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The absolute saddest thing in the world is that he spends any time at all on Twitter. My god, the field of possibilities for how to spend his free time is abso

The absolute saddest thing in the world is that he spends any time at all on Twitter. My god, the field of possibilities for how to spend his free time is absolutely limitless - the man could spend a billion dollars a year on personal entertainment and growth, on doing literally anything his heart desires, and die the richest man on the planet. He could visit every corner of the globe, talk with anyone on the planet, see any performance up close and personal, he could build magnificent buildings, found incredible institutions, sponsor whole art movements. He could die on the moon. The possibilities for this man are limited only by the actual possible, and he’s got enough money that on a reasonable timescale even that’s malleable. But what’s he doing instead? He’s tweeting “my pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” He’s engaged in the shittiest, lowest quality, most horseshit expression of whatever passes for politics on Twitter, on which he spends a horrifying amount of time. Is this what it’s like to watch an artist die slowly from a heroine addiction? Just an incredible breadth of potential, slowly wasting itself in the most obscene and depressing fashion, and all that possibility dying with it. What a goddamn tragedy.

WXLCKNO 4y ago
> He could die on the moon Pretty crazy that this is accurate. This man could choose to go to the moon. To die or not would be up to him.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
  > go to the moon. To die or not would be up to him The moon is an extremely harsh environment. Dying fairly soon is the default outcome. If a billionaire wanted to die on the moon, they could do that within maybe 5 years of announcing the plan. For EM, less time than that, as his personal space program already exists. Realistic plans to survive in a small metal box on the moon for some time, might take longer.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  In fact he's stated that his ambition is to die on Mars. And he spent 20 solid years working towards that -- SpaceX the rockets and Tesla has given him the financial ability. And this year his destruction of the TSLA stock value is throwing it away.
  - metadat 4y ago
    Stated ambitions and real motives are two different things. In hindsight it's looking like we fell for a hollow sales pitch. The odds of Musk himself physically departing the Earth forever (or even at all) on a mission to Mars are approximately zero. A true Mars-bound space farer wouldn't fritter about with all this Twitter and political nonsense, they'd stick to The Mission. Twitter becomes 100% irrelevant noise if you don't plan to stay on Earth.
    - theGnuMe 4y ago
      You can tweet from Mars..
pixl97 4y ago
>In Greek mythology, Narcissus was a hunter from Thespiae in Boeotia who was known for his beauty. According to Tzetzes, he rejected all romantic advances, eventually falling in love with his own reflection in a pool of water, staring at it for the remainder of his life. After he died, in his place sprouted a flower bearing his name. Musk is just another page in a story as old as time.
- dfxm12 4y ago
  Narcissus' downfall is that he loved himself too much. Musk's downfall will be that he seeks the validation of the terminally online. A "Musk" wouldn't be a flower fed by the light of its own reflection, but something like a spam bot using all of its nearly unlimited resources to just ask people via email, web forums, other social media, "check out this meme I found. Do you like me yet?"
  - halfnormalform 4y ago
    In the modern concept of “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” the patient has had their healthy sense of self severely wounded at a very core, raw, primal level that they desperately try to cover up with constant “Narcissistic Supply” which is provided by fans, groupies, and sometimes even negative attention. Something social media provides in bulk.
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  I am amazed at how much the Greek's understood about mental health.
pschuegr 4y ago
andrei_says_ 4y ago
This is so beautifully written and really touches on the core issue. So much wealth and power coupled with such small thinking and a very unhealthy mind. Yes, he could even solve world hunger, or just US hunger - how much to pay for the food of all school kids who get nickeled and dimed for their school lunches? He could even die on Mars. Or, we could establish a proper wealth tax and make wealth extraction and inequality of such ridiculous proportions less possible. I know, first we’d have to un-institutionalize legal political corruption which sounds as impossible as changing the laws of physics.
- ryandvm 4y ago
  Keep dreaming, man. We can't even stop minting the penny.
- kodyo 4y ago
  The government could do it, too, but there's a proxy war in Ukraine and that takes precedent.
- pushingice 4y ago
  Everyone talks about taxing him. What about not subsidizing him in the first place? Without carbon credits and low emission vehicle credits he'd have gone bankrupt long ago.
  - jfengel 4y ago
    Because those are things that we want done. They help kickstart a low-carbon economy, which would otherwise be slowed by costing more than the existing fossil-fuel infrastructure. He just happened to be the one who best took advantage of it. Which looked awfully smart at the time, especially since he succeeded so well at it. And that makes his bizarrely mercurial, seemingly short-sighted behavior seem so inconsistent.
  - andrei_says_ 4y ago
    Yes, let’s - both.
tarsinge 4y ago
Beautifully said
revolvingocelot 4y ago
>He’s tweeting “my pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” "I really expected the wholesale firing of Twitter staff and mass microservice-removal to crash Twitter immediately, but everything (er, barring some stuff like 2FA) seems to be basically OK. I guess I shouldn't have doubted Elon when moving-fast-and-breaking-things; you've really got to hand it to Fauci."
- bakuninsbart 4y ago
