[SimianSci]

I very violently recoil from any of Musk's ventures these days. Im sure there are some very smart and talented people working at Neuralink. They should go work for someone else as their boss has shown himself to be a revolting person and the kind of leader who seeks to actively harm people who inconvenience him.

This kind of behavior is not befitting of a company that will need to cultivate an incredible amount of trust from customers before they buy into the idea of a brain implant.

[JohnTHaller]

Considering that Musk is purging government agencies and employees that investigated/are investigating Neuralink, it would be smart to stay far away from it.

[BluSyn]

I violently recoil at comments like this.

Elon is so effective as a leader he seems to break people’s brains. No other person could have started this company and had even half this success. There’s a reason all the most talented flock to his companies, despite “conventional wisdom” saying they shouldn’t. It takes a lot of self deception to ignore the reality that he obviously must be doing something right.

[simianparrot]

I also think the way DOGE has gone about their business is the only way that'd work in a systemically corrupt environment. If you give these institutions ample warning they'll bury or destroy any and all evidence, because that's how it's been done for decades. That doesn't work.

[allturtles]

Ample warning of what? Evidence of what? If the goal is to, say, shut down USAID, to do so legally you just need to get Congress to pass a law shutting down USAID. No "evidence" is required, and warning is irrelevant. What is a shut down agency going to do with "warning" that it has been shut down?

[goatlover]

Why should we trust DOGE to get it right? They're not elected, and Elon has serious conflicts of interest with his business ventures.

[simianparrot]

They're appointed by your president to do the job. What do you mean, "not elected"?

[craftsman]

They are unelected in exactly the same way that anyone appointed by the President--namely the entire Executive Branch--is unelected.

[jlengrand]

Both views can exist at the same time. Many effective leaders are terrible human beings. It's up to everyone to choose their own, ethics and empathy is high on my list of things I care about in a new job but it may be different for others.

[dennis_jeeves2]

>It takes a lot of self deception to ignore the reality that he obviously must be doing something right.

Well, you have hit the nail on the head. My misanthropic view is that most people are a deluded lot.

[throwaway290]

> Im sure there are some very smart and talented people working at Neuralink

I'm sure there are. There may also be people with The Com background (https://cyberscoop.com/the-com-764-cybercrime-violent-crime-...) working on it too: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/teen-on-musks-doge-team-...

yea more known as the DOGE guy but worked at Neuralink before that. Imagine the potential for abuse.

[Yoric]

Sadly, this kind of brings back memories of a few regimes employing criminals for enforcement.

[MathMonkeyMan]

What is the problem with Musk? I know his many shenanigans, but what about his helmanship causes you to violently recoil?

[SimianSci]

I think it comes down to his personal conduct. Specifically, just as I said, I think he actively tries to harm people who might inconvenience him or cause him damage to his public image. In short, I see him as a bully.

One of the great examples of this is the infamous "Pedo guy" incident in which he showed himself as very unempathetic and petty the moment people dismissed him as he attempted to hastily insert himself into a tragic moment.

He's also regularly sued people exercising their free speech to comment on or criticise his financial interests, knowingly attempting to drown influential people he doesnt like in legal fees and frivolous lawsuits.

In the past he has participated in doxing governmental employees who might cause him financial damages, often encouraging his followers to harass beuraucrats and lawyers who are just doing their legal jobs.

There are plenty of examples of Elon regularly engaging in bullying of others who may not have access to the resources he does, its not just limited to these few examples.

In my eyes, any measure of success or wealth will never excuse how a person conducts themselves in public. And I think Elon no longer thinks that the rules apply to him as so many are willing to overlook his behavior due to worshiping his money and influence. Elon's nazi salute is the perfect example of this.

So my original statement still holds. Neuralink has a very large mountain to climb when it comes to consumer trust. Products in the Healthcare industry can massively impact people's lives, especially when they dont work as intended. Any company that participates in this space is morally and ethically required to be empathetic to the lives that they impact. And this level of empathy is not something that I see coming from the man behind neuralink which I think should disqualify it as a company with the potential to impact a lot of people.

