Yes. With the astronomical level of clout that Elon Musk has, I'm willing to call him immoral, unethical, and a bad person for doing business with KSA. A vanishingly small number of people are as influential as Musk, and his actions inspire and are emulated worldwide. Saudi Arabia is currently trying to rehabilitate its image (while maintaining its vicious corporal punishments, extremist views, support of terrorism, and legalized misogyny) and shouldn't have help from anyone who claims to care about anything other than profit.
Probably the biggest single thing you guys could do to make this thread even worse is turn it into yet another comic book feud about Elon Musk. Enough with that, please.
More generally, please don't practice the online shaming culture of denunciation on Hacker News. It makes for lousy, predictable discussion, regardless of how right you are or feel. From an intellectual curiosity point of view—which is the main value of this site—all denunciations are the same.
We make concessions every day regarding human rights in the United States (abusing immigrant/migrant labor under the table, our prison population). I am most definitely not saying it's right, but you have to look inward first when you're making such bold claims.
On one hand I'm curious to see the responses to the idea that corporations that were founded and bloomed in liberal countries can suddenly just become "global" companies and not be held to those same liberal standards.
On the other, I look at countries like China and Russia and wonder how much mileage this "liberal world order" has left in the gas tank.
If we look at history we can see that when liberalism first encountered china it wasn't John Locke and human rights that opened up trade, but a naval blockade that forced china to capitulate (and create hong kong too, which is the most liberal country in asia).
Do we as the west have the ability or the willpower to pull a move like that again? Because if we don't then i don't see how we can overcome china other than writing more bloomberg articles on how their ghost cities are going to crash their economy any day now.
