8 ms·

The strongest evidence against Musk was Musk. His own 2017 emails supporting for-profit chats made the "betrayal" narrative very hard to sell.

dzonga 4mo ago
Muskys problem is does things in the moment as a way to increase popularity without thinking that end up bitting him. e.g the twitter thing - forced to buy when he didn't want.
- tahoeskibum 4mo ago
  Did you read the article:"...that his lawsuits had been filed too late."
- Freedom2 4mo ago
  I wonder if a more "hardcore" team, by his words, would have handled this legal case better?
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - rufo 4mo ago
    My understanding is that the case was flimsy enough that no "hardcore" lawyers wanted to represent him. It's not just a matter of money; their record (and, therefore, future earnings) are on the line.
  - mrhottakes 4mo ago
    His case was handled as well as any lawyer could have. He signed the deal and then tried to change his mind. That's not how contracts work, and the legal system and status quo have strong interests in keeping it that way.
  - nkozyra 4mo ago
    A more "hardcore" team will keep telling him he can win on appeals, and bill accordingly.
- mustaphah 4mo ago
  Extreme smartness has its own failure modes
  - tombert 4mo ago
    I'm not convinced he's all that smart. Space datacenters seems like an unbelievably stupid idea to me, and I cannot imagine anyone who is ostensibly surrounded by tech seriously considering it. Well, no one sober anyway.
    - peterfirefly 4mo ago
      It's a lot less dumb if you can drastically reduce the launch costs AND drastically increase the launch mass and size. If the Starship thing works out, he will have achieved that. It's also a lot less dumb if you can make your chips work well at higher temperatures. It's also a lot less dumb if you can space harden your chips better than anybody else can at the moment. This is what the Terafab thing is about (for now). Not about pumping out insane amounts of chips but about doing practical R&D for chips that work better in space: hardening and higher temperatures. Such chips would also be useful for Starlink/Starshield and for Starship itself. Putting something similar to Akamai/Cloudflare up there would work very well with Starlink. If the costs could be made low enough, of course. Will it make any sense whatsoever for AI training? Not unless he manages to scale a whole lot of things drastically, and probably not even then. It might make sense for AI inference in a few years, though. Faster inference responses (via Starlink) might be worth some money.
      - tombert 4mo ago
        > It's a lot less dumb if you can drastically reduce the launch costs AND drastically increase the launch mass and size. If the Starship thing works out, he will have achieved that. No, it's still dumb. No matter how cheap they manage to make SpaceX launches realistically, there's really no situation that a space datacenter makes any sense compared to putting datacenters in, for example, Antarctica. If they built in Antarctica, it would still be cheaper than launching into orbit. You'd have lots of free cold air to potentially cool the computers, and you wouldn't need trained astronauts to fix things when things break. I dont' even think that building a datacenter in Antarctica is a good idea, I'm just saying it's less dumb than launching into space. Even if you make CPUs that are able to work at a hotter temperature, you still have to contend with the fact that space is effectively one giant insulator and these CPUs cannot work at infinitely high temperatures no matter what. Even for something like Akamai space data centers are a dumb idea. Keep in mind, this would be space, where people can't easily get to, so you'd need considerably more physical servers to be installed in order to have fault tolerance. Even if the servers weighed nothing, which they wouldn't, you'd need to power them, and in order to power that many servers you'd need solar arrays considerably larger than the ISS. And what exactly would this buy you? Slightly lower latency for Starlink? With a potentially spotty connection, I'm not even convinced on that; I suspect any latency savings you'd have would be eaten by retries when packages drop. Outside of a neatness factor, I just don't see exactly would be won by doing this compared to just setting up gigantic solar array in the middle of large deserts and building here on earth. You know, the planet we live on, where technicians can go and repair things in datacenters, because servers break all the fucking time, and these technicians don't have to get into a rocket to do that.
