The strongest evidence against Musk was Musk. His own 2017 emails supporting for-profit chats made the "betrayal" narrative very hard to sell.
The strongest evidence against Musk was Musk. His own 2017 emails supporting for-profit chats made the "betrayal" narrative very hard to sell.
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.
I wonder if a more "hardcore" team, by his words, would have handled this legal case better?
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.
A more "hardcore" team will keep telling him he can win on appeals, and bill accordingly.
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.
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.
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.
Too early to write closing arguments on this. A vengeful future administration might make us realize that the entire transaction was a huge mistake.
True. There is a “so far” on that.
I don't know where a vengeful future administration would come from. We only have Democrats or Republicans to choose from, and Democrats have made turning the other cheek their entire purpose and political mission. They slow-rolled the investigation of Trump so long he got elected again in the meantime. The idea that any major Democrat would go after a billionaire and not just any billionaire but the biggest billionaire of them all? Absurd thought.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
The EU also lacks incentivizes to not harm SpaceX. The US government as a whole, and DoD in particular wants SpaceX around to deliver cheap mass to orbit.
Europe on the other hand would love any judgements which give their rockets a chance to catchup. So they won’t temper an investigation or fines accordingly.
Musk only owns 42% of SpaceX; he only takes 42% of the loss as if he continued to own Twitter outright.
Well Twitter has other investors, too.
But he'll also likely be shaving equity here and there along the way to hedge this bet.
On the other hand, buying twitter was the turning point for his public image. Before that, he was Tony Stark. Now he's Lex Luthor.
Key word being public. People from the industries he operates in were screaming from the rooftops about him for years. Tech people chose to actively ignore their colleagues in automotive and space. I remember the circumstances that led to the creation of /r/realtesla.
> People from the industries he operates in were screaming from the rooftops about him for years. Tech people chose to actively ignore their colleagues in automotive and space.
The thing is... SpaceX and Tesla actually delivered something, in the case of Tesla at least until that damn rust bucket. They were (and, with the exception of the rust bucket, still are) miles ahead of the competition.
Back when Musk proposed buying Twitter, the site already was in the gutters, there's a reason that place was up for sale. Bugs littered everywhere, reliability issues, the disaster that was the universally hated 2019 redesign, sex spam bots, trolls and propaganda farms running the show, the "legitimate" bluecheck verification program being all but dead for new applicants. People actually hoped that Musk would turn the sinking ship around.
What even those critical of Musk didn't expect was that he'd open all the floodgates.
> Back when Musk proposed buying Twitter, the site already was in the gutters, there's a reason that place was up for sale. Bugs littered everywhere, reliability issues, the disaster that was the universally hated 2019 redesign, sex spam bots, trolls and propaganda farms running the show
I'm guessing you have not checked out modern X/Twitter if you think Musk has managed to evict the bots, trolls, propaganda firms, or even sex workers. The only difference now is they have blue checks and get pushed to the top of the feed.
Any of the struggles old Twitter had are absolutely dwarfed by its current problems. They still lose money hand over fist, the noise floor is way higher than it used to be, and a solid majority of the best users have either left or simulpost their content on other platforms like Mastadon and Bluesky. The new blue check system is close to an outright disaster, the only saving grace being that you can filter out the worst of the trolls by installing an extension that filters out blue check users.
> The thing is... SpaceX and Tesla actually delivered something, in the case of Tesla at least until that damn rust bucket. They were (and, with the exception of the rust bucket, still are) miles ahead of the competition.
For SpaceX this is true, but for Tesla the competition has caught up and in some cases surpassed them. The supercharger network used to be the envy of all other EV companies, but ever since Musk randomly threw a fit and fired the management a few years back the system has stagnated and modern 800V competitors are making them look like fools. Elon's big bet on Full Self Driving has yet to pay off as the deadline for getting it to actually work as advertised continues to slip and it's not clear when if ever unsupervised Full Self Driving will be available, especially on vehicles with older hardware. People paid thousands of dollars for it and Tesla has yet to deliver on the promise. Remember it was supposed to be live in 2021. Even more prosaic things like the 200+ mile total range and integrated route planning are effectively standard features across the EV landscape. Tesla had 3 or 4 years where they stood head and shoulders over the competition, but those days are gone.
