Infested! » « Believe the evidence, ignore the cranks

What “myth of the tech genius”?

Was there ever such a myth? I guess it’s been shattered now, since Musk’s battles with Twitter have forced him to reveal the contents of his cell phone. It’s a mess of banality and unwarranted confidence and egotism.

What is so illuminating about the Musk messages is just how unimpressive, unimaginative, and sycophantic the powerful men in Musk’s contacts appear to be. Whoever said there are no bad ideas in brainstorming never had access to Elon Musk’s phone.

In no time, the texts were the central subject of discussion among tech workers and watchers. “The dominant reaction from all the threads I’m in is Everyone looks fucking dumb,” one former social-media executive, whom I’ve granted anonymity because they have relationships with many of the people in Musk’s texts, told me. “It’s been a general Is this really how business is done? There’s no real strategic thought or analysis. It’s just emotional and done without any real care for consequence.”

You might be wondering who has the privilege of chatting to Elon Musk. It’s a gang of rich idiots.

Appearing in the document is, I suppose, a perverse kind of status symbol (some people I spoke with in tech and media circles copped to searching through it for their own names). And what is immediately apparent upon reading the messages is that many of the same people the media couldn’t stop talking about this year were also the ones inserting themselves into Musk’s texts. There’s Joe Rogan; William MacAskill, the effective altruist, getting in touch on behalf of the crypto billionaire and Democratic donor Sam Bankman-Fried; Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer (and the subject of a recent, unflattering profile); Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist, NIMBY, and prolific blocker on Twitter; Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who was recently revealed to have joined a November 2020 call about contesting Donald Trump’s election loss; and, of course, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO. Musk, arguably the most covered and exhausting of them all, has an inbox that doubles as a power ranking of semi- to fully polarizing people who have been in the news the past year.

Few of the men in Musk’s phone consider themselves his equal. Many of the messages come off as fawning, although they’re possibly more opportunistic than earnest. Whatever the case, the intentions are unmistakable: Musk is perceived to have power, and these pillars of the tech industry want to be close to it. “I love your ‘Twitter algorithms should be open source’ tweet,” Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, said, before suggesting that he was going to mention the idea to members of Congress at an upcoming GOP policy retreat. Antonio Gracias, the CEO of Valor Partners, cheered on the same tweet, telling the billionaire, “I am 100% with you Elon. To the mattresses no matter what.”

Lonsdale is also one of the money men behind the University of Austin. Don’t you just love his casual assumption that he gets to talk to members of Congress, and they’ll listen? I don’t have that privilege. You probably don’t, either. Money is the only factor that gives you access.

Infested! » « Believe the evidence, ignore the cranks

Comments

  1. StevoR says

    Yup. Musk is an utter douchebag.

    But.

    Would SpaceX and Tesla have happened without him? Or been better without him?

    Serious question. I do not know the answer to that. I don’t know that anyone does.

  6. Pierce R. Butler says

    … a power ranking of semi- to fully polarizing people who have been in the news the past year.

    What did Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, and the Trump™s have to say about Musk buying TwitCorp?

  7. says

    Would SpaceX and Tesla have happened without him? Or been better without him?

    What makes you think they wouldn’t have? Stop listening to all the hype and carney-barker BS, and it’s pretty obvious that Musk is not the only person ever to think about private space ventures or electric cars.

  8. microraptor says

    Tesla was doing just fine before he bought the company and forced the founders out so that he could claim that he was the one who started it.

  9. hillaryrettig1 says

    What an incredible self-own.

    We are currently rewatching Silicon Valley, and it is hysterical and totally on point. (The producer is Mike Judge, who did Beavis & Butthead: he actually worked in Silicon Valley for a few months before fleeing.) As someone who had a long career in tech journalism, I know that so many of these bros were just clever and lucky. But in their own mind, they’re geniuses. (To be clear, I actually did meet some geniuses, but they tended to be humbler.)

  10. says

    I’m a fan of EV’s. However, ever since I became aware of him, the photo you used is VERY appropriate. Musk is always blowing smoke! (usually choking toxic smoke, too!)
    I agree heartily with @8 microraptor

  11. says

    replying to @7 Raging Bee
    As a retired aerospace engineer, I have studied EV’s for decades and have the documentation that shows that practical EV’s have been around since the 19th Century. There have been many small companies that put out thousands of excellent EV’s. Even toyota had the RAV4 EV and GM the EV-1. The only real thing that Musk contributed to the success of tesla and EV’s was MONEY!

  12. twoangstroms says

    Also among the people listed as contact/people relevant for information in the legal documents? Richard Spencer. THAT one? Who knows?

  13. seachange says

    Money is important in that you have to have massive amounts of input capital to manufacture something like a car, and you have to keep on doing it. If a car is suddenly less popular, you’re screwed because of all the materials and labor, you can’t undo that. Knowing how to continue to get financed is the thing!

    As I mentioned when PZ was talking about Thiel’s latest idiot: this is correct. Alas. These are the kinds of people you need to have friends in order to do the things that they want. As I mentioned last time PZ was talking about what a worthless human being Elon is, dude knows just enough to keep on going. This results in his company ‘lookin all purdy’ to exactly these kinds of dickhead, who control the markets, who are the tails that wag the banks. They tell their subordinates ‘izz kool’ and they tell theirs ‘izz kool’ etc. and by the time it gets to the average investor certain companies seem inevitable.

