He seems to broadly pursue projects he considers helpful to humanity like sustainable energy, the multiplanetary thing and setting up OpenAI. You can interpret people's motivations in different ways but it doesn't look like just power gathering to me. I mean if he was that power hungry you'd expect him to try to monopolize AI for himself rather than make it open.

How does manipulating MemeCoin prices or buying Twitter to bring back the n-word benefit humanity?

While the broad strokes of Tesla and SpaceX might benefit humanity, he seems to have no compunction about doing screwed up things with those companies, either. Remember when he proposed putting indentured servants on Mars?

I think it's arguable that SpaceX and Tesla represent far more of Musk's contribution than anything else. But even with X, it helps to realise, he thinks he is doing good for the world by echoing rw thought.

> I think it's arguable that SpaceX and Tesla represent far more of Musk's contribution than anything else.

Eh, how much of a contribution did Elon Musk actually make to those things? He got them started, but owning something isn't a contribution, frankly. There are thousands of workers involved in those companies, and some of those workers are explicitly tasked with managing Musk's free-floating ego so he doesn't screw things up. If Musk died Tesla stock would probably tank in price, but that price change would represent a loss in hype, not in the value of Tesla. The relevant engineering talent that's there, would all still be there.

> But even with X, it helps to realise, he thinks he is doing good for the world by echoing rw thought.

Obviously, but who cares?

Intentions matter because a person who doesn't intend to cause harm can learn from their mistakes and causing harm. But Elon Musk doesn't think he's making mistakes, so his intentions don't particularly matter--he's not going to learn from his mistakes and he's just going to keep going on causing the same harms.

> He got them started, but owning something isn't a contribution, frankly.

Just an aside, he didn't get Tesla started. Although, he's often cited as the founder by news organizations, there is zero case for that claim.

If anyone deserves credit for getting Tesla started prior to Musk, it's Tom Gage and his AC Propulsion tzero prototype. According to Tom Gage, Musk approached him with a proposal to fund the commercialisation of the tzero, but instead Gage pointed Musk towards Eberhard and Tarpenning.

Prior to Musk, the only thing Eberhard and Tarpenning did was search for investors interested in commercialising the tzero. And they don't even deserve full credit for doing that, as Tom Gage was the one who connected them to Musk.

It's true that Eberhard and Tarpenning were the ones who got Tesla's corporation paperwork filed. They deserve all the respect and admiration which stems from filing corporate paperwork. Sure, they picked a name which someone else already had the the trademark for. Pesky details.

Elon Musk got Tesla started in any real sense with its first significant capital injection, at which point the company started doing its first things. Then in 2008, Musk became CEO where he rescued the minuscule mismanaged basket-case and oversaw its transition to a mature, profitable automaker worth billions.

I'm not sure "mature" is a word that can be applied to anything Musk touches. When Tesla abruptly stopped shipping right-hand-drive cars in the UK, they included complimentary grabbing sticks with the left-hand-drive cars that were delivered to buyers, in response to customer complaints about not being able to use toll booths.

Founder or no, I do think he deserves he credit for the company's early growth and viability, though. At a time when it needed showmanship, he was its showman. But it has long since outgrown him.

> I'm not sure "mature" is a word that can be applied to anything Musk touches.

Certainly Musk is very far from the traditional notions of maturity that you'd expect from a corporate executive, and clearly Musk doesn't care whether anyone thinks he's mature or not. But there's absolutely no question that Tesla and SpaceX are both as mature as any corporation could possibly be.

> At a time when it needed showmanship, he was its showman.

I never understood this line of thinking. I think Musk is a self-evdently terrible showman[0] but everyone has retconned some supposed showmanship as a component explanation for Tesla's market success. In my opinion, Tesla never needed a showman, because the product itself was always the "showman." Musk could have handed launch event duties off to a marketing exec and the outcome would have been functionally identical.[1] Perhaps marginally fewer early sales, but they were manufacturing constrained for so long that it wouldn't have had any impact on production ramp or total deliveries.

