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As reasonable as your argument is, let's apply Occam's Razor. Which is more likely? 1. Jack Ma knows things you don't, and those things made mouthing off seem
by kdmccormick 4y ago
As reasonable as your argument is, let's apply Occam's Razor. Which is more likely?
1. Jack Ma knows things you don't, and those things made mouthing off seem worthwhile to him. Still, he miscalculated, but not out of sheer cluelessness.
2. You, HN commenter, understand Chinese politics and power better than Jack Ma, a prominent Chinese billionaire. He is clueless.
Doesn't 2 seem a little arrogant to you?
- SkyMarshal 4y agoHaha, you're not wrong. Though I would argue that the explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is not that Ma was being calculating and strategic, but that he just got cocky and said something dumb in the moment. He let all the global feting of his rise from schoolteacher to China's richest man go to his head, made an all-too-human mistake, and said something inadvisable. He may even have been trying to defend the CCP in that moment, trying to communicate to US audiences that the CCP doesn't need to be feared because it's not scary, and thus he himself didn't fear it. But Xi and the powers that be interpreted it differently, and disappeared him. Which is always a risk in that system, but not in liberal democracies.
- kdmccormick 4y agoFair enough! There are certainly other recent examples of billionaires getting themselves in trouble by saying too much....
- SkyMarshal 4y agoI know right. A lot of that going around these days. Maybe something in their bottled water.
- factormeta 4y ago>Which is always a risk in that system, but not in liberal democracies. No, you just get arrested by the authorities, and later committed suicide before the trial.
- HWR_14 4y agoMissing option (3). Jack Ma, prominent billionaire, was surrounded by kiss-asses for the past 5-10 years. In doing so, he developed a distorted sense of his own intelligence/power/allies which caused him to make a calculation about the current state of Chinese politics and power that is obviously false to an outside observer. See also, Twitter is was not worth $44 billion in 2022. Missing option (4). If you have billions, sacrificing a lot of wealth and power to do something you want is just another valid option. See also, sacrificing 20% of your net worth to support "freedom of speech" is a reasonable choice, especially if you are left with an objective fortune.
- not2b 4y agoExcept that Musk's Twitter in no way supports freedom of speech. For a while he banned any mention of Mastodon, or the ElonJet account, and he's banned a whole slew of antifascist accounts and journalists who report on the far right (he will claim that it's because they violated rules, but in each case it seems it was a new rule: journalism he doesn't like is "doxxing": reporting on who did what). So sure, it looks like he is willing to lose a big chunk of his net worth to change Twitter, but his intent seems to be to promote certain speech and suppress other speech, or as he would say, to kill the "woke mind virus".
- HWR_14 4y agoIt doesn't matter for what we're talking about if Elon's "freedom of speech" is an ironic take on people only being able to listen to him or actual freedom or whatever. The point is, blowing 44 billion USD on a hobby/for a point he cares about is a reasonable cost for him (and Bezos. Maybe a few others)
- webmaven 4y ago> Except that Musk's Twitter in no way supports freedom of speech. It seems to be supporting Musk's freedom of speech just fine.
- ehvatum 4y agoIt’s worth noting that Elon unbanned a whole slew of accounts that had been silenced simply for disagreeing with what happen to be your political priorities. Who has Elon banned for their politics? Being banned for tweeting Andy Ngo’s current home address is very different from being banned for saying that COVID-19 likely originated in a laboratory.