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Can you understand why some might feel resentment towards a wealthy billionaire capriciously abusing his wealth and power to be a glaring, overt mortal failure?

by nemo 3y ago

Can you understand why some might feel resentment towards a wealthy billionaire capriciously abusing his wealth and power to be a glaring, overt mortal failure? If you look at the absolutely pathetic figure he cuts as a moral agent in the universe and think he's doing well, your values far out of the mainstream and to the far extremes. This is illustrated by the pullout of advertisers then he began posting anitsemitic hate and doubled down on it. Once that happened, the advertisers that were left bailed out because they are rational agents who recognize that Musk's brand of extremism is unpopular and toxic to their brands. He might be an ok engineer, and he's a talented enough business manager, and some of his businesses might serve some public good, but he's still a deeply flawed moral agent making moral choices very clearly driven by hatred, ignorance, and greed. Also, whatever blaming Musk for his moral failings might be, it's not scapegoating. A scapegoat is by definition innocent. Musk is anything but that.

VirusNewbie 3y ago
I don't particularly have strong opinions one way or another about Musk's behavior, and certainly don't understand how you could claim he's "abusing his wealth". I can think of many other companies and rich owners who have done much worse things, so it's surprising people seem so passionate about Elon. Given he apologized for his Tweet that had accusations of anti-semitism, is your main evidence of him being awful is that advertiseres pulled out of the platform? From what I understand, some of them are back. Will you retract your hatred if they all return?
- nemo 3y ago
  >I can think of many other companies and rich owners who have done much worse things Me too. He's still a trash fire of a human being on a moral level. The businesses that he runs aren't anything that I see as valuable contributions to society, of them SpaceX, the least bad, is still a trash fire of malfeasance that's doing harm to ground based astronomy and also allows Musk to interfere in world politics, as he did when he defended Russia by blocking StarLink access to Ukraine's offensives. >is your main evidence of him being awful is that advertiseres pulled out of the platform? I picked a particular instance of his regular expressions of bigotry since it's clear by the ramifications just how serious it was, but it's only one of a number of past racist and antisemitic episodes, I could have gone with his work to platform the worst of the far right on Twitter, many racist incidents at Tesla, his various sex abuse cases, his infantile labeling of a cave diving hero as a "pedophile" (while Musk himself deliberately chose to reinstate a Twitter account banned for posting child porn), I could have gone with his vindictive firing of employees who criticize him at his various companies, or his promoting "pizzagate" and other far-right extremism, his regular deception of investors at Tesla, and any number of his many other moral failings. The guy is a narcissistic sociopath who has made a long string of ethically dubious choices from the start to make his money with PayPal. He's a complete moral failure and always has been, this is why he's as successful as he is - he is clearly very comfortable transgressing moral boundaries that normal people are not. >Will you retract your hatred if they all return? I don't hate Musk, I mostly pity him, he's an absolute garbage fire of moral failure and knows it, it must be horrible. He spends a lot of time excusing himself and no time making amends and I see a pathetic, lonely, unhappy person incapable of establishing any healthy relationships with others.
  - kbenson 3y ago
    > SpaceX, the least bad, is still a trash fire of malfeasance that's doing harm to ground based astronomy and also allows Musk to interfere in world politics, as he did when he defended Russia by blocking StarLink access to Ukraine's offensives. I'm not a fan of Musk by any means, but this seems to wildly mischaracterize what happened. Are you going by the actual details of the situation, or just the reported headlines? My understanding, which I just backed up with some review of the situation, is that SpaceX allowed starling service continuously, and footed the bill until the US government stepped in to pay it. They allowed it for humanitarian and defense purposes, but refused to extend service into contested territories that Ukraine was assaulting to recover, especially after a Starlink enabled assault drone was discovered. I'm not sure it's accurate to say they defended Russia be refusing to allow their service to be used as an offensive weapon when they had the ability to control that. Many companies would do the same. Many developers would do the same for their code. I doubt they would consider their actions defending Russia.
    - nemo 3y ago
      Sure.
golemotron 3y ago
Not resentment, ressentiment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment
- ryanklee 3y ago
  Objecting to someone's retrograde ethics is not resentiment. People in power ought to understand the world better than Musk does. His ethical and intellectual facility is inverse to his net worth. It's ridiculous and horrifying that people aren't shaming him until he crawls into a hole.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]