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That dynamic of influence compounding certainly echoes the historical patterns we’ve seen with capital—those who have it can shape systems to acquire more. But

That dynamic of influence compounding certainly echoes the historical patterns we’ve seen with capital—those who have it can shape systems to acquire more. But it’s worth remembering that this only holds power if we choose to participate. Personally, I’ve stepped away from anything associated with X.com or Elon Musk. I deleted my accounts, disconnected from the ecosystem entirely—and life is better for it. No doomscrolling, no algorithmic nudging, no subtle behavioral conditioning. Influence may be the new capital, but opting out is still a form of agency. Disengagement can be a powerful act. We often forget: participation isn’t mandatory.

stevenAthompson 1y ago
I was going to buy a Tesla. My brother had one and I coveted it. They make neat stuff. Then Elon started taking testosterone (or whatever it was that jacked up his aggression), using psychedelics, and became incapable of keeping his mouth shut. To compound it he then got involved in politics. Now I will never buy a Tesla, starlink, or anything else he's involved in because his behavior represents a real risk that any of those companies might cease to exist if Elon gets high and does something stupid, then I'll be stuck without support. Similarly, a social media account is an investment. I would never invest my time into building relationships on a platform like X. Even if it does survive Musk, the community is broken permanently.
- jandrese 1y ago
  Many years ago I was really rooting for Tesla and Elon as they dragged the auto industry kicking and screaming towards electrification. How they focused on the underserved whole home battery market. He even kept his manufacturing domestic unlike most other big companies. Some cracks started to form in this when he made a reckless wall street bet that he could make a million cars in a year or something and had his employees working double shifts in tents to get it done. In the end he won the bet and got an enormous payout. I remember calculating that if he divided the award in half and split that half evenly among every single Tesla employee that it would amount to about $40,000 per person, a life changing amount of money for most people. Instead he kept it all for himself and gave a press conference about how big of a genius he is. But the turning point is when there was a kid trapped in a cave and he received some mild criticism over his ill conceived rescue solution and the result was to baselessly claim that the critic was a pedophile. He's exactly the kind of guy who looks like a god when you only measure things in dollars. He takes big risks and they've paid off more often than not, but he's not someone anybody should really look up to.
  - gruez 1y ago
    > In the end he won the bet and got an enormous payout. I remember calculating that if he divided the award in half and split that half evenly among every single Tesla employee that it would amount to about $40,000 per person, a life changing amount of money for most people. Instead he kept it all for himself and gave a press conference about how big of a genius he is. You call the bet "reckless", but are seemingly only opposed to it because he didn't share the winnings? Which one is it? Also, I can't find the source for this bet, only some bets about covid, and whether the tesla roadster could be built at all.
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      > You call the bet "reckless", but are seemingly only opposed to it because he didn't share the winnings? Which one is it? What's the conflict? I can call something reckless without the recklessness itself making me particularly opposed to it. Also it's not just that he didn't share the reward, it's that he forced a whole lot of extra difficult work and then also didn't share the reward.
      - gruez 1y ago
