On 12/24/2024 at 5:51 AM, ignatius said:

Porsche/VW/Audio are one company.. or controlled by one company. when VW did the dirt and lied about their emissions on the "clean diesel" vehicles and wrote that software hack to trick emissions devices and got caught.. they paid billions in fines.. as a result of that Porsche had to end development of a part of their prototype racing program.

by looking at that graphic one would think tesla made better cars... it's kind of a meme stock isn't it? 

BYD will eat everyone's lunch if they could be imported w/o tariffs. they are making affordable electric cars for average people instead of $80k tech luxury bullshit. 

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Yeah Tesla is massively overvalued, but the hype train is too strong to allow that bubble to burst.  I don't know when it will burst but it has to at some point if the market is going to remain somewhat tethered to reality.

  On 12/23/2024 at 8:43 AM, J3FF3R00 said:

eats mayonnaise barehanded

he was disgusting with salsa

.... SpaceX employees have packed into newly refurbished midcentury homes and temporary housing — some of it in the form of silver Airstream trailers — in the shadow of the company’s rockets.

Then this month, company employees who live around its offices and launch site took the first major step toward incorporating a town (called Starbase), gathering signatures and filing an official petition to hold an election. The petition, filed with top officials in Cameron County and shared with The New York Times based on a public records request, provides some of the first details on the size and the operation of the new city that Mr. Musk and his company are envisioning. If authorized by the county, the election would allow voters to cast a ballot for a slate of three new city officials, including the city’s first mayor.

The petition suggests that the mayor will be SpaceX’s security manager, Gunnar Milburn. “This is a very unique situation,” said Alan Bojorquez, a lawyer in Austin who specializes in helping groups of Texas residents through the process of incorporating new towns. He said he had never helped a company that wanted its employees to form their own town.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/24/us/starbase-texas-city-elon-musk-spacex.html

  On 12/22/2024 at 1:17 AM, ignatius said:

dude is a former muslim, atheist and supports the AFD anti muslim far right asshole. 

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Just because someone parrots the standard curriculum that guarantees asylum and prohibits deportation doesn't mean anything about their political standing, especially when they are a trafficker with paranoia, a trigger temper and every reason to stay out of Saudi Arabia for life. 

uh.. whut?

there's audio at the link below. apparently this is real. what a fucking hack. circus side show. what a joke. fckn clown

https://charlesjohnson.substack.com/p/how-elon-musks-twitter-alt-account

How Elon Musk's Twitter Alt Account "Adrian Dittmann" Was Unmasked

Part of the reason I was as aggressive as I was with Adrian/Elon was to get him agitated so he would speak faster than his voice modulator could work and we could make a positive match using some software some friends of mine use for this sort of thing. I can confirm it’s Elon.

DJ Lone Skum

Some people opine that the real Skum stutters, while the alter ego doesn’t. 

it’s true, the Dittmann persona sounds more confident.

But clearly that’s the reason for the alter ego to exist in the first place. The huge amounts of shame that he must repress to be as shameless as he is, plop out through his skin as that stutter tick and awkward speaking. He must hate that about himself. If he doesn’t identify as himself, he can be more confident, more unhinged. Cannot love himself, so he creates a persona that loves him. Great guy.

(and just to be clear. Whether Dittmann is a different meat bag than Skum Bro is totally irrelevant, functionally this makes no difference. One option is sadder than the other, but which? )

What the hell kind of world do we live in when the richest guy on the planet is throwing an online tantrum and telling everybody to fuck themselves in the face?

And to see his wealth skyrocket on top of that...if wealth were actually evenly distributed throughout the world, literally every human could be at least a millionaire.

Just...what an astronomical waste of wealth on a single turd of a man.

lmao.. facepalm to the moon

lol sure. Tell that to the Sex Pistols, anonymous lawmaker.

i wish i could project a giant facepalm on the face of mars so the telescopes and robots could see it. 

Breaking News:

Musk has changed his Twitter name and avatar to 'Kekius Maximus'.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/elon-musk-x-kekius-maximus-meaning-b2672205.html

The name combines video-gamer slang 'kek' (~ lol), and Russell Crowe’s character, Maximus Decimus Meridius, from the Gladiator film (2000), and the meme character 'Pepe the Frog'.

It might refer to a memecoin '$KEKIUS' (like dogecoin), which has led to a significant increase (900%) in its value.
So this might also be a crypto rug pull / pump and dump.

Musk also wrote: “Kekius Maximus will soon reach level 80 in hardcore PoE.”
(= video game Path of Exile, which Musk is known to play)

But who knows anymore?

