[jakobnissen]

I don't think that's right - although of course we are speculating about what's happening inside the head of Musk.

Musk strikes me as an juvenile and naive man, precisely the kind of man that would take a hatchet to a complex system while believing he is competently reforming. His experience with taking over Twitter probably reinforced his belief that you can move fast and break organisations and, despite all the moaning from liberals, nothing bad will happen in the end.

So Musk is exactly the man to honestly believe in what he was doing, and he was immersed in a right wing echo chamber, which for 50 years has been talking about government waste.

Don't ascribe to malevolence what can be explained by incompetence.

[trueismywork]

He did so the hyperloop just to stall trains. So there is precedent.

[mrguyorama]

When you are in charge of US government reform, incompetence IS malice.

You don't get to claim incompetence while being one of the richest people alive.

[spaceman_2020]

The idea that he is “stupid” or “naive” while also being the world’s wealthiest man by far needs to die

What he really is is a sociopath who uses the idea of “doing good” to infiltrate systems and setup laws and legal structures that benefit him and his companies

I don’t buy any of the goody-two-shoes “for the sake of humanity” persona and neither should you. But the worst thing you can do is dismiss his sociopathy as naivete or stupidity

[UltraSane]

His behavior after buying Twitter really is stupid though.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Is it? Chaotic, certainly. But if you proposed in 2021 that there was a way to:

* make white nationalism acceptable on Twitter

* while increasing the US government's dependence on it

* at the same time that the US president owns a competing social media app

I think nearly anyone would have told you that's impossible. Strategic chaos in service of a bad goal just looks stupid from a distance.

[UltraSane]

I meant the way he fired AND INSULTED all the smart people whore created the Twitter back end

[SpicyLemonZest]

Again, though, do you think that there’s some concrete goal he was aiming for which he could have achieved if only he hadn’t fired and insulted them? Or do you just think that it was terribly rude and they didn’t deserve to be treated that way? I wouldn’t call the latter stupidity, especially since he was working against contemporaneous predictions that the site wouldn’t be able to function without those people.

[UltraSane]

It is stupid because people are going to want a asshole premium to work at Twitter after seeing how badly Musk treated people.

[spaceman_2020]

I really think his entire Twitter purchase was a way to get political leverage

Musk is thinking far down the line

[meheleventyone]

He did try to get out of buying it which everyone seems to have memoryholed. I doubt anything other than way too much ketamine is behind a lot of the chaotic decision making.

[spaceman_2020]

Maybe the point of buying Twitter was to help elect Trump and get his fingers into the administration

His net worth figure certainly seems to indicate that it wasn’t stupid

[fakedang]

You underestimate Musk too much.

This was years in the making. He basically made a $200 million bet on the USG, one that translated into hundreds of billions. This was all calculated, and the veneer of government inefficiency was good enough to mask his actual objectives.

I can say this confidently because that's what I would have done too, and I'm not half as smart as him (given that I haven't built a Paypal or a SpaceX myself). That's what anyone in such a privileged position would have done. The upside to doing it that way was just that much massive.

[conartist6]

Smart doesn't work like that. I have little doubt that you are as "smart" as Elon.

Usually what people mean when they say "smart" is actually more like meaning of the word "canny," which helps explain the distinction. A canny decision is one that makes you look smart in retrospect.

To put it another way, I might climb to the top of a hill. Climbing the hill doesn't make me taller, but it does get me the benefits of being able to see everything for miles around.

Perhaps after climbing a hill/Ent I see Saruman's army marching off to war, and realize that even though I may be a halfling, right now I could say a particular thing that would be "as the falling of small stones that starts an avalanche in the mountains." This is a canny moment, and like any canny moment or is filled with surreal possibility. But it isn't because Meriadoc is a tall hobbit and, not because only a tall person could do this thing that involves seeing a great distance.

[UltraSane]

Musk didn't build PayPal or spacex

[firesteelrain]

What do you mean? SpaceX in particular he still owns

[UltraSane]

Musk knows nothing about rocket design and has very little to do with SpaceX, which is a big reason it is actually successful. If Musk actually TRIED to design a rocket it would go about as well as the CyberTruck because he would just ignore all advice from anyone who actually know how to design rockets.

[firesteelrain]

He didn’t personally design rockets, but he founded SpaceX, funded it, set the architecture, and has been deeply involved in major technical decisions. That’s not ‘nothing,’ and it’s hard to explain SpaceX’s success without him.

[braebo]

> That's what anyone in such a privileged position would have done.

That’s what anyone who’s self-centered and morally bankrupt enough would do perhaps, but no, not “anyone”. Some people are committed to being good (or at least striving towards it).

Your take strikes me as sociopathic at worst, and misguided at best. Much like musk, to your point.

[margalabargala]

On the other hand, getting into "such a privileged position" of hundreds of billions has the sociopathy you mention as a prerequisite...