[bmacho]

> In the past he has participated in doxing governmental employees who might cause him financial damages, often encouraging his followers to harass beuraucrats and lawyers who are just doing their legal jobs.

Is this legal in the US?

[kragen]

In general, yes. With narrow exceptions, employment as a public servant is a matter of public record and subject to public comment. Such comments are not only protected by US constitional law but in many cases are statutorily required to be taken into account by regulatory proceedings.

This makes it rather galling that Elmu is seeking to shield DOGE employees from such accountability, but understandable when people on Reddit are openly advocating their assassination.

[kspacewalk2]

>understandable when people on Reddit are openly advocating their assassination.

Is this standard of shielding government employees from accountability applicable only to DOGE employees, or could we also have applied it to the many employees receiving death threats from Elon's fan base? Consistency on this would be welcome.

[kragen]

I think that in general it's going to be hard to square the liberal bedrock ideal of government accountability with networked mob violence, individual superempowerment, the rise of surveillance capitalism and the surveillance state, and autonomous swarming weaponry. When the people winning every armed conflict are those who can protect their anonymity while penetrating the anonymity of their opponents, republicanism itself seems like it has to be politically unstable, much less the consent of the governed.

Briefly, in the firearm age, respecting the popular vote was a Nash equilibrium, because if you lost the vote, you probably wouldn't be able to field enough riflemen to win on the battlefield either, so your best option was to lick your wounds and make do under the opposition party until the next election. Despite the resounding defeats of the US by masses of riflemen in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and of the USSR in Afghanistan in between, that equilibrium seems increasingly unstable in the drone age. The first warning signs of this were the staggeringly unequal death tolls in the US's first Iraq invasion, reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa. Recent examples of this instability might include the US's successful initial invasion of Afghanistan, the US's successful eventual defeat of Daesh in western Iraq (despite the relative hostility of current Iraqi leadership to the US, which counts as a sort of defeat), Israel's utter dismemberment of Hizbullah, Israel successfully stymieing Iran's nuclear weapons program, and Ukraine's surprisingly successful resistance to the invasion by Russia's much larger army. Also Hamas doesn't seem to be doing very well at defending Gaza.

Unfortunately the literature I could recommend to you on this topic has mostly been flagged as wrongthink, so I won't recommend that, but Slaughterbots is probably still safe to watch. It contains the memorable line "nuclear is obsolete", a riff on Putin's remarks at Valdai in Sochi 11 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA

It's fiction, of course, but thought-provoking fiction, scripted by leading AI researchers to be as realistic as possible, and it may have more truth in it than we would like.

[Philpax]

Legality is only relevant when enforced, and it doesn't look like that's going to happen any time soon.

[pcthrowaway]

> There are plenty of examples of Elon regularly engaging in bullying of others who may not have access to the resources he does, its not just limited to these few examples.

As written about by Sam Harris recently and discussed in the (now dead) thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42716926

Musk is a terrible person, but also a deeply dishonest and selfish one.

[amelius]

Pulling out of USAID probably killed more helpless people than his companies helped enhance lives.

[naravara]

There’s no “probably” about it. There are hundreds of thousands of doses of tuberculosis treatments that aren’t being delivered and will expire. Every untreated case of TB will lead to some other number of infections and increases the odds of more drug resistant strains popping up. It will take a long time to undo the damage of killing those programs alone.

[kspacewalk2]

Even if you subscribe to the notion that US government should not be paying for this, you can phase it out with enough notice for others to step in and take over the funding. The flippant, "tech disruptor" method of abruptly ending an organization that has for decades been funding critical public health initiatives in countries where they would otherwise not happen... That is the truly infuriating part.

In the grander scheme of things, the US voters do indeed have the right to vote for not providing foreign aid. Which is sad of course, but is a valid political position.