- exe34 4mo ago
  To be fair, twitter ended up useful for him when he used it to buy his way into the US government and close down all the departments that were investigating his companies for breaking all sorts of laws.
  - bonesss 4mo ago
    As a business transaction: Twitters acquisition is among the worst deals in human history. As means to buy an election an Presidency: highly efficient use of capital with an undeniable short and long-term ROI.
    - BeetleB 4mo ago
      > Twitters acquisition is among the worst deals in human history. That he won't have to pay for. Shareholders will, as part of the SpaceX IPO.
      - aniviacat 4mo ago
        If shareholders have to pay the debt, then the shares will be less valuable, and Musk (whose wealth is measured in shares) will be less wealthy, no?
        BeetleB 4mo ago
        By a tad. SpaceX's worth is an order of magnitude more than Twitter's debt. I doubt any serious person considering buying shares in SpaceX will spend even a moment worrying about Twitter.
        ben_w 4mo ago
        They probably should. I've seen people concerned a subsidiary's GDPR fine would be calculated on the basis of the parent company's global revenue, and in Musk's case something similar has happened in Brazil where Starlink's assets were frozen and justified in part because of how Musk fails to properly delineate between his businesses.
- outside2344 4mo ago
  And the Trump thing, which cratered his car business
  - shimman 4mo ago
    Yeah but he was able to personally make the call to kill millions of people around the world, he's just going back to his roots.
    - the_doctah 4mo ago
      [flagged]
      - doron 4mo ago
        The results of DOGE A former USAID global health official has cited internal modeling suggesting around 600,000 excess deaths in 2025 alone, roughly two‑thirds among children, due to the collapse of programs for malnutrition, HIV, TB, obstetric care, and child health. https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/ https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund... USAID global health and development funding has been cut by on the order of 80–85%, sharply reducing support for vaccination, TB control, maternal health, and other essential services in many poorer countries. Within CDC, DOGE‑related cuts and mass firings have removed thousands of staff, with specific centers (e.g., National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention) losing over a quarter of their workforce. Short term: more outbreaks like the Bangladesh measles surge, interrupted treatment for chronic and infectious diseases, and increased mortality where programs were heavily donor‑funded. Medium term: degradation of global health infrastructure and human capital (loss of trained staff, data systems, and labs), making it harder to recover even if funding later returns. Long term: slower medical innovation, reduced global surveillance capacity, and entrenched health inequities, as countries and communities with the fewest resources bear the brunt of lost support. https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/07/01/nx-s1-5452513/trump-usaid-foreign-aid-deaths https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/07/01/nx-s1...
      - catlifeonmars 4mo ago
jjordan 4mo ago
There was no decision made on this basis. It was dismissed entirely due to the elapsed statute of limitations.
ls612 4mo ago
He lost the lawsuit on a legal technicality about the statute of limitations not on substantive grounds.