> I'm guessing you have not checked out modern X/Twitter if you think Musk has managed to evict the bots, trolls, propaganda firms, or even sex workers. The only difference now is they have blue checks and get pushed to the top of the feed.
Oh yes, I did. Which is why I wrote my last sentence: "What even those critical of Musk didn't expect was that he'd open all the floodgates."
> The supercharger network used to be the envy of all other EV companies, but ever since Musk randomly threw a fit and fired the management a few years back the system has stagnated and modern 800V competitors are making them look like fools.
Yup, the problem of the competitors is that it's a whole mess. Everyone has different rates, sometimes depending on the payment method, discoverability is nuts, payment is nuts.
> People paid thousands of dollars for it and Tesla has yet to deliver on the promise. Remember it was supposed to be live in 2021.
Again, that is why I wrote: "at least until that damn rust bucket". With that, Tesla started to go down the drain - it was obvious that Musk had managed to yeet everyone able / willing to say "no, that is a goddamn stupid idea" to him.
> Even more prosaic things like the 200+ mile total range and integrated route planning are effectively standard features across the EV landscape.
Meh. The Model 3 is less than 40 k€ here in Germany. Competitors in that price range of actual quality brands such as BMW still don't get that range.
> The thing is... SpaceX and Tesla actually delivered something, in the case of Tesla at least until that damn rust bucket. They were (and, with the exception of the rust bucket, still are) miles ahead of the competition
The fact that the quote of "it's all computer" is not wrong with all of the other negatives about it are automotive reasons why I'll never own one. I also choose not to do business with companies with that kind of leadership. A noble idea like by an ignoble person does not bode well for that noble idea.
> The fact that the quote of "it's all computer" is not wrong with all of the other negatives about it are automotive reasons why I'll never own one.
Well... on the other side, not recognizing where the world is moving towards is a damn large part of why the "legacy" automotive companies went down the gutter. VW nearly killed itself over Cariad and even in 2020, most automotive control units had less UI performance than a 2015 iPhone.
if the cartel known as Big Auto resists the change to EV and continues to only make ICE vehicles while their lobbyists convince congress critters to enact legislation making it illegal to import foreign EVs, then it doesn't matter what the rest of the world is doing now does it?
When you're the young upstart company playing David to Big Auto's Goliath, you need to make cars that people want and can afford. After that, having a fanatical leader that turns even the most ardent of EV fans away is also not a good for business. Since they can't make cars that people can afford and then decide to make cars that people don't want and you have a mentally unstable drug addled person in charge of the company constantly lying about the abilities of the cars, your David is just going to get slaughtered.
> there's a reason that place was up for sale.
It was "up for sale" because it was a public company. Tesla is also "up for sale" by that definition.
> Back when Musk proposed buying Twitter, the site already was in the gutters
I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single serious person who'd say Twitter is a better product/experience today than prior to the acquisition.
The place continues to bleed users and is the first stop shop for Nazis
> I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single serious person who'd say Twitter is a better product/experience today than prior to the acquisition.
I stated that it already was in the gutters. That does not imply it's gotten out of the gutters ever since. Musk took something that was already pretty much dead and gave it a final shot.
> something that was already pretty much dead
You keep saying that, but prior to the acquisition Twitter had finally managed to start turning a profit.
> Back when Musk proposed buying Twitter, the site already was in the gutters, there's a reason that place was up for sale. Bugs littered everywhere, reliability issues, the disaster that was the universally hated 2019 redesign, sex spam bots, trolls and propaganda farms running the show
Frankly, bullshit. It worked reliably, extremely so. It had remarkably few bugs too. It was also actually doing way better financially. It was not perfect ... but all the issues you claim it had became massively more worst.
Musk bought it for political reasons, to stomp down on left leaning opposition and networks that were well functioning there. That part was a success, it is a nazi site now and helped Trump win elections.
> Frankly, bullshit. It worked reliably, extremely so. It had remarkably few bugs too. It was also actually doing way better financially.