[javcasas]

Last time that people doing the nazi salute experimented with health, well it wasn't pretty.

[42772827]

It wasn’t pretty, and for their crimes some of them were sentenced to positions as top scientists for the US government after the war.

[jbreckmckye]

He seems hostile to regulatory oversight which is a problem when he's selling a microchip you implant in your brain

[goatlover]

Kind of like the chip from Lumen on Severance. I don't understand why anyone would want a chip placed in their brain, unless it's to help overcome a disability.

[willturman]

Diagnosed or otherwise.

[drawkward]

Well the nazi salute for one. The attempt to gaslight earth about it for two.

Those are just two of very many recent examples.

[phillipcarter]

Overt nazi salutes is one, but another is the intentional tinkering-with and partial dismantling of the US Government's system to dispense appropriated funds, and act that is blatantly illegal.

[sneak]

I have no extremely strong pro- or anti- Musk feelings, but the ADL (who seem to me to be the experts on antisemitism) say that’s not what that was.

https://x.com/ADL/status/1881474892022919403

There also doesn’t seem to be any corroborating data to suggest he’s a nazi. I’m all for calling a spade a spade if he is, but it seems that people are working backwards from the “I hate Musk” position rather than forwards from the facts.

[zwirbl]

The 'awkward gesture' take is a fun one.

"Sorry officer, I did not flip you off twice, that were both just very awkward gestures"

There is tons of data on how Musk became a far right supporter and sympathizer, like his support of UK racists and the German far right. You seem to still use X, you could just scroll through his posts there and try to not ignore the evidence you see with your own eyes

[try_the_bass]

Have you considered that perhaps the increasing levels of vitriol and outright hatred directed at him by the left might have had something to do with his rightward trend? They seem pretty correlated.

I struggle to see how doubling down on the hatred is going to convince anyone other than _already hateful_ people of the righteousness of your cause?

[phillipcarter]

Have you considered that doing a nazi salute, whether earnest or ironically earnest, is just not okay?

[Philpax]

The ADL's current leadership appears to be ideologically aligned with Elon Musk for reasons unclear. Here's an article with other Jewish voices, including the former director of the ADL, emphatically stating that it was a Nazi salute: https://forward.com/fast-forward/690745/adl-elon-musk-sieg-h...

As for his other views, Wikipedia can speak to it better than I can: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Views_of_Elon_Musk#Race_and_wh...

[sneak]

> Musk later denied being antisemitic and described himself as a "pro-Semite".

So which is it? It seems wildly inconsistent to me to intentionally make a nazi salute but verbally deny being antisemitic. I don’t think someone like him would need to rely at all on plausible deniability, given that everyone already seems to hate him and he’s been granted immense power without having been elected to any position.

[lores]

It strikes me there's no particular reason a modern Nazi should hate Jews when there are plenty of other groups to be scapegoated, like immigrants or liberals. There was historical prejudice against Jews then, there is against others now. I can well see Musk loving the trappings of fascism, the hilarious fun of trolling as a Nazi, and having people pay attention to him, while not being directly antisemitic.

[toasteros]

You have to remember that fascism's application of othering is not logical, it's just a convenient method of gaining leverage. The Nazis targeted Jews because it was easy to weave a narrative about them, and because their population within Germany itself was so small that it was electorally inconsequential to victimise them. You see this with the Musk-Trump regime's position on trans people; trans people are not a threat to anyone, and are so few in number that you can easily weave a narrative about them and use it to push a more extreme agenda.

You are absolutely correct that modern Nazis are not really bothered by the Jews, but you have to remember that fascists just look for easy targets to hate.

Essentially, yeah, fine, he's not a card carrying member of the NSDAP. But he's a hateful individual pursuing a hateful agenda all the same, and he did the salute to signal to edgelords that he sees them.

[KaiserPro]

Forigner here, one who's family has been shaped on both sides by the nazis and lived through either bombing, or were active members of the resistance in occupied europe.