I'd bet at least 99% of Model 3/Y buyers never saw the launch event. They bought the car because of word-of-mouth from satisfied customers and positive reviews. The launch event sold a bunch of pre-orders, but there were enough people interested in the car to fill their order book for a long time. Within a year, these cars were selling themselves.

There's a lot of parallel with Jobs. In Jobs' case you also had a pre-eminent showman, but ultimately the star of every show was the product itself, not the slide deck or the speaker's tone. Both Musk and Jobs were obsessed with the product, and steered the ship of their respective corporations to focus on making a product worthy of dramatic reveal. This meant knowing what about the product actually mattered. (Consider, for example, whether it was more important for Tesla to focus on software or panel gaps.)

When the "Model 2" is ready, Tesla could do literally nothing to launch the vehicle. Just add it to their website and they'd sell everything they could possibly manufacture. Its continued success will be driven by customer satisfaction with the product, not marketing. The only point in having a launch event would be fan service.

--

[0] I would distinguish his skill as a presenter with skill as a speaker. He's a terrible and often cringe-worthy presenter. But when he's talking about things he's passionate about, he can be a deeply compelling speaker.

[1] Arguably better because a C-suite in suit-and-tie would have stuck to the script and not waffled on with overly optimistic predictions about future R&D milestones.

> clearly Musk doesn't care whether anyone thinks he's mature or not.

That's not the problem with him, though. The problem is, he clearly doesn't care whether anyone thinks he's an asshole or not.

And since he seems to be such a huge one of those, it would be nice if he cared that pretty much everyone thinks he is, because then maybe he'd try to stop being one.

> The problem is, he clearly doesn't care whether anyone thinks he's an asshole or not.

It's a natural consequence of a progressivist assumption that all ultra-rich people are assholes. Given that, you can't fault an ultra-rich person from concluding that being called an asshole is noise to be disregarded. IMHO the real problem is too many people are consumed with having an opinion about whether he's an asshole or not. What I see is a bunch of highly online people who utterly exude delight in saying anything mean about Elon, which is a sad state for them to be in — regardless of Elon's inherent virtues or iniquity.

In the past couple of years he's fallen much too far down the right-wing rabbit hole for my tastes, but I don't blame him given how the political left are constantly berating him for not adhering to the Correct Opinion™ on the full suite of progressive issues. The left have forgotten how to win arguments on their merits, or how to tolerate a diversity of views. The left have rejected him, but the right still want to talk to him, and people wonder why his views are being increasingly shaped by right-wing perspectives.

Regardless, who cares what Elon thinks anyway? I don't form my political opinions by agreeing with whatever any ultra-rich person says, and I don't know anyone who does.

> It's a natural consequence of a progressivist assumption that all ultra-rich people are assholes.

Or he feels he doesn't have to care, as a natural consequence of there being so many people holding the regressivist assumption that being ultra-rich means one can't be, or it doesn't matter if one is, an asshole.

> Regardless, who cares what Elon thinks anyway?

Far too many people, it seems, including quite a lot of the HN commentariat.

> I don't form my political opinions by agreeing with whatever any ultra-rich person says, and I don't know anyone who does.

Look around a bit better then; there's droves of them.

If one believes free speech is crucial to human thriving, then from their perspective buying Twitter to remove speech restrictions benefits humanity.

I believe that free speech is crucial to human thriving, but just by its nature of being a centrally controlled platform which pushes forward the ideas it wants and takes money from advertisers, Twitter has never been free speech. And if you're going to have rules on what speech is allowed and algorithms that push certain speech forward, it's very telling what speech is allowed and what speech gets pushed forward.

Then why does a free-speech absolutionist constantly bow down to dictatorships to censor users [0]? And why did he repeatedly ban outspoken critics of his person?

If you truly believe that he believes in free speech being crucial to human thriving, those actions make no sense.

However, if they this stance is just a veneer for other motivations, serving to blind the gullible and win points with conservatives (a lot of overlap between the two groups nowadays in the US, as seen by the reception of recent news about the prominent court case), they do. You can decide for yourself what to believe. I think the facts speak for themselves.

