It's nothing like that. We're just trying to have an internet forum that manages to stay slightly more interesting than internet mean. Or, if you like, that doesn't burn itself to a crisp and turn into scorched earth. It is rather a modest goal. I think there is a place for such a website, and I believe most HN readers do too.
Which was previously the submitted url on this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362528 (Reddit appears to have briefly removed the post, so then the HN submission was updated). So, dupe & merge?
All: please stick to thoughtful, substantive discussion. You may not owe you-know-whom better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
If you don't have a thoughtful, substantive comment to add, not commenting is also a good option. There are quite a few interesting submissions to talk about.
In the context of what Elon has done, the only real discussion should be condemnation. If that leads to Elon fans feeling embattled, well, they should get better role models to look up to.
So, it utterly fails? A good part of the community still seems to be stuck in 2017 where Elon could do no wrong.
Turns out a lot of not just wrong, but malice could be done in 9 years. And worse yet, incompetent malice. I don't know why that has to be a political statement these days, but thems the brakes here.
Is it politics or ideology to recognize the flawed character of someone? How cultish his following is? His erratic behavior, the damage that he's doing?
Some people will cry "politics" just to take the voice away from those who dare to question their beloved celebrities.
That's excellent modbait, but of course what you say is the opposite of what we approve.
It's is a complex and hard question, but the principles we apply to it have been around for a long time and are consistent with the site guidelines. If they weren't, we'd change the latter.
I've explained all of this many times. If you, or anyone, would like to know how we approach the question, you could start here:
Yup, since around 2016 HN and other tech spaces got infested with people who cannot separate their political ideology from technical discussions.
When it comes to FOSS they claim that FOSS has always been political to justify the politicization of everything they touch.
Things used to be much better when the people adhered to the age-old wisdom "Keep politics and religion out of the office" and carried this attitude to neutral spaces online.
In part, some of us got into tech because it was one of the places where meritocracy ruled and you could get away from those who thrive by overwhelming others with BS.
Being “apolitical” is a luxury of the privileged, especially in turbulent times.
True tests of courage, morals, and ethics are occurring more and more every day now, especially in the tech industry that is so closely intertwined with the regimes across the world who seek to cause great harm to those who do not look like, speak like, or believe in the same things as them.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" - there’s your quote for political apathy.
I'm ex-Tesla (Energy) and I'm shocked at how a lot of my former colleagues are still there. Their morals and ethics must really be for sale to have stayed, shame.
Many wouldn't, but some people share his values, and given the compensation, it makes saying "no" much harder. Money may not be the most important thing in life, but it does make them extremely easier to live.
Get down to A&E quick, you've clearly drunk a potentially fatal amount of Elon KoolAid.
Musk is a buffoon. Clever? yes by all accounts, genius? Hardly. He's had luck, made good judgments mostly offsetting the bad ones. Most of all he has enough money to power through errors that would bankrupt thee & me.
Evidently not genius enough to not have his car business and global image fail. Genius he might be, but he's only entrenching his position in a way not dissimilar to cults: by alienating a lot of people you can get loyalty from a selected few. If that's the kind of power he wants, sure, he's a genius. But a good businessman is something else.
Let's assume that you are correct. How is that relevant to how good he is as an employer? There are lots of people in history who were very significant and perhaps geniuses in some way that I wouldn't want to work for in a billion years.
We had cabinet members for this administration call Trump a nazi months prior to the nomination. People give up all kinds of morals for financial gain. That was always true, but it's become outright blatant this past decade.
Tastes differ, of course, but a comment consisting of nothing more than "I wouldn't give $so-and-so a dime even if $such-and-such was $this-or-that" definitely counts as unsubstantive by the usual standard here.
This is not a fully formed thought, so take it with a grain of salt:
Keeping politics off of here is a good idea.
Some things aren't really politics, but morals. Like, a discussion of different tax schemes or how much environmental regulations accomplish what they set out to do or something is 'politics'. Lamenting that there is "no homeland for white people" is... something else.
It's probably still not likely to have good outcomes as a subject of discussion here, but it's also something the tech industry needs to wrestle with somewhere, somehow.
My experience of the tech world was that it went from being a collection of oddballs, geeks, nerds and maybe kind of naive politically to mainstreaming some really evil shit.
I think this will come back to bite the industry, and depending on how angry the people with pitchforks and torches are, could end up hurting more than just the bad actors.
None of these guys literally has the blood of millions of people on their hands.
Elon’s gutting of USAID (and you can argue they would have done it anyways but he chose to be the executioner) will kill millions of people every year who otherwise would not have died.
Not only will I never give him a dime, I want him prosecuted and deported.
Moral grandstanding on the account of his political views and the fact that he does Nazi salutes on stage, on TV, for the world to see… might have something to do with it.
You've been a good HN user for many years, but lately your comment history has swerved towards ideological battle generally, and unsubstantive flamebait like this post. Can you please swerve back? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
* gave a Nazi Sigg Heil salute (twice) at a political even, on video. Famously.
* has consistently supported a German political party that re-uses Nazi slogans, minimizes or outright denies the Holocaust, minimizes the criminality of the SS
* frequently and consistently upvotes posts on X echoing white supremacist and Nazi ideology on his social media site
* owns the most popular site for neo-Nazis
To say "is not backed up by any kind of connection to reality" is actually verifiably false. I can't say anything about the other words, but there is evidence for miles that he is sympathetic to Nazi ideology.
