Is Elon Musk Nuts?
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Thursday, September 3, 2026 02:05
VIEWED: 37827
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SpaceX Tender Offer Is Said to Value Company at $140 Billion
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-13/spacex-tender-offer
-is-said-to-value-company-at-140-billion-lblj2e1f
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Since the launch of the so-called “Twitter Files” — Elon Musk’s self-styled exposé of the alleged excesses of the “woke” managers of Twitter before he bought it — there’s been a lively debate over what exactly Musk is trying to accomplish.
His statements clearly indicate that he sees himself as being engaged in some kind of culture war — “The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters,” as he tweeted on Monday morning. But what does the highly public censure of Twitter’s previous management team have to do with fighting the “woke mind virus”?
To understand how Musk sees the connection, it’s helpful to look at a recent tweet from Antonio García Martínez, a writer who’s very plugged into the world of right-leaning Silicon Valley founders. García Martínez describes a project that looks something like reverse class warfare: the revenge of the capitalist class against uppity woke managers at their companies.
“What Elon is doing is a revolt by entrepreneurial capital against the professional-managerial class regime that otherwise everywhere dominates (including and especially large tech companies),” García Martínez writes.
On the face of it, this seems absurd: Why would billionaires who own entire companies need to “revolt” against anything, let alone their own employees? To explain, García Martínez cites a book by conservative political theorist James Burnham: The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World.
Published in 1941, Burnham’s book predicted that capitalism had reached a terminal stage; the capitalist class’s power would soon decline, giving way to the rise of the “managerial class” — people who direct industry and the complex operations of the state. His examples of this new state were Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, which Burnham believed to be rooted in a more efficient economic model than liberal capitalism. For this reason, he predicted a Nazi victory in World War II was all but inevitable.
Burnham’s predictions were wildly wrong, in ways that should cast significant doubt on the viability of his entire theory of “the managerial revolution.” But his conceptualization of an unaccountable managerial class has nonetheless been extremely influential in the right-leaning tech world and in the broader conservative intellectual firmament.
Marc Andreessen, a leading tech venture capitalist, called Burnham’s work “the best explanation for the current structure of our society and politics.” Julius Krein, a leading conservative policy intellectual, wrote that Burnham was “enjoying something of a revival” because “David Brooks, Ross Douthat, and Matthew Continetti, among others, have recently pointed to his work as essential to understanding the current political moment.”
So, while Burnham’s work got some big things wrong, it’s still worth taking seriously. In many ways, he’s the progenitor of the right’s current cultural obsessions with so-called “woke managers” — and the godfather of the approach to politics that Musk has spent $44 billion advancing.
More at https://www.vox.com/23505311/elon-musk-twitter-managerial-woke-james-b
urnham
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Twitter Suspends @ElonJet, Even Though Elon Musk Said He Wouldn't Ban It
“My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, [@ElonJet] even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” Musk tweeted on Nov. 7.
That commitment didn’t last long.
The incident underscores how quickly Twitter’s new owner can change his mind when it comes to content moderation. In late October, for example, Musk said Twitter would only unban accounts after the company established a content moderation council. But in November, Musk reinstated former President Trump’s account after polling Twitter users about what he should do.
This past week, Musk also abruptly dissolved a Trust and Safety Council that Twitter had originally established in 2016.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/twitter-suspends-at-elonjet-even-though-elo
n-musk-said-he-wouldnt-ban-it
Elon’s jet: A drama in three or four acts
Much weirdness is detailed at https://jabberwocking.com/elons-jet-a-drama-in-three-acts/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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I don't think there's much question that Elon Musk's turn to the dark side started with his annoyance over wokeism at his Bay Area Tesla plant. But in reality it was never about wokeism except in his own mind. He was mostly annoyed by unions; by the state of California actually expecting him to obey the law; and by employees wanting to put a stop to garden variety racism. At the same time, he developed a cult of admirers who validated his every utterance and egged him on against the critics.