That was a Hitlergruß, no ifs no buts. More over it wasn't just the once.

Does it make him a nazi? no.

But one has to question why the fuck he thought it was a good idea.

He's terminally online, he knows exactly what it is. He's seen the same memes as us, and knows exactly what that gesture means. So why do it?

That is the far more concerning question.

But thats irrelevant as he appears to be gaining absolute control over the executive.

[Yoric]

I think we're forgetting something.

As far as I understand, most of the leaders of the historical NSDAP (the Nazi party) / the Nazi regime were not Nazis themselves, insofar as they did not believe in whatever was written in Mein Kampf. Nazism was just a mean to grab and hold power. The true believers were basically victims of a con.

So... I don't care whether Elon Musk is actually a Nazi. I do believe that he is willing to use Nazism as a lever, which makes him much more dangerous.

[diggan]

Probably some of the Nazi leaders may have been opportunists to varying degrees, but to say that most of the leaders were not hardcore Nazis is not accurate. Out of the various biographies and books I've read, they're were all aligned about racial supremacy, antisemitism, and German expansionism, this is 100% crystal clear. Even private diaries from people like Goebbels that are now public, makes their commitment abundantly clear.

Another example is Albert Speer (whose biography I've also read), where he initially was an opportunists but eventually became active participants in furthering the goals and believing the "mission" of the Nazis, even though initially (and afterwards) wasn't as convinced (edit: by his own accounts, many historians disagree with this today).

Characterizing the leadership/inner-circle/leaders as merely power-seekers who didn't believe their own ideology minimizes their moral culpability and misrepresents the historical record.

[goatlover]

Likely trolling and pushing boundaries to see what he can get away with. Similar to Trump. They're grifters and like being the center of attention. I don't think they have real ideologies. Whatever works for them. Well, maybe Musk buys into techno feudalism.

[dennis_jeeves2]

>But one has to question why the fuck he thought it was a good idea.

Probably not a good idea publicly. I'd say he slipped if he did do it. I do find NS to be very funny because it annoys/offend some people, most comedians similarly will find it funny.

[KaiserPro]

> I'd say he slipped if he did do it

I mean yeah, but he did it more than once, and it wasn't like it was an odd sort of wave, it was a full on parade standard Hitlergruß (thumpy on the chest hand out at the ascribed hitler angle). Which he then repeated to the audience in the front and the people behind him.

Monty python use to do it all the time, as did a number of other comedies. but the important distinction is that comedians aren't in power.

Musk arguably has more power than the president. So him thinking that it can't harm to try the old nazi salute, with unprecedented power isn't a healthy thing for democracy, regardless of who you think should be in power. Do you think he's going to give up that power willingly?

[specproc]

I don't think there's any real question as to what he's doing there.

The ADL these days mainly exist to shout "antisemite" at anyone criticising Israel. Their giving him a pass was sickening, and undoubtedly related to Republican support of ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

Other Jewish organisations have called it as the world has seen it. One organisation does not speak for a very diverse people.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/26/elon-musk...

[drawkward]

The ADL can be wrong too. The ADL can want to avoid harassment from Elon's brownshirts.

[computerthings]

You mean the same ADL that sees no problem in Gaza? Okay?

https://www.jta.org/2025/01/21/politics/how-did-the-adl-conc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy#J...

> There also doesn’t seem to be any corroborating data to suggest he’s a nazi.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/11/22/ilnh-n22.html

> On November 15, a Zionist account posted a tweet attacking Nazis for being “cowards” and posting ‘Hitler was right.’” In response, a fascist account replied that “Jewish communities have been pushing... dialectical hatred against whites” through “hordes of minorities... flooding their country.”

> Musk responded to the latter post with the statement, “You have said the actual truth.”

Those, and so much more, are the facts. You cherry-pick the ADL, say "there doesn't seem to be anything else", and conclude everyone, including Auschwitz survivors who seriously have better things to do, just "hate Musk".