And this is directly relevant here. It can't be ignored when you are talking about his business, or you have an elephant in the room. His personal flaws and meglomaniacal executive style are a package deal.
Okay, so what you're saying is that you don't have an argument to back up your opinion and just ignore the other arguments because they could endanger your opinion
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/27/nx-s1-5276084/elon-musk-germa... is where Musk says, "Frankly too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that. Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their parents, their great-grandparents." - referring the Holocaust, just 80 years ago, in which 13 million people were systematically rounded up, placed in concentration campls, and mass murdered by the government, including 6 million Jewish people.
According to data provided by the research company Memetica to The New York Times, in the past month, Elon Musk's platform featured 46,000 posts with the hashtag #HitlerWasRight, compared to an average of less than 5,000 posts per month in previous months (an increase of 820%). Posts with the hashtags #DeathtotheJews or #DeathtoJews appeared 51,000 times in the last month, marking a surge of 2,450%.
This is the guy claiming to try to make a trustworthy foundational model. There are deeper reasons for Grok's market share problems than the founding team or coding capability. You can't talk about this event and ignore it. He's trying to take Space X public and it's only going to get worse. His personal brand is dragging down his companies, as far as I can tell Tesla has lost 25-50% of their EV market share in Europe in the past 2 years? The problem is not just BYD.
He is not wrong here dang and you are keen to scold one side of the bar more than the other in the last few months. This thread is a good example there wasn't even anything in the comments and it got a sticky real quick.
Not true in general on HN about one side only; it happens to all sides imho. But if you wanted to measure, you would have to normalize by the total number of occurrences on each side, and there is a lot of passive aggressive wording so the measurement would be easy to do badly.
To the extent that discussion of discussion is considered boring, perhaps this will get shut down too, but I think it was important to counter your claim.
The grandparent comment is from someone that has been on this site almost since the beginning. Far longer than you. They might have insights about the community that you do not.
Integrity means understanding when your community if falling into the snares of its own rules. What's the point of formal, nuanced discussion if it's used to empower hate?
I agree. For whatever reason, whether it is a change in community sentiment or something else, I get downvotes talking about this. I can't think of a more useless thing to care about. Even if I cared, I couldn't think of a better way to spend accrued social capital.
The hold that scumbags - influencers, political operatives, narcissists with Messiah complexes - have taken over young men, particularly those inclined to go into the software field, is alarming.
Various former founding members of PayPal, leaders of the companies they've founded subsequently, member of A16Z and some opportunists and hangers on to these wealthier individuals who are beneath the dignity of mentioning separately - they have lost their moral and ethical moorings in the course of accumulating massive wealth and they are corrupting others in doing it.
Even modest startup incubators are be obsequious to the wealth and power of these people in the field and decided that money is more important than morality. Or at the very least there is no pretense of it now.
I'm not using surprised by the moderation direction here (formality above all). But stubs tend to be rare and I've never seen a stub develop over 2 top level comments. Even the most blatantly political posts don't get such treatment (or it takes a long time do so).
I'm sure it's common for dead flagged posts, but it seems this story was too significant to pull over that smoke screen this time.
We're sadly well past friends of friends of friends coming in. At some point the only thing you can do as a non-bartender is to simply leave and never come back.
I don't want to say we're at that point just yet. But it's something that's been gnawing at me for a while now. I've certainly been disillusioned of this being a progressive tech hub interested in bettering humanity.
It’s so funny to me how much ire Elon draws from the HN crowd. HN in general is a very negative place, but it’s amplified to truly remarkable levels of hysteria when discussing Elon.
Amongst my cadre of mostly founder friends Elon is deeply admired. I’d you have ever tried building something new truly by yourself then you know it is capital H Hard. Getting your teeth kicked in by investors and customers and this bizarre breed of self-righteous people that gain purpose from poking you with a stick.
It’s never clear if a new venture will succeed, but the glee I see here for a stumble is pretty disappointing.
So you deeply admire a man who threw a temper-tantrum when his giant box designed by a bunch of people with no experience in anything underwater or rescue, much less underwater rescue - and was deemed unusable to rescue people from an underwater cave with passages so small divers had to remove their gear and push it ahead of them? And repeatedly, directly, said the lead rescuer was a pedophile?
You deeply admire a man so unable to restrain his ego and temper that much of his production team at Tesla quit, some right to his face, because they couldn't meet his nearly impossible goal of extreme levels of automation on the Model 3 production line? Which, if all else is ignored, cost Tesla billions in delays because of his demands?
You deeply admire a many who is vehemently racist and misogynistic?
You deeply admire a man who latches onto just about any conspiracy theory?
You deeply admire a man who is so desperate for attention he unblocks himself from Twitter users' accounts?
You deeply admire a man whose companies were under investigation by nearly every federal enforcement agency there is?
You deeply admire a man who has failed to meet the vast majority of his own publicly stated benchmarks?
And who engages in PT Barnum levels of bullshit, like having "AI robots" that are actually just robots piloted by unemployed actors?
The man is a pathological liar who has failed upward not because of some sort of unique talent or skill, but because he's extremely abusive and willing to break any regulation or law he sees as inconvenient.
reply