So he moved Tesla's headquarters — i.e., its highest paid executives — to Texas, which doesn't have a personal income tax. Ka-ching! There he stewed and stewed over how California had treated him — him! the richest man in the world! — and eventually fell down the rabbit hole of anti-wokeism. This isn't really surprising. He was primed and ready, and there's no better place in the world to hate California and wokeism than Texas.
He's pretty far down the rabbit hole now, and who knows how it will turn out? Will Twitter be his greatest victory or the final leap down the rabbit hole? At the moment it looks like Musk's resentments have gotten the best of him and he's hurtling down the rabbit hole at maximum warp. Teaming up with the MAGAnauts is incomprehensibly stupid from a business perspective, but I guess he can't help himself anymore. I recommend a nice big prescription of Zoloft for Musk.
https://jabberwocking.com/weird-musings-about-california-and-elon-musk/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Elon Musk is on his way to becoming the next Henry Ford.
That is not a compliment.
In his early entrepreneurial years, Ford was a revolutionary: an innovative genius who transformed the way Americans traveled, worked, and lived. Following in Ford’s footsteps, Musk has become the leading innovator in the 21st-century auto industry.
Elon Musk now seems grimly determined to walk Henry Ford’s path much further than he should, for after his spectacular early success, Ford turned very dark, very quickly. The consequences of his hateful actions continue to poison the world today.
After he had accumulated massive wealth and achieved global fame, Ford allowed bigotry and paranoia to dominate his life. Deeply anti-union, he created a network of company spies who surveilled his employees and tried to control their lives. He also bought a newspaper that disseminated lies and antisemitic conspiracy theories. He followed that up by publishing a series of antisemitic books that were influential among Nazis and other European fascists between the First and Second World Wars.
Ford became a favorite of Adolf Hitler, who kept a photo of the automaker in his office. “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration,” Hitler told the Detroit News in 1931.
The Ford Motor Company eventually began to decline as a result of its owner’s hateful and erratic behavior; it was saved only when Ford was forced to turn over control to his grandson.
Musk seems to be on the same trajectory that led Ford into the abyss. Tesla investigators hired by Musk allegedly hacked an employee’s phone and spied on his messages, and the stridently anti-union Musk reportedly hired a public relations firm to investigate an employee Facebook group just as Tesla workers were trying to unionize.
Earlier this year, SpaceX, another firm that Musk controls, fired employees who had written a letter calling on SpaceX to condemn Musk’s tweets, in which he’d ridiculed reports that SpaceX had settled a sexual harassment complaint against him. After Musk acquired Twitter in October, he began slashing the company’s workforce — including firing employees who had dared to criticize him.
Now, like Ford, Musk is going further, enabling right-wing hate on a massive scale.
After buying a social media platform whose reach far exceeds the newspapers of Henry Ford’s era, Musk is rapidly turning Twitter into his personal plaything, making a series of arbitrary moves to showcase his right-wing political agenda. He has unblocked the Twitter accounts of Donald Trump and other right-wing extremists, and ended enforcement of the site’s Covid misinformation policy. QAnon accounts are now returning to Twitter too.
Musk has also looted the platform’s internal files to further his political goals. Last week, he suspended the Twitter accounts of journalists at The Intercept and elsewhere who have criticized him, and then tried to make demands on the journalists in return for lifting the suspensions. Over the weekend, he briefly suspended the account of Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz after she tried to contact him for a story.
“Elon Musk has demonstrated to the entire world in the space of a few weeks that his management of Twitter is a disaster for the right to information,” Reporters Without Borders said in a statement after Musk suspended the reporters’ accounts. Officials from the European Union have also warned that Twitter may face sanctions for failing to live up to the EU’s standards for press freedom.
Musk has embraced Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and in October showed his willingness to become Putin’s de facto messenger to the West by laying out specific pro-Russian terms for a settlement of the war in Ukraine. On Sunday, Musk was photographed at the World Cup in Qatar, standing in what appeared to be a stadium suite with Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
If Henry Ford’s life is any guide, the hate Musk is now unleashing will continue to spread long after he’s gone. A century after it was published, references to Ford’s
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Looks like the Intercept and the Atlantic have just gone crazy.
