Elon Musk

what kind of impreza do you have?

are there awd hyundai kias

Can someone jack EV Kias as easily as their gas-driven brethren? Can EVs get carjacked, or do they have, like, some biometric killswitch?

xp 2014 base model. almost 200,000 thousand miles and very banged up from years of street parking.

if it's a manual i'm sure you can sell it to some high school kid

that Atlantic article is paywalled but yeah there's something to be said about dumb celebrities desperate for validation and how easy it is for them to fall into the waiting arms of Nazis. like I don't think it's so much that he's always had these views but he's an idiot who really wants to be liked and sound smart and that's kind of hard to do on the left when you don't actually know anything (and also run multiple union-busting businesses with famously terrible working conditions), but remarkably easy to do on the right, and that's how you basically wind up siding with a fascist belief system that you probably never really seriously thought about. you can see how this would happen to say the Dilbert guy but having it happen to the richest guy on Earth is pretty remarkable

https://archive.ph/tGeFB

I think it is also that he’s always had these beliefs, to be clear

I haven’t really commented on it because I feel like this is exactly what he has been for years; I’m not even like “oh he said the quiet part out loud” because he is fundamentally incapable of being quiet.

he comes from a family that moved to south africa because they liked apartheid, and he segregates his factories. i don't see any reason to give him the benefit of the doubt here, even if he's not on record with the "hitler was right" stuff until now.

i agree. frogbs is being too charitable. he grew up under apartheid and he likes the idea of a system like that.

I guess what I'm saying is I don't think Elon himself is a guy who necessarily has developed serious political views because he seems to only view the world through the lens of himself. he'll say whatever he has to to make people think he's edgy and smart and the ultimate memelord. I realize this is giving him way too much credit for no reason but I really do believe if not for the armies of blue checks going "so true!" on everything he posts he would not be doing this

yeah saw someone theorize that the fall of apartheid was a formative and traumatic event in musks life and that the parallels with blm and me too really triggered him provoking him to be more vocal about his awful beliefs, which idk if its true but it really does all line up

he grew up in south africa and then spent ten years working closely with peter thiel. the idea that he doesn't have sincerely held political beliefs seems dubious at best. i can see how recent events would encourage him to be more open about those beliefs, or make them feel more on-topic.

I believe he bought Twitter specifically to do this. His entire argument was “free speech is being stifled, let everyone talk” and made it a priority to let u fettered racists back onto the platform. If there’s an echo chamber, it’s because it was his vision to create it. You’re looking at a symptom/attribute and treating it as a side-effect.

if that's in response to the last sentence of my post, that's fair.

yeah otm, also due to solipsism he thought the new racist twitter would be popular and profitable xp

“u fettered” should have been “unfettered”, I do not believe the other posters here are racists chained to their posting devices *insert PROVE ME WRONG dude here*

Also, that was a response to frogbs, I don’t think we are in fundamental disagreement

well look it's def true that he's almost certainly always been a rightwing shithead but I also think its true he wants to be a known and important figure in more mainstream/leftwing pop culture, from which he's been pretty roundly rejected. which I think caused him to seek that sort of validation on the right. I mean to me it looked like he was mostly unbanning those guys because he wanted them to like him. but idk yall are probably right that he's always been this way just a lot less public about it. by the way I'm not using "he just wants racists to love him" as an argument I just mean he's an extraordinarily needy guy which you don't see from insanely rich dudes who can singlehandedly influence US policy

I don't think there's any contradiction between Musk's racism and reactionary politics being both shallowly considered and deeply felt.

I don't think he's spent much time thinking about any of it, but by god he knows the truth when he retweets it.

well... for people seeking a new electric car, there are now solid alternatives to Tesla, many of them

It'll be interesting to see how his bullshit affects car sales

I don't think there's any contradiction between Musk's racism and reactionary politics being both shallowly considered and deeply felt.

I guess no but he definitely seems like a guy who can oscillate between Mitt Romney and Adolf Hitler depending on who he's talking to, because he is nothing but a dumb reply guy, his whole life is memes, he never has an original thought on his own. so yeah the fact that he made himself the eternal main character of Twitter is really gonna amp this shit way up

thank you to the failing new york times for heeding my call for more prominent coverage of this https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/16/technology/elon-musk-endorses-antisemitic-post-ibm.html

IBM doesn’t need any more association with Nazis than it already has certainly

Not to perpetually beat the dead Reddit horse but I think that site was also formative of Musk’s political views (which means likely the YouTube right wing too). He’s said he has spent a lot of time on Reddit, most of his memes apparently came from there and the site is in many ways an alt-right pipeline. Especially if those creeps had some idea who he was there and were specifically targeting him. Of course as he was palling around with Thiel at the same time, Reddit would have just helped him to rationalize his prejudices, to be socialized among the creeps, and to have his biases confirmed — thereby cementing the work Thiel was presumably already doing on him.

