And the worst thing is that Elon could've been a living legend by building/funding colleges and schools focused on the tech his companies need, software development, robotics etc. Or even given out million dollar scholarships for the very top students.
And he still would've been worth over 250 billion easily.
Instead he chose to buy the president and start "optimising" the government with AI.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43801711 and marked it offtopic (because it turned into a generic thread that has nothing to do with the topic that was being discussed in the parent comments).
There's a question about his actual goals in government.
He's an ambitious person. And AI enables a degree of surveillance state that we find it difficult to even begin to imagine. All the logistical difficulties of something like Orwell's 1984, of the Stasi having 1/3 of Berlin on the books as informants against the other 2/3, go away completely. We have more cameras than ever. Every person gets to enjoy the kind of focus that went into tracking down Luigi. DOGE has exfiltrated all our sensitive databases to servers that they control; Every 'Chinese Wall' intended to ensure some kind of separation of concerns has been broken down, almost certainly including various formally classified intelligence-gathering campaigns. You can't necessarily stuff that genie back in the bottle. If somebody wanted to be... not president, but authoritarian leader of a post-democracy, Musk would be well positioned technologically.
It wouldn't be inconceivable to set up an AI to do all the same sort of fraud & identity theft attacks against an individual that for-profit blackhats do, or that a Kiwifarms harassment campaign can do, without much of any actual staffing. Only DOGE starts out with your social security number, your tax records, your drivers' license, license plate reader records, web history, everything. That individual could be a Wall Street Journal editor who wrote something Musk dislikes, or ten thousand Redditors who are making fun of Teslas.
If somebody wanted to be... not president, but authoritarian leader of a post-democracy, Musk would be well positioned technologically.
of course, that was his very explicit goal. Thiel backed Curtis Yarvin, who came up for the plan for this and called it RAGE. google it, it's all written down. they hoped to put in Bezos or Zuckerberg and have a more efficiently-run dictatorship replacing our democracy. because they didn't understand politics, they got the ketamine addict instead, who renamed RAGE to DOGE so he could also use it to power a crypto pump-and-dump.
*edit: and because it was never a realistic plan. because they didn't understand politics
> And the worst thing is that Elon could've been a living legend by building/funding colleges and schools focused on the tech his companies need, software development, robotics etc.
Could he, though?
I mean, he might have the cash, but if you look at his history you don't see that much interest or respect for basic academic principles, or even any basic academic achievement whatsoever.
He conveys an image of someone who is mentally trapped in prepubescence, and who repeatedly does things that a prepubescent kid does to try to gather admiration. I meant who desperately tries to pass themselves off as elite gamers? How long will it take until he moves on to DJing? That's not someone who has any interest in founding education institutions.
The man does have an army of terminally online sycophants, which I now wonder whether they are astroturfed.
> I think the point is he could if he was a different person.
That statement is pointless. The critical factor is not money, it's willingness. You do not even need to be the world's richest man to put together a school. There are pro athletes with a fraction of the wealth that already do meaningful investments in education.
> Musk's past statements about his educational background, however, have been, at best, imprecise. He has claimed on several occasions to have received a physics degree in 1995 — a claim that was never fully true but which may have aided Musk's early business career.
The Snopes article confirms the comment you're replying to. The sentence you left out, before your quote:
> The University of Pennsylvania considers Musk to be a graduate of both the economics department and the physics department.
And right above that, from the University of Pennsylvania:
> Elon Musk earned a B.A. in physics and a B.S. in economics (concentrations: finance and entrepreneurial management) from the University of Pennsylvania. The degrees were awarded on May 19, 1997.
Elon has proven to truly be the dumbest smart guy ever. He alienated Tesla’s core customers; tree hugging liberals, and anyone who cares about sustainability. The GOP nor their voters care and never will. I called this Tesla stock crash months ago; did not act on it though.
One interesting thing is that he seems completely unaware that he is the problem. Stepping back from DOGE to focus on Tesla again. He thinks that him getting closer to Tesla will help save the brand, when it's exactly his association with it that caused the damage in the first place.
The best thing he could do for Tesla would be to step aside.
> I called this Tesla stock crash months ago
TSLA is currently up 5% MoM despite really, really horrible earnings and outlook. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent sometimes.
Nor do I, I'm sure he's aware it's propped up on nothing but fumes and vibes. I was just commenting on OP wishing they had shorted TSLA months ago. Easy to say in hindsight, is all.
I think less people care about it politically than you think. Most people I know who have Teslas stand by the product even through Elon’s dumb shit.