Some media says kek and Pepe have been co-opted by alt-right ? I never heard about that before.
I see kek en Pepe constantly in twitch streams that have nothing to do with alt-right.
 

yo wtf  kek
 

  On 1/1/2025 at 12:18 PM, MaartenVC said:

Breaking News:

Musk has changed his Twitter name and avatar to 'Kekius Maximus'.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/elon-musk-x-kekius-maximus-meaning-b2672205.html

The name combines video-gamer slang 'kek' (~ lol), and Russell Crowe’s character, Maximus Decimus Meridius, from the Gladiator film (2000), and the meme character 'Pepe the Frog'.

It might refer to a memecoin '$KEKIUS' (like dogecoin), which has led to a significant increase (900%) in its value.
So this might also be a crypto rug pull / pump and dump.

Musk also wrote: “Kekius Maximus will soon reach level 80 in hardcore PoE.”
(= video game Path of Exile, which Musk is known to play)

But who knows anymore?

Some media says kek and Pepe have been co-opted by alt-right ? I never heard about that before.
I see kek en Pepe constantly in twitch streams that have nothing to do with alt-right.
 

yo wtf  kek
 

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Queefus Maximus 

His "term" in the trump white house will be nothing more than successive pump & dump schemes interspersed with racist rants, until the SEC possibly begins to threaten him at which time he'll post an epic rant, then take his ball and go home.

Some years ago I was in this thread defending musk, like in a 'yeah hes a dick but overall perhaps net positive sort of way', but when he weighed in on the UK riots in summer 2024 he really lost me. So I feel like I should pop in here and say: Holy shit I did not expect it to go this way.

That said, I've been watching him for a long time, way before he started appearing in the headlines every day, there's too many reductive 'what a moron' or meme type takes in this thread. Like you could call him politically naive or something, and clearly there's some mad stress/ketamine/mental health stuff going on, but he's clearly a smart guy in some dimensions. You can trash the tunnels and hyperloop and Cybertruck, but Tesla and SpaceX have been phenominally successful. We need some proper analysis in here. Its a complicated picture and its increasingly important to understand it. You can't just reduce it to 'moron', laugh and walk away.

Good article in the Guardain here: ‘Trump is a little guy, Musk is a big guy’: historian predicts trouble for president-elect

My first thought a few months ago was that Musk and Trump would soon fall out, but this article makes a good point - Trump was always in debt and up for sale, and now musk has bought him.

So the richest guy in the world is now running the presidency. What does he want? What can we do about it?

Bear in mind all billionaires try and do this stuff. Look at the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch etc. Musk is just much more visible in his influence.

Maybe I'll be wrong again but my take today is that despite all the money, thats just a means to an end, and what Musk wants is to "get stuff done" - e.g. he now has one of his mates running Nasa so he can progress Starship more quickly. He'll definitely want to bend Trumps 'tariffs' plan so that it doesn't mess up Tesla. I believe Musk is sincere in his position that green energy and space travel are important. That is: I think he is persuing those things because he really does think they are what is most needed. So it will be interesting to see if he is able to influence Trump to not withdraw from the Paris agreenent. Last time round in 2017 Musk resigned from an advisory council due to Trumps withdrawal from the Paris agreement. "Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world"

So thats what I'm going to be watching out for.

  On 1/1/2025 at 4:50 PM, zazen said:

I believe Musk is sincere in his position that green energy and space travel are important.

i don't. i think if he cared about the environment he'd get to the obvious conclusion of trains being the best way to move lot's of people but that goes against his business interests... i don't think he cares much about the environment and only cares about green energy because it's his business. i think he's interested in technical achievements of his companies because that makes him look good and he really does want to appear as 'iron man' tech solutions guy. if he cared about green energy and the planet he wouldn't be saying "mars" all the time which is just another version of his hype machine brain algorithm. 

he's just a big ol capitalist oligarch. he didn't invent tesla.. he bought his way in then started saying shitty things to make stock go wonky so he could buy more of it and force the founders of the company off the board.. so he could take control. i credit tesla's footprint and hype w/getting the major automakers off their asses and in the electric car game but that's about it.  electric cars aren't going to save us anyways and neither is green energy.  

musk sucks and i don't think he's a net gain for anyone but himself.  he's disingenuous and a bad faith type character. 

  On 1/1/2025 at 4:50 PM, zazen said:

Some years ago I was in this thread defending musk, like in a 'yeah hes a dick but overall perhaps net positive sort of way', but when he weighed in on the UK riots in summer 2024 he really lost me. So I feel like I should pop in here and say: Holy shit I did not expect it to go this way.

