> The fallout between Slim and Musk was further exacerbated by a controversial tweet from Musk, which implied connections between Slim and organized crime.
Instant flashback when Elon called Thai cave diver a "pedo guy" when they declined his help. Elon needs to take rejections way less personally.
> Elon needs to take rejections way less personally.
That's putting it mildly. For someone with that much power and influence to have some petty vengeful tendencies is extremely dangerous. It's like the "off with your head" tyrants of old.
He sent private detectives to dig up dirt on the caver he called "pedo guy" and told journalists they were defending an abuser of children with very specific, totally invented, details to the accusation.
He also then got away with it in court because he claimed he wasn't making an accusation, just using a generic insult.
In the case of health, I can see how having too much money can potentially be detrimental. If he tries hard, he can find doctors prescribing unnecessary pills or surgeries.
"The best doctors he can afford" != "the best doctors he's willing to listen to".
Consider for example Steve Jobs: despite his wealth, he resisted his doctors' recommendations for medical intervention for nine months in favor of alternative medicine.
> This is a weird take. The "pedo guy" guy told Elon to stick the submarine up his ass.
The weird thing here is that Elon waltzed in with a 'solution' that was ostensibly flawed to anyone but those with the most superficial understanding of what was required, and blithely presented it to actual experts who were putting their lives at risk, and then expected to be praised. What would be normal, would have been to graciously take the reality check he was given and adjust his priors. This is what actually intelligent people do: they learn; they grow up. And maybe one day, Elon will make it to adulthood, but his early fortunes have insulated him from any need for introspection.
Something getting attention without Elon is simply unacceptable. The news was obsessed with the cave story there was no way he wasn't going to jump into that story.
I don't think he's purely about attention, but he craves a particular kind of attention. The kind that the gifted schoolboy gets when they put their hand up in class to a tricky question posed to the class. This might have been his only validation in childhood, or at least the one that was most rewarding, and now his whole life is based around being the clever guy in the front of the class. Most gifted children course-correct some kind of humility in their adult years, either voluntarily or by being humbled by reality, but Elon is yet to meet the moment of his awakening. Being told he's wrong in front of the whole class is the most mortifying thing he's experienced, but he has enough money, enough sycophants surrounding him, and enough momentum is his business ventures (so far) to keep making the same mistakes without any reflection.
> I don't think he's purely about attention, but he craves a particular kind of attention. The kind that the gifted schoolboy gets when they put their hand up in class to a tricky question posed to the class.
> Which I felt was a little dramatic. And I thought: Wow, this is a man in his 40s who thinks that he’s the center of the universe. So it always has that element of drama.
> I think he’s greatly informed by video games. Someone described him to me as Ready Player One, and everybody else is an N.P.C. — a nonplayer character. He always has to be the hero or the person who matters the most. Sometimes he does, and sometimes he has engineered it — getting the founder role when he’s not actually the founder or rewriting history or using public relations to make himself the founder.
> He understands the hero’s journey kind of thing rather well. Also the stakes have to be very high, and if it doesn’t work, we’re doomed. He tends to overstate problems. Most companies have problems, but: Everything is a disaster here, and I’m here to fix it. Or: Everything sucks, and everybody previously is criminal or evil or “pedophiles.” A word he likes to use a lot.
> In one tweet, he called Yoel Roth, who was head of trust and safety at Twitter, “evil.” And said that I was “filled with seething hate” — which is really dramatic and ridiculous. I’m not seething with hate.
Ezra Klein has many axes to grind, so I take his commentary with a grain of salt, but it's probably right that Elon has become a solipsist with a savior complex, and harbors the attendant cognitive dissonance that comes with that. I still hold some hope that one day he'll snap out of it, but that won't happen unless he finds himself in a dire situation.
Speaking of weird takes. The rescuers first response wasn't "stick it up your ass", it was that they had a workable solution, the team to execute it and the last thing necessary was an even bigger media circus. Elon pouted and whined that he wasn't being taken seriously, and -then- that quote came out. That quote from, by the way, someone who was actually in the middle of coordinating the rescue, being harangued by reporters as to why they weren't indulging Musk's spur-of-the-moment idea that wasn't even remotely feasible (Musk hadn't even considered the cave geometry).