It was still notoriously prone to failure, and it had been a financial disaster area until the Trump phenomenon suddenly boosted it.
> Frankly, bullshit. It worked reliably, extremely so. It had remarkably few bugs too. It was also actually doing way better financially. It was not perfect ... but all the issues you claim it had became massively more worst.
I did not claim that Musk improved on the issues, quite the contrary. It seems many people did not read the very last sentence. I also wrote:
> People actually hoped that Musk would turn the sinking ship around.
Quite obviously I am referring to what was the situation back in 2022. Past tense.
Is he though? I find he still has a STRONG positive image among younger tech people..
There is clear empirical data
https://futurism.com/elon-musk-most-hated-person-america-gal...
> And the latest poll conducted by Gallup seems to confirm that Musk has become genuinely hated: a whopping 61 percent of 1,000 randomly selected adult American respondents said they had an unfavorable opinion of Musk, topping the list of most despised global figures.
> Even Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has widely been accused of genocide against Palestinians, couldn’t quite match Musk’s “strongly negative skew,” with just 52 percent of respondents saying they had an unfavorable opinion of the politician.
A lot of young people are coming of age with the worst imaginable role models to emulate, from politics to business. This is going to become obvious soon enough, I imagine.
I'm very glad I'm not responsible for raising children these days.
No by then his public image would have be damaged by the cave diver incident
Nah, too much hair to be Luthor. Bezos is Luthor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umBuxoLHV6M
Ironically, I'd say that Musk is still Stark, in a lot of bad ways: both show narcissism, overconfidence, impulsivity, ego-driven decision making, control issues, disregard for consequences, and volatility.
And all he really did was gut the censorship engine.
Is that what we're calling allowing CSAM and promoting white supremacist rhetoric?
>CSAM
proof?
>white supremacist rhetoric
Not illegal so... ?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg1mzlryxeo
Xkcd 1357: "you're saying the most compelling thing you can say about your position is that it’s not literally illegal to express"
Did the total of fines the US gov't was looking to levy on Musk total up to more than the $44Billion he spent on Twitter?
$44B is peanuts for a soon to be trillionaire
Doesn't make it a good deal. Just means he can afford to make bad deals.
This is part of what people miss about poverty - it’s incredibly unforgiving.
By contrast, the more money you have the more mistakes you can afford to make
When you are the richest man in the world, you can afford to do things out of spite. But we won't know - he got rid of the people who could have fined him.
It just seems highly unlikely the USG would issue a >$44Billion dollar set of fines to anybody.
Did you read the article:"...that his lawsuits had been filed too late."
And the Trump thing, which cratered his car business
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.
Needs context otherwise you appear hysterical.
What does “hysterical” mean in this context?
"I disagree with you and have zero awareness of the world around me."
Yeah canceling USAID programs that made the difference between life and death for millions of people around the world. Were you in a coma during DOGE in 2025 or are you being purposely selective in your memory?
Nothing hysterical about killing millions of people, hopefully there becomes a movement in the US to not only try Elon Musk at say the International Criminal Court (which we all know will lead to successful conviction, the evidence is apparent and naked enough as is) but hopefully the US government nationalizes his assets as he is a danger to the world.
Also the US should start throwing some oligarchs in prison to help rehabilitate its image after people start blaming us for causing famines and more deaths due to the recent imperial project that has become a total shit show.
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
"If founding is not restored by 2030, 8 to 10 million people will die."
If Harvard is too woke for you here's a youtube interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ8wm5PTKJg
If Youtube is too woke for you, here's the book detailing this as well:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243105542-into-the-wood-...
If books are woke for you, maybe just go back into your cave where concern trolling is more respected.
>"If founding is not restored by 2030, 8 to 10 million people will die."
"The polar ice caps will be gone by 2020" energy.
And yes, Harvard is too woke for me. Thanks for asking.
Not to anyone with basic grasp of what USAID did or was
A tax money laundering program? I don't even want to hear what you've been brainwashed to believe it was. You probably think California makes efficient use of its tax dollars too.
We may agree or not regarding specific policies, but hard to imagine a less curious reply.
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-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...
