6 ms·

Is this not a common trait among most of the high-level tech CEOs? We hear of lack of humanity across much of the tech industry when you get up to that level. A

by jb1991 2mo ago

Is this not a common trait among most of the high-level tech CEOs? We hear of lack of humanity across much of the tech industry when you get up to that level. All the stuff that is said about Musk, and all the others.

nashashmi 2mo ago
If we are seeking role models, dont seek out petty people.
- janderson215 2mo ago
  Or, everybody is flawed and we shouldn’t adopt petty traits while respecting other traits and still having aspirations.
nailer 2mo ago
[flagged]
- Supermancho 2mo ago
  > The main think I hear about Musk is that he supported a candidate people didn't like and has a lot of different mothers for his children. You missed a word there. `The main NEGATIVE things I hear about Musk is that he supported a candidate people didn't like and has a lot of different mothers for his children.` > Compared to making EVs mainstream, He didn't do that, although he contributed. I can credit him with raising the consumer demand for in-vehicle assistance. > helping paralyzed people interact with the world, I also helped someone carry their groceries yesterday. That's a personality trait. The results of one of his many business efforts is not a personal act...although he likes to take credit. > reducing traffic in LV, That was a selling point for funding a different boring technology (that wasn't realized) and hopefully a better transportation system (which also wasn't realized) for a convenience tunnel. SR-99 is a commuter highway tunnel, with double the traffic, and the Seattle Tunnel Partners is not considered a magnate for the same reason Elon's tunnel isn't. It's just boring (literally and figuratively). > cutting government fraud That's not what happened. You should expand your bubble.
  - nailer 2mo ago
    > You missed a word there. > The main NEGATIVE things I hear about Musk I missed no words, the things being negative are implied by the parent comment "All the stuff that is said about Musk, and all the others." If this degree of pettiness is how you start your comment I'm not looking forwaerd to the rest, but here goes. > > Compared to making EVs mainstream, > he contributed So you agree, but wanted to make another petty point. > > helping paralyzed people interact with the world > I also helped someone carry their groceries yesterday. What a bizarre and silly comparison. Why would you write that? > The results of one of his many business efforts is not a personal act...although he likes to take credit. Nobody was saying they were a solo act, merely that he deserves credit. Which he does. > That's not what happened. Yes, it was. You provided zero supporting arguments. Here's 30 seconds of research, let me know if you want links. - $550 million decade-long bribery scheme: USAID contracting officer steered 14+ contracts for bribes (cash, homes, luxury perks); pleas in 2025 - Tens of billions estimated to “scam” NGOs via no-control funding loophole (Musk/DOGE claim: one of the biggest sources of fraud) - ~$10.3 million for male circumcision programs in Mozambique - ~$17.5 million for male circumcision and condom programs (broader Africa) - ~$9 million humanitarian aid diverted to al-Qaeda-affiliated groups in Syria - Hundreds of thousands to non-profits linked to designated terrorist organizations (even after IG probes) - $11–20 million for Middle Eastern “Sesame Street” (Iraq/Ahlan Simsim) - $1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia workplaces - $70,000 for DEI musical in Ireland - $47,000 for transgender opera in Colombia - $32,000 for transgender comic book in Peru - Millions to EcoHealth Alliance (Wuhan lab collaborator) - Funding for drag shows, LGBTQ programs, and related cultural projects abroad - $6 million for tourism in Egypt - Electric vehicles for Vietnam and other low-priority development spends - Broader pattern of unaccountable grants and contracts flagged as systemic waste/fraud enabling the above I have no idea about your points about the Las Vegas tunnel. You might be right but you're rude and disrespectful so I don't want to spent more time interacting with you unless you apologize. > You should expand your bubble. Someone certainly should.
    - angoragoats 2mo ago
      > you're rude a/nd disrespectful so I don't want to spent more time interacting with you unless you apologize. What? The person you're replying to didn't use any harsh language or insult you in any way. How thin is your skin?
- kmeisthax 2mo ago
  If you read news outside of what you personally agreed with, you would know that Musk is a lot worse than just "supporting a candidate people like". That's the thing that got all the low-information California liberals who weren't paying attention to stand up and listen, but Musk has been a problem for a lot longer. My personal moment of disillusionment was when a bunch of kids got trapped in a cave in Thailand in 2018, Musk suggested a rescue sub that wouldn't work, and Musk's answer to the rescue diver pointing this out was to call him a pedophile. And even then, I'm kind of a johnny-come-lately. But even if you don't care about Musk's personal attitude, and just like his results... his results absolutely, positively suck. I'll go point by point, as all of them are overstated and fall apart when you look at the details: - Making EVs mainstream: He bought the founder seat of an EV company (and sued the actual founders over who's allowed to use the word "founder"). The one car that was a clean-sheet Musk design, the Cybertruck, was a huge flop you can't even take into a car wash without remembering to put into "Car Wash mode". Also, Tesla