Elon Musk

another vote for Hern, just now.

wait, i thought Donalds was the consensus candidate

a couple hundred representatives are googling "who the fuck is kevin hern" right now

wrong thread Karl

gentlemen you can't talk about incompetent morons in here this is the Elon Musk thread

smdh #onethread ofc

#elonethread

lol oops sorry!

Gaetz should nominate Musk next time.

if it goes long enough, there is a non-zero chance that elon musk does get nominated.

we need outside of the box solutions

complete the triumvirate, nominate Kanye

https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_fit-560w,f_auto,q_auto:best/rockcms/2022-12/221201-gop-kanye-tweet-mn-1415-5d8d24.jpg

Vox Populi, Vox Dei. pic.twitter.com/I14fKiIh0f

— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) January 5, 2023

lmao

$200/month for an AI that thinks a daycare parking lot has the same speed limit as the adjoining street pic.twitter.com/9tB3MFcViG

— Dan Nguyen (@dancow) January 6, 2023

Per @josephmenn Elon Musk ordered Twitter to ban antifascist researcher Chad Loder https://t.co/tPBKAvWsbv As I reported, Loder's open-source investigations ID'd Capitol rioters but infuriated 2 far-right activists Musk admires, Andy Ngo and Chaya Raichik https://t.co/TagSTpsNkT https://t.co/7lDSJlq8c4 pic.twitter.com/tlGsiPCgKe

— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) January 5, 2023

elon is broing down with some of the absolute shittiest people, and also hes one of them

feel like any self-proclaimed "centrist" who is also obsessed with being the smartest guy in the room goes down that path

also holy shit at that Dan Nguyen tweet, how is this even legal

so I totaled your car
you was using it wrong

Is the Whole Mars catalog guy employed by Elon?

He has similar brainworms

I cannot even imagine the life of someone who stans a billionaire that hard without being paid or in a romantic relationship.

even Grimes has more dignity

Lmao how had I not heard he got this incredibly cringe photo removed https://t.co/HQ0PCBX77a pic.twitter.com/onO6gKiNqh

— K. Thor Jensen 🐀 (@kthorjensen) January 6, 2023

narrator's voice: it was not popular with anyone

Rich guys who are into S&M should be an exception to the "don't kinkshame" rule.

The only way to understand Musk is as a video game messages board troll circa 2000

And in particular, he has become Lowtax. We’ll see if things end the same way of not

Rich guys who are into S&M should be an exception to the "don't kinkshame" rule.

― papal hotwife (milo z), Saturday, January 7, 2023 9:16 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

can they really be into s&m if they've never experienced full consent in their lives though

I cannot even imagine the life of someone who stans a billionaire that hard without being paid or in a romantic relationship

I think a lot of it comes from the immediately Great Recession crash era, where you had a combination of social and political-economic factors colliding:

-tech interests coming into to start gobbling up all the capital spending that real estate couldn’t reliably generate profits from.
- tech guys becoming savior-gurus to the level beyond the hype that guys like Bill Gates had in the 90s
-the Obama Admin openly embracing and incorporating tech guys has the cool smart saavy technocratic leaders who will lead civilization into the next era because mass politics sure as shit wasn’t going to be allowed to do that
-Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark being a bit hit and a useful fantasy of what a tech guy is and how this superhero was going to save us, and guys like Elon, Jobs, or Zuck paying a lot to promote that kind of branding for themselves
-the western(or at least American) conflation of tech-progress with social progress, since that’s how a lot the second half of the 20th Century/Cold War was both marketed and perceived

So yeah, you have a certain kind of person who swallowed every bit of the STEM hype of the last 15 years and existing in a culture where the personal advancement of tech billionaires is conceived as Progress(and/or America) Marching Forward. I don’t think it’s surprising that this kind of parasocial relationship would form. Our culture is great at generating those

Relatedly, because every other institution and metric of modern life(or at least the perception of it) is getting worse, I think plenty of folks put all their hopes into one of those tech moguls innovating/disrupting/conjuring the genius solution to everything. Electoral politics has been deliberately drained of any ability to address the problem, so without those tech superhero figures to believe in, there’s be nothing but despair.

death/murder/suicide/dissolution of the labour movement seems to be lurking in the background here

but it still seems to keep him up at night which is something to hold on to

everyone love the rocketman who will save us from the environment, tho tbf a many of his online boosters are prob paid or at least financially aligned in some way

I hope so

vaguely recall someone trying to untangle it all at some point, pr firms def offer the service of people liking you online, and then the tesla investor community is extremely active too

think tesla gives perks/access to big accounts too

does that explain the absurdly credulous media coverage until a minute ago or is that its own problem

i mean it cant hurt but i think that was mostly just good tradidtional pr work, pitching the business press with a story about how a business man is going to save the world by doing business is a winner every time, musk really shouldve stuck to that instead of doing whatever it is hes doing now

death/murder/suicide/dissolution of the labour movement seems to be lurking in the background here

True, tho I think the Musk fanboy types aren’t exactly the types who would have been at those kind of jobs

Also, as somebody expressed it better than me, Musk has switched his target audience up of the years, going from aiming at NPR liberals to more libertarian tech types to now transphobic Maga chuds

I guess the thing with mega billionaires is that they really are a different form of life and I don't think any of us can really comprehend what that mindset is like. You wanna say "oooooh the money wouldn't change me" so you'd just be a more extravagant version of who you are now. You'd still want the same sort of people to like you. You wanna be the most popular kid at school AND own the school at the same time. And if you're a total asshole then Elon Musk IS that guy. So maybe they just identify with him and think "well he must be a good person then"

the thing with mega billionaires is that they really are a different form of life and I don't think any of us can really comprehend what that mindset is like.

Somewhere north of $10 million money stops being money and becomes power. A mega billionaire has enough power to warp the direction of entire societies. It's got to be a huge mindfuck.

yeah someone pointed it out on Twitter but spending your whole life getting to point at anything you want and then receiving that thing probably does really stunt your emotional growth, to say nothing of asking for and receiving full credit for extremely intricately engineered stuff you had nothing to do with outside of "let's add a fart button, ha ha"

Also, as somebody expressed it better than me, Musk has switched his target audience up of the years, going from aiming at NPR liberals to more libertarian tech types to now transphobic Maga chuds

― Glower, Disruption & Pies (kingfish)

That last step may be death for Tesla. They still want their giant RAM/Ford/Chevy rides.

Tho tbf, I never thought that demographic would ever link with Russia.

Musk can win them over by engraving “I identify as an F-250 Dually” in the bumper.

xxpost There are something like 700 billionaires in the US alone, and most of us can only name a couple. those few must represent the most insatiable egoists.

Sadly, I suspect the only thing that will slow down climate change is some self-aggrandising billionaire firing tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere from some bought country; this will then lead to some other disaster.

did a lot of non-rich people hero worship scumbag industrialists to an embarrassing degree back in the 1800s and 1900s? can the success of musk and his ilk mostly be attributed to well-funded PR via contemporary mass/social media (in the context of broader trends in social conditions, ideology, technology)? or does it reflect something more basic about human psychology (under capitalism? or in general?)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peasant_mentality