  Software developers don't go to work in the morning to physically hold together the microservices they once programmed. My entire team could stop working tomorrow, and it would probably take months before things start to seriously break. Now if you're trying to code up a bunch of new features at the same time, and basically the entire world knows your security team just quit, the story is probably a bit different.
  - revolvingocelot 4y ago
    I myself have a pretty low bus factor, but I'm pretty sure if I were bus'd, the issues that would eventually crop up would be hard to solve because of the institutional knowledge that makes me bus-y at all. I suspect neither you nor I work at hyperscale, where I'm given to understand things break much faster and at more interesting scales. It's hardly "physically holding" anything together, but what happens if you leave a bunch of services unmaintained? "Something bad", IMO, and the fact that something bad hasn't actually happened by this stage is impressive; you've really got to hand it to Fauci.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
What makes it so much worse is that we saw a spark of that potential in SpaceX. Imagine if he instead decided to do for the other verticals of crewed spaceflight what SpaceX did for launches.
sublinear 4y ago
Strongly disagree. Why does he have to do any of that, and do you seriously believe you know the "potential" of a stranger? There are likely constraints here you're not thinking about. "die on the moon" probably isn't an option when a bunch of people depend on him.
- unethical_ban 4y ago
  You put up a strawman. u/roughly didn't say Musk "has" to do anything; merely that it is pathetic that of all the options of how to spend one's mortal existence as a hundred-thousand-millionaire with two successful, boundary pushing businesses, posting low-level tripe on a social network you have paid half your fortune for and decimated in a matter of weeks is a poor way to go about it. In other words, for you to "strongly disagree", it would seem you think it is not sad at all that Musk is engaged in tweeting superficial culture war memes dozens of times a day.
  - sublinear 4y ago
    I'm going to sidestep the misapplication of logical fallacy and just state the obvious: 1) You probably don't know what else he does or doesn't do with his free time beyond his tweets 2) Twitter is a form of marketing and always has been
    - unethical_ban 4y ago
      "Beyond his tweets" which happen multiple times a day, presumably by him directly, and engaging in shitty witless culture war banter. Marketing in the loosest of terms, if trolling counts. Listen, we're talking opinion here. I don't know what you stand for. You haven't directly taken a stance on whether you think his time is well spent, you are just trying to state that no one has a right to judge it, or doesn't have enough info to judge it. I do think I have enough info, with my own eyes, to see that his behavior is poor and that whatever time he is spending on twitter is time wasted. Marketing? Self-sabotage.
badrequest 4y ago
The problem is ever having thought he was an artist and not merely a heroin addict who hung around them.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ChrisLTD 4y ago
Well said. It almost makes me want to leave social media.
kgwxd 4y ago
More like watching a spoiled brat squander the fortune they didn't earn. There's no tortured artist in this story.
rednerrus 4y ago
The heroine addiction is apt. Fame is the worst drug. It's terrible to watch what it does to people.
krapp 4y ago
No. Screw Elon Musk. How many people with just as much, if not more, potential than he has grow up, live and die in obscurity because they weren't lucky enough to be heirs to a fortune in slave emeralds? How many of his employees deserve just as much praise and respect as he gets, only to go unremarked because we believe that in the Great Man theory of capitalism, only the one on top gets the glory? If there's a tragedy here, it isn't how far Elon has fallen, it's how far above us the rich are to begin with. That one person commands as much power as Elon Musk does is an insult to human dignity. And people talk about him as if he's a divine being. The smartest man who ever lived. More brilliant than Einstein. More cunning than Jobs. More innovative than Da Vinci. The man in whose hands the very course of technological society and human evolution are held. He, and only he, is responsible for Tesla. He, and only he, is responsible for SpaceX. He literally built his rockets in a cave from a pile of scrap. But it turns out he's just an asshole with money. The rich don't deserve pity any more than they deserve privilege, and maybe the crumbling of the facade that is Elon Musk will help people see that. Is this the one you called Messiah? Behold the man.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  > He, and only he, is responsible for SpaceX. He literally built his rockets in a cave from a pile of scrap. From what I've seen people mostly don't credit Musk with building SpaceX on his own. What people found admirable is that of the numerous individuals who could've founded a "SpaceX" and had the means to keep the it afloat through the rocky beginnings unavoidable to newcomers in that field, he was one of the few who actually did. The number of people who fit that description can be counted on a single hand because the majority who are that wealthy are too risk averse and prefer to use their resources to pursue things with greater, safer, and/or more immediate profit potential.
  - knighthack 4y ago
    Yes, and risk-taking/courage with enterpreneurship is something worthy of being celebrated. Plus it's not like Musk had all the money to throw into SpaceX at that point. And he came in not as some sort of angel investor, but as a doer who participated in the actual engineering aspect of things too. Most 'savvy' businessmen would not have acted as he did, given the risks. So as a businessman, Elon's risk-taking and participation deserves the rewards that ensued to him.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kodyo 4y ago

WXLCKNO 4y ago

> He could die on the moon Pretty crazy that this is accurate. This man could choose to go to the moon. To die or not would be up to him.

SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
> go to the moon. To die or not would be up to him The moon is an extremely harsh environment. Dying fairly soon is the default outcome. If a billionaire wanted to die on the moon, they could do that within maybe 5 years of announcing the plan. For EM, less time than that, as his personal space program already exists. Realistic plans to survive in a small metal box on the moon for some time, might take longer.
bryanlarsen 4y ago
In fact he's stated that his ambition is to die on Mars. And he spent 20 solid years working towards that -- SpaceX the rockets and Tesla has given him the financial ability. And this year his destruction of the TSLA stock value is throwing it away.
- metadat 4y ago
  Stated ambitions and real motives are two different things. In hindsight it's looking like we fell for a hollow sales pitch. The odds of Musk himself physically departing the Earth forever (or even at all) on a mission to Mars are approximately zero. A true Mars-bound space farer wouldn't fritter about with all this Twitter and political nonsense, they'd stick to The Mission. Twitter becomes 100% irrelevant noise if you don't plan to stay on Earth.
  - theGnuMe 4y ago
    You can tweet from Mars..

pixl97 4y ago

>In Greek mythology, Narcissus was a hunter from Thespiae in Boeotia who was known for his beauty. According to Tzetzes, he rejected all romantic advances, eventually falling in love with his own reflection in a pool of water, staring at it for the remainder of his life. After he died, in his place sprouted a flower bearing his name. Musk is just another page in a story as old as time.

dfxm12 4y ago
Narcissus' downfall is that he loved himself too much. Musk's downfall will be that he seeks the validation of the terminally online. A "Musk" wouldn't be a flower fed by the light of its own reflection, but something like a spam bot using all of its nearly unlimited resources to just ask people via email, web forums, other social media, "check out this meme I found. Do you like me yet?"
- halfnormalform 4y ago
  In the modern concept of “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” the patient has had their healthy sense of self severely wounded at a very core, raw, primal level that they desperately try to cover up with constant “Narcissistic Supply” which is provided by fans, groupies, and sometimes even negative attention. Something social media provides in bulk.
theGnuMe 4y ago
I am amazed at how much the Greek's understood about mental health.

pschuegr 4y ago

andrei_says_ 4y ago

This is so beautifully written and really touches on the core issue. So much wealth and power coupled with such small thinking and a very unhealthy mind. Yes, he could even solve world hunger, or just US hunger - how much to pay for the food of all school kids who get nickeled and dimed for their school lunches? He could even die on Mars. Or, we could establish a proper wealth tax and make wealth extraction and inequality of such ridiculous proportions less possible. I know, first we’d have to un-institutionalize legal political corruption which sounds as impossible as changing the laws of physics.

ryandvm 4y ago
Keep dreaming, man. We can't even stop minting the penny.
kodyo 4y ago
The government could do it, too, but there's a proxy war in Ukraine and that takes precedent.
pushingice 4y ago
Everyone talks about taxing him. What about not subsidizing him in the first place? Without carbon credits and low emission vehicle credits he'd have gone bankrupt long ago.
- jfengel 4y ago
  Because those are things that we want done. They help kickstart a low-carbon economy, which would otherwise be slowed by costing more than the existing fossil-fuel infrastructure. He just happened to be the one who best took advantage of it. Which looked awfully smart at the time, especially since he succeeded so well at it. And that makes his bizarrely mercurial, seemingly short-sighted behavior seem so inconsistent.
- andrei_says_ 4y ago
  Yes, let’s - both.

tarsinge 4y ago

Beautifully said

revolvingocelot 4y ago

>He’s tweeting “my pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” "I really expected the wholesale firing of Twitter staff and mass microservice-removal to crash Twitter immediately, but everything (er, barring some stuff like 2FA) seems to be basically OK. I guess I shouldn't have doubted Elon when moving-fast-and-breaking-things; you've really got to hand it to Fauci."

