Elon Musk

“That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.”

it’s true that’s a poor wikipedia article

what i meant was the mentality that some people are just born to power and riches, and that’s fine, we have nothing, and that’s also fine, in fact it’s the only way it can be, it’s how the world is ordered and to argue for a better way is to in some sense go against the will of god and nature, so let us simply enjoy what pleasures we can in this life and recognise the beauty and greatness of our betters when they accomplish their public feats

some people have for sure always venerated the rich and powerful, in rome emperors were both the richest and powerfulest guys and when they werent busy assassinating them many considered them to be demi gods

as to why musk got particularly famous, and his fame does well predate becoming "the richest person in the world" which carries its own fame, i think it was due to a well executed plan to become famous

alien vs predater

should add was brilliant marketing for tesla which prob wouldnt have survived or flourished without it, but then musk started believing his own hype which is a well known thing you shouldnt do

Monotheism lends itself even more to veneration of the powerful than polytheism did, because the monotheistic god is all-powerful and infallible, where the Greco-Roman deities were fickle and sometimes even wrong. Kings and caliphs exploited this obviously via divine rights and all that, but in the post-monarchical parts of the Abrahamic world we've still allowed some sense of that to persist, that the wealthy and powerful must have divine favor, as evidenced by their wealth and power. If you believe in a hierarchical monotheistic deity, it's easy to assume the hierarchies established in the earthly realms reflect God's wishes. That this actually goes against some pretty explicit teachings of Christ per the gospels — which were anti-establishment and anti-wealth-and-power - is less of a problem than it seems like it should be, because obv most people don't really follow Jesus as a philosopher, just as a guarantor of their own ticket to heaven.

There’s also the bootstraps ideology that is pounded into peoples’ brains from the moment they take their first breaths in this country.

Yep, which also has a strong Protestant flavor. Really, the Prosperity Gospel movement just kind of takes that twining of capital and theology to a logical end.

Anyway, Elon is now encouraging coups. Basically just turning Twitter into Parler.

And once again, Twitter let election conspiracy theories run rampant after Musk dismantled all of their trust and safety teams. Now Brazil's capitol is facing an insurrection. But unlike before, Musk has actively promoted and pushed these conspiracies. https://t.co/rKts84I4Rg pic.twitter.com/iwUIslAtb9

— Alejandra Caraballo (@Esqueer_) January 8, 2023

Anyway, Elon is now encouraging coups.

what an astonishing, new turn of events

https://i.imgur.com/lMIOHax.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/muvyX4Y.jpg

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says it asked Tesla for more information about the tweet. https://t.co/bWcgWjFW1c

— FOX6 News (@fox6now) January 9, 2023

car signaled and pulled over done with self driving for the day

I obtained surveillance footage of the self-driving Tesla that abruptly stopped on the Bay Bridge, resulting in an eight-vehicle crash that injured 9 people including a 2 yr old child just hours after Musk announced the self-driving feature.

Full story: https://t.co/LaEvX9TzxW pic.twitter.com/i75jSh2UpN

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) January 10, 2023

Lol... always an excuse. (I mean yes, safe following distance matters but ffs a car pulling into and abruptly stopping in the left lane is deadly)

Doesn’t anyone understand the concept of safe following distance? Like you should always be ready for sudden stops. Which is why you stay behind a couple car lengths

— Dennis (@AbibIiophobia) January 10, 2023

to be fair to the tesla, the footage does not appear to show any children running in front of it

Lol, of course the person stopping to help at the end is driving a Subaru.

my @Tesla’s traction control, stability control, airbag system, and emergency braking all failed while driving in the pouring rain on the 10 freeway tonight.

tow truck is on the way, will be an hour.

bad product, bad company. pic.twitter.com/OmGnt1IHsJ

— Rustin Sotoodeh (@rust1n) January 10, 2023

Doesn’t anyone understand the concept of safe following distance?

Doesn't this idiot understand that in heavy traffic on a multi-lane high speed road any attempt to create a safe stopping distance in the event of a 'panic stop' by the vehicle ahead of you is rendered moot within a few seconds by someone pulling into that space?