I find it borderline offensive that you equate someone under stress saying "stick it up his ass" as "toxic attitude" that is on the same level as going to the media and saying "I have evidence that this person is a pedophile" (Oh, not to mention the fact that Musk then fucking HIRED a PI to try to gather evidence for when he was called on his bullshit).
"Stick it up your ass" and "I have evidence that you are a pedophile" are not "reflections of the same".
"Stick it up your ass" won't ruin anybody's life. Being falsely accused of pedophilia can, has, and does ruin lives.
I think it takes a clear bias to even conflate the two in some attempt to defend Musk and make the cave diver the bad guy.
> Or it's like a normal person making a normal mistake.
Except that like the kings of old, Elon is not a normal person, and therefore his "mistakes" are not normal either, because they have repercussions.
The whole point is that with great power comes great responsibility. And when you have someone who can't handle that power responsibly without lashing out the way Elon does in a highly immature manner, then you do wind up with a modern version of the "off with your head" tyrant. Sure, he may not cut off your head, but he can cut off your livelihood.
> "He can stick his submarine where it hurts," Unsworth replied. [1]
There are plenty of places that a submarine can go where it will hurt, such as ear canals. You are assuming in bad faith that Unsworth told him to place it in a specific area.
> But being an asshole back to an asshole is hardly a red flag.
Being an asshole is almost always a red flag. It's like teaching someone to not eat grilled babies by eating grilled babies yourself to show them how bad it looks.
> Elon needs to take rejections way less personally.
True, but Elon needs to worry most about the fact that when all the MAGA voters who aren't independently wealthy fully realize the current administration is throwing all the poors under the bus and not just the brown ones he is the useful idiot that is going to take the public fall to try to create some distance between the political fallout and the GOP.
Its pretty obvious to anyone with any political acumen that they are allowing him to be the public facing figurehead for all of this "efficiency" specifically to allow him to fill that role when the time comes.
That said, he'll be fully deserving of everything that happens IMO. I ain't saying any of this to try to warn him, I don't think his ego would allow him to believe it in any case.
I'm absolutely opposed to Musk and happy to see anyone trying to diminish his power... But, Slim having some connections to organized crime (cartels) seems much less far fetched than other Musk outbursts.
I can't see why the midterms would do anything to unseat him. Thus far what we've gotten from the current administration is exactly what they promised. I don't see why anybody would change their vote (or decision not to vote).
The House is close enough that the ordinary midterm power shifts could suffice to change it. And that would at least enable a certain amount of investigation-cum-harassment. But it's less likely to change both houses, and unless that happens with a substantial margin, it'll be hard to pass significant legislation to change anything.
> I can't see why the midterms would do anything to unseat him.
Hopefully, today, you realized what midterms will do to unseat him. The mockery of what US stands for has been going on since Jan/20 and people have been watching.
So let's be clear, Musk, when a deal seems possible, "Cartels? None of my business, not my problem, let's make a deal."
Musk, when it falls through, "Oh, he's just in bed with the cartels. I wouldn't want to do business with him."
He and Trump have a lot alike in that regard. "Best people, smartest people" when they're new and still in favor. "Who?" "Stupid person, who hired him?" when not.
Basically all politicians in Mexico are “serving at the pleasure of the cartels” so to say, so it would be far fetched to think the cartes don’t try to extract concessions from the wealthy as well. Plata o plomo
A billionaire Asperger high on ketamine, can't stay out of the limelight for a single day, and for every stupid thought, media gives him some more attention. It's a vicious cycle.
>Mr Musk called Mr Unsworth a "pedo" in a July 15 post on his Twitter account after Mr Unsworth, in an interview with CNN, dismissed Mr Musk's attempts to help rescue the boys as a "PR stunt".
Hate on Musk (or anyone). Be accurate is the message here.
Musk calling a hero a pedo with no evidence in response after (correctly?) being accused of having a garbage solution that couldn't work and he could stick it on international tv is appalling.
Added: I wonder if it was the pro or anti musk faction that flagged the call fo accuracy ad provided references. Even more amusing if both.
is a better article for sequence, although the twitter dates are not helpful - the embedded in a tweet interview clip has the date of the tweet and not the date of the interview. That was tweeted after the Musk pedo tweet.