as a company engages in comically owner-hostile parts pairing, their cars have some of the worst fit-and-finish issues I've ever seen, they feel a constant need to reinvent how cars work to make them seem "futuristic", and the only thing stopping BYD from handing them their ass on a silver platter is the fact that the US government engages in shittons of domestic car company protectionism. - Helping paralyzed people interact with the world: In clinical trials on a handful of human subjects, many of which already have had complications due to the BCI device failing. I admit I don't know enough about medical devices to know where Musk hid the bullshit here, but I do know other companies are doing similar things already. - Reducing traffic in LV: I genuinely do not understand how you could come to this conclusion about the Vegas Loop unless you have never stepped foot in Vegas. The Loop is a god damned joke of a service. The tunnels only exist between one convention center and about two integrated resort hotels; everywhere else the Loop is just a glorified taxi service with an app that barely works. What he should have built was an actual underground train line, but all these techbros that want to solve traffic don't want to touch trains with a 100 foot pole, because that costs real money and Musk just wanted to aurafarm. - Cutting government fraud: He eviscerated USAID for being in SpaceX's way, punched a bunch of security holes in critical government IT infrastructure, and made a bunch of really tiny penny-pinching cuts that were almost immediately undone by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act dramatically increasing government spending. Oh, and because of the DOGE cuts, America has new world screwworm again. The entire premise of DOGE - that there's an exorbitant amount of unidentified waste and fraud that is primarily contained in small-scale discretionary spending programs - is nearly bullshit. I say nearly, because there IS waste and fraud - it's just that the waste and fraud is in the form of well-paid McKinsey consultants and military contractors. Both of which have lobbyists that can get Congress to pass all sorts of bills to enshrine their waste and fraud as politically untouchable, including and especially by DOGE[0]. Ergo, DOGE was doomed from the start to only be able to deal with insignificant amounts of fraud. - Making reusable rockets: SpaceX's rockets are only partially reusable (the second stage is still disposed of) and they have to spend a lot extra for the equipment to make the first stage and cone able to land. Also, every launch and landing must be paired with an expensive refurbishment process as landing is extremely stressful. In other words, reusable rockets are really dumb. The reason why SpaceX is doing this really dumb thing is because they run a satellite ISP, Starlink. The problem with satellite Internet is that going up into space increases your latency (thanks, Einstein) and having a lot of people hitting the same satellite lowers the bandwidth it can push. Musk's solution is to put the satellites into a lower orbit - but the problem is, at Low Earth Orbit you can't stay locked to one position on Earth. And satellites are a shared medium: the more people using the service, the worse it gets. So you need a lot more satellites to provide service equivalent to wired ISPs. All these extra satellites in low-Earth orbit create light pollution that makes terrestrial astronomy impossible, and also pollute the orbits they're in with junk if they get damaged. I'm noticing a bit of a pattern here: Musk suggests something really stupid and thinks we can just engineer our way around the stupidity, because the stupid thing is there specifically to get around an essential expense of the problem. Why is the Vegas Loop a bunch of Teslas and a tunnel that only covers like a quarter of the system? Because the obvious solution - a train - is too expensive to build, and people like Musk want car-like social isolation[1] on every mode of transportation. Why is SpaceX so obsessed with reusable rockets? Because it'll let them spam LEO with satellites, which they need in order for Starlink to work, because just building a wired ISP or a traditional cellular ISP is expensive and fundamentally unsexy work. At least when Steve Jobs reinvented the wheel, his wheel was usually rounder and smoother. [0] If there is a theme of the second Trump administration, it is the concept of impoundment. The thing is, this is explicitly unconstitutional; the President cannot refuse to spend money Congress tells them to spend. And corporate interests generally tend to win bigly in court against Trump. So if DOGE had done the smart thing and went after McKinsey, they probably still would have lost. [1] As an autistic person, I'd accuse this of being an anti-social autistic tendency, but we also really like trains.
AnthonBerg 2mo ago
"In animals with hierarchical societies, aggressive behavior is thought to help individuals gain and maintain higher social status. It has been shown that aggressive behavior, especially the experience of winning, has rewarding properties in animals and repeated aggressive experience may lead to compulsive, pathological aggression that is highly reinforcing." From the 2017, uh, molecular neuroimmunosociobiology survey paper Aggression, Social Stress, and the Immune System in Humans and Animal Models by Takahashi, Flanigan, McEwen & Russo – https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00056 https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00056 (These are serious, credentialed people. The tl;dr is that "losing" is proinflammatory and subjugating others is antiinflammatory. In the brain. Which is behavior-modifying.)