dzonga 4mo ago

Muskys problem is does things in the moment as a way to increase popularity without thinking that end up bitting him. e.g the twitter thing - forced to buy when he didn't want.

tahoeskibum 4mo ago
Did you read the article:"...that his lawsuits had been filed too late."
Freedom2 4mo ago
I wonder if a more "hardcore" team, by his words, would have handled this legal case better?
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- rufo 4mo ago
  My understanding is that the case was flimsy enough that no "hardcore" lawyers wanted to represent him. It's not just a matter of money; their record (and, therefore, future earnings) are on the line.
- mrhottakes 4mo ago
  His case was handled as well as any lawyer could have. He signed the deal and then tried to change his mind. That's not how contracts work, and the legal system and status quo have strong interests in keeping it that way.
- nkozyra 4mo ago
  A more "hardcore" team will keep telling him he can win on appeals, and bill accordingly.
mustaphah 4mo ago
Extreme smartness has its own failure modes
- tombert 4mo ago
  I'm not convinced he's all that smart. Space datacenters seems like an unbelievably stupid idea to me, and I cannot imagine anyone who is ostensibly surrounded by tech seriously considering it. Well, no one sober anyway.
  - peterfirefly 4mo ago
    It's a lot less dumb if you can drastically reduce the launch costs AND drastically increase the launch mass and size. If the Starship thing works out, he will have achieved that. It's also a lot less dumb if you can make your chips work well at higher temperatures. It's also a lot less dumb if you can space harden your chips better than anybody else can at the moment. This is what the Terafab thing is about (for now). Not about pumping out insane amounts of chips but about doing practical R&D for chips that work better in space: hardening and higher temperatures. Such chips would also be useful for Starlink/Starshield and for Starship itself. Putting something similar to Akamai/Cloudflare up there would work very well with Starlink. If the costs could be made low enough, of course. Will it make any sense whatsoever for AI training? Not unless he manages to scale a whole lot of things drastically, and probably not even then. It might make sense for AI inference in a few years, though. Faster inference responses (via Starlink) might be worth some money.
    - tombert 4mo ago
      > It's a lot less dumb if you can drastically reduce the launch costs AND drastically increase the launch mass and size. If the Starship thing works out, he will have achieved that. No, it's still dumb. No matter how cheap they manage to make SpaceX launches realistically, there's really no situation that a space datacenter makes any sense compared to putting datacenters in, for example, Antarctica. If they built in Antarctica, it would still be cheaper than launching into orbit. You'd have lots of free cold air to potentially cool the computers, and you wouldn't need trained astronauts to fix things when things break. I dont' even think that building a datacenter in Antarctica is a good idea, I'm just saying it's less dumb than launching into space. Even if you make CPUs that are able to work at a hotter temperature, you still have to contend with the fact that space is effectively one giant insulator and these CPUs cannot work at infinitely high temperatures no matter what. Even for something like Akamai space data centers are a dumb idea. Keep in mind, this would be space, where people can't easily get to, so you'd need considerably more physical servers to be installed in order to have fault tolerance. Even if the servers weighed nothing, which they wouldn't, you'd need to power them, and in order to power that many servers you'd need solar arrays considerably larger than the ISS. And what exactly would this buy you? Slightly lower latency for Starlink? With a potentially spotty connection, I'm not even convinced on that; I suspect any latency savings you'd have would be eaten by retries when packages drop. Outside of a neatness factor, I just don't see exactly would be won by doing this compared to just setting up gigantic solar array in the middle of large deserts and building here on earth. You know, the planet we live on, where technicians can go and repair things in datacenters, because servers break all the fucking time, and these technicians don't have to get into a rocket to do that.
exe34 4mo ago
To be fair, twitter ended up useful for him when he used it to buy his way into the US government and close down all the departments that were investigating his companies for breaking all sorts of laws.
- bonesss 4mo ago
  As a business transaction: Twitters acquisition is among the worst deals in human history. As means to buy an election an Presidency: highly efficient use of capital with an undeniable short and long-term ROI.
  - BeetleB 4mo ago
    > Twitters acquisition is among the worst deals in human history. That he won't have to pay for. Shareholders will, as part of the SpaceX IPO.
    - aniviacat 4mo ago
      If shareholders have to pay the debt, then the shares will be less valuable, and Musk (whose wealth is measured in shares) will be less wealthy, no?
      - BeetleB 4mo ago
        By a tad. SpaceX's worth is an order of magnitude more than Twitter's debt. I doubt any serious person considering buying shares in SpaceX will spend even a moment worrying about Twitter.
        ben_w 4mo ago
        They probably should. I've seen people concerned a subsidiary's GDPR fine would be calculated on the basis of the parent company's global revenue, and in Musk's case something similar has happened in Brazil where Starlink's assets were frozen and justified in part because of how Musk fails to properly delineate between his businesses.
outside2344 4mo ago
And the Trump thing, which cratered his car business
- shimman 4mo ago
  Yeah but he was able to personally make the call to kill millions of people around the world, he's just going back to his roots.
  - the_doctah 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - doron 4mo ago
      The results of DOGE A former USAID global health official has cited internal modeling suggesting around 600,000 excess deaths in 2025 alone, roughly two‑thirds among children, due to the collapse of programs for malnutrition, HIV, TB, obstetric care, and child health. https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/ https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund... USAID global health and development funding has been cut by on the order of 80–85%, sharply reducing support for vaccination, TB control, maternal health, and other essential services in many poorer countries. Within CDC, DOGE‑related cuts and mass firings have removed thousands of staff, with specific centers (e.g., National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention) losing over a quarter of their workforce. Short term: more outbreaks like the Bangladesh measles surge, interrupted treatment for chronic and infectious diseases, and increased mortality where programs were heavily donor‑funded. Medium term: degradation of global health infrastructure and human capital (loss of trained staff, data systems, and labs), making it harder to recover even if funding later returns. Long term: slower medical innovation, reduced global surveillance capacity, and entrenched health inequities, as countries and communities with the fewest resources bear the brunt of lost support. https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/07/01/nx-s1-5452513/trump-usaid-foreign-aid-deaths https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/07/01/nx-s1...
    - catlifeonmars 4mo ago

jjordan 4mo ago

There was no decision made on this basis. It was dismissed entirely due to the elapsed statute of limitations.

ls612 4mo ago

He lost the lawsuit on a legal technicality about the statute of limitations not on substantive grounds.