The quote was:
He can “stick his submarine where it hurts,” Unsworth said during the interview in Thailand.
before going in detail about why the sub idea was impractical (as was stated by several others at the time).
It doesn't justify the "Pedo Guy" accusation though, Musk was clearly being a attention seeking nuisance and getting in the way of an ongoing rescue effort.
His help WAS going to be useless (mostly because Musk's design completely failed to account for the cave geometry) and of course it was a publicity stunt. There's a team of international cave rescuers and medical professionals on scene, but what do they know? Musk literally announced his "plan" to the media before anyone on scene. That's the definition of a publicity stunt.
Oh, and if you just called me a pedophile to the world, WHILE I've been up for 30 hours straight coordinating a cave diving rescue, and the media keeps asking me "Why not Musk's submarine?", you know what, I'd probably say something a lot less polite than "he can stick it up his ass".
I don’t disagree with any of that other than I’m pretty sure the sequence is the other way around. The guardian story linked, published at the time has the sequence cnn interview calling it a publicity stunt and the pedo guy tweet after that. Unless I’m reading it wrong somehow or they messed up the story?
Good!!! I just finished porting my number off of T-Mobile since I canceled my service with them mid-Superbowl when I learned they were collaborating with StarLink; I don't want to support a man advocating for my erasure because he's mad at his daughter for disowning him. I made it explicitly clear why I was cancelling, citing Elon and StarLink
by name.
Glad to see others participating in the "free" market and "voting with our wallets" before that ends up being the only way we can vote. Even more glad Slim is costing him billions compared to my pennies.
I do wonder though, when I see so many famous people on Joe Rogan, for example, if the world isn't pass that somehow. Remember Neil Young as the absolutely solitary voice trying to pressure Spotify? It doesn't matter if you think Rogan should be boycotted; there are people that clearly should be doing it, to be honest with their own values, but aren't.
Since Trump started his term, Rogan has fallen from the top podcast in the charts to number two with a 32% drop in downloads over the past month. I guess its something?
Lots of people wish for the failures of profitable businesses. The sooner the better for us to be off oil the better for the planet. The slave trade employed many people and was extremely profitable. There's no reason to care about Starlink being successful.
Why not? The entire point of market economics is to make that not a problem and leave room for other potentially better companies to take the place of worse ones. He obviously is a negative influence for the business as a whole even if he stayed out of politics, just the fact that he tries to pull so much money/value out of those businesses for personal gain has a negative effect on how efficient and beneficial to consumers those businesses can be.
By US standards, Musk is pretty good. And I doubt there'll be any economic consequences for him no matter what ideologies he holds. The literal next line on Wikipedia is "The United States Postal Service honored Ford with a Prominent Americans series (1965–1978) 12¢ postage stamp".
Actually before WW2 many Americans were somewhat sympathetic to the Nazis; Hitler didn't seem so bad until he started invading other countries and stepped up his persecution of the Jews and Roma in 1938. Other recipients of that award were Charles Lindburgh and the chairman of IBM.
"T-Mobile (NASDAQ: TMUS) introduced the next big thing in wireless — T-Mobile Starlink — to tens of millions of football fans. Now in public beta, this breakthrough service, developed in partnership with Starlink [...]"
I have yet to meet a person who regrets having successfully weaned themselves off the news-cycle dopamine treadmill. If anything, I find that they tend to be better informed and more thoughtful than they were when they wasted cycles on the carnival.
Well that's a bit of conceptual selection bias, isn't it? Good for their mental health, but you cannot regret something if you don't know what you're missing.
There must have been 1930s Europeans who checked out of all those news about Hitler, after all. Must have been much better for their peace of mind, until one day suddenly it wasn't.
The rise of Hitler was noticed and minimized by even the most plugged-in governments and leaders. The UK was led by a chap who thought he could mollify him by just giving him parts of Central Europe. You can call Chamberlain many names but "uninformed" isn't one.
I like the description earlier in the thread of "the carnival". You can leave at any time and your life and dopamine will be the better for it.
lol. Because I’m sure all the news was posting anything critical about the nazi party at all. Look at now the vast majority of the mainstream news handled Covid. Absolutely zero intellectual curiosity or actual honest insight and 100% pure grade-a government propaganda. Not even a shred of actual investigation or thought. They were nothing more than a mouthpiece for whatever nonsense the government spewed out.
