To me, it's pretty funny. It's like we're being told "hey, don't worry, this is the world's smartest guy, and he's going to, in a heartbeat, examine every dollar of spending and tell us what to cut. And oh yeah, he didn't anticipate that Tesla might be hurt by his actions."
And it is not even the intent of his actions, it is the haphazard, chainsaw slash-&-burn, "move fast and break things" way he is doing them.
The same thing was done by Al Gore in the 1990s, cutting 250,000 federal jobs, eliminating 100+ programs, and consolidating over 800 agencies [0], all without creating these kinds of programs — specifically because Gore CONSIDERED all the issues and players and worked with congress to get it all done in a rational, and more importantly effective way. And that effort is respected decades later.
In Musk was using a similar approach, he'd earn respect, which indicates he is not making changes for efficiency for the government or people, but to slash-&-burn for his specific goals, e.g., gutting regulators requiring him to behave responsibly in his businesses.
I think Twitter is partly responsible for destroying his mind, with the rest of the job being done by drugs.
It's an inherently toxic format. It promotes incoherent, contradiction-ridden, emotionally-driven, short-attention-span meme-think.
IMHO Bluesky is no better, which is why I'm not there. It's the same format, an incoherent soup of sound bites competing to emotionally trigger you into amplifying them. This format is the kind of thing a mad scientist would design with the explicit goal of rotting the human mind.
The good thing about books and longer-form works... even things as long as Reddit and HN comments... is that they can encapsulate complete thoughts that are connected to other thoughts. Building systems of thinking is how humans reason coherently about the world. Meme soup reduces us to some kind of animal level of grunts and short-horizon reactions but with language. It's gross.
I've been calling "social" media companies in general "the tobacco companies of the mind" for years.
I get where you're coming from (and I've rolled my eyes at the "video games cause violence" line of reasoning myself).
However, there is much wisdom in McLuhan's "we become what we behold" -- and consuming too much "social media" turns one into a performative puppet. Twitter is the distilled version of this (Jaron Lanier called it "Twitter Poisoning").
If Elon Husk huffing Twitter 24/7 while owning Twitter isn't a case of "getting high on your own supply", then I don't know what is.
I strongly agree with this argument. Both sides are equally guilty of fueling a culture of baseless accusations. While it's a broader issue across the Western world, it's especially pronounced in the U.S. It's reached a point where words have lost their weight and meaning.
So people joined blue sky because of an algorithm? My point is that the content on these various platforms are low quality and fuel the fire and has ultimately created low quality arguments and ideas.
Saying “both sides” is free PR for the worst side. They’ve never been close since the turn of the century when the right-wing reaction to 9/11 included people rationalizing vile smears against their political opponents and it’s just become more and more unbalanced now, especially when you consider the power disparity.
Was just pointing out a general issue, not taking sides. Can we stick to the topic—rage-bait memes on Twitter and Bluesky—and leave politics out of it for now? It’s an awful drag especially when we get into these dull statements “the other side is worse!!!”
He's definitely gone a bit wackier sounding since buying twitter. His idea of free speech is anything goes with the idea it leads to truth, but it allows people to post any old made up nonsense which seems to lead to weirdness.
I think the case with Elon Musk was skill issue than toxicity, like how pre-TV person would find modern cable TV infomercials irresistible.
Are infomercials toxic? maybe? Is banning them useful? maybe - can you find them addictive, as a post-TV individual? I can't, and I can't get schezophrenic like those perpetually enraged Twitter users, either.
I think it's just that those people, including Musk, didn't have the new form or literacy, a stronger grounding to the reality, required to be online. Twitter/Bluesky architecture itself, IMO, is about 10^2-5 less toxic than anything before it.
I'm not using it for the same reason. It tailors the content to trigger emotional reactions-usually negative ones. I'd often leave X feeling like people are just evil, idiotic creatures. That's not healthy. Kinda ironic that the so-called prodigy of our generation is letting himself get manipulated by his own platform's algorithm-promoting garbage to himself just to better manipulate others.
You don't get lucky building both Tesla and SpaceX. Bezos spent the same amount of time and money on a rocket company and they haven't got far. Elon does have something going, it's just unlikely the competence carries over to national and international politics.
The guy is clearly very skilled at identifying opportunities and putting together the best team to execute on them. Probably better than any other human alive today.
People may not like the guy for whatever reason, but saying he isn’t talented is absurd.
I have a feeling that if Einstein, Newton, Leonardo da Vinci, Churchill or really any of the great historical figures had access to Twitter, there legacies (or lack thereof) would be very different today.
Churchill was known to be very problematic and his career outside of the war wasn't exactly stellar as he had some dubious opinions: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29701767
I don't know much about da Vinci, though he designed machines for war and he must have performed a lot of macabre work on cadavers for his research into anatomy (not that studying anatomy is a bad thing).
I don't think it is his DOGE antics that are affecting the european sales though, I think it was the Nazi salute. That went down very badly this side of the Atlantic.
The Nazi salutes, the repeated commentary on individual European countries politics, his explicit support of far right parties in various European countries (at the time) upcoming elections. The related spread of misinformation at best and disinformation at worst via his x account regarding individuals in Europe he opposed, and so on and so forth.
I get you. It's still amusing to see the increasingly creative ways his fanboys come up with to cope. In the end, it all turns into blind belief in him, just because they see him as part of their tribe. Just another reminder that deep down, we're still just a bunch of unga bunga monkeys.