by jb1991 2mo ago

nashashmi 2mo ago

If we are seeking role models, dont seek out petty people.

janderson215 2mo ago
Or, everybody is flawed and we shouldn’t adopt petty traits while respecting other traits and still having aspirations.

nailer 2mo ago

[flagged]

Supermancho 2mo ago
> The main think I hear about Musk is that he supported a candidate people didn't like and has a lot of different mothers for his children. You missed a word there. `The main NEGATIVE things I hear about Musk is that he supported a candidate people didn't like and has a lot of different mothers for his children.` > Compared to making EVs mainstream, He didn't do that, although he contributed. I can credit him with raising the consumer demand for in-vehicle assistance. > helping paralyzed people interact with the world, I also helped someone carry their groceries yesterday. That's a personality trait. The results of one of his many business efforts is not a personal act...although he likes to take credit. > reducing traffic in LV, That was a selling point for funding a different boring technology (that wasn't realized) and hopefully a better transportation system (which also wasn't realized) for a convenience tunnel. SR-99 is a commuter highway tunnel, with double the traffic, and the Seattle Tunnel Partners is not considered a magnate for the same reason Elon's tunnel isn't. It's just boring (literally and figuratively). > cutting government fraud That's not what happened. You should expand your bubble.
- nailer 2mo ago
  > You missed a word there. > The main NEGATIVE things I hear about Musk I missed no words, the things being negative are implied by the parent comment "All the stuff that is said about Musk, and all the others." If this degree of pettiness is how you start your comment I'm not looking forwaerd to the rest, but here goes. > > Compared to making EVs mainstream, > he contributed So you agree, but wanted to make another petty point. > > helping paralyzed people interact with the world > I also helped someone carry their groceries yesterday. What a bizarre and silly comparison. Why would you write that? > The results of one of his many business efforts is not a personal act...although he likes to take credit. Nobody was saying they were a solo act, merely that he deserves credit. Which he does. > That's not what happened. Yes, it was. You provided zero supporting arguments. Here's 30 seconds of research, let me know if you want links. - $550 million decade-long bribery scheme: USAID contracting officer steered 14+ contracts for bribes (cash, homes, luxury perks); pleas in 2025 - Tens of billions estimated to “scam” NGOs via no-control funding loophole (Musk/DOGE claim: one of the biggest sources of fraud) - ~$10.3 million for male circumcision programs in Mozambique - ~$17.5 million for male circumcision and condom programs (broader Africa) - ~$9 million humanitarian aid diverted to al-Qaeda-affiliated groups in Syria - Hundreds of thousands to non-profits linked to designated terrorist organizations (even after IG probes) - $11–20 million for Middle Eastern “Sesame Street” (Iraq/Ahlan Simsim) - $1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia workplaces - $70,000 for DEI musical in Ireland - $47,000 for transgender opera in Colombia - $32,000 for transgender comic book in Peru - Millions to EcoHealth Alliance (Wuhan lab collaborator) - Funding for drag shows, LGBTQ programs, and related cultural projects abroad - $6 million for tourism in Egypt - Electric vehicles for Vietnam and other low-priority development spends - Broader pattern of unaccountable grants and contracts flagged as systemic waste/fraud enabling the above I have no idea about your points about the Las Vegas tunnel. You might be right but you're rude and disrespectful so I don't want to spent more time interacting with you unless you apologize. > You should expand your bubble. Someone certainly should.
  - angoragoats 2mo ago
    > you're rude a/nd disrespectful so I don't want to spent more time interacting with you unless you apologize. What? The person you're replying to didn't use any harsh language or insult you in any way. How thin is your skin?
kmeisthax 2mo ago
If you read news outside of what you personally agreed with, you would know that Musk is a lot worse than just "supporting a candidate people like". That's the thing that got all the low-information California liberals who weren't paying attention to stand up and listen, but Musk has been a problem for a lot longer. My personal moment of disillusionment was when a bunch of kids got trapped in a cave in Thailand in 2018, Musk suggested a rescue sub that wouldn't work, and Musk's answer to the rescue diver pointing this out was to call him a pedophile. And even then, I'm kind of a johnny-come-lately. But even if you don't care about Musk's personal attitude, and just like his results... his results absolutely, positively suck. I'll go point by point, as all of them are overstated and fall apart when you look at the details: - Making EVs mainstream: He bought the founder seat of an EV company (and sued the actual founders over who's allowed to use the word "founder"). The one car that was a clean-sheet Musk design, the Cybertruck, was a huge flop you can't even take into a car wash without remembering to put into "Car Wash mode". Also, Tesla as a company engages in comically owner-hostile parts pairing, their cars have some of the worst fit-and-finish issues I've ever seen, they feel a constant need to reinvent how cars work to make them