[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/5/2/twitter-fulfillin...

If you pass by the slightly inflammatory language (“indentured servitude”) it’s just a different model.

As in: if I want to go and work on Mars, but can’t afford the flight, it’s not unreasonable to take a proportion of my earnings up front (in kind) and then work off that debt subsequently. Obviously the devil is in the detail of how that would work, and which protections I might be afforded, but the underlying concept doesn’t seem bad to me.

> If you pass by the slightly inflammatory language (“indentured servitude”) it’s just a different model.

"Indentured servitude" is the nice way of saying this. "Slavery" is the inflammatory way of saying it.

> As in: if I want to go and work on Mars, but can’t afford the flight, it’s not unreasonable to take a proportion of my earnings up front (in kind) and then work off that debt subsequently. Obviously the devil is in the detail of how that would work, and which protections I might be afforded, but the underlying concept doesn’t seem bad to me.

Those who do not learn history are bound to repeat it.

Repeating the same things without additional explanation or arguments doesn’t really progress the discussion.

Slavery is involuntary and unpaid, so it wouldn’t be that.

The form of indentured servitude that was outlawed a long time ago was also involuntary, so it’s not that either.

Would you have a problem with someone taking out a bank loan to travel to Mars, and then working there to pay off the loan?

That just sounds like a messiah complex to me?

To be fair, in regards to his actual companies I don’t have much of a complaint, it’s his cult of personality that I can’t stand.

Yeah, but demonizing the individual because of the people who follow him is a bit logically inconsistent. Granted, he doesn't fully comprehend the impact things he says and does can have when they're amplified through the mountain of people that hang off his every word.

But the dudes Autistic, it shouldn't surprise anyone that intuitively understanding and anticipating the inner workings of large amorphous social-structures isn't exactly his strongest skill.

> it shouldn't surprise anyone that intuitively understanding and anticipating the inner workings of large amorphous social-structures isn't exactly his strongest skill

I’m not sure if you’re trying to help or hurt the case for musk, but the description you put here tells me this is somebody that if that’s true, I never want them in any power in any organizations.

You just described probably the most important skill of a leader being completely absent

That’s why it’s curious he managed to accomplish everything he did. Clearly something must be going right.

... most important skill of a leader being completely absent

Maybe these are very coincidal exceptions to your rule, but if it had been absent, the high volume versions of Teslas would not have existed, SpaceX would not exist and plenty more tax money would have flown to NASA.

Anyways, with or without all cult culture around his person, bottom line his intentions towards humanity are pure, we should at least give him that.

> But the dude[ i|']s Autistic

You seen any diagnosis signed by an accredited physician? I haven't.

I mean... He's said it himself and anyone with any kind of understanding of the condition can see it a mile away...

Autistic behaviour often looks quite similar to just plain asshole behaviour. Many assholes nowadays use that precisely like Musk, claiming they're autistic and therefore should be allowed to get away with being assholes.

Funny how on the one hand such a lot of people on HN are willing to drag this out in Musk's defence, but on the other hand when the same is attempted in defence of, say, Richard Stallman, they do all hasten to point out that he's not officially diagnosed.

Unless and until we see a diagnosis from a qualified medical professional, we have no evidence that Musk is anything but an asshole.

> I mean if he was that power hungry you'd expect him to try to monopolize AI for himself rather than make it open

Can you point me to the Github repository for Grok ?

That's right it doesn't exist so the facts on the ground are that he doesn't care about openness. And if he truly cared about humanity he would give away all of the designs, code etc for Tesla, SpaceX etc.

Don’t forget the most important thing: the data

The second Elon makes the data for all his companies open (not patents which are already “open”) I’ll start believing him

Or just maybe —and bear with me here-- there’s a place in the universe for both for-profit entities, and entities set up with different goals?

I’m no Musk apologist, but the idea that he’s inconsistent or a hypocrite because he’s expecting OpenAI to stick to their founding principles whilst also running for-profit companies in highly competitive markets, is just bizarre.

