Skip Navigation
Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world
multicolorKnight @lemmy.world

What do you think Elon Musk is actually doing?

Seems to me that it's mostly revenge; dismantling any government agency that has ever thwarted him, or that the right wing does not like. But, I certainly don't trust his motives...

63 comments

  • Ketamine. He's doing ketamine mostly, everything else is just stuff he hires someone else to do. So I guess hiring people whilst doing ketamine.

  • He is a one man ponzi scheme, he would buy tesla stock,increasing his cash,the Ln spend that cash on buying stock. Its a really terrible idea because it means you conning yourself. Which is where he is now,so his trying and failing to but time and to beef up his value. Think about it, before is worth about half as much as musk,but amozon sells millions of kg of physical stuff everyday,so ya he should be worth billions. What does Elon sell? Why is his car company worth twice as much as Ford? No one is buying his shit but the stock value keeps going up? Well its a one man ponzi. Well now the walls are closing in,so what's a billionaire to do? Buy the walls. But he needs to be stopped otherwise he'll swallow the whole us economy

  • I once heard a talk by Bill Gates about his charity work through the Gates foundation. He described how he and Melinda had dedicated tens or hundreds of millions to causes. But the best money he could spend was in petitioning the government to join the cause. Because for all the wealth and power and notoriety held by the billionaire class, it was still a drop in the bucket compared to what world states could do. It's a difference of orders of magnitude. The difference between a thousand dollars and a million dollars? That's the same as the difference between a million and a billion. World governments operate in the trillions.

    This is a coup.

    Musk the Billionaire is small potatoes compared to Musk at the levers of government finance. It's like a leaky faucet compared to a firehose. The one holding that firehose controls where it goes.

    This is a coup. It is establishing an unelected oligarchy at the core of the Federal Government with the power to influence and manipulate policy, and execute unofficial policy through financial pressure. It's not anything new to history, and it's not 5-D chess. It is just people in power grabbing more power for themselves at the expense of all others including elected officials. In other words, a coup.

  • Not playing whatever that game is that he said he's really good at but actually doesn't even play

  • Apparently, at both SpaceX and Tesla, he had a habit of going around demanding random changes because he was convinced he was the smartest person on the planet and whatever he came up with 2 seconds ago was far better than what the seasoned engineer who had spent months designing it had come up with. They had to make a team of people to try to keep him away from useful work because it was so destructive to what they were trying to do. There is no plausible explanation for that, to me, other than that he genuinely believes his own hype.

    He could literally have the best and most qualified people in the room with him to explain virtually anything he wanted, for unlimited time, any time he wanted. He doesn't want that. He just wants to take some random bullshit he found on Twitter combined with his own prejudice about how things work, and act on it, taking pleasure in people getting upset about him not being supposed to do that.

    I am sure there is more complex stuff at work than is obvious, but I think probably, a pretty huge chunk of it is just that he genuinely believes that the whole US government is fucking up because it's staffed with morons, and he's such a genius that he can fix it, and that's what he's currently doing. I do think there's some pathology at work in why he's so motivated to do it: He has insecurity about whether he is actually the smartest man on the planet, it creates unsettledness, and so he has to go out and take some drastic action to prove to himself that he is. Because would anyone but the smartest person do all this stuff? It's unprecedented. And therefore, he is smart on an unprecedented level, as he always knew, and he doesn't need to be unsettled. And then, the next day, the unsettledness returns.

    I think most of it pretty simple. It's just "never been told no" syndrome coupled with societal reward to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, an army of fans, a record of "success" on his resume, and so on.

  • Your intuition is spot on.

    Elon is gutting USAID because they were investigating him over starlink. Elon is gutting the government agencies that oversee electric car regulations and safety regulations. Elon is going after the SEC for investigating him. Elon is using the government's databases to amass data to target political and business competitors and to further the far right propaganda campaigns as well as build list of deportees and political targets. Elon is gutting every TLA he can to ensure his taxes decrease and yours increase. Elon is tearing through decades of support and opportunity programs designed to help the less fortunate/less abled to live comfortably so he can live more comfortably.

    Everything he's doing, is for his own benefit and personal gain, to the extreme detriment of the entire country. He's neither qualified nor elected. His actions should amount to treason, but they're being enabled by a traitorous, treasonous, felonious criminal, the shittiest president this country has ever seen.

  • Doing whatever he can to become a trillionaire. So, devalue the dollar and remove obstacles to his businesses.

  • Not revenge as much as financial motives. He wants less oversight on his business activities so he can make more money and be involved in fewer lawsuits and regulatory actions. There seems to be a broader motive to degrade the US and cause chaos and hardship, which I assume is other Republicans and influences like Putin. Some are probably favors to other interests - for instance, my guess about decreasing park rangers is probably to degrade parks and decrease attendance so they can justify drilling for oil or mining in national parks. The amount of money saved by slashing federal employment is trivial in terms of the budget, so it certainly isn't that. One thing is that before the election they said they were going to specifically make sure that agencies were staffed with Trump loyalists at every level, so I'd bet when you hear there were cuts at the FDA and the staff said they seemed random, everyone who was fired voted for Democrats, had Democrat supporting social media activity, and so forth.

  • As others have said, money is most of it.

    But I also remember that what seems to have prompted his last few years of total unhinged behaviour was his daughter turning her back on him. That seemed to be the point of no return for him.

    So there is part of me that thinks he wants to have access to and control over data. The whole nazi salute wasn't about money, it was about ideology and I think controlling data will allow him to go after communities of people as part his ideology.

  • In all seriousness, he strikes me as someone who's compelled to act out something from his past, maybe even his childhood... if true, that's very scary given the immense power he has today, that he simply can't be reasoned with like with a healthy-minded person.

    ETA Even scarier, the same appears to also be true of Trump, and the two of them have now paired up together.

  • Well, firstly you have to understand that deep down on the DNA level the man is a weasel. Everything springs from that, with each successive gain in financial success, he's become emboldened and excused to allow his inner weasel to run wild. He's got 11 kids at last count. He's done everything we wanted to do professionally, and then he got bored, and found the greatest drug there is for a weasel with tyrannical proclivities, using his money to buy power, in order to act like a god, then bully and hurt people. It's not rocket science.

  • Acting like if he owns a country and its institutions?
    I do wonder for how much longer Trump will tolerate such a diva standing right next to him on scene?

    (that's coming from a non-US citizen. I may not be the most well informed, mind you)

63 comments