While I encourage everyone to opt out of the sensationalized news cycle and prioritize their own mental health, people who aren't paying attention aren't better informed, because the news is actively being censored by their billionaire owners, so it takes a lot of effort to be fully informed, and no, remembering a few things they heard off of Joe Rogan doesn't make them well informed.
Ea-nāṣir sold me poor-quality copper. I need high-quality copper. Therefore, I will buy loads of copper from Ea-nāṣir, and sift through it until I find high-quality copper.
The copper market sold me copper,
some of which was low quality, some of which was high quality. But instead of continuing to shop at the whole market and developing any sense of what is quality, I've decided to go exclusively to Joe's Best Copper. He tells me his stuff is the best. I don't go to anyone else now so I have no way of comparing it to anything else. Anyway, there's no possible way he could be lying to me, I'm way too smart for than.
So many here are in agreement that queer erasure is occurring you're saying that being informed about it happening can have no positive impact at all? How should we fight against something if we ignore that it is even happening?
What are you even talking about? Trying to rule that trans people don't exist and kick them out of every space possible is one of the biggest efforts of Trump's first month.
elon lost a contract. At this point most people consider that a good thing, since he is trying to sow chaos in the US government for little to no benefit to the US or anywhere else except his wallet. And he is enabling the little dictator.
That doesn't mean you support the person who pulled the contract.
You can scream MDS all you want. Most people are done with the meme garbage.
Thinking that everyone in a federal job or benefitting from those big bad grants are all in one party is some massive ignorance that takes a lot of brainwashing on right wing media to accomplish. They won't understand until it affects someone they know. By then musk will have diverted a lot of spending to his own companies with the doge fraud.
not sure why you read "irrational ragequit" into it. Calmly telling the CSA, who may or may not be in the Philippines, what to note down as cancellation reason: Other - Elon Musk, gets stuffed into a database and then bubbles up in internal reports on a pie chart of reasons so if enough other people also cite that reason, it becomes seen.
> T-Mobile since I canceled my service with them mid-Superbowl when I learned they were collaborating with StarLink
That implies spur of the moment, emotional response.
You are watching the Super Bowl one minute, you see a commercial for T-Mobile, then immediately call to cancel your service in anger? If it happened at all - you must port before cancelling, or lose the number
They're gonna come for me anyway. Better than my communications going through his network. Maybe if enough people cite his behavior when cancelling T-Mobile will back off working with him, and he'll lose even more money.
Looks like Elon's tweet may have been retaliatory, in response to Slim's decision not to continue business with Starlink (but build out more land-based networks), rather than prompting Slim's decision (though it no doubt solidified it).
I'm amazed at how the other space companies have failed to offer competition to starlink just the same as the auto industry can't seem to compete with tesla and make a good and profitable EV. They've had a decade to figure it out, so where are they?
Everyone has become cynical and no one is willing to invest in the future and build new things.
I drive a VW ID.4. It's profitable for VW (modulo some boondoggles early on in production), and it's the best car I've ever driven, even solid for road trips.
If I wanted, I could have gotten a Hyundai or a Chevy equally well. Tesla just isn't the only or even best game in town, and hasn't been for years.
> If I wanted, I could have gotten a Hyundai or a Chevy equally well. Tesla just isn't the only or even best game in town, and hasn't been for years
I'm yet to find an EV with the same range, acceleration and price point as the model 3 LR. Many seem to beat it on two but not three points. The Polstar is close. The ID.4 has less range, double the time 0-100 and (prices not confirmed yet in Australia but) expected to be $10-20k more expensive.
My biggest dislike in Teslas. I won't entertain buying one until they decide that an iPad is not in fact an appropriate way to handle user interface in a car...
TBH, this is something that scares me about Teslas. Most people can’t handle a car that accelerates that fast. Granted, I know they have safety features that prevent you from running over people… but safeguards fail, this is just a game we shouldn’t be playing at all.
On the track? Go crazy. Long stretches of road by yourself? It’s your life, just don’t crash and don’t get caught. Around other people, though?
Acceleration? Anything with 6s or faster 0-60 is plenty fast unless you're just measuring dick size.
Actual range is matched by Hyundai/Kia EVs, and pricing is quite good as well (especially used). Also these vehicles support V2L, charge faster, and
Don't get me wrong - Tesla has some amazing tech, but they blew their lead in the past few years on that useless Cybertruck instead of iterating their most popular models.
