs, reusable rockets, and most of all, actual internet in airplanes.
Is it accurate to say Tesla democratized EVs? The Roadster came out in 2008 but was over $100k. Over its lifetime they only sold around 2500. It was always a rich person's car.
The first 21st century EV in the US that was aimed at a more mainstream mass market was the Nissan Leaf which launched in late 2010, and in the first year sold 4x as many units Tesla Roadster's lifetime sales.
Tesla took a significant step toward an EV for the less rich with the Model S in 2012. It was still a lot more expensive than a Leaf (about 80%ish more for a base Model S) but way less than the Roadster.
The Leaf was the world's best selling EV in 2011-2014 and 2016, and in 2020 was the first to reach 500k sales.
It wasn't until 2017 with the model 3 that Tesla had a car that, like the Leaf, was priced in the range typical middle class families could afford. That's when they took off, and they caught up and passed Leaf in cumulative sales in early 2021.
- he most certainly did not democratize EVs, although he said the plan all along was to make cheap EVs it wasn’t until other car companies started “democratizing” EVs that his had was forced (and delayed)
- we had internet (and still do) in planes that have nothing to do with starlink
I don't agree after reading Walter Isaacson's excellent biography of Elon. It's deeply unfortunate that the book is already a few years old, I'd love and buy the hell out of a 2nd edition that is updated with the last few years.
Obviously it's always been latent in Elon, but he was a pretty bog standard lightly-if-apolitical silicon valley startup guy for most of his adult life. The free speech erosion under the Biden admin is what really started to "red pill" him and eventually led him off the cliff. It's a sad story really, but an important one because I think there are a lot of people in the same boat, and understandign them is important if we want to correct the trajectory of our country's ship. It's a damn hard problem though.
>Having reportedly voted for Joe Biden in 2020, Musk even voiced his pro-Dems alignment in 2022 when he posted on X, formerly Twitter, that he had “strongly supported Obama for President” in 2007.
I think he turned after Tesla was snubbed at Biden's 2021 EV summit because although it was the US's largest EV maker it wasn't unionized and Biden was in with the unions.
There are a lot of people who are unhappy with the steps the government took to crack down on COVID misinformation, and some people are still upset about Twitter's decision to limit spread of the Hunter Biden laptop story (which was entirely unilateral, and reversed within 24 hours).
Both of these took place in 2020, when Trump was president, but of course Trump's greatest coup was to make everybody think Biden was president in 2020.
Though IMHO it's not just a Biden problem, it's a "everybody in power" problem. They just can't seem to resist (ab)using their power to shape the conversation and censor their opponents. It's also not new, it's been happening for hundreds of years at least. But it did get a lot more brazen under Biden IMHO with Twitter/Facebook etc and admin officials telling private companies what to censor (err, "moderate").
This is your regularly mandated PSA that the quote about "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater" comes from Schenck v US, which used that analogy to justify why the government could ban people from protesting the draft in WW1. It is not good law anymore, and has been fully superseded since the Brandenburg v Ohio case which limited the exemption to "imminent lawless action."
Read the links. It wasn't just that. People from the administration were actively talking with social media companies and telling them to take stuff down. At some points they even demanded it.
andy do you really think the Hunter Biden laptop story was equivalent or even close to "yelling fire in a crowded theatre"?
They didn't. Fbi told Facebook etc to be on the lookout for Russia pushing stories to influence elections etc, they didn't ask them to do anything specific. Bidens campaign did ask Twitter to remove nudes of his son, which already broke Twitters own rules. This is why the twitterfiles were a nothing burger.
2018 (tham luang cave rescue) is when the cracks really started showing up, so the trajectory was probably set a while earlier.
The tendency was probably always there given the serial lying about self driving started circa 2015, or the weird ego trip of ousting the founders and getting himself called co-founder, but if we’re looking for a point event the removal of his long time PA in 2014 still stands out to me.
What did he do specifically to crater his reputation?
Is it his politics? He seems to have reasonable beliefs there. It's not like he's been supporting Trump unconditionally. He doesn't always agree with Trump. Is it because of his stance in favor of free speech? How is that a bad thing? As someone who doesn't like any side of politics, I don't get it.
Two very public Nazi salutes without any attempt to deny it afterwards will certainly crater anyone's reputation. It's not really politics, but more a question of humanity, but then people don't become billionaires without having a contempt for others and a desire to underpay and mistreat everyone you come into contact with.
Fair enough, I see that online all the time. Here’s my take.
Raising your hand alone is a common gesture that pretty much everyone has done. Saying “my heart goes out to you” gives plausible deniability. But making the hand gesture while clicking your heels together and snapping to attention with a stern jaw-jutting look on your face is pretty unmistakably a nazi salute.
Elon has publicly denied it was a nazi salute, but any normal person would go a step further and also disavow neo nazi ideology in the same breath. But doing that would break the dog whistle effect.
Some people say he’s just trolling, and yes, Elon likes to troll. But trolling or not, it has the same effect if you don’t also renounce neo nazism. It normalizes and shows you are comfortable with it.
Can I prove he’s a neo nazi? No I haven’t gone through his wallet and found his membership card. But his support for the AfD and all his great-replacement-theory adjacent talk are strong signals.
No they haven't. You've likely been misled by seeing still images of their hand in that position, whereas if you see the video, then it's clearly nothing like a Nazi salute. Meanwhile, the video of Musk makes it incredibly clear that it's a Nazi salute and he has not denied that as far as I know.
His politics also seem to align very much with white supremacy and the far right.
Here's video of Musk performing his fascist salutes. He did it deliberately, he did it with gusto, he grunted with the effort, and he did it twice just to make sure:
That doesn't seem like a denial from Musk, but instead he's just accusing others, but the article doesn't include specific quotes.
From what I remember of the incident, he specifically didn't deny that they were Nazi salutes, but merely hinted that they may have been a Roman salute, though that's pretty much the same thing.
I can't recall any time that he's tried to distance himself from Nazis or their ideology.
Although the ADL didn't think that it was a Nazi salute, most other Jewish organisations thought that it was and Germany very much condemned it, so on balance reasonable people should conclude that it's generally thought of as a Nazi salute. Also, former ADL national director Abraham Foxman described the gesture as a "Heil Hitler Nazi salute".
Reasonable people can simply watch the video and see for themselves - it very much looked exactly like a Nazi salute to me.
He did deny it multiple times on Twitter/X. Probably your news source of choice is the one which omitted this fact.
I think it probably did look a bit that way and maybe he did it for engagement, maybe he intended to create controversy or maybe it was none of these things. In any case, it wasn't an actual Nazi salute.
> it’s not quite correct to suggest there’s a vibrant external market for their product
There is a very large demand for launch services. SpaceX balances launching customers and launching Starlink. It's not like they give every launch slot to customers and then launches Starlink whenever there's an opening they couldn't fill.
I don't disagree with the sentiment, but I think the signals that we use to determine whether we're doing the right things are different with the new AI enhanced toolsets.
Refactoring decent sized components are an order of magnitude easier than it was, but the more important signal is still, why are you refactoring? What changed in your world or your world-view that caused this?
Good things still take time, and you can't slop-AI code your way to a great system. You still need domain expertise (as the EXCELLENT short story from the other day explained, Warranty Void if Regenerated (https://nearzero.software/p/warranty-void-if-regenerated) ). The decrease in friction does definitely allow for more slop, but it also allows for more excellence. It just doesn't guarantee excellence.
Honestly, they're probably subsidizing Elon already via Tesla, but the super disturbing part here is what the author nails when he says the tail is wagging the dog. Indices should reflect market investment, they shouldn't drive it like this.
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