Honestly surprised there aren't pileups like that every day on the Bay Bridge. I was visiting relatives outside of Oakland on Thanksgiving and my cousin, who was in charge of mixing Thanksgiving cocktails, got caught in the subsequent traffic jam. What a disaster.

much as with wikipedia, interstate traffic is one of those things that wouldn't work in concept but works in practice. AI driving is the inverse!

👀 @elonmusk (Great person. Please do not ban this bot.) is no longer following @kimbal

— Big Tech Alert (@BigTechAlert) January 9, 2023

Baby let me ban yer bot.

👀 @elonmusk (Great person. Please do not ban this bot.) is no longer following @Grimezsz

— Big Tech Alert (@BigTechAlert) January 11, 2023

Do you feel a sense of real purpose in ur life?

— 𝔊𝔯𝔦𝔪𝔢𝔰 (@Grimezsz) January 4, 2023

Watching this I fully realized that this tunnel is an instagram opportunity, not really about transit at all pic.twitter.com/oGWoSVwp0f

— Read Jackson Rising by @CooperationJXN (@JoshuaPHilll) January 11, 2023

the funny part is that, of all the insta-friendly light installations, it’s one of the worst I’ve seen

all these small time business ideas, things musks cronies were texting him before he bought twitter all no brainer i would easily pay ten million dollars for an elite username

BREAKING: Twitter is considering selling user names to generate new revenue.

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) January 11, 2023

its not enough to pay the rent tho

I'm told Twitter employees were just walked out of its Singapore office — its Asia-Pacific headquarters — over nonpayment of rent. Landlords walked employees out of the building

— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) January 11, 2023

Love 2 not pay my landlord.

if i were the richest guy i'd just buy all the buildings duh

No it’s better to talk about having floating buildings in 10 years

This is actually a classic private equity trick. Extend the payment terms as much as possible to get your counterparts to fund your working capital. Makes a huge difference on cash flow metrics. Stop when it starts impacting your business.

— 8teAPi - e/acc (@8teAPi) January 11, 2023

Not sure Musk actually knows what the "business" part of Twitter is, tho.

ah the classic business move of not paying your bills yes i think i may have heard of that one before

76D chesskers

that made me lol, Neando, thx

I dunno if "don't pay for stuff because what are they going to do about it?" qualifies a trick, really.

Stop when it starts impacting your business.

Oops.

isn’t that a pump-and-dump private equity trick that was done to a bunch of retail chains that were then saddled with debt and thrown into bankruptcy by bain capital, etc.

thank you for bringing free speech back

If you try searching Twitter for @kenklippenstein—the major investigative journalist who recently posted footage of a Tesla crash—you can’t find him anymore. This is all you get. pic.twitter.com/7UYLmtHRTD

— Eve Fairbanks (@evefairbanks) January 12, 2023

that is odd, but fwiw when i searched for him just now i immediately found his twitter profile and all his posts

do yo follow him tho

but i see he also retweeted @evefairbanks' post, too, so i guess he agrees?

xp i do not follow (...@kenklippenstein on twitter)

i tried searching with my account where i follow him and he showed up then i tried with one of my bot accounts that does not and got the musk but no ken result but it did return some other nine follower ken klippenstein lol

https://i.imgur.com/xxUBdhb.png

https://i.imgur.com/RWMRZsk.png

logged out incognito search returned all the ken klippensteins and no musk

https://i.imgur.com/4xm5zMU.png

seems like something weird is going on especially the fact that its returning musk too, cld just be twitter sucking but prob some meddling going on or more likely even is a combo of the two

Musk sucking?

musking

yeah right after I posted that I tried in a different browser where I wasn't logged in and I got the same thing where I saw Musk & no Ken. but now if I do it Ken shows up and no Musk. so it could be they reversed course after people started noticing, or maybe it's just a random search bug, which actually seems kinda likely given it took me several tries just to test this since half the time it just returns nothing at all

Klippenstein still shows up for me when I open Word '97 on my compaq presario. But he is gone in Microsoft 365.

Twitter app has started defaulting to ‘for you,’ when it’s in the background and reopened. That was the death knell for Facebook and Instagram being even remotely usable, can’t wait for the chronological timeline to be hidden behind five menus.