[lowkey]

- I believe he can launch rockets into space and land them on their own footprint.

- I believe he can revolutionize auto manufacturing and disrupt a 100 year old industry replacing fossil-fuel burning dinosaurs with clean electric vehicles that outperform them and that appeal to the general public

- I believe he can allow quadrapelegics to interact with the world in ways never thought possible

- I believe he can, to a great degree, restore free speech on social media even if it is messy and imperfect at times

- I believe that innovation is hard and just because he boldly claims he is going to Mars or make cars drive themselves - and hasn’t done it yet, is no reason to discount the possibility that he might actually pull it off one day

[ben_w]

Mostly I agree, modulo "he knows how to make teams to do XYZ", which I'm happy to count for the same reason I'm happy to blame him personally when those teams he's ordering around do something I don't like:

> I believe he can, to a great degree, restore free speech on social media even if it is messy and imperfect at times

I strongly disagree with this.

Even if I ignore the proxy of all the investors writing off their buy-out loans by 75%, even if I ignore that when people link me to random threads I can only see the specific one linked and not any reply because of an invisible paywall^w account-wall, even if I ignore that loading a random tweet now often takes 26 seconds or more (yes, I did just record my screen to get that number), even if I ignore that undesirable stories can be buried by an avalanche of alternative narratives and not just by censoring the truth…

There's still the problem of Musk intervening politically in ways that, although totally legal, are exactly the kind of thing he was complaining about before the takeover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions

[specialist]

Yes and:

I'd like someone, eg Musk, to define "free speech". Start with some of those "first principles" he likes so much.

Then, per "theory vs reality" cliché, I'd like someone, eg Musk, to explain or demonstrate or larp or interpretative dance what "free speech" looks like in practice. Maybe even point to an existing example.

For bonus credit:

- explain relationship between "free speech" and news feeds (algorithmic hate machines)

- explain operation of "free speech" multinationally

- explain how to balance "free speech" and moderation

- enumerate the tradeoffs of, downsides due to, and consequences of "free speech"

[dom96]

You’re a fool tricked by another fool who shouts loudly that they support free speech while they ban speech left and right.

For goodness sake, ElonJet was banned and you can’t even say the word “cisgender” on the platform. How delusional are you?

[pavlov]

Also Musk has banned mentions of his own transgender daughter, who now posts on Meta’s Threads app instead.

X is like a textbook case of why total autocracy isn’t actually good management practice. Musk has become the Henry VIII of social media.

[horns4lyfe]

I prefer that to the CIA having a direct line to the top of the platform and free reign to use it for propaganda, yes.

[ETH_start]

ElonJet was a live geotracking site for private jets. You can post cisgender, it just comes with a warning.

Before, people were being banned for using "him" instead of "her" to describe biological males who self-identified as women. People were secretly de-amplified for criticizing the government policy of lockdowns. It was censorship on a whole different magnitude.

[baxtr]

I really wonder if he is not focused enough

[specialist]

Ya, 3.5 out of 5 ain't bad.

[ben_w]

> HE can do nothing of the sort because he is an idiot with very few real skills.

Management is a real skill. Salesmanship is also a real skill. I may not approve of the showboating, but drumming up enthusiasm for a future that most consider to be fantasy, was a necessary (though not sufficient) part of building an electric car company in an era when most people thought hydrogen was the future and that "electric car" meant "a milk float" and, if they had memories of any real personal electric vehicle, those memories would have been of the failure of the Sinclair C5:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5

[twobitshifter]

I don’t like the guy but he’s built companies that are implanting brain chips to give people vision and parapalegics the ability to interact in the world, has blanketed the globe in true high speed internet, have built spaceships that launch more frequently than any nation has ever done their own. And then there’s the EV thing which many see as key to fighting climate change. If he wasn’t so unlikable and part of this twitter debacle, the world would be praising each of these efforts.

[horns4lyfe]

You’d prefer the rich just throw their money at political back room deals or speculative finance? At least he’s spending money to build cool things.

[7thpower]

>> Even his code in pre-PayPal days was amateurish.

..Okay?

Calling Elon Musk an ’idiot’ in a non-ironic way tells us you’re not being objective and contributing to a rational discussion.

[panick21_]

Same old nonsense story.

> What he has done is throw money at people who can.

Funny then that countless other space and car startups had far more money and were far less successful. And many of those were far less micromanaged.

BlueOrigin for example literally got 100x as much money from its owner as SpaceX did.

> But now he has started micromanaging things because he believes he knows best.

This is just factually inaccurate, he has been micromanaging since the beginning. Literally everything ever said about him was that.

Look we get it, you don't like him as a person, but these statement just make you seem dumb and uninformed.

[ETH_start]

If you can't recognize his contributions I think you're too emotionally attached to the question.

[ben_w]

Nobody else did, though.

That's the reason he was able to get this rich with SpaceX and not stall sooner — most of the other space companies were (and in the west, still are) busy scratching backs rather than developing successful products.

[mensetmanusman]

Someone like Boeing. The administrative class has taken over and they have zero risk appetite. Nothing new will come of them.

[horns4lyfe]

You honestly believe that DARPA would have given us the Tesla model Y?