bakuninsbart 4y ago
Software developers don't go to work in the morning to physically hold together the microservices they once programmed. My entire team could stop working tomorrow, and it would probably take months before things start to seriously break. Now if you're trying to code up a bunch of new features at the same time, and basically the entire world knows your security team just quit, the story is probably a bit different.
- revolvingocelot 4y ago
  I myself have a pretty low bus factor, but I'm pretty sure if I were bus'd, the issues that would eventually crop up would be hard to solve because of the institutional knowledge that makes me bus-y at all. I suspect neither you nor I work at hyperscale, where I'm given to understand things break much faster and at more interesting scales. It's hardly "physically holding" anything together, but what happens if you leave a bunch of services unmaintained? "Something bad", IMO, and the fact that something bad hasn't actually happened by this stage is impressive; you've really got to hand it to Fauci.

kitsunesoba 4y ago

What makes it so much worse is that we saw a spark of that potential in SpaceX. Imagine if he instead decided to do for the other verticals of crewed spaceflight what SpaceX did for launches.

sublinear 4y ago

Strongly disagree. Why does he have to do any of that, and do you seriously believe you know the "potential" of a stranger? There are likely constraints here you're not thinking about. "die on the moon" probably isn't an option when a bunch of people depend on him.

unethical_ban 4y ago
You put up a strawman. u/roughly didn't say Musk "has" to do anything; merely that it is pathetic that of all the options of how to spend one's mortal existence as a hundred-thousand-millionaire with two successful, boundary pushing businesses, posting low-level tripe on a social network you have paid half your fortune for and decimated in a matter of weeks is a poor way to go about it. In other words, for you to "strongly disagree", it would seem you think it is not sad at all that Musk is engaged in tweeting superficial culture war memes dozens of times a day.
- sublinear 4y ago
  I'm going to sidestep the misapplication of logical fallacy and just state the obvious: 1) You probably don't know what else he does or doesn't do with his free time beyond his tweets 2) Twitter is a form of marketing and always has been
  - unethical_ban 4y ago
    "Beyond his tweets" which happen multiple times a day, presumably by him directly, and engaging in shitty witless culture war banter. Marketing in the loosest of terms, if trolling counts. Listen, we're talking opinion here. I don't know what you stand for. You haven't directly taken a stance on whether you think his time is well spent, you are just trying to state that no one has a right to judge it, or doesn't have enough info to judge it. I do think I have enough info, with my own eyes, to see that his behavior is poor and that whatever time he is spending on twitter is time wasted. Marketing? Self-sabotage.

badrequest 4y ago

The problem is ever having thought he was an artist and not merely a heroin addict who hung around them.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ChrisLTD 4y ago

Well said. It almost makes me want to leave social media.

kgwxd 4y ago

More like watching a spoiled brat squander the fortune they didn't earn. There's no tortured artist in this story.

rednerrus 4y ago

The heroine addiction is apt. Fame is the worst drug. It's terrible to watch what it does to people.

krapp 4y ago

No. Screw Elon Musk. How many people with just as much, if not more, potential than he has grow up, live and die in obscurity because they weren't lucky enough to be heirs to a fortune in slave emeralds? How many of his employees deserve just as much praise and respect as he gets, only to go unremarked because we believe that in the Great Man theory of capitalism, only the one on top gets the glory? If there's a tragedy here, it isn't how far Elon has fallen, it's how far above us the rich are to begin with. That one person commands as much power as Elon Musk does is an insult to human dignity. And people talk about him as if he's a divine being. The smartest man who ever lived. More brilliant than Einstein. More cunning than Jobs. More innovative than Da Vinci. The man in whose hands the very course of technological society and human evolution are held. He, and only he, is responsible for Tesla. He, and only he, is responsible for SpaceX. He literally built his rockets in a cave from a pile of scrap. But it turns out he's just an asshole with money. The rich don't deserve pity any more than they deserve privilege, and maybe the crumbling of the facade that is Elon Musk will help people see that. Is this the one you called Messiah? Behold the man.

kitsunesoba 4y ago
> He, and only he, is responsible for SpaceX. He literally built his rockets in a cave from a pile of scrap. From what I've seen people mostly don't credit Musk with building SpaceX on his own. What people found admirable is that of the numerous individuals who could've founded a "SpaceX" and had the means to keep the it afloat through the rocky beginnings unavoidable to newcomers in that field, he was one of the few who actually did. The number of people who fit that description can be counted on a single hand because the majority who are that wealthy are too risk averse and prefer to use their resources to pursue things with greater, safer, and/or more immediate profit potential.
- knighthack 4y ago
  Yes, and risk-taking/courage with enterpreneurship is something worthy of being celebrated. Plus it's not like Musk had all the money to throw into SpaceX at that point. And he came in not as some sort of angel investor, but as a doer who participated in the actual engineering aspect of things too. Most 'savvy' businessmen would not have acted as he did, given the risks. So as a businessman, Elon's risk-taking and participation deserves the rewards that ensued to him.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kodyo 4y ago