I don't get it. Musk could have died Tony Stark if he'd just kept his mouth shut. But according to his trans daughter, he's such an emotionally stunted, overgrown 15 year old, narcissistic asshole who needs constant narcissistic supply, he can't help himself.
He'll eventually get Xcrement banned from multiple countries, and have his lawsuits dismissed.
What an asshole.
He has a lot of money, but he has nothing. He has nobody with him who actually loves him for who he really is, it's sad, really. I know a few guys like him (just way less rich) IRL, they are just the saddest bunch to see. They are so insecure and dickish that they always need more money so that they can use it to control other people into staying close, it's the only way they can pretend that they are loved.
That's why the pedophile tweet in 2018 so thoroughly shattered the illusion for me. It wasn't just incredibly petty, it was also easily avoidable. Like not only did he reveal who he was, it was easy to see how he could have been that person all along and the world could have never known about it if he just knew when to swallow his pride. And "the cave is too tight and twisty for your submarine to fit, even if you could develop and confirm its safety in time to save the kids, when we can just get them out without that tech" was such a dumb moment to decide to be petty.
I don't have much of a mind for PR stuff but it was even obvious to me that he could have still walked away looking great if he had financed some catering for the rescue team and families. Just show he was comfortable with sharing the spotlight and having an idea that was made in good faith shot down.
But nooooo, he had to be the saviour and since he couldn't do that, he needed to turn the one that hurt his feelings into a villain. With a comment that caught anyone who goes to Thailand for non-child sex tourist reasons in the blast radius (and maybe even told on himself a bit?).
And then he's just been spiraling since, at least as far as public image goes.
It was about one day before that for me. I was like
oh that's so cool, he's got amazing engineers working to repurpose a pressure vessel from SpaceX to act as a rescue pod to save those kids.
Then actual cave divers were like:
any cave diver will tell you that this will never work
What kind of cave diving rescue plan doesn't talk to any cave divers before drawing any attention to itself? The kind designed solely to draw attention and stroke ego. He tried to make those boys' struggles about himself because he thinks he's the most capable man alive.
Despite having more money than god, he had "lovable dork" energy. I can't imagine squandering that. I would have just kept my mouth shut and only opened it when I wanted to talk about whatever new cool thing I decided to have built.
Well, that's the thing: he's never built shit. He buys existing companies that do. Then forces them to credit himself as a founder. Musk's only skill is manipulating stock prices. That's it.
I wonder why the richest man in the world says he's about free speech. He lives in a country that considers money to be speech. He has the most speech of anyone, but that's not it surely.
He says he's about free speech because he agreed with the kinds of speech that get excluded from civil discussion. He considered people getting shunned for racist opinions to be censorship, while he considers terminating the accounts of anyone who disagrees with him to be his prerogative and perfectly fair.
Elon Musk has never actually stood for "Free Speech," only for the speech he likes. He SAYS he likes free speech purely because it has better optics for him and worse optics for his opposition than "Let me say racist things."
It's the sort of thing I might do if I were so rich that I could burn tens of billions of dollars to run a major corporation just for fun. I mean, saying "get lost" to the government of a country of over 200 million people must be quite a rush.
Yeah, if twitter was run by a principled individual who actually was a free speech absolutist, I would be siding twitter. If twitter was anything other then an advertising platform, I would be siding with twitter. If twitter wasn't censoring news orgs that criticized Musk, I would be siding with twitter.
My country has hate speech laws and 99.9% of us aren't concerned or yelling "censorship!", because 99.9% of us aren't running around saying hateful shit that would get us arrested for hate speech. Only a racist is worried about being cancelled for racism, only a bigot is concerned about hate speech laws.
I don't think that works as a blanket statement, for example Australia has a law allowing takedowns for hate speech but it was recently used to censor a journalist who shared a video of an Isreal leader saying from the "river to the sea".
But in general, yes, censor hate and uphold journalistic integrity and freedom of the press in equal measures.