This is proven false by many of his behaviors, like sabotaging high speed train projects with dumb car tunnels. This was a blatant misuse of his reputation at the time to make society worse for saving his business interests. Mars talks were nonsense. FSD was a lie. Tesla is a business success but in the end it’s just cars. It’s improving humanity as much as an iPhone. So no he is only after power, helping humanity is just his marketing angle for gullible geeks.

The CHSR project never stopped. It never spent a dollar exploring Hyperloop as an alternative. The people who sabotaged CHSR are the consultants who have extracted billions of dollars with little to show for it. The sabotage was entirely financial. Blaming Musk for the failures of CHSR because he’s on the sidelines casually offering an opinion is absurd on its face. It’s the kind of unhinged ranting nonsense you’d expect from the likes of YouTube popularity whores like Thunderfoot.

I dont doubt power is part of it but i will correct your assertion about Tesla. Tesla has created the EV market - the O&G companies killed it in the 90s and Tesla made it possible otherwise right now wed still be looking at gas vehicles. And yes going to EVs will help humanity - even if its only 20% of the fleet.

> otherwise right now wed still be looking at gas vehicles

But is it really true?

It feels to me that Tesla might have only sped up the EV market emergence by a couple of years and given the growth of battery's capacity/price/density over the years it was inevitable.

Sheer force of will did Tesla manage to bring around the EV market. Noone else had any interest in doing it and theres no way any of the incumbent car companies would have pursued it even if it was more viable from a battery perspective.

Any other reading of that era of industry would be re-writing a narrative to diminish what Tesla really did. It is too bad he has earned so many detractors (through his own mistakes) because many of his accomplishments are exceptional.

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic.

But in case you're not. The main blocker to production and adoption of electric personal vehicles has been battery capacity and charging infrastructure.

Electric vehicles where already the norm where the battery was not necessary (trains). And in many cities there were electric buses for decades even though they were very impractical because they needed to be connected to the electric grid while driving.

The moment the car industry would realize that the battery is big enough to cover decent range and would charge reasonably fast the switch to EV would be inevitable. Tesla was was simply the first to make a bet that the get future is now.

In my city we have now a fleet of electric buses, electric trash collecting trucks (live quality improvement due to how quiet they are and how loud those huge diesel engines were). I really don't think the trash collection truck manufacturers decided to go electric because of Tesla.

Im not being sarcastic. That is absolutely not true - there is no way any of the major car companies in North America had any intention of changing up their operations and product offering. They have all been dragged in unwillingly and dragging their feet to the party (except in China where they were directed to by the governing party).

You are rewriting history to make it sound like it was an inevitability which it absolutely was not and still is not an inevitability. I am not sure if you were alive and in industry at the time but it sounds like you are much younger and are relying on reading as opposed to experiencing the world.

Heavy duty municipal vehicles are a completely different market not comparable. Cities have mandates that aren't always cost such as quality of life - that and they can draw from their tax base + these vehicles always return to base. Again not comparable.

I don't know. I'm not from/in America.

I see all around me electric mobility everywhere. E-bikes, e-scooters, electric motorbikes, electric buses, electric trucks. More and more of them.

To believe that without Tesla car industry would never notice that or dared to try is a bit too much.

And to illustrate that the momentum was already there look at the growing popularity of hybrid cars (Prius) which predates Tesla.

What would it look like to monopolize AI for himself?

I think it would have looked a bit like what Sam is doing now - turning OpenAI to ClosedAI and having it run by himself.

The guy literally donates to a non-profit the funds to open source the technology with a clear open and benevolent charter. And somehow you attach this to nefarious ends. Out of curiosity, what’s your converse? What do you actually think he would actually have done if he had sought to “monopolize AI for himself”? Seems to me it would most definitely not include what he did in this actual reality.

I asked simply to specify the argument criteria. You just went on a fallacy laden rant to redirect to me to define those criteria

So can you clarify?