> extremely wealthy and powerful interests that seem to obviously want Elon to fail actually want him to succeed or don't care either way I mean, it's hard not

> extremely wealthy and powerful interests that seem to obviously want Elon to fail actually want him to succeed or don't care either way I mean, it's hard not to notice a large number of extremely wealthy and powerful interests that obviously want Elon to succeed. Investors in his companies for one, whose stake in them obviously exceed the short sellers which is why the share prices of his public companies are what they are and entities holding short positions haven't been crushed by short squeezes. Nobody with the slightest understanding of stock markets believes there's a $40B incentive to character assassinate Musk there, even if if he wasn't capable of alienating people himself. The fact some of the people who don't like Musk are rich is moot. Nobody needs to spend $40b drawing attention to Musk's politics because he's done that himself. When he didn't do that barely anyone cared. The entities that wanted electric cars to fail wanted electric cars to fail when Tesla was the only game in town, but that was a time when most people didn't know who Elon was and those that did tended to admire him. On the other hand I don't know who the CEO of the world's current biggest and fastest growing car company is, never mind what their politics are. This isn't because Big Oil wants people to buy BYD or Geely, it's because the CEOs of BYD and Geely don't wade into culture wars on multiple continents never mind buy the entire social media platform to promote those tweets just in case anyone had any doubt about whether they wanted people to know about them. I'm sorry, but if you're going to make the extraordinary claim that Musk bought a website to become social media's most prominent figure and opted to use that pulpit to culture war against the demographic that bought his cars, and now to personally and publicly attack both sides of the aisle that funds his space launch services because special interests are somehow forcing him to do that, the burden of proof sits squarely on you. And if your "mental model of the situation" refuses to countenance the possibility Elon speaking out against people and the things they believe in might be sufficient cause for them to dislike him unless you can be convinced no wealthy third parties disapprove of Elon, then please at least have the decency to drop the veneer of openmindedness...