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with the gigafactories out and market pressure to build EVs, I feel like Elon has achieved what he set out to do. If he borrows too much and builds too many fac

with the gigafactories out and market pressure to build EVs, I feel like Elon has achieved what he set out to do. If he borrows too much and builds too many factories, those factories will still be producing cars after Tesla is liquidated. I can see why he'd be so cavalier with Tesla's survival given what else is happening, the momentum is achieved even if he loses a lot of money. That he'd turn that leverage to X though, I didn't like to see. Even as a Musk fan, it looks like a functional alcoholic buying a bar. Twitter probably does have a lot of military value as a propaganda vector, but it's hard to see how he could be an improvement over Jack Dorsey without ending up in conflict with the military industrial complex that pays for that propaganda.

rurp 3y ago
Given all that we know now, Musk's concern for the environment seems a lot more like good marketing than a deeply held belief. A lot of what he says is nonsense but sounds neat, like pretending that we're close to building a Mars colony. Undermining public transit actively makes the world worse off, but helps him sell more cars. How much of his immense wealth and power has he used to help the environment in ways that don't enrich himself?
- suoduandao3 2y ago
  Well... whether he's responding to a market need versus creating a market need versus responding to a moral obligation is very hard to untangle. That's part of why nobody's found a better system than capitalism yet - the most self-serving actions are often also the most public serving. I will say from the perspective of someone who specialized in renewable energy all through undergrad, renewable energy is cheap but requires storage. Expensive storage is the reason wind and solar have trouble competing with coal and gas on a dollers per watt basis. Subsidizing the creation of a lot of batteries by bundling them with cars people would buy anyway is the kind of brilliant but dirty growth hacking only a Silicon Valley Techbro would have the audacity to try. I can't comment on his motives, but I don't have a better idea for how to accelerate renewable energy adoption than the path he's pursued. Affordable storage is the keystone that supports that entire structure, in 2009-2014 it was the big unanswered question among my professors. As for enriching himself by helping... I don't think there's a perfect solution there. The Rockefeller-Gates system of making money in one industry and funding purely philanthropic ventures in another comes with its own moral hazards. For profit work in a field of public interest comes with different ones. Both are preferable to taking no interest in the public good IMHO. Personally, if I was a billionaire I'd try to fund ventures that are in the public interest and also have paying customers, it promotes a certain kind of honesty that would be important to me, but I think any oligarch that claims to be trying to help should be given the benefit of the doubt, societal incentives are just so much more aligned that way.

rurp 3y ago

Given all that we know now, Musk's concern for the environment seems a lot more like good marketing than a deeply held belief. A lot of what he says is nonsense but sounds neat, like pretending that we're close to building a Mars colony. Undermining public transit actively makes the world worse off, but helps him sell more cars. How much of his immense wealth and power has he used to help the environment in ways that don't enrich himself?

suoduandao3 2y ago
Well... whether he's responding to a market need versus creating a market need versus responding to a moral obligation is very hard to untangle. That's part of why nobody's found a better system than capitalism yet - the most self-serving actions are often also the most public serving. I will say from the perspective of someone who specialized in renewable energy all through undergrad, renewable energy is cheap but requires storage. Expensive storage is the reason wind and solar have trouble competing with coal and gas on a dollers per watt basis. Subsidizing the creation of a lot of batteries by bundling them with cars people would buy anyway is the kind of brilliant but dirty growth hacking only a Silicon Valley Techbro would have the audacity to try. I can't comment on his motives, but I don't have a better idea for how to accelerate renewable energy adoption than the path he's pursued. Affordable storage is the keystone that supports that entire structure, in 2009-2014 it was the big unanswered question among my professors. As for enriching himself by helping... I don't think there's a perfect solution there. The Rockefeller-Gates system of making money in one industry and funding purely philanthropic ventures in another comes with its own moral hazards. For profit work in a field of public interest comes with different ones. Both are preferable to taking no interest in the public good IMHO. Personally, if I was a billionaire I'd try to fund ventures that are in the public interest and also have paying customers, it promotes a certain kind of honesty that would be important to me, but I think any oligarch that claims to be trying to help should be given the benefit of the doubt, societal incentives are just so much more aligned that way.