[_DeadFred_]

Musk just recently had to go tour Nazi death camps to do a PR tour after promoting Nazy theories on Twitter. The people on the tour with him said touring the camps had zero emotional impact on the guy.

[amelius]

The guy is a psychopath, which is probably also why he's so good at doing business. He just doesn't care about other people's feelings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace

> Hare further claims that the prevalence of psychopaths is higher in the business world than in the general population.

[steveoscaro]

Edit

[SimianSci]

When people mistakenly make a gesture, they dont do it once more exactly the same.

And when people point out that they made this gesture their answer is usually not to crack jokes about how they made a Nazi salute in response.

We can maybe disagree about WHY he did it, there's room to discuss if it was genuinely a white nationalism thing or if he was just being an edgelord.

But it WAS a nazi salute and denying this is disingenuous.

[watwut]

> it was genuinely a white nationalism thing or if he was just being an edgelord.

Can we admit to ourselves that most edgelords are actually people infatuated with exact same movements and value systems? Literally all edgelords get angry and strongly dislike anyone left leaning. For example, you do not see them harassing right wing, but you do see them harassing perceived sjws.

Somehow, there is no such thing as left wing edge lord. And that is because when left wing people act badly, they are blamed as bad left wing people. Edgelord is just a way to not blame right wing people and attributing them benefit of the doubt never given to the center or to the left.

[toasteros]

> Somehow, there is no such thing as left wing edge lord.

Your comment is absolutely correct; Musk and his ilk are just people who "joked around" on 4chan and essentially radicalised themselves doing it.

HOWEVER left wing edgelords absolutely exist. Look up (at your peril) the phenomenon of "tankies". They're not your average communist, but rather apologists for Stalin's genocides.

Maybe your comment is more about the terminology at play, but it's interesting to see that the left wing mirror image of the average 4chan poster absolutely exists.

[lewispollard]

> Somehow, there is no such thing as left wing edge lord.

I mean, I'm a pretty staunch socialist/commie and there are plenty of hard-left edgelords out there "joking" about gulags and executing academics and so on.

[misja111]

Sadly it seems that the most visionary and successful CEO's tend to be a*holes to the people around them. Steve Jobs with his 'reality distortion field' comes to mind as well.

[andrewoneone]

What's his vision though? (This isn't me being naive - it's more of me asking the reader of these comments to contemplate this)

[NikkiA]

Basically Bioshock's Rapture, but on Mars.

[rob74]

And to have enough candidates for that, he's doing his best to make life on Earth as bad as possible for as many people as possible as fast as possible?

[ben_w]

Now he looks like a cross between film and book versions of Hugo Drax, or like Joiler Veppers from Surface Detail.

But — despite all the things that should've (but didn't) set alarm bells ringing in my head at the time — until just after he bought Twitter and immediately starting making harmful decisions with its new rules, the output of his companies looked kinda like it was helping improve the world.

With SpaceX, humanity was finally unlocking that cheap spaceflight the Space Shuttle promised but didn't deliver ever since Rockwell started building the Enterprise-née-Constitution in 1974, which is one of the few areas where their work is still going great.

(Buuuut even then, for Mars missions to be viable they must have a working Sabatier plant that fits in the payload bay and can produce 330 tons of methane every 2 years from a Martian atmosphere and irradiance level, and I've not seen any sign of this actually getting worked on by any Musk-group company; such machines would be really useful for Earth's environment, and it's a requirement for his Mars plans as otherwise the Starship vehicles can't return to Earth).

With Hyperloop we were finally getting high speed transit to compete with polluting flights, but TBC has completely failed to do anything noteworthy, not even when it is news-worthy.

With Tesla, we were finally getting non-polluting cars, when the competition was hydrogen vapourware, milk-floats, an excuse for ongoing corn subsidies, and the occasional slow news day when some back-yard inventor made a car that was propelled by springs and/or hamsters.