I don't believe in racial essentialism myself but I know someone who does
*ducks to dodge downvotes for not only making a bad dad joke but a political one*
Obviously Trump was not going to be a champion of clean, renewable energy. If he knew the "Trump thing" was coming -- which thanks to his position inside Twitter he probably did -- then the rational thing to do was, in fact, what he did. Suck up to Trump to try to avoid or shape the outcome.
What he didn't need to do was alienate his existing customers by acting like he enjoyed it. Did he actually think he was going to sell a lot of EVs to Trumpers?
Extreme smartness has its own failure modes
After the many years, there have been insider voices indicating that success was despite Musk in many ways. Musk bought his way into cutting edge tech, it succeeded despite him due to the already amazing people working in the industries. The projects that have his actual involvement are pretty regularly seen as mistakes or flops.
I personally hold to the idea that whoever at SpaceX crafted the team used to pre-occupy Musk and keep him entertained while the rest of the company worked, is largely responsible for its success.
I heard this was a thing at Tesla, figure out how to redirect while the grown ups were actually building stuff
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Solar energy is going to expensive in Antarctica.
We can imagine a situation where the server hardware becomes so cheap that the energy cost dominates. In that case, sticking the things in space could make sense, particularly if extremely low mass space PV (just a few microns thick) can be made to work and also work cheaply.
You still would have to deal with the fact that you would almost certainly need to budget at least 2x the regular amount of hardware to deal with the fact that you can’t do stuff like “replace failed power supply” or “replace failed hard drive” without launching an astronaut into space, so you would need to have an abundant amount of resiliency to overcome that. You know, fault tolerance. Something you can’t handwave away for a data center.
I am harping on this point because You can’t just say “but in future computes won’t need maintenance” because at that point you’re just engaging in speculative fiction that you have no way of knowing. I could say “in the future we’ll have cold fusion” and maybe that’s true but I have no way of knowing.
So given that you would need 2x the power that you’d need on earth. Compared to just putting a shitload of solar panels in a desert where non-astronauts can easily access it I don’t see the point.
And of course there’s the nuclear-power-plant sized elephant in the room; if power is the constraint it would still almost certainly be more economical to have a nuclear reactor than trying to get a data center in space.
It gets you out of the reach of the suffocating regulatory states here on Earth.
Some of those states could project power in orbit if they wanted to. I'm not normally a hawk but I'll make an exception in this case.
Are you forgetting that you need to launch from one of those "suffocating regulatory states"?
If it's something that could even realistically be done, which again I don't actually concede based on what I said before, then maybe it would have slightly less regulation.
Or, and hear me out, Elon is just a drug addict who makes shit up based on his 12-year-old-boy fantasies because it sounds neat and investors just eat it up.
So it's a lot less dumb if 50 really difficult and borderline physically impossible things happen. On the word of a conman. Right.
It's actually more dumb if you can manage all of the things to make this farce successful, because high-temperature chips that don't require cooling would work even better on Earth than in space because the temperature resistance could be combined with ambient cooling, and there are far more valuable (and longer-lasting) things that could be launched with greater launch mass efficiency.
Also...hardened electronics have been a thing for decades. It's not big because shielding is cheaper and far more effective. The only practical use is military, and there are already DoD suppliers who are generations ahead of SpaceX on the hardened chip front.
He's been smart at self-promotion and growing (certain kinds of) businesses. But when it comes to non-executive work he did himself, he did a completely mediocre internet directory, and that's about it. No-one would have heard of him if he didn't go into the business side.
Things like space datacenters are probably just part of the promotion side. It pumps up share prices for a gullible public. Where's he's been clever is in creating companies that do enough real things to convince many people that he might be able to pull off the unrealistic things as well.
> I'm not convinced he's all that smart
We probably disagree on the meaning of "smartness"
I'm not even sure I'm willing to concede he's smart by any definition of the word.
I guess he's good at making shit up and making his investors forget his failed promises? I guess that requires some level of intelligence.
There was no decision made on this basis. It was dismissed entirely due to the elapsed statute of limitations.
He lost the lawsuit on a legal technicality about the statute of limitations not on substantive grounds.