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by marvin 826 days ago
SpaceX is amazing, but having Elon Musk as a critical geopolitical asset seems rather dodgy given his loud anti-Western comments recently.
2 comments

Could you provide examples of the anti-western comments he has posted? I understand he is one of the few of the ultra rich who wants to increase the birth rate beyond replacement in the west.
Generally I think the West is more concerned about the fact that he's currently providing infrastructure for a Western ally whilst actively campaigning for them to surrender, endorsing Russia's annexation of the Crimea and questioning the existence of NATO than his enthusiasm for fecundity.

Though I think the comment that's most indicative of Musk's actual mental state recently is "super rich ex wives who hate their spouse should be listed under the 'Reasons Western Civilization died'". :D

He’s also turned off Stsrlink coverage in Taiwan despite being explicitly required to be enabled there by his DoD contract.
Thanks. So you think he is essentially against western civilization in his motives, if I understand you correctly. What do you think drives this sentiment? Does he want another sort of civilization to flourish instead of the Western one?
That's... a long way from what I actually said, which is that it's fairly unusual for a Western ally to be dependent on infrastructure provided by a company lead by an-unstable-seeming guy whose screechingly bad takes on Twitter include an obsession with endorsing their enemy's talking points.
Its always kind of funny to me that people call Musk unstable. He had the same 2 jobs for decades now. He does these jobs and works on them insane hours. He is successful in the things he does. Other then people not liking his opinion, he isn't really unstable in any meaningful way. People just prefer to call him crazy and unstable because then anything he says doesn't have to be taken seriously.

Of course he is often wrong about things, and has bad takes. And he can get angry and competitive. He is pretty petty. But if that makes somebody mentally unstable there are a lot of unstable people around.

The takeaway that everyone is failing to appreciate is very simple: nobody should be paying any attention to what is being said on twitter.

As in, a person can be a screeching lunatic on twitter yet have two companies that are hitting milestone after milestone.

The achievements are what's relevant but everyone is glued to what's tweeted.

It's not a hard lesson to learn.

There's a difference between merely tweeting nonsense and spending a large part of your fortune buying Twitter and driving its commercial partners away with the nonsense you tweet though...

And, back on topic, dependency on infrastructure provided by a company lead by someone who is publicly campaigning for you to surrender and occasionally publicly threatens to switch it off is a more conspicuous security risk than most.

Wanting to end a civil war isn't a bad thing, as civil wars go on, the often settle in along existing battle lines, if people want it or not. Think about Korea, lots of people would have been pissed if somebody suggested to let Pyongyang be in the Communist sphere. And yet its still there.

The fact is, in actual action, rather then a few tweets throwing ideas around, is there any other private person who help Ukraine more?

I think its kind of depressing when you have pro-Ukraine people shit on Musk, including the government itself, given that without him they would be in a far worse position. But that's the thing, in war, give a hand they want a whole arm, and if you wont give the arm, they will call you an enemy. That is a rational position to take for a government that is in a war, but everybody else doesn't have to parrot the messaging.

The Soviet Union in WW2 was the same way with the US. Here have this X any Z. Stalin "but we also want Y, A, B, C and more of X. The evil capitalist wont us to fail because they don't want to give us C".

> Wanting to end a civil war isn't a bad thing, as civil wars go on, the often settle in along existing battle lines, if people want it or not.

It's possible to want to end the war without loudly and publicly endorsing explicitly Russian chauvinist positions like Crimea being "Khruschev's mistake" (screw the Crimeans that voted to continue to be part of Ukraine when they actually had a free and fair vote on the issue), Ukraine having an obligation to be "neutral" after its surrender to ensure they can't acquire any allies to protect themselves when Russia comes back for Odessa, and NATO having no reason to exist. It might be rational for Elon to believe any armistice is going to involve some concessions to Russia, but he doesn't have to parrot their messaging. (Or indeed comment at all: the main reason why you can't think of any other private people that have helped Ukraine more is that CEOs of other companies supplying Ukraine aren't quite so active on Twitter)

I think it's kind of depressing that Ukrainians have to trust him whilst he becomes one of the loudest public voices calling for a settlement on Russia's terms, and kind of understandable that they don't trust his motivations when he takes more reasonable decisions like declining to extend Starlink coverage to support an attack on the Russian naval fleet.

's/rather dodgy/dodgy at best/; s/loud anti-Western comments recently/often-poor judgement and problematic mental balance/'