They look like Alex Jones, if Alex Jones wrote for Legacy Media instead of being a performer.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Rod Hilton @rodhilton@mastodon.social
He talked about electric cars. I don't know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.
Then he talked about rockets. I don't know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.
Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I've ever heard anyone say, so when people say he's a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets.
Dec 24, 2022, 23:32
https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/109572674700288958
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Elon Musk Goes Nuclear: ‘*Every* Social Media Company Is Engaged in Heavy Censorship’ at the ‘Explicit Direction of the Government’ . . . Google ‘Makes Links Disappear’
https://theamericantribune.com/elon-musk-drops-bomb-on-big-tech-claims
-this-woke-company-makes-links-disappear/
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What Elon Musk Is Teaching Us About Billionaires
It’s hard to find much to say about Elon Musk except for this: He was once the richest man in the world and widely hailed as a genius, or at least respected as an innovator, and he found that inadequate to his emotional needs.
How did it happen? Perhaps he found the role of “Thought Leader” too sedate and constricting. To the extent that noblesse oblige still exists among modern-day oligarchs, I suppose it could feel repressive; the Gateses and Buffets of the world perform good manners and good intentions and end up offering a retiring, cultivated blankness.
Or—billionaires being subject to experiential distortions most of us will never know—it may be that he found infinite wealth uninteresting. When you grew up rich already and have only grown richer, maybe it’s appealing to operate in an atmosphere of stringent artificial scarcity. If his pleasure lies not in largesse but in the capitalist jouissance of screwing others, it makes sense that the richest man in the world might seek out situations that would endanger his backers, saddle assets with debt, and justify him nickel-and-diming Twitter users while he strip-mines the company, auctioning off chairs and coffee makers and firing janitorial staff such that employees must bring toilet paper from home. This behavior can perhaps best be understood as playing the game on hard mode—ignoring the ease of keeping one’s sycophants happy by attempting to gain new converts despite constantly taking actions guaranteed to piss almost everyone off. Plenty of stand-up comics like losing the room on purpose just to try to win it back.
Musk is on the record as liking a challenge. He dislikes chess, for instance, for being too egalitarian and insufficiently chaotic: “too simple to be useful in real life: a mere 8 by 8 grid, no fog of war, no technology tree, no random map or spawn position, only 2 players, both sides exact same pieces, etc.” Sure, this declaration was uttered while seeking to downplay the achievements of World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov (who had accused Musk on television of “moral idiocy”; Musk responded by claiming his iPhone could play better chess than Kasparov).
What is clear is that being bound by rules does not read as fun to Elon Musk. Making up rules, though, and arbitrarily enforcing them? That seems to be another story. Musk in his professional capacity appears to have enjoyed (for example) demanding that employees who work from home return to the office immediately—and sleep at work—only to stop paying rent and shut a number of offices down, such that employees (like those in Seattle) are now forced to work from home. There is joy in this, too—in using your power to make others do humiliating things while refusing to abide by any constraints yourself. Musk isn’t bothering to honor rental agreements or employment contracts. He’s looking for ways to avoid paying severance that is owed. He wants to withhold payments from companies he’s in business with until they renegotiate. The model is familiar, Trumpian: No demand others make on you is legitimate, and no demand you make of others is anything less than fair.
But the thing I can’t stop thinking about is that all this could have been achieved with relative privacy. That’s been his way up until now, anyway; Musk has a long, long record of being a terrible employer, but you might not have heard much about it until recently. Because now, Musk wants attention. He has rebranded as an extremely public troll. That is noteworthy.
The public move is what makes speculating about a billionaire’s motives, however dreary the exercise, worth doing. Because billionaires are usually private, it is more than a little disorienting to watch one dispense with all that and behave with absolutely no constraints on his conduct. Forget playing the game on “hard” mode. What’s clear is that Musk is simply playing. This is all a game to him—and he wants his obviously despotic conduct (which affects the lives of real people in his employ) to be celebrated. He wants
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LOL @ Slate.
Nobody there is able to learn anything, so no... Nobody cares what they think that somebody is teaching them.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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