That said, I've been watching him for a long time, way before he started appearing in the headlines every day, there's too many reductive 'what a moron' or meme type takes in this thread. Like you could call him politically naive or something, and clearly there's some mad stress/ketamine/mental health stuff going on, but he's clearly a smart guy in some dimensions. You can trash the tunnels and hyperloop and Cybertruck, but Tesla and SpaceX have been phenominally successful. We need some proper analysis in here. Its a complicated picture and its increasingly important to understand it. You can't just reduce it to 'moron', laugh and walk away.

Good article in the Guardain here: ‘Trump is a little guy, Musk is a big guy’: historian predicts trouble for president-elect

My first thought a few months ago was that Musk and Trump would soon fall out, but this article makes a good point - Trump was always in debt and up for sale, and now musk has bought him.

So the richest guy in the world is now running the presidency. What does he want? What can we do about it?

Bear in mind all billionaires try and do this stuff. Look at the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch etc. Musk is just much more visible in his influence.

Maybe I'll be wrong again but my take today is that despite all the money, thats just a means to an end, and what Musk wants is to "get stuff done" - e.g. he now has one of his mates running Nasa so he can progress Starship more quickly. He'll definitely want to bend Trumps 'tariffs' plan so that it doesn't mess up Tesla. I believe Musk is sincere in his position that green energy and space travel are important. That is: I think he is persuing those things because he really does think they are what is most needed. So it will be interesting to see if he is able to influence Trump to not withdraw from the Paris agreenent. Last time round in 2017 Musk resigned from an advisory council due to Trumps withdrawal from the Paris agreement. "Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world"

So thats what I'm going to be watching out for.

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it's quite possible to be the richest person in the world running multiple successful businesses (he's not doing it singlehandedly) and still talk and act like a moron in front of people, as he loves to repeatedly demonstrate. pointing out that he turned his nose up at working with Trump in his first term means nothing when compared to his present day behaviour, he's fallen pretty far since then. any person with that much wealth complaining about the "woke mind virus" should be causing alarm bells to clang in your mind, it doesn't inspire confidence in him as a leader at all.

sounds like you're still ok with rationalising his behaviour in the context of some grander scheme that you believe to be a net positive. this is still a mistake. he's in it for himself primarily, that's the essential rule for the rich. whatever good they do is incidental to furthering their own name and wealth. he's not principled, that much is evident when you consider how thin-skinned and prone to lashing out he is. guy sank an unspeakable amount of money into acquiring a personal megaphone to try and shape perceptions around himself and push his own agenda, and he largely failed at that.

  On 1/1/2025 at 5:54 PM, ignatius said:

i don't. i think if he cared about the environment he'd get to the obvious conclusion of trains being the best way to move lot's of people but that goes against his business interests... i don't think he cares much about the environment and only cares about green energy because it's his business. i think he's interested in technical achievements of his companies because that makes him look good and he really does want to appear as 'iron man' tech solutions guy. if he cared about green energy and the planet he wouldn't be saying "mars" all the time which is just another version of his hype machine brain algorithm. 

he's just a big ol capitalist oligarch. he didn't invent tesla.. he bought his way in then started saying shitty things to make stock go wonky so he could buy more of it and force the founders of the company off the board.. so he could take control. i credit tesla's footprint and hype w/getting the major automakers off their asses and in the electric car game but that's about it.  electric cars aren't going to save us anyways and neither is green energy.  

musk sucks and i don't think he's a net gain for anyone but himself.  he's disingenuous and a bad faith type character. 

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QFT.

My take is he's successful because he's exceptionally driven, smart in certain ways, and started with a nice chunk of change from his dad.  As Ignatius said, a lot of innovations his companies have produced didn't necessarily come from him, but from the environment he created at those companies.  Not saying that's worthless, but he's not some Iron Man super genius.

My take is also that he doesn't care much for the betterment of the world and/or other humans, but he'll play that card if it serves to further his ego.

Edit:  take going to Mars. That is an exceptionally stupid idea at this point in time. The amount of resources it would take to get there could go so much further if spent smartly here, but then he couldn't be the space guy Mars champion that he likes to paint himself as.

  On 1/1/2025 at 7:41 PM, EdamAnchorman said:

My take is he's successful because he's exceptionally driven, smart in certain ways,

yeah.. has a certain skill set and willingness to be a tyrant within his companies. also, pretty sure he loves the smell of his own farts.