seem "futuristic", and the only thing stopping BYD from handing them their ass on a silver platter is the fact that the US government engages in shittons of domestic car company protectionism. - Helping paralyzed people interact with the world: In clinical trials on a handful of human subjects, many of which already have had complications due to the BCI device failing. I admit I don't know enough about medical devices to know where Musk hid the bullshit here, but I do know other companies are doing similar things already. - Reducing traffic in LV: I genuinely do not understand how you could come to this conclusion about the Vegas Loop unless you have never stepped foot in Vegas. The Loop is a god damned joke of a service. The tunnels only exist between one convention center and about two integrated resort hotels; everywhere else the Loop is just a glorified taxi service with an app that barely works. What he should have built was an actual underground train line, but all these techbros that want to solve traffic don't want to touch trains with a 100 foot pole, because that costs real money and Musk just wanted to aurafarm. - Cutting government fraud: He eviscerated USAID for being in SpaceX's way, punched a bunch of security holes in critical government IT infrastructure, and made a bunch of really tiny penny-pinching cuts that were almost immediately undone by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act dramatically increasing government spending. Oh, and because of the DOGE cuts, America has new world screwworm again. The entire premise of DOGE - that there's an exorbitant amount of unidentified waste and fraud that is primarily contained in small-scale discretionary spending programs - is nearly bullshit. I say nearly, because there IS waste and fraud - it's just that the waste and fraud is in the form of well-paid McKinsey consultants and military contractors. Both of which have lobbyists that can get Congress to pass all sorts of bills to enshrine their waste and fraud as politically untouchable, including and especially by DOGE[0]. Ergo, DOGE was doomed from the start to only be able to deal with insignificant amounts of fraud. - Making reusable rockets: SpaceX's rockets are only partially reusable (the second stage is still disposed of) and they have to spend a lot extra for the equipment to make the first stage and cone able to land. Also, every launch and landing must be paired with an expensive refurbishment process as landing is extremely stressful. In other words, reusable rockets are really dumb. The reason why SpaceX is doing this really dumb thing is because they run a satellite ISP, Starlink. The problem with satellite Internet is that going up into space increases your latency (thanks, Einstein) and having a lot of people hitting the same satellite lowers the bandwidth it can push. Musk's solution is to put the satellites into a lower orbit - but the problem is, at Low Earth Orbit you can't stay locked to one position on Earth. And satellites are a shared medium: the more people using the service, the worse it gets. So you need a lot more satellites to provide service equivalent to wired ISPs. All these extra satellites in low-Earth orbit create light pollution that makes terrestrial astronomy impossible, and also pollute the orbits they're in with junk if they get damaged. I'm noticing a bit of a pattern here: Musk suggests something really stupid and thinks we can just engineer our way around the stupidity, because the stupid thing is there specifically to get around an essential expense of the problem. Why is the Vegas Loop a bunch of Teslas and a tunnel that only covers like a quarter of the system? Because the obvious solution - a train - is too expensive to build, and people like Musk want car-like social isolation[1] on every mode of transportation. Why is SpaceX so obsessed with reusable rockets? Because it'll let them spam LEO with satellites, which they need in order for Starlink to work, because just building a wired ISP or a traditional cellular ISP is expensive and fundamentally unsexy work. At least when Steve Jobs reinvented the wheel, his wheel was usually rounder and smoother. [0] If there is a theme of the second Trump administration, it is the concept of impoundment. The thing is, this is explicitly unconstitutional; the President cannot refuse to spend money Congress tells them to spend. And corporate interests generally tend to win bigly in court against Trump. So if DOGE had done the smart thing and went after McKinsey, they probably still would have lost. [1] As an autistic person, I'd accuse this of being an anti-social autistic tendency, but we also really like trains.

AnthonBerg 2mo ago

"In animals with hierarchical societies, aggressive behavior is thought to help individuals gain and maintain higher social status. It has been shown that aggressive behavior, especially the experience of winning, has rewarding properties in animals and repeated aggressive experience may lead to compulsive, pathological aggression that is highly reinforcing." From the 2017, uh, molecular neuroimmunosociobiology survey paper Aggression, Social Stress, and the Immune System in Humans and Animal Models by Takahashi, Flanigan, McEwen & Russo – https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00056 https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00056 (These are serious, credentialed people. The tl;dr is that "losing" is proinflammatory and subjugating others is antiinflammatory. In the brain. Which is behavior-modifying.)