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Elon spends more money highlighting his own flaws than all his opponents put together, and orchestrated his own spat with the Trump administration in public on

Elon spends more money highlighting his own flaws than all his opponents put together, and orchestrated his own spat with the Trump administration in public on his own website; no third party PR conspiracy is necessary here. Lockheed will of course be angling for this contract for reasons which have nothing to do with "undermining Elon" and everything to do with being keen on securing themselves more multibillion dollar prestige projects, as will Blue Origin, as they would under any other government and frankly NASA is quite entitled to reopen the contract if SpaceX doesn't hit performance milestones. Whether the alternatives are any more likely to deliver adequate solutions on time, and whether the current US administration can be trusted not to make decisions one way or another for arbitrary political reasons or straight up corruption is another question entirely. (The arbitrary political reason in this case may be more a desire to do things on unrealistic deadlines to credit it as a Trump admin achievement than to punish or favour any particular individual, but it's not like they're reluctant to do that either)

FloorEgg 1y ago
A conspiracy assumes secret cooperation, and I am not making any claim like that. I am merely pointing out that Elon has position himself as a rival against a lot of rich and powerful people. Rather than speculate on the specific arbitrary political reason, it might be mostly because of the underlying pressure or general anti-Elon baseline effect (and to attribute it to something more specific is a form of baseline or base rate neglect). And to your point about him spending more money then the rest combined, maybe, he did spend a lot on twitter, but I don't think any of us can actually know how much all those people are spending. It might be closer than you think. Also the anti-Elon media brigade started long before he bought twitter, it just wasn't focused on the general public, it was focused on amateur investors.
- notahacker 1y ago
  Rather than speculate that the Trump administration might have fallen out with Elon because Trump's former right hand man loudly and publicly repudiated one of their flagship policies (he had a point...) and insinuated Trump was a paedophile, we should instead conclude that the baseline effect shifted from Trump's bestie to persona non grata that week because he was the innocent victim of underlying pressure of uncoordinated campaign by shadowy anti-Elon entities which happened to kick in at that time. rrriight.... the idea that an uncoordinated group is spending more than $44b on defaming Elon and this is what made people go out and buy the "I bought this car before Elon went mad" and not any of the things he started doing and saying on his own very public platform is also too ridiculous for even a hardened Elon stan to contemplate, never mind someone trying to maintain a "balanced view" of his positive and negative qualities.
  - FloorEgg 1y ago
    Well the short positions against Tesla that started out as small bets when Tesla was valued at ~20bn but have exploded in liability are a financial vice grip well beyond $20bn. I noticed this pattern start in 2017 and watched how all narratives the media was peddling unfolded as untrue (Elon is a fraud, Tesla is going bankrupt). Then I noticed how the scale and scope of the anti-Elon narratives grew. Yes, Elon did all sorts of egotistical things that didn't help. Yes, he deserves plenty of criticism. I'm not denying any of that. But there are distinct quantitative financial dynamics here that can be traced back a long time that point at a "big problem" for some very rich and powerful people, and that's not even taking into account the potential lost future revenue of all the entrenched industries I mentioned. So yes, I stand by my point. There is an anti Elon base effect going on and it's probably having a bigger effect on the situation than most people realize. Your skepticism of my view without a substantive rebuttals (you aren't taking the most respectful interpretation of my point or "steel manning" it as they say), doesn't speak to me having an unbalanced perspective, if speaks to you having a narrower one, taking less scope across time and dimensions into consideration. Have you done the math to estimate how much NPV Elon's companies threaten entrenched interests? Have you calculated the liability of the short positions against Tesla and how its grown over the last 8 years? Do you know who pays for the media you consume? How much the publishers receive in revenue, and multiplied that over 8 years? If Elon represents a $1tn threat to a bunch of random uncoordinated rich people, why is it so hard to believe some of them might have spent tens of billions (combined) on lobbying and "sponsored content" to fight back? No coordination is even needed on their part. Just a collective "oh man f#@k this guy" attitude. Are you uncomfortable with the idea that your own strongly anti-Elon opinion might have been manipulated by a bunch of rich people? If you weren't constantly reading anti-Elon articles and social media posts, would you even care about it or be paying attention? All kinds of bad people do all kinds of bad things all the time and we don't hear about it. So why do we hear so much negative stuff about Elon specifically? I have been genuinely curious about this situation for 8+ years now and I still am. I'm open to having my mind changed, but you need to bring novel facts, not just the same old "but Elon's bad and does bad things" like everyone says who has read a bunch of stuff slagging Elon. Saying something akin to "it's obviously Elon's fault because Elon is bad because everyone says Elon is bad" is not critical thinking, it's groupthink, brought to you by all the people who paid for all the stuff you read that says Elon is bad.

