Elon Musk

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.)

////\\\\
//// \\\\
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

I don’t think reddit and whether it’s good or bad in 2023 is at all relevant to the conversation other than as a historical reference on how not to handle hate speech, and I don’t think we need to cite an actual pro-nazi site to cite something that was broadly written about and documented at the time

now reddit the just the only non seo trap how to site left

jfc I've seen people pick some weird hills to die on in an internet argument, but doubling down on quoting from an actual Nazi site to prove some incomprehensible point really might be a sign that you need to step away from the internet for a few days

redaction made

I have to say that cannonballing into a discussion about how Elon Musk sucks with “LOOK GUYS, THERE’S RACISM ON REDDIT” is making me laugh more than it probably should

i admit that I don't see what the connection is at all

i think the claim is elon musk, a man who grew up in south africa and then spent the first 20 years of his adulthood working closely with extremely political crank businessmen, and is a billionaire who runs like ten businesses (and is CTO of one, reporting into the CEO), gets his politics from lurking on message boards.

His heel turn also probably as much to do when the unfettered hero worship of him by people on left and right stopped and someone dared to ask him why he was interfering with a cave rescue

cool

This is an important and welcome move by @elonmusk. I appreciate this leadership in fighting hate. https://t.co/N1tMHa1M1j

— Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) November 17, 2023

nevertheless

https://i.imgur.com/wW1u9Ue.png

Burning piles of money, to scale.

if i were the conspiratorial sort i would say that owning twitter was a good way of creating an anti-jewish army of american college kids via algorithms and targeted misinformation. but i'm glad i'm not that sort.

don't think there's any college kids on twitter in 2023 tbh