> Acceleration? Anything with 6s or faster 0-60 is plenty fast unless you're just measuring dick size.
"Fun", is my reasoning, the same reason (I assume) why most people buy fast cars.
> Also these vehicles support V2L, charge faster
V2L doesn't interest me. My understanding is in North America charging is an issue, but in Australia mine charges at 250KW.
> Don't get me wrong - Tesla has some amazing tech, but they blew their lead in the past few years on that useless Cybertruck instead of iterating their most popular models.
Completely agree RE the cybetruvk - a small "model 2" would be a market changer, cybertruck is weird Elon wank. But every other electric I've driven so far I find inferior, I'm not sure they've lost their lead yet.
I also own an ID4, I'm actually on my second lease (had a 2021, now a 2024). I originally had some skepticism from friends since I went non-Tesla, but I love the car. I also appreciate that it's not tied to Musk (and has Android Auto).
My friend’s Tesla drives itself with no hands on the steering wheel from door to door. It is a totally different product category than a regular EV from VW, come on.
Tesla is doing better than most other brands still. Somehow all the articles claiming Tesla sales falling in Europe is due to politics are missing that the missing sales basically almost fully shifted to Chinese EVs and not other European or American brands. In other words, people are buying the cheapest thing. If the politics mattered they would probably not support Xi.
> Somehow all the articles claiming Tesla sales falling in Europe is due to politics are missing that the missing sales basically almost fully shifted to Chinese EVs and not other European or American brands.
... Wait, where are you getting that? BYD saw substantial percentage year on year growth for Jan 2025, but from a very low base. Growth seems to largely be accruing to VW AG, BMW, and, oddly, Toyota (for all that reviewers panned the bZ4X, _consumers_ seem to like it).
> In January, according to the ACEA data, Tesla clocked the largest — by far — decrease in sales of any auto manufacturer in Europe. The largest increase, at 36.8%, was for SAIC Motor, a Chinese automaker whose brands include MG.
> In January, SAIC Motor sold more than twice as many vehicles in Europe as Tesla did, according to the ACEA data.
Yeah, so SAIC is 2.3% of the _total_ car market, up from 1.7%. Tesla is 1% down from 1.8%.
So if SAIC only made BEVs, then it would indeed be one of the bigger sellers of electric cars. However, SAIC makes lots of things. SAIC/MG is not in the top ten BEV brands for Jan 2025.
(This seems to have been a common mistake made in reporting, and people often do think of MG as a BEV brand, but it actually sells a lot of hybrids, too.)
So not purely electric but they have batteries and motors in them - is that the distinction you’re making?
Are you also disagreeing that car sales are shifting mostly to cheap Chinese vehicles not European or American brands? To me it still looks like if people are moving away from Tesla for political reasons, they apparently align with the CCP. Which doesn’t make sense to me since China is a dictatorship.
I am disagreeing with that, yes. If you look at BEV sales, there are no Chinese vendors in the top ten; looks like the Tesla sales went to BMW, VW AG, and Toyota. Maybe Nissan to some extent. Tesla sales would generally shift to other BEVs, not hybrids.
MG is basically just noise in the broader market. Like, a whole 2.3%!
One piece of context that you may be missing is that hybrids are the single biggest chunk of the European market, about 40% (I gather they’re way smaller in the US), so MG’s 2.3% isn’t hugely impressive.
Why do you think Tesla sales would shift to other BEVs not other types of cars? I feel like this is more about the whole car market and where sales are going. Is there data showing an equivalent increase in BEV sales specifically from European or American brands that equals Tesla’s lost sales?
Electric car sales are up in Europe year on year. Tesla sales are down. Chinese cars are not a significant part of the BEV market. I mean, come on, now, do the maths.
> I'm amazed at how the other space companies have failed to offer competition to starlink
Revenue estimated in the 7-8bn range last year. That's pretty tiny for a telecom, especially one with global scope; it's about the size, say, of France's fourth largest telecom. Profitability would be almost impossible to estimate (to what extent should rocket development costs be laid upon it, say?) but realistically you wouldn't expect it to be profitable.
Like, it is not necessarily a business you'd want to be in.