[otikik]

Musk's vision is a big picture of himself.

[api]

I don't like Musk's recent actions or the awful political ideas he's been pushing either, but it's remarkable that people can't see why he's admired by so many people.

This sort of blindness is a major reason liberals can't properly respond to the rise of MAGA or Trumpism. They refuse to understand it. Understanding something doesn't mean you agree. You can't properly criticize something you don't understand, nor can you provide an alternative that answers it.

Go back in time to the 1990s and 2000s.

The shuttle program was winding down. The only way to get humans into space currently on the market was the Russian Soyuz program, which is ancient Soviet technology. The only human habitation in space was the ISS, which everyone knows is a good engineering experimental platform but otherwise a dead end. The DC-X (first vertical landing rocket) was cancelled. The Venturestar was cancelled, and it may not have been a good design anyway for several reasons.

A lot of people are writing about this as the end of the space age, that the whole thing wasn't a good idea to begin with and there is no future there.

Then along comes SpaceX and within a few years they go from small orbital rocket to functional first stages that land themselves and now they almost have a fully reusable super-heavy capable of refueling in orbit.

Now look at cars. Common wisdom in the 1990s and 2000s is that affordable long-range cars are impossible without fossil fuels. There's a popular site called The Oil Drum that pushes the narrative that all motorized transport will end if fossil fuels are depleted. There are hybrids, but they still run on gas, and nothing much has happened to ICE technology since fuel injection in the early 1980s.

There are some EV efforts but they're early and half-assed.

Then along comes Tesla with the roadster and shows that EVs can be not just viable but cool and actually faster with better torque and acceleration than conventional cars. Since then many other car companies have caught up, but I still believe the whole industry would not have moved without Tesla kicking them in the arse.

If you really hate Musk, the question you should be asking is: why does the human race seem to need people like this to advance?

We had the technology to build the Falcon 9 and Starship in the 1990s, maybe even the 1980s. The problem wasn't money. The total cost of Falcon 9 development was comparable to two space shuttle launches.

The situation wasn't as absurd with EVs, but we definitely could have built a commuter EV at least a decade before we did. Look into the GM EV1 from the 1990s, which pre-dated the Nissan LEAF -- the first mass market EV, which did beat Tesla on that front -- and it had similar range and performance. The EV1 was killed in spite of demand becuase the conventional auto industry hated EVs. Some still do, like Toyota.

It really does seem like nothing big happens in human history without some manic unhinged asshole pushing it. We have everything -- ability, intelligence, technology, money -- but we don't do it without one of these people. Why?

Maybe we'd need "visionary" CEOs less if we had an over the counter amphetamine-like drug but with less addictiveness or other side effects.

[ben_w]

I agree about everything else, but I'm not sure about this:

> The situation wasn't as absurd with EVs, but we definitely could have built a commuter EV at least a decade before we did. Look into the GM EV1 from the 1990s, which pre-dated the Nissan LEAF -- the first mass market EV, which did beat Tesla on that front -- and it had similar range and performance. The EV1 was killed in spite of demand becuase the conventional auto industry hated EVs. Some still do, like Toyota.

Could we have actually built an affordable commuter EV a decade earlier?

Eyeballing this graph, batteries were about 6x more expensive a decade before Tesla actually started delivering the Roadster: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

OTOH, perhaps the extra demand would just have made prices fall sooner, given the other graph in the link shows the relationship between market size and price, rather than year of price…

[hahamrfunnyguy]

Conversely, it's remarkable to me that people still admire Elon Musk. It's perfectly acceptable to acknowledge his past accomplishment while accepting now that he appears to be suffering from drug abuse related and mental health issues.

In my view, Elon's spent most of his good will reputation capital. Of course, we still do have the super-fans who are willing to look past his petulant behavior and give him a pass for his bone-head business moves.