        >What's the conflict? I can call something reckless without the recklessness itself making me particularly opposed to it. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov's_gun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov's_gun If you start off a sentence with "Some cracks started to form in this when", and then describe a situation using negative adjectives (ie. "reckless"), it's fair for most assume that the "recklessness" was your justification for the aforementioned claim. If that detail is irrelevant to your argument, then you shouldn't include it. As for the object level question of whether taking such a bet is "reckless" at all. It's entirely impossible to tell without knowing the bet amount, and his finances at the time. Musk was recently able to take a $40B hit to his finances when he was forced to buy twitter (after trying to back out), with seemingly little consequence, so it's unclear whether an absurdly large bet would actually be "reckless". >Also it's not just that he didn't share the reward, it's that he forced a whole lot of extra difficult work and then also didn't share the reward. Bosses telling non-equity owning subordinates to work harder is hardly a phenomenon limited to Musk.
- PaulKeeble 1y ago
  Based on some of the videos of him it looks like its Ketamine.
  - pas 1y ago
    for anyone interested: https://alisoncrosthwait.substack.com/p/a-ketamine-addicts-perspective-on https://alisoncrosthwait.substack.com/p/a-ketamine-addicts-p...
    - stevenAthompson 1y ago
      Thanks for sharing that. The section on conspiracy thinking was interesting to me. I've been trying to understand the ever increasing amount of it in our society, and my thoughts keep going back to the rise in marijuana legalization. I can't help but feel that there is a link. Like ketamine, other psychedelics can trigger mild psychosis and with it conspiratorial thinking, grandiosity, and all of the other symptoms described here. The rise in legalization seems, anecdotally, to match the "normalization" of tin-foil hat thinking in society. Years ago Dan Quayle was essentially disqualified from office for misspelling potato, now Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly decries the Jewish Space Lasers and nobody blinks. I feel like there has to be more to societies changes over the last ~25 years than "the internet".
      - bigbadfeline 1y ago
        > The section on conspiracy thinking was interesting to me. I've been trying to understand the ever increasing amount of it in our society, and my thoughts keep going back to the rise in marijuana legalization. Are we switching the horse and cart places here? It's highly likely that people resort to drugs in order to cope with the distress caused by conspiracy talk. Musk is using drugs as stimulants to increase his "productivity" which is the other common reason for taking drugs. BTW, his "productivity" isn't the source of his success, but that's tangential here. In both cases, conspiracies aren't the root cause and fighting them ends up fighting free speech without reducing either conspiracies or drug use. The same is true for the normalization of wild conspiracies - MTG followers aren't engaging in them because of drugs, they are doing it because MTG is promoting them from a place of authority and bot-love. If you think she's not playing by a script but simply spilling out the contents of her concerned heart... you know very little about propaganda.
zoogeny 1y ago
I think we should be careful of too much cynicism (although too little is bad as well). There is the old Aesop tale of the fox and the grapes. Being unable to reach the grapes the fox sulks away saying "they were probably sour". There is a lot to gain for the powerful if they can convince those that they wish to hold that power over that the "grapes are sour", so to speak. That leaves less people fighting for the few grapes available, as we stretch this analogy to its breaking point. No man is an island, and all that. If the holders of influence decide to start a war, you are in it if you like it or not.
- grey-area 1y ago
  There's no probably here, and it is healthy to avoid social media platforms run by people who perform nazi salutes in public and attempt to destroy democracy.
  - tyleo 1y ago
    Agreed, I don’t think the analogy holds in this case. Elon is grape maker and he can dole out sour or sweet grapes as he pleases. No point in eating them if you don’t favor him because he often gives out sour ones to those folks.