Well SpaceX does not need outside financing anymore, even while continuing to build out Starlink and developing Starship. Seems like a bold claim to say Starlink is not profitable.
But it is still not a business you would want to be in, because it is enabled by super cheap rockets, which no one else has.
> the auto industry can't seem to compete with tesla and make a good and profitable EV. They've had a decade to figure it out, so where are they?
This talking point is 5 years old. As of 2022, legacy auto has matched Tesla in enough respects to be worthy competitors. Sure Tesla's electronics are a bit better, but in terms of being a good car, other manufacturers have Tesla beat.
Launch support. Starlink launches are effectively subsidized by SpaceX launch missions (private and government, so US taxpayers helped a lot here). To compete and develop a similar LEO network you need to be able to launch a lot of satellites, and if you don't own the launch system and piggyback your satellites on launches supporting other customers it's a major expense.
> no one is willing to invest in the future and build new things.
The markets have been so warped by the power of existing monopolies that most investors are only interested in trying to find the next golden goose (as we can see in the crypto, AI, metaverse and countless other bubbles).
Their planned satellites still aren’t on par. They have to be twice as high in orbit it because they don’t have the launch tech to hit lower orbits. Bad news for the world though - if they have issues, space debris at that altitude will take hundreds of years to fall back down. Starlink satellites take a max of 5 years to fall back and burn up. China is creating a huge risk of space debris issues.
Elon Musk is responsible for making EVs a real alternative with a meaningful market share but if you compromise moral values and ethics each time money, success, or progress comes up you'll create a horrible world
> The fallout between Slim and Musk was further exacerbated by a controversial tweet from Musk, which implied connections between Slim and organized crime.
Lets hope Slim wipes the "business floor" with Musk with his initiative.
Musk would probably not tweet that if Slim was really involved with drug cartels, as insulting someone like that could end up with kinetic retaliation in physical world.
I was being sarcastic. It is, after all, very much unlikely Mr. Slim would send a bunch of sicários to torment Elon Musk.
If, indeed, Musk were right (he isn’t) it’d be amusing, simply for the unlikely event he was, for the first time, right on one of his many drug-induced late night tweets.
no need to wish for it, but it's not a hard thing to imagine. if the Trump admin starts to go after cartels in a way that starts to affect them, do we honestly think they will not retaliate?
Right now in my day-to-day, I'm much more materially threatened by the current administration's stated objective being rolling back my civil rights than by anything the cartels could do, much as I loathe them.
And anyway if you think either Elon or Trump actually care about the cartels, I've got a bridge to sell you
Your posts are always out there but this one seems completely divorced from reality. On what basis? He didn't pass any laws, he's attacking "DEI" whatever that is...
So Musk amplified an unsubstantiated tweet making accusations of “his main partner in 25 countries”, which not only made him “lose 7 billion dollars” but also “an investment of 22 billion dollars”? And this is the guy people are trying to convince us is some kind of business genius?
People forget that Elon impulse bought twitter and tried to reverse the deal through the bogus bot angle [1]. The only way in which the acquisition has been a success is as a way to force his political agenda.
Do people forget that? It was highly publicised and he even admitted he only went through with it because he thought he’d be forced to. The political angle is clearly something he hadn’t realised at the time.
If you mean people on HN, maybe not. If you mean people in general, then a lot of people don't know it at all let alone forgetting it. The vast majority of people do not pay attention to what CEOs do, if they even know who they are. The vast majority of people don't want to be tuned in like that and are using social media to deliberately check out. It's one of the reasons they are so susceptible to the algos
Thank you. I got this Nate Silver article in my inbox on how Musk is some sorta special genius because he was born to wealth and won the PayPal lottery, and thought I was going insane.
And factually inaccurate. Musk in no way founded or co-founded PayPal. The trademarks were registered, the MVP was running, when the company building it merged with Musk's failing online banking plan.
He was then made CEO by virtue of being the biggest shareholder. For four months.
Four months later, the Board fired him in his absence on the morning he left for his honeymoon.
How badly do you have to fuck up to not be asked to resign but fired, and fired two days after your wedding, leaving for your honeymoon? Well, Musk tried by insisting the Java app that was up and running was trashcanned and PayPal was rewritten in Classic ASP, because Musk understood that and not Java - that'll do it, apparently.