FloorEgg 1y ago

A conspiracy assumes secret cooperation, and I am not making any claim like that. I am merely pointing out that Elon has position himself as a rival against a lot of rich and powerful people. Rather than speculate on the specific arbitrary political reason, it might be mostly because of the underlying pressure or general anti-Elon baseline effect (and to attribute it to something more specific is a form of baseline or base rate neglect). And to your point about him spending more money then the rest combined, maybe, he did spend a lot on twitter, but I don't think any of us can actually know how much all those people are spending. It might be closer than you think. Also the anti-Elon media brigade started long before he bought twitter, it just wasn't focused on the general public, it was focused on amateur investors.

notahacker 1y ago
Rather than speculate that the Trump administration might have fallen out with Elon because Trump's former right hand man loudly and publicly repudiated one of their flagship policies (he had a point...) and insinuated Trump was a paedophile, we should instead conclude that the baseline effect shifted from Trump's bestie to persona non grata that week because he was the innocent victim of underlying pressure of uncoordinated campaign by shadowy anti-Elon entities which happened to kick in at that time. rrriight.... the idea that an uncoordinated group is spending more than $44b on defaming Elon and this is what made people go out and buy the "I bought this car before Elon went mad" and not any of the things he started doing and saying on his own very public platform is also too ridiculous for even a hardened Elon stan to contemplate, never mind someone trying to maintain a "balanced view" of his positive and negative qualities.
- FloorEgg 1y ago
  Well the short positions against Tesla that started out as small bets when Tesla was valued at ~20bn but have exploded in liability are a financial vice grip well beyond $20bn. I noticed this pattern start in 2017 and watched how all narratives the media was peddling unfolded as untrue (Elon is a fraud, Tesla is going bankrupt). Then I noticed how the scale and scope of the anti-Elon narratives grew. Yes, Elon did all sorts of egotistical things that didn't help. Yes, he deserves plenty of criticism. I'm not denying any of that. But there are distinct quantitative financial dynamics here that can be traced back a long time that point at a "big problem" for some very rich and powerful people, and that's not even taking into account the potential lost future revenue of all the entrenched industries I mentioned. So yes, I stand by my point. There is an anti Elon base effect going on and it's probably having a bigger effect on the situation than most people realize. Your skepticism of my view without a substantive rebuttals (you aren't taking the most respectful interpretation of my point or "steel manning" it as they say), doesn't speak to me having an unbalanced perspective, if speaks to you having a narrower one, taking less scope across time and dimensions into consideration. Have you done the math to estimate how much NPV Elon's companies threaten entrenched interests? Have you calculated the liability of the short positions against Tesla and how its grown over the last 8 years? Do you know who pays for the media you consume? How much the publishers receive in revenue, and multiplied that over 8 years? If Elon represents a $1tn threat to a bunch of random uncoordinated rich people, why is it so hard to believe some of them might have spent tens of billions (combined) on lobbying and "sponsored content" to fight back? No coordination is even needed on their part. Just a collective "oh man f#@k this guy" attitude. Are you uncomfortable with the idea that your own strongly anti-Elon opinion might have been manipulated by a bunch of rich people? If you weren't constantly reading anti-Elon articles and social media posts, would you even care about it or be paying attention? All kinds of bad people do all kinds of bad things all the time and we don't hear about it. So why do we hear so much negative stuff about Elon specifically? I have been genuinely curious about this situation for 8+ years now and I still am. I'm open to having my mind changed, but you need to bring novel facts, not just the same old "but Elon's bad and does bad things" like everyone says who has read a bunch of stuff slagging Elon. Saying something akin to "it's obviously Elon's fault because Elon is bad because everyone says Elon is bad" is not critical thinking, it's groupthink, brought to you by all the people who paid for all the stuff you read that says Elon is bad.