The other take is that he's a genius and a hostile takeover of Twitter was just a checkpoint on the way to making US government his puppet state. Congress is twiddling their thumbs while Musk is apparently preparing to siphon off taxpayer dollars into Space X, Tesla or other ventures.

Either way, it's bad. I loathe the man and fear what could happen.

[api]

My feeling on Musk is kinda like... there's this rock star I liked and damn the man could play, but then he ended a concert by stumbling onto stage covered in vomit, misses half his shows now with a syringe hanging out of his arm, and got arrested for domestic violence against his wife.

It's sad, but damn the man could play... once... I guess I can listen to the old albums.

It's like that.

Unfortunately rock stars on the spiral don't generally destroy democracy.

[mrguyorama]

But it is emphatically not like that, because Musk fans aren't saying he should keep doing what he's good at: Telling SpaceX to shoot for the moon and feeding them cash

Musk fans keep insisting he should get more and more control of my life as an individual who has no interest in buying his products or using his businesses because they aren't good products for me.

They keep insisting that I AM WRONG for being upset about an outright asshole forcing himself into my life.

[rob74]

I don't dispute Musk's success as a manager - the problem is that, to achieve his vision, he turned each of his companies into dictatorships. That's fine (at least in the US), because you can choose not to work for him. But I don't think it's fine to run the entire US like Musk's (and Trump's) companies are run. As they say, Hitler contributed a lot to technical progress, built great Autobahns, and his scientists later assisted both the US and the USSR in the space race and in other fields - does that mean it's good Hitler was in charge of Germany? I don't think so..

[api]

That's what I'm getting at.

Why do we need this to advance?

We had everything we needed to build the Falcon 9 in 1985.

We will keep suffering Hitlers until we can build the Autobahn without him.

[senordevnyc]

If we look at every other category of major innovation for the last century, are they all kicked off by a world-class narcissistic asshole?

Many yes, but certainly nowhere near all. So that would seem to invalidate your hypothesis.

[afpx]

Everyone connected to spacex via brain implant with him in control - i.e. the borg.

If the guy has demonstrated anything, it's that he wants total control.

[14]

Well I personally don't think he is trying to better the world for the sake of being some amazing person giving back to humanity, I do think he really wants to succeed being the first trilionaire. And even if he is not doing this for compassion of those who have lost so much, I do think he wants nothing more then this to be successful so he can sell it to those who need it. Even if his motivation is fully monetary, I don't think anyone with complete loss of mobility ultimately cares what it costs to get some freedom back even if it comes from the a person some see as evil.

He has access to a lot of money so maybe these people working on it should continue to work for him. Maybe he wants to charge an outrageous fee for it but ultimately at some point down the road if he can do it others will to and it will be common place for those who need it and probably common place for those who don't need it but want it.

[tsimionescu]

> And even if he is not doing this for compassion of those who have lost so much, I do think he wants nothing more then this to be successful so he can sell it to those who need it.

I'm sure he wants to sell it to those who need it, but I don't think that this means he cares that much whether it's successful as a medical device. He generally cares whether some device appears to work well enough that he can sell it, especially to investors, and far less about whether it actually solves a problem/doesn't introduce worse problems.

Tesla FSD is the best example of something he's been selling for at least 7 years now without it actually working as advertised. Cybertruck was sold long before it came out, and now they're producing only a trickle. Roadster has been sold by the tens of thousands and it's not even in a design phase yet. Solar Roofs was presented to investors as a working product when it was a plastic mockup. There are probably others.

[14]

lol I never said I think this means he cares. He cares only as far as being able to sell it. So ultimately he wants it to work and work well but if it works just good enough that those who are desperate for some fraction of improvement are will be willing to pay whatever he will be happy.

[soco]

Arguably he has found a quicker way to become a trillionaire, based on a government willing to fund his trip. And even now he's pushing to expand this base internationally. Do you think investing in research is still worth of his attention? It might be too soon to notice, but I somehow think not, and the "normal" projects and companies be they cars or links will start to wither...