Feeling icky for looking at this article but just to make it perfectly clear this is a quote from an article from The D4ily $t0rmer from 2015:

There are many terrific pro-White communities on Reddit, including:
(redacted)
…to name just a few.
These are all great communities that you should certainly consider joining for pro-White links and news. However, for White Nationalists, the really great thing about Reddit is that it provides quite a lot of fertile ground for recruiting young people into the pro-White movement.

Thanks for reproducing racism in order to decry it

Reading the Da1ly St0rm3r but shaking my head in disgust so people know I don’t agree as I frantically paste the content

Agree that stuff doesn't need to be posted to make the point - we don't need to see the racism receipts.

He didn’t need the internet to make him racist. He and thiel have all kinds of creepy hierarchical ideas about human nature.

Who cares why he is an asshole, on one level, but on the other hand, he isn’t a teen who got sucked into 4chan, he is the richest man in the world, and he is using his position to sow hatred in the US

yes, i don't see much point in pathologizing why obscenely wealthy white men happen to have horrible politics

One thing about this reddit connection is that reddit got cleaned up in recent years. So musk probably wants to make X the “new reddit.”

mentioning a white supremacist site you happen to read in order to decry Reddit is a weird flex honestly?

I don’t like social media illiterates upholding a literal right wing extremist-captured disinformation service as their go-to for balanced discussion.

― recovering internet addict/shitposter (viborg), Tuesday, 17 October 2023 02:33 (one month ago) link

lol remember this

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/business/media/elon-musk-politics-twitter.html

Yeah I don’t think “conservative” really captures that recent tweet…

“Why” he thinks like this is probably on interest only to a biographer.

Does seem sometimes like people are giving him the benefit of the doubt by saying he doesn’t actually think like this and is doing a bit because it’s funny or he’s not very bright or it will cause people to admire him.

I think older people assume that the man behind tesla and spacex must be a reasonable person with considered beliefs.

Remember the kids rescued underwater by the diver? An older man I know, a very successful ivy league educated guy, believed elon helped resolve this issue. I told him no, elon wanted to use a submarine and when that didn’t work he baselessly attacked the diver who did rescue the kids as a pedophile. He said no — no way — elon wouldn’t behave in such a weird way.

mentioning a white supremacist site you happen to read in order to decry Reddit is a weird flex honestly?

gyac is referring to this

Nuanced discussions are often lacking in the echo chambers of social media and the 24 hour news cycle. The only place where I've seen nuanced discussions about the topic are on platforms that favor more nuanced discussion, such as 4chan and (yes, believe it or not) St0rmf0ont.

which i'd like some clarification on, because i don't think reading and quote posting from ACTUAL NAZI SITES on ilx is acceptable behaviour tbh

You’re really not gonna let it go huh gyac. I have never regularly read the D.S. but since you seem invested in defending Reddit, or calling me out for criticizing Reddit or whatever, I wanted to make it clear how specific this association with actual literal Nazis is.

Sorry to anyone else that found the language offensive, again I’m all for the mods doing any editing that seems appropriate.

I have zero interest in defending Reddit. I don’t really understand why this is the second recent incident of you mentioning some Neo-Nazi site you read, as though anyone here was interested in the thoughts of their posters.

Sorry Noodle what did you need cleared up there? My point was that Reddit is very specifically linked to S.F. and to /pol/ so the original quote poising it as a home of “nuanced discussion” was farcical imo. I mean yeah maybe nuanced compared to Twitter but that’s really a low bar to hop over. Pretty ridiculous this level of outrage in defense of Reddit when the actual offensive content in that quote was the names of fucking subreddits.

(And to be clear the article I viewed was on the archive not their site.)

////\\\\
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parody ___///// gyac \\\\___

That worked well

i'm not defending Reddit either, i'm asking why anybody would read fascist websites, "regularly" or not, and asking you to think about posting actual racial slurs on this board, for illustrative purposes or otherwise

I could say the same about Reddit. That’s my point and yet whether you’re actively defending it or not, it seems to be given a free pass here.

It's being given such a free pass that we are asking you to stop posting stuff from it.

viborg your argument doesn’t make sense— “this website is a racist cesspool, i shall quote noted racist cesspool site praising it as evidence that former is racist cesspool.”

trust me when i say you didn’t need to quote the DS to get your point across.

mods, plz, delete that awful post.

reddit had the same obnoxious free speech contrarian stance where they allowed subreddit communities to fester for way too long with the defense that their content was banned from the front page. afaik they banned all those communities years ago, but not before people like Musk had proliferated. it’s just a normal internet cesspool at this point and not one that’s a notable shelter for hate speech.

Musk thinking that their decision to oust those communities was bad and that twitter should let people post that garbage? probably something that occurred to him