I feel like this is an example of the dangers of surrounding yourself with a monoculture. Maybe Elon was always exactly this way, but he was seemingly previously tempered by the notably distinct moderation policies at Twitter. Once he owned it and stripped that moderation, there's nothing holding the pendulum anymore and he swings pretty far the other direction.
Maybe he was always this way and not public about it, but things changed for the worse right around when his trans daughter came out.
Between that and covid I think he went down a rabbit hole further entrenching things and turned into a MAGA type as that rabbit hole does to those that go down it.
And now he won't even listen when his brother and the chair of the board of Tesla tells him he's hurting the brand.
Edit: just to clarify, "the woke mind virus" is what thinks took his daughter away, and now he is hellbent on destroying it, not realizing it's him who's been infected by hate and bigotry
You might always lean a certain way, but before, he maybe didn't really care about trans people one way or another. As soon as his daughter came out as trans though he becomes faced with a choice.
Some people when they are faced with the choice, even if they might seem like they'd go against their child, don't.
He doubled down unfortunately and made the wrong choice.
He doubled down unfortunately and made the wrong choice.
No, that's not the choice he made. The status quo rewarded Phony Stark for being a right-wing douchebag - long before he even had a daughter . He chose to remain a right-wing douchebag because he was rewarded for it. He simply made the choice the vast majority of the rich either has made or will eventually make.
So once he wouldn't get in trouble for openly being a bigot, he openly became a bigot?
He owes his entire life to apartheid and slavery in all senses that matter. And even when he was everyone's hero and a real life Tony Stark, he threw a temper tantrum when divers chose to rescue children and not stroke his ego. To the point he accused one of the divers of pedophilia, ran an investigation, and used a team of lawyers to protect himself from any consequences.
And why democracy is important as a form of error correction. People can have their opinions, and inevitably we all get things wrong (magnitude of things we get wrong varies a lot). But when someone has a large concentration of power we all have to deal with the fallout from their malfunction. Companies the size and import of Twitter, Facebook, Reddit should be democratically controlled, some kind of cooperative.
Fully agreed. The authoritarian institution of shareholders and CEOs makes large companies prone to arrogance and short-term decision-making, democratic control of these large companies would make the economy much healthier.
I can't tell which is the bigger influence but he has certainly gone down the right wing rabbit hole and also insulated himself from all critique as a billionaire who has everyone he talks to regularly on his payroll or otherwise benefitting from him. A bad mix.
I've noticed that a lot of these people will lean left for a minute, because they hope that it will get them a get out of jail free card for being problematic in specific ways.
They find out quickly that the left doesn't do that. I can support your stance on XYZ while still disliking you and not wanting to do business with you because of ABC.
So then they switch to regressive stances, because those people will cheer you on for being awful.
Same thing happened to Reagan. He created the EPA as an executive agency to avoid Congress creating and empowering an independent entity that the executive wouldn't be able to control. He thought it would get him votes from the left. It did not, and he pretty much immediately stated that he regretted it because lefties didn't buy his bs.
Same thing happened to Reagan. He created the EPA as an executive agency to avoid Congress creating and empowering an independent entity that the executive wouldn't be able to control. He thought it would get him votes from the left. It did not, and he pretty much immediately stated that he regretted it because lefties didn't buy his bs.
Wait, what?
The EPA was created by Nixon in 1970, 10 years before Reagan was elected.
It's an independent government agency, to this day. The administrator is appointed by the executive branch and approved by the Senate, but it's not an official cabinet position nor part of the executive branch (but frequently involved in cabinet meetings).
Reagan tried to dismantle it by appointing Anne Gorsuch, who was very pro-business and anti-"big government". She ended up slashing their budget by 22% and was held in comtempt of Congress for refusing to provide subpoenaed documents explaining why.
And Reagan won reelection in one of the largest landslides in US history in 1984.
There are days I wait for it, but I imagine one of these days the top is going to pop on South Africa and we are going to not like the skeletons we find there.
They got rich the same way rich people everywhere get rich - by exploiting impoverished and disempowered labor to the max. The only difference with the Apartheid-regime (to whom Elon owes his riches) was that they were pretty overt when it came to who it was that got to be the impoverished and disempowered labor.
To be clear... that hasn't really changed all that much in South Africa. But, then again, it hasn't really changed in the US, either.
He didn't get rich from the emerald mine. Its a real thing, but he only made around 400k (in 2021 dollars) on his roughly 200k investment. He didn't own it either.
Any actual riches were something else.
Not to say that 200k is nothing, but it's not the source of any rich level money his father had.