
Elon Musk calls Thai cave rescuer a 'pedo guy' - yumraj
https://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Elon-Musk-calls-Thai-cave-rescuer-a-pedo-guy-13076699.php
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propman
I honestly think Musk was trying to help. He does this stuff everywhere,
Puerto Rico, Australia etc. it does seem PR, but also very risky and I like
that he does unorthodox not by the book things.

I also understand he sucked the gravity of the praise there with news articles
mostly mentioning him and I understand how divers who risked their lives might
feel constantly being asked about the sub.

This diver was rude, but if he’s been asked this constantly I don’t blame him
really.

This is one moment where he should have kept quiet on twitter and it would
have blown over, but he fired back which is in poor taste, but still not too
bad.

But the second he called him pedo...that was the lowest point of Elon Musk
ever. It was petty, narcissistic, rude. His teen fanboys will no doubt harrass
and dox this hero, he’ll have this moniker on him forever, and it’s just
because Elon was attacked. Whenever he feels unfairly attacked he always
attacks back, sometimes very very rudely. I hope he gets sued for millions. I
don’t blame his journalism attacks because they were fairly justified, but
this was really messed up.

~~~
Someone
_”I honestly think Musk was trying to help. He does this stuff everywhere,
Puerto Rico, Australia etc. it does seem PR”_

He may have been trying to help without consideration for how the world thinks
about him and his companies, but it became PR the moment he tweeted about it
(if John Doe tweets he’s donated to charity X, i consider that PR for John
Doe, too. If he just wanted others to donate, he could have tweeted “X does
good stuff and needs money” without mentioning his own good deed)

~~~
propman
Wow that is so bloody obvious, I didn’t even think about that...Elon was
constantly tweeting it out, updates and everything. You can help others and
have it be PR simultaneously like Elon was doing, or you can help others and
not be PR. So this was obviously PR for Elon, SpaceX,and Tesla.

One of the replies to his tweet made me change my opinion a bit too.
Government officials who make the decision what to do should listen to the
experts, but if famous people come the govt officials might listen to them
instead and it could have been a disaster. She was saying how in these
situation, rescue workers hate celebrities coming because they have to fight
against their usually erroneous opinions, making it harder for the workers to
get through to the decision makers

------
bjl
Absolutely disgusting on Musk's part. Calling an actual hero a child molestor
simply because he called out an obvious PR stunt.

Hopefully Unsworth sues him for libel.

~~~
TillE
As several American lawyers have pointed out on Twitter, this is just about
the easiest libel per se lawsuit you could have. I guess Elon can stand to
lose a few million dollars, but it's still incredibly stupid.

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Analemma_
FFS, Elon. You had this one in the bag. Even though Thailand didn't end up
needing it, the sub offer made you look great and even crowded out the bad
news about Tesla for a while. All you had to do after the rescue was over was
say "Glad to hear all the kids are safe; we'll keep the sub mothballed just in
case this happens again" and you'd have been golden. Instead you go off on
these tangents about how Thailand is incompetent and now this, and now you
just look like a prick for about the twentieth time this year.

Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

~~~
Millennium
Yeah, pretty much this. I'm actually willing to accept that this wasn't
initially meant to be just a PR gesture, but a sincere attempt to help. But
now his tantrums over not getting to be the hero have gone and poisoned it
all, rendering it indistinguishable-from-PR whether or not it was intended as
such in the first place.

~~~
mindslight
Actually, I'm pretty sure that this outburst makes it distinguishable from PR.
Not that it's pleasant to see.

Elon Musk needs a serious figurative punch in the gut, to get back to the
actual outlook of a collaborative problem solver and away from pumped up
competitive douchebag. The world already had enough of those.

------
nathanlied
I get the feeling Elon might need someone to reign him back on some of his
tweets. I've heard he suffers from bipolar disorder, which, even if medicated,
can sometimes flare up.

If that's the case, and some of his episodes bring this about, he really does
need to either recognize this in himself, and exert some self-control, or
straight up have someone else check it over.

This is especially dangerous because, since his companies' valuations are so
intrinsically tied to his 'cult of personality' (I'm using this term neutrally
- I believe 'both sides' will agree that a large percentage of Musk's
companies' valuation does come from his bombastic personality and presence),
this behaviour can only damage his work, which may put him into a negative
feedback spiral, with each subsequent outburst plunging it all further down.