None of those points are accurate. He is not his main partner in 25 countries. He did not lose 7 billion dollars from anything related to this. That is a completely made up story.
Carlos Slim is literally a bit player authorized reseller. There are no major investments this guy has made in Starlink.
Musk really seems to have lost his mind and any kind of filter. He hears about something and tweets it without any thought. Pretty much the same approach he is using with DOGE. Look at something for five minutes max and if you don’t like it understand it, cancel it.
My theory is that anybody who engages a lot on X for a while gets their perception of reality totally distorted. If US leadership keeps passing off the whole world I think the real winner of “America first” will be China and Russia.
>I think the real winner of “America first” will be China and Russia.
Indeed.
>An hour later, Slim announced that he would transfer his projects for the next 5 years with Starlink, an investment of 22 billion dollars, to companies in China and Europe.
Brings to mind a meme that's quickly become a favorite of mine since Jan 20th. It's a picture of a "gigachad" Xi Jinping with the caption "Do nothing. Win."
I find that meme super funny - because China is doing a LOT of things that simply aren't getting noticed by (or being ignored by) the media in the West. Belt & Road, New Silk Road, solar panels everywhere, etc.
They're not doing nothing - they're just not being idiots.
Perhaps you've seen this, or maybe not. It's worth mentioning that you're not the only one to make that connection -- Jaron Lanier called it "Twitter Poisoning":
I certainly see similar situations where people I knew seem terrified of trans related topics, one couple I knew are on a sort of anti porn crusade.
I ask them all and they have ZERO personal run ins with what they fear and tweet / post about… but it doesn’t end and when the topics come up they can’t imagine that you’re not deep in the middle of their social media memes and conversations and so on.
It’s a wild situation, there’s nothing in their life that supports their ideas and fears but they’re all in.
The problem is that when someone gets to that level of wealth there's really nobody left to say "no". Likely nobody in his circle has the guts to tell him what he needs to hear. This in addition to the alleged drug issues and his excessive time on X (which is also kind of a drug) is how we got here.
Or maybe, just maybe, someone who obsesses over hardcore work and tries to manage 20 different companies, while also trying to be perpetually online, is probably sleep deprived and/or is on medications to keep up with everything.
That kind of lifestyle would do that to you long term.
I think he's trying to generate engagement on X through controversy.
The recent change to search, which now shows posts from people you've blocked (with no options to turn it off) suggests this too.
The problem with this strategy is that you have to keep escalating otherwise it gets boring fast, and it attracts people no one wants to advertise to. My feed is full of racebaiters and anti-woke culture crap despite telling the algorithm I’m not interesting. I’m not sure there's much else left.
That’s why I stopped: just being there is giving him money and if you interact with anyone else you’re incentivizing them giving him money, too. I signed up in 2006 but that was a sunk cost I couldn’t stomach growing.
There are circles of people that I like still on the platform. Plus, lots of great discussion on AI and entrepreneurship, both of which BlueSky takes a hostile attitude towards.
In addition, I take the general zeitgeist of X to be something like the Freudian id of the MAGA coalition, which is a useful thing to be tuned into, given that they run the country currently.
If enough people leave Xitter then those people "who only use twitter" will either leave as well, or it indicates that they're just fine being on a "racebaiting" platform. I really don't get why people are staying there other than it means they're just fine with Musk's antics and the rage farming.
There's plenty of evidence now based on his aberrant behavior in public that he has a serious drug problem.
Look at the video of him on the stage at the event where he told all the x advertisers "fine, don't advertise, go fuck yourself".
If you are wealthy enough you can certainly find enough licensed medical professionals to provide you with basically whatever substance you want, and in unlimited quantities. Exact same sort of thing that ended in the death of Michael Jackson.
He's Tweeting >500 times a day. There is almost no hour of the day he does not Tweet now. He is either paying someone to Tweet or he's literally no longer sleeping.
It's typically not that people lose the need for sleep as they older, but that aging negatively impacts the ability to sleep, which leads to individuals suffering from both age-related decline along with the impacts of their sleep's impaired restoration.
Exactly. It's the same way that having a deformed jaw, hydrocephalus, and leg braces equates to being absolute ruler over an empire colonizing half the world.
