Monday, 25 November 2024

Elon Musk 'visibly deranged'

Elon Musk is in danger of going power mad.  The man who has conversations with Vladimir Putin, apparently seriously believes that Britain is a “tyrannical police state.” This seems to have come in response to a petition calling for a new general election apparently reaching a million signatures. This is being furiously promoted by a lot of right-wingers, including Ben Habib from Reform UK. I’m not convinced the petition is all legitimate anyway. I see some people are suggesting it’s all being done by bots, something that wouldn’t surprise me. But let’s assume it does reflect public opinion, it is simply going to result in a debate in parliament at best. Nothing is going to change.

But Musk has chosen to repeat to his 200 million followers what one Twitter user posted:

Britain has many problems (although nowhere near as many as the USA) but being a tyrannical police state isn’t one of them.  Getting close to Trump and being charged with cutting federal spending by $2 trillion has gone to his head. He may be the world’s richest man but he is also among the stupidest.

Musk seems to be upset that Britain is jailing rioters who attacked the police and communities following the terrible events in Southport in August. He’s been summoned before a parliamentary select committee to explain how Twitter failed to stop the spread of misinformation which many think helped to stoke the riots in the first place.

It remains to be seen whether he'll come or not, but he has now demanded MPs travel to the US to explain the censorship and 'threats' to American citizens. He doesn't spell out what these threats are but appears to be insisting Americans have the right to incite violence overseas. Musk has also claimed there is two-tier policing in the UK and that changes to inheritance tax on British farms mean that “Britain is going full Stalin.”  A reminder: Stalin caused the deaths of 3.9 million Ukrainian Kulaks in the 1930s by his forced collectivisation of farms. His grasp of history is practically zero.

I think Musk has always been a bit of a wacko and this seems to be confirmed by a former friend of his named Sam Harris. Mr Harris says Musk is: "Snorting ketamine and tweeting at all hours of the day and night." 

I don't know about the drugs but plenty of others have noted the time stamp on Musk's tweets which come at all hours so this at least is true. And he tweets a lot. Over one 50-day period, he sent 3,200 tweets. That's 64 per day or nearly three an hour assuming no sleep.  You might ask what he is actually working on, if anything

His former friend says the multi-billionaire is "palpably, visibly deranged" and said he signal boosts "lunatics." Harris added that: "We’re seeing the total derangement of a personality based on social media addiction." Mr Harris also slammed Musk’s so-called "service to humanity by boosting to 200 million followers obvious lies and conspiracy theories."

He is talking about the man who is now at the centre of the US government, helping to shape policy and appoint key personnel.

Musk's reputation is as some sort of brilliant tech giant and it's true he's made himself an awful lot of money but he is not the genius he - and Trump - think he is.This post on BlueSky explains how he made his initial fortune from the sale of PayPal, but not before he nearly bankrupted it. The board had to force him out and replace him with someone else who rescued the online payments business and built it up so it could be sold for $1.5 billion to Ebay.

I feel like not enough people know that Elon Musk first became wealthy by being so awful at running a company that his own management team mutinied when he went on his honeymoon; his own board of directors then fired him; and his replacement then turned the company into PayPal. 1/

Musk took $250 million from the deal although he had almost run the company into the ground.

He also started a couple of other businesses that failed under his leadership, Hyperloop and The Boring Company. The latter was a tunneling business which has barely done any work.

The companies he's most associated with are Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink which are run day-to-day by other competent, qualified people not Musk, who is said to think of himself now as a co-president of the USA.  Essentially, the world's most powerful country will be run by two extremely wealthy but ultimately failed businessmen.

Rich men have often got involved in politics to further their own agenda while others used their wealth to do good. Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate, for example built libraries. Bill Gates has donated $59 billion to various good causes since 2000 through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, mainly to help immunise half the world’s children from serious life-threatening diseases.

You have to wonder what Musk's legacy will be don't you?  It is not going to be great, that's for sure.


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