It's starting to feel like Musk is playing this political game to me.
Pretending he is championing the little guy, that he/twitter/everyone is somehow being repressed and they/he is fighting against it. His recent tweet on how 'activists' are the cause of twitters recent revenue drop for example.
Even with the blue check marks, he is framing it as it being open to all and the little guy taking the power back, all you have to do is pay him $8 a month for it. Viva la revolution indeed!
It feels like social engineering to me and the same game that has been played very successfully in division politics.
Or maybe he is just a dumb guy who believes his own bullshit but ultimately doesn't know what he is doing. How much do we have to hear about the chaos behind the scenes at his companies before people start to realize this whole thing possibly isn't a well orchestrated plan?
Distinction without a difference in this case. When you are as rich and powerful as Elon Musk, you usually get away with your own stupidity and it will ultimately turn to your benefits no matter what. The law of the accumulation of wealth also applies to social capital.
I think it's healthy to calibrate one's own beliefs to reality. So maybe you're right and there is no difference in outcome.
But strictly for my own mental model, I think it is far more accurate to model this as "super rich guy makes shit up on the spot and has no master plan" rather than "this is part of a massively complex plot that relies on second- and third-order psychological effects planned years in advance."
It is really human to over value intentions at the cost of the outcome. Even our legal system does this to a pretty large extent. However when looking and trying to grasp the amazing amount of share stupidity the rich folks do, we have to ask: „how does this much stupidity yield so high rewards?“
IMO it is way more damning to us as a society that people can be this stupid and still become so insanely rich, then if someone had an evil masterplan to manipulate others into making them more and more.
But at the end of the day, this concern is dwarfed by the fact that in either case we let them get away with it and ultimately reward them with insane wealth. This is the true damning of our society that these people are given all this wealth and power in the first place, and after the fact, honestly they can do whatever they like. And what they do isn’t pretty at all.
It is because you should separate the style of execution from the target effect: Musk sounds like a bumbling idiot but... he s halving payroll... it's gonna reduce the load tremendously for a while and if he stops innovating, swallow a loss compensated by paying customers for a while, it might end up surviving enough to provide him some returns.
The difference between me, clever socially but idiot as an entrepreneur, and Musk, the definition of asshole but with good instincts, is enough I suppose ?
> But strictly for my own mental model, I think it is far more accurate to model this as "super rich guy makes shit up on the spot and has no master plan" rather than "this is part of a massively complex plot that relies on second- and third-order psychological effects planned years in advance."
B.b.but a bunch of his PR guys convinced a lot of Redditors that he's the real-life Tony Stark who's saving humanity as we speak. What have you done? How could the PR not by true, if so many people repeat it?
> When you are as rich and powerful as Elon Musk, you usually get away with your own stupidity and it will ultimately turn to your benefits no matter what.
I'm yet to see how that idiotic "pedo guy" episode turns out to benefit Elon Musk.
How the accumulation of wealth works statistically is that when transacting with less wealthy players, you have a lot more to win and a lot less to loose, while the other player has everything to loose and—relative to you—hardly anything to win. Over time this results in gradual accumulation of wealth.
I see the accumulation of social capital no differently. This particular transaction might not have benefited him, he might even had lost some from it. But over time, other transactions more then made up for that mistake, and this one became irrelevant, which really is to his benefit.
All publicity is good publicity when you're in the game of monopolizing the world's attention market, c.f. the constant publicity stunts of figures like Trump and Kanye.
I have never in my life thought that Musk would champion the little guy. If anything, Musk will run the little guy over 5 times in the quest for interplanetary domination.
To champion the little guy has nothing to do with rhetoric, right? In my exprerience it's the uneducated masses that pretend to champion the little guy but don't understand that their actions have unintended consequences that often produce the opposite result. I would think people are starting to understand the inverse correlation between words and actions, at least where power politics are at play (not to mention specifically in corporate entities that make their dough by brainwashing)
It is quite common for some kinds of politics (you can deduce which ones) to create an enemy of the common people from thin air, and use it to justify your actions.
Elon is heavily dependent on politicians keeping taxes low for billionaires, and policy that pushes NASA and other government agencies to hire private companies.
Crony capitalism it’s called colloquially.
Marc Andreesen was tweeting a few months about the pressure from DC to curtail behavior that the politicians felt was undermining them.
Around the time Powell began raising rates, memes in finance changed to “save”, banks raised rates on savings accounts to get people to park cash they can leverage rather than get free cash from Powell they can leverage.
Pulling cash out of the economy means fewer lattes and avocado toasts; being a bit glib, but those are the workers most likely to be hurt long term.
So yeah it’s basically division politics. The only reason it works like this is because of memory this is how it works.
NPR reporter literally just said employers offering higher and higher wages is what’s creating inflation, and they want unemployment to go up to bring inflation down. Manufacturing consent by repeating “truth”.
Behavioral economics runs the country. Politicians prefer behaviors like fealty to politically correct traditions. They are protecting the net worth class based system that keeps them from growing potatoes and determines which families thrive or die.
Pretending he is championing the little guy, that he/twitter/everyone is somehow being repressed and they/he is fighting against it. His recent tweet on how 'activists' are the cause of twitters recent revenue drop for example.
Even with the blue check marks, he is framing it as it being open to all and the little guy taking the power back, all you have to do is pay him $8 a month for it. Viva la revolution indeed!
It feels like social engineering to me and the same game that has been played very successfully in division politics.