There seems to have been a clear decline. It's doubtful that he would have gotten to his current level of wealth if he was mentally in the space he's in now back 10 or 15 years ago.
He’s doing all that despite his mental health issues. Not because of it. He’s just an embarrassment that needs to sort his shit out. Actually use his wealth to do something useful instead of hoarding more wealth and having more kids.
Wouldn't shadow president imply that he's acting within the shadows and out of sight? This is definitely not an apt description of what's going on. Co-president is much more apropos.
Sibling commenter has provided a list of links, but there are plenty of reasons to dislike Musk. I personally think he is not someone we should be putting on a pedestal for others to look up to. Just because someone has made money does not make them a good person. Al Capone and Pablo Escobar made a lot of money as intentionally extreme examples. He does however fit hand-and-glove with this administration for those very same reasons
I'm surprised even hacker news is getting suckered in by this. This is a tabloid website and no legitmate source is reporting on this. The article also lies significantly. Carlos Slim's company was only a Starlink authorized reseller. There was no significant investment.
Near the end of the article, the cause is described:
>>Elon Musk shared a post on his social network stating that Slim could have ties to criminal groups, and five minutes later, Carlos Slim canceled all business collaborations with Starlink in Latin America, which made Musk lose 7 billion US dollars.
It doesn’t really matter since the USA will invade Mexico in the next year as part of a new anti-terrorisim initiative initially aimed at drug cartels. As that escalates many things will get carved out for corporate interests.
I’m not saying I support this. But this is the reality.
SpaceX is a private company. Tesla is public, but the board is not independent, still trying to give Musk a pay package of $50 B.
CEO answer to the board, but a board can be controlled by the founder in one way or another. For example, Zuck control shares with more votes and Bezos have vote rights over his ex-wife shares. The CEO can also fill the board with loyalists, as Jobs did on his return.
In what world Elon is the founder of Tesla? He's just a CEO and about 20% shareholder who stuffed the board with his cronies in ways that should interest legislature so that laws can be written to prevent something like that from happening again.
He sued the original founders into granting him the title. Although it really shouldn't be that big a deal he's labeled as founder. When you're the CEO you can just generate titles anyways so he could be called the The Excellent Supreme Leader Always (TESLA) and it'd be allowed.
In layman terms he's not a founder of Tesla but titles aren't required to fit a layman's definition.
Tesla would in principle be so much better off without the connection to Musk and all the bad publicity that results, even without him constantly siphoning value from the company. However, if they were able to somehow get rid of him now, there'd be the potential retribution from the US government to worry about.
> ... Carlos Slim canceled all business collaborations with Starlink in Latin America, which made Musk lose 7 billion US dollars.
Uhhh.. what? Can anyone explain that line? Where did this 7B come from? Did Musk lose it or did SpaceX? This makes it sound like it was forefit like Musk just gave Slim $7B for free. What is actually going on there?
> Elon Musk shared a post on his social network stating that Slim could have ties to criminal groups, and five minutes later, Carlos Slim canceled all business collaborations with Starlink in Latin America, which made Musk lose 7 billion US dollars.
I haven’t seen any clear connection. maybe it links to this article that is claiming it’s bad to represent cartels as terror orgs as some loose indicator it is slim trying to push that narrative to benefit the cartels since I did see he owned 17% share in NYT?
I get some animal farm vibe reading this. I'm looking at the US gov and I'm looking a the cartels, and I can't figure out which one is which.
The way this US gov is operating, they pretty much operate likes cartels "we are the boss, you stfu and you do as we say, or else".
> "It is better to put our towers, plants and optical fiber to link them," said the business magnate in his press conference held on February 10.
> Two days later, Daniel Hajj, CEO of América Móvil, confirmed the decision in a conference call with analysts, where he announced an investment of 22 billion dollars over the next three years to expand its infrastructure. With this move, the possibility of a collaboration with SpaceX was ruled out.
It's like mush lives in a glass house and just hangs out online all day chunking rocks. I don't know Carlos Slim so maybe this is or maybe it isn't the pot calling the kettle black. Unless someone has evidence that can paint Carlos Slim with the same brush as the one mush uses on himself then I tend to believe that Slim's friends are a lot less shady than mush's.
Instant flashback when Elon called Thai cave diver a "pedo guy" when they declined his help. Elon needs to take rejections way less personally.