    Nobody wants to argue with money.

  14. hemidactylus says

    Twitter is really starting to tick me off with that intrusive box that forces you to join before you can scroll more or read any more tweets. I noticed it obnoxiously when trying to see updates from local Emergency Management officials during a frickin’ unfolding hurricane event (Ian). If I’m trying to find out possible critical information during a disaster and all Twitter cares about is expanding its userbase…WTF? So much for readily available public information. All Facebook does on such publicly facing pages is perhaps load your browser full of hard to eliminate long lasting trackers. Youtube just interrupts with annoying time consuming ads.

    Would Musk eliminate that signup box hindrance or make it even worse somehow? I’m not getting an account just to browse tweets.

  16. StevoR says

    So I googled and ..

    Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Tesla, recently posted a picture of Hitler on his social media. The mogul used the picture to compare the murderous dictator to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

    Musk, who claims solidarity with the Canadian truckers currently protesting COVID-19 protection measures at the border, made the controversial Hitler tweet on Tuesday. A few days later, the tweet was still visible on his feed.

    The backlash against his antisemitic Hitler tweet was swift and forceful. … (snip) .. Musk, who eventually took down the Hitler tweet without explanation, did share another tweet referencing the original post. The second tweet encouraged his supporters to read a book about the economics of Germany during the Holocaust under Hitler.

    Source : https://theblackwallsttimes.com/2022/02/21/elon-musk-draws-backlash-after-posting-hitler-meme-on-twitter/

    Plus see :

    Tesla CEO Elon Musk once again reminded everyone why it’s important not to trust a billionaire populist. This week Musk, who loves to post nonsense on Twitter, embraced the weeks-long Canadian trucker antivaccination protest with his usual clumsy belligerence. He tweeted an image of Adolf Hitler that said, “Stop comparing me to Justin Trudeau. I had a budget.”

    Source : https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/elon-musk-s-hitler-tweet-highlights-right-wing-faux-populism-ncna1289377

    How did we not hear abpout this before? Did not know & my respect for Musk has just fallen a lot..

    Also see :

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Politics

    Seems he’s getting worse..

  17. Dunc says

    “I love your ‘Twitter algorithms should be open source’ tweet,” Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, said

    Wow. That’s some heavy-duty, industrial-grade irony there.

  18. leerudolph says

    hemidactylus@14: “Twitter is really starting to tick me off with that intrusive box that forces you to join before you can scroll more or read any more tweets.”

    I recently discovered (don’t know if it’s a new phenomenon; don’t know if it will go away) that, when Twitter makes the offer “See more Tweets from [name]” (in a box floating over the tweets) and prompts me to “Log In”, when I click on “Log In” and get in reply a new floating box with “Sign in to Twitter” in the middle of it, simply clicking instead on the X in the upper left corner will clear away that box and leave me free to keep on scrolling and reading. (Whether this works with every Twitter feed I don’t know, but so far it’s worked for all the ones I’ve tried it on. For now.)

  19. says

    He tweeted an image of Adolf Hitler that said, “Stop comparing me to Justin Trudeau. I had a budget.”

    The most charitable response I can muster to that is: What the AF does that even mean?

  20. John Morales says

    Raging Bee, an insinuation that Hitler would be appalled that he was being compared to that loser Trudeau who has no budget, is what it means.

  21. Silentbob says

    @ ^

    Juan Ramón, the point is – if one were to make a list of the top 100 things Hitler was known for, “budgeting” would not be on the list. Hence, the quote is a bizarre non sequitur.
    (You get that if you don’t understand something, you can just ask for clarification, right? You don’t have to make a fool of yourself by stating things that are obvious, but irrelevant.)

  22. John Morales says

    Silentbob:

    Hence, the quote is a bizarre non sequitur.

    Those things are called ‘memes’, though not in the sense of the original neologism. They’re generally allusive and often indirect.

    In short, a meme expressing the sentiment that Trudeau is even worse than Hitler.

    You get that if you don’t understand something, you can just ask for clarification, right?

    What is it you imagine I don’t understand?

    You don’t have to make a fool of yourself by stating things that are obvious, but irrelevant.

    Your gibes are akin to being whipped with a length of single-thickness toilet paper.

  23. birgerjohansson says

    Going off on a tangent.
    REAL geniuses win the Nobel Prize.
    Svante Pääbo- who pioneered the tech for extracting very old DNA- has received the Nobel Price for medicine and physiology.
    His dad won the very same prize 1982.

    While Musk is displaying unimpressive robots, people using Pääbo’s methods are finding new human species or mapping prehistoric migrations.

  26. says

    What the AF does that even mean?

    It means (in the minds of the idiots promoting it) that Trudeau is an authoritarian fascist meanie (because he invoked the Emergencies Act to cut off funding for the protesting truckers) but he’s worse than Hitler because he didn’t deliver a budget for Parliament two years running.

    Also, your misusing “AF”.

    if one were to make a list of the top 100 things Hitler was known for, “budgeting” would not be on the list. Hence, the quote is a bizarre non sequitur.

    So profoundly stupid people may think.

    You get that if you don’t understand something, you can just ask for clarification, right? You don’t have to make a fool of yourself by stating things that are obvious, but irrelevant.

    Such pure projection is a thing to behold.

  29. says

    Edit #3: “I I” -> “I”

    (What the heck is going on here? I’m under the weather but this is getting ridiculous. Time for me to turn off the internet.)