~~~
RivieraKid
This is the result of deep insecurity (and maybe narcissism), not a bipolar
disorder. He has always been like this, overreacting to criticism, rage
outbursts, constantly having conflicts with other people, trying to appear
smart.

~~~
isaiahg
Not to say he isn't smart or even extremely smart. But I also noticed the
insecurity. He desperately needs people to love him and searches for
validation with his fans. But that's not a stable way to live.

------
curtis
From Musk's recent interview with Bloomberg [1]:

 _“I have made the mistaken assumption—and I will attempt to be better at
this—of thinking that because somebody is on Twitter and is attacking me that
it is open season,” he said in an hour-long interview with Bloomberg
Businessweek for this week 's cover story. “That is my mistake. I will correct
it.”_

It seems like Musk ought to be smart enough to generalize from "Twitter" to
any sort of media (I don't think Unsworth is on Twitter), but I guess maybe
he's still working on it.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-13/-the-
last...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-13/-the-last-bet-the-
company-situation-q-amp-a-with-elon-musk)

------
isaiahg
Hard to say I didn't see this coming. Elon has been lucky he's had the world's
media on his side for a lot of his career. But he's been too loose with his
words for a long time. Getting into arguments and making risky jokes.

If there's anything the media loves more than building a hero up it's tearing
that hero down. It was only a matter of time before he started saying things
that would get him in trouble.

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bdz
The deleted tweet

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Zdx_Qw...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Zdx_Qw3LMtEJ:https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1018497953051258880+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=en)

Doubling down

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qsVGLi...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qsVGLizOopUJ:https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1018513369404493824+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=en)

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Apocryphon
Software CEOs are eating themselves, in front of the world.

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jhanschoo
I have reservations using a just-in-time assembled prototype for a life-
critical task. How well-founded is my reservation?

~~~
greglindahl
Very. The actual rescue involved "plastic cocoons" and sedation for the kids,
I don't think any of that was previously proven. If there was a proven rescue
technique, they would have used it.

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petertodd
Has anyone confirmed this wasn't just an unfortunate typo?

Why is sfgate making an issue about this prior to doing that?

~~~
jsheard
He doubled-down in another tweet:
[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1018513369404493824](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1018513369404493824)

~~~
petertodd
Thanks.

Yeah, IMO that's pretty stupid and Musk would do well to take a break. :/

Pity, because I think he overall did the right thing with that sub idea - it
was a good plan B and what was done in the end was pretty similar to it (strap
the kids into stretchers with positive pressure full face masks). But calling
one of the team a pedo doesn't help anyone; better to just shut up.

------
mchahn
But why "pedo"? Why not ahole or something less specific. Is there something
Musk knows about the guy?

~~~
BrandoElFollito
Such a comment is what frightens me in today's uber-connected world of instant
information. Don't get me wrong - I understand what you are saying and know
the comment is genuine.

We have in French an expression "il n'y a pas de fumée sans feu" (there is not
smoke without fire) which means that since a random person (Musk in that case)
said a random thing (his tweet), there must be something behind.

In the past it was a village gossiping, worst case one could envision leaving
and making his life somewhere else. Today, he is dead socially because "who
knows".

Musk should be punished for such words. oit punished by a few millions because
this is not going to teach him anything (beside the fact that having a lot of
money is cool) but rather denying him for 5 or 10 years the possibility to
communicate on Internet (à la Mitnick) and denying him the possibility to be a
CEO/engineer. Just so that he understands how painful this can be.

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briandear
But then in classical SFGate style — they basically “insult” him by suggesting
he donated to Republicans. What does that have to do with the main topic of
the story? It seems like that last paragraph was added simply as “punishment”
to Musk (in the eyes of the typical SFGate reader.) This story hardly feels
newsworthy — it’s just gossip.

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chroma
This seems so totally out of character for Elon that I can only assume he is
drugged or mentally ill. Maybe he's Ambien tweeting. If he's still in
southeast asia, that would make sense (as he'd be tweeting around midnight
local time).

~~~
bjl
How is this out of character? He's constantly insulting people on Twitter.

Honestly, I'm surprised this one blew up more than the time he called a guy
from South Africa a 'chimp'.

~~~
chroma
I follow Musk on Twitter and I've never seen behavior like today. Yes, he
sometimes insults people, but there's a huge difference between offhand
insults and sticking to your guns accusing a rescue diver of being a
pedophile.[1] It's utterly bizarre.

1\.
[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1018513369404493824](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1018513369404493824)