I think people care more about their own convenience. There’s nothing else in our market that’s even comparable. People talk a lot of shit and it wasn’t great to start but FSD is on a different level now, especially on newer cars like the new Model Y. Having a car that mostly drives itself is the best purchase I’ve ever made.
It doesn’t seem to be slowing down sales in Seattle. New Model Ys are everywhere here.
It is definitely slowing demand. You can see it in the Q1 numbers and the discounts on vehicles.
You can ask anyone who buys used EVs in Seattle. There is a glut of Tesla sellers and not many buyers.
Like it or not, your car says a lot about you. People bought Teslas because they liked what they said and now they are avoiding them because they don’t like it.
My dude I'm european and unless you have a "i hate elon too" sticker on your tesla, people gonna cut you off, spit on your car, do nazi salutes at you while you drive. The resale value of these cars tanked hard, and noone is buying new ones.
Elon had better put a bunch of quarters up his ass, considering how hard he played himself.
Apologies for my shitty comment; too much doom scrolling and too much crappy 30 year old hiphop. And apologies for writing something that sparked more than a dozen child comments full of divisive crap. Looking back i wasn't really doing the HN comment vibe I'd like to see myself, indeed...
> I recently saw a compilation of Democrat politicians doing the exact same "Nazi salute" over the years. Obama, Hillary, Sanders, AOC, etc.
No, you did not. You saw a collection of Democrat politicians whose arms at one point were sticking out in the same position that arms stick out at the end of a Nazi salute. This happens all the time. I do it 3 days a week when making breakfast.
What Musk did was start with his arm down, rapidly raise it to his heart, and then forcefully thrust it out to the position usually shows in photographs of Hitler doing the salute. There are videos of Hitler doing that full hand to heart and then thrust gesture that almost exactly match Musk's gesture from start to finish.
When you track down the videos that the purported Democrat examples are taken from you will see that none of them did that. They were doing things like pointing, or waving to a crowd, or gesticulating while they talked, and in the midst of that their arms ended up in that position.
Is your argument really so paper thin that you can't even attempt to defend it? You need to go straight to asserting that those who disagree are delusional? Makes me wonder if you even believe what you're saying or you're just taking comfort in repeating it, like an old yarn.
There is nothing to defend. The National Socialists were defeated 80 years ago. That only exists in their imagination, not in reality. Anyone can go to YouTube and listen to the speech. Not a Nazi rally.
We've all seen. Other commenters explained in great detail what they saw. You choose to plug your ears and then insist everyone else is crazy. Everything you've brought up here is irrelevant. No one thinks that the Nazis are secretly living on the moon. The defeat of the Nazis is entirely orthogonal to a gesture made in recent history. The Hunger Games is fiction but I can still hold up three fingers if I choose to.
I saw yours first because it was recent, and your earlier comment was the first that started using terms like "crazy" and "mentally deranged". Sure, it's not ok for others to break the guidelines in replies, and I've now responded to the one you pointed out and others. We're not always going to have the time and patience go through a tyrefire of a subthread and scold every single person. Those who start or escalate flamewars need to take more responsibility.
As for bias: I've spent much of the past week and several hours today responding to allegations of bias in the opposite direction. I say to you what I've said to the others: we're not interested in ideology; we're interested in keeping HN a good place for curious conversations.
The term mentally deranged I used was at those committing acts of vandalism and terrorism against innocent people's private property, not against someone in the comments here. This is clear to anyone who can read at 8th grade level.
Am I wrong that such vandals are not mentally 100? Am I breaking HN rules with this assessment?
Yes, language like this is against the guidelines, whether or not it’s about people in this community. Also, in this comment you've broken at least one more guideline, and I can see other comments in your recent history that also break the guidelines, notably these:
These are just a sample from the past few weeks but there are plenty more that cross the line and have been correctly flagged by the community for breaking the guidelines.
Some particular guidelines for you to pay attention to are:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
But all the guidelines are important to follow and they apply equally to everyone, no matter their ideological position.
We need you take care to follow them in future if you want to keep commenting on Hacker News.
The fact that so many "climate activists" and environmentalists turned on him confirms my suspicion that they didn't think so highly about the earth or climate change in the first place. They care about partisan politics and their tribe more than the planet.
Be wary of confirmation bias. I don’t find it unlikely at all that Tesla owners have sincere environmental goals that could be overshadowed by other concerns. Let’s afford each other the grace of being rational expected utility maximizers.
He spent hundreds of millions to get Trump elected, so that now the EPA is gutted, the closing of coal plants has been halted, and federal lands are set to be drilled and mined into oblivion. This is what climate activists correctly opposed and continue to oppose in opposing Musk.
And he still would've been worth over 250 billion easily.
Instead he chose to buy the president and start "optimising" the government with AI.