stevenAthompson 1y ago

I was going to buy a Tesla. My brother had one and I coveted it. They make neat stuff. Then Elon started taking testosterone (or whatever it was that jacked up his aggression), using psychedelics, and became incapable of keeping his mouth shut. To compound it he then got involved in politics. Now I will never buy a Tesla, starlink, or anything else he's involved in because his behavior represents a real risk that any of those companies might cease to exist if Elon gets high and does something stupid, then I'll be stuck without support. Similarly, a social media account is an investment. I would never invest my time into building relationships on a platform like X. Even if it does survive Musk, the community is broken permanently.

jandrese 1y ago
Many years ago I was really rooting for Tesla and Elon as they dragged the auto industry kicking and screaming towards electrification. How they focused on the underserved whole home battery market. He even kept his manufacturing domestic unlike most other big companies. Some cracks started to form in this when he made a reckless wall street bet that he could make a million cars in a year or something and had his employees working double shifts in tents to get it done. In the end he won the bet and got an enormous payout. I remember calculating that if he divided the award in half and split that half evenly among every single Tesla employee that it would amount to about $40,000 per person, a life changing amount of money for most people. Instead he kept it all for himself and gave a press conference about how big of a genius he is. But the turning point is when there was a kid trapped in a cave and he received some mild criticism over his ill conceived rescue solution and the result was to baselessly claim that the critic was a pedophile. He's exactly the kind of guy who looks like a god when you only measure things in dollars. He takes big risks and they've paid off more often than not, but he's not someone anybody should really look up to.
- gruez 1y ago
  > In the end he won the bet and got an enormous payout. I remember calculating that if he divided the award in half and split that half evenly among every single Tesla employee that it would amount to about $40,000 per person, a life changing amount of money for most people. Instead he kept it all for himself and gave a press conference about how big of a genius he is. You call the bet "reckless", but are seemingly only opposed to it because he didn't share the winnings? Which one is it? Also, I can't find the source for this bet, only some bets about covid, and whether the tesla roadster could be built at all.
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    > You call the bet "reckless", but are seemingly only opposed to it because he didn't share the winnings? Which one is it? What's the conflict? I can call something reckless without the recklessness itself making me particularly opposed to it. Also it's not just that he didn't share the reward, it's that he forced a whole lot of extra difficult work and then also didn't share the reward.
    - gruez 1y ago
      >What's the conflict? I can call something reckless without the recklessness itself making me particularly opposed to it. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov's_gun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov's_gun If you start off a sentence with "Some cracks started to form in this when", and then describe a situation using negative adjectives (ie. "reckless"), it's fair for most assume that the "recklessness" was your justification for the aforementioned claim. If that detail is irrelevant to your argument, then you shouldn't include it. As for the object level question of whether taking such a bet is "reckless" at all. It's entirely impossible to tell without knowing the bet amount, and his finances at the time. Musk was recently able to take a $40B hit to his finances when he was forced to buy twitter (after trying to back out), with seemingly little consequence, so it's unclear whether an absurdly large bet would actually be "reckless". >Also it's not just that he didn't share the reward, it's that he forced a whole lot of extra difficult work and then also didn't share the reward. Bosses telling non-equity owning subordinates to work harder is hardly a phenomenon limited to Musk.
PaulKeeble 1y ago
Based on some of the videos of him it looks like its Ketamine.
- pas 1y ago
  for anyone interested: https://alisoncrosthwait.substack.com/p/a-ketamine-addicts-perspective-on https://alisoncrosthwait.substack.com/p/a-ketamine-addicts-p...
  - stevenAthompson 1y ago
    Thanks for sharing that. The section on conspiracy thinking was interesting to me. I've been trying to understand the ever increasing amount of it in our society, and my thoughts keep going back to the rise in marijuana legalization. I can't help but feel that there is a link. Like ketamine, other psychedelics can trigger mild psychosis and with it conspiratorial thinking, grandiosity, and all of the other symptoms described here. The rise in legalization seems, anecdotally, to match the "normalization" of tin-foil hat thinking in society. Years ago Dan Quayle was essentially disqualified from office for misspelling potato, now Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly decries the Jewish Space Lasers and nobody blinks. I feel like there has to be more to societies changes over the last ~25 years than "the internet".
    - bigbadfeline 1y ago
      > The section on conspiracy thinking was interesting to me. I've been trying to understand the ever increasing amount of it in our society, and my thoughts keep going back to the rise in marijuana legalization. Are we switching the horse and cart places here? It's highly likely that people resort to drugs in order to cope with the distress caused by conspiracy talk. Musk is using drugs as stimulants to increase his "productivity" which is the other common reason for taking drugs. BTW, his "productivity" isn't the source of his success, but that's tangential here. In both cases, conspiracies aren't the root cause and fighting them ends up fighting free speech without reducing either conspiracies or drug use. The same is true for the normalization of wild conspiracies - MTG followers aren't engaging in them because of drugs, they are doing it because MTG is promoting them from a place of authority and bot-love. If you think she's not playing by a script but simply spilling out the contents of her concerned heart... you know very little about propaganda.

zoogeny 1y ago

I think we should be careful of too much cynicism (although too little is bad as well). There is the old Aesop tale of the fox and the grapes. Being unable to reach the grapes the fox sulks away saying "they were probably sour". There is a lot to gain for the powerful if they can convince those that they wish to hold that power over that the "grapes are sour", so to speak. That leaves less people fighting for the few grapes available, as we stretch this analogy to its breaking point. No man is an island, and all that. If the holders of influence decide to start a war, you are in it if you like it or not.

grey-area 1y ago
There's no probably here, and it is healthy to avoid social media platforms run by people who perform nazi salutes in public and attempt to destroy democracy.
- tyleo 1y ago
  Agreed, I don’t think the analogy holds in this case. Elon is grape maker and he can dole out sour or sweet grapes as he pleases. No point in eating them if you don’t favor him because he often gives out sour ones to those folks.