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Perhaps because disrupting things was the actual goal, rather than saving money. DOGE was highly effective in harming the entities meant to oversee Musk's compa
by InsideOutSanta 10mo ago
Perhaps because disrupting things was the actual goal, rather than saving money. DOGE was highly effective in harming the entities meant to oversee Musk's companies, stealing information about union organizing and labor complaints, reducing the government's ability to collect taxes, and destroying its regulatory capacity.
- exe34 10mo ago[flagged]
- BennyGezerit 10mo agoThis is the right take
- underlipton 10mo agoThere is a certain class of American that rides the knife edge between credulity and contempt in supporting and accepting the activities and intent of bad actors who pledge to get rid of the things they don't like and they people they detest. They're ever-ready to believe the barest of excuses and to hand-wave the worst excesses in this regard. Today's anti-woke are yesterday's McCarthyists, and history will note the echo.
- MisterTea 10mo ago> There is a certain class of American The selfish kind. Unfortunately that seems to be the end goal of the American dream: "I got mine, fuck you." I can't tell you how many times I heard the "protect my family" argument from people I never thought would vote for that clown.
- ido 10mo agoAlso not exclussively American. Plenty of selfish assholes where I'm at as well, I suspect this is a world-wide phenomenon.
- zimpenfish 10mo agoThe UK is a good example of this over the last decade (at least.)
- underlipton 10mo agoBut people do come here specifically to be selfish. They like that they can be selfish here in ways that are socialized away in other countries. They like that they can even socialize their selfishness, forcing poor people to subsidize the rich.
- braebo 10mo agoThey are typically uneducated victims of the largest and most well funded mass propaganda brainwashing campaigns in the history of mankind, to be fair. Forgive them, for they know not what they do. The perpetrators of the misinformation, however, know exactly what they’re doing.
- underlipton 10mo agoI think this misrepresents the situation. Many of these people are well-educated and affluent. In fact, such efforts wouldn't be possible without the support of the wealthy and academic elite, including on the left. Stooge-of-the-month Ezra Klein is decried as a woke liberal by certain segments of the political sphere, and yet he's running interference against those who support forcing the affluent to give back some of their recent outsize gains (through his "abundance" tripe). It's not poor, rural red-staters listening to his message.
- 9rx 10mo ago> Many of these people are well-educated and affluent. That does not preclude them from being uneducated and gullible to brainwashing. In fact, there is a strong case to be made that being well-educated and affluent primes one to become more likely to be uneducated/brainwashed. When you are well-educated and affluent, the "yes men" show up and start to make you feel like you know everything, and it becomes really easy to lose the skepticism and awareness that one normally has. > It's not poor, rural red-staters listening to his message. Was there something to suggest that it was? I see no mention of this group anywhere.
- rayiner 10mo ago[flagged]
- underlipton 10mo agoYou're a racist asshole and I'm tired of being forced to read your thoughts on every even halfway-related topic.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- throwrqX 10mo agoThe purpose of a system is what it does
- ourmandave 10mo agoOr maybe the unelected moronic clown running it went in with a chainsaw like when he took over twitter. Giving zero f*cks for the massive harm caused or the legality of it.
- Aeglaecia 10mo agoI don't think hanlon's razor applies to billionaires , unless the peter principle holds true all the way to the very top
- Nasrudith 10mo agoWhy wouldn't Peter Principle apply just because the magical financial threshold is crossed? This is Peter Principle in a textbook way, a promotion from managing companies to managing the government.
- Aeglaecia 10mo agomy original thesis is wrong - while musk may have petered up to the top, that doesnt imply his actions must also be attributed to stupidity. the error in the thesis is conflation of stupidity with the raw brutal strength of cancer
- 7bit 10mo agoWas he ever competent in something, tho?
- watersb 10mo agoAh. That would be the Dilbert Principle: > Unlike the Peter principle, the promoted individuals were not particularly good at any job they previously had, so awarding them a supervisory position is a way to remove them from the productive workflow. > An earlier formulation of this effect was known as Putt's Law (1981), credited to the pseudonymous author Archibald Putt ("Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand."). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle
- saltcured 10mo agoThis is disturbing. They actually had competence at something..?
- jauntywundrkind 10mo agoDisregarding the state, all data protection rules, and running amock; yes they are competent maligners.
- thisisit 10mo agoI like how in today’s world and especially when it comes to Musk things cannot be as simple as incompetence. It has to be some 4D chess move. Like a reverse Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which might be/maybe/perhaps explained by 4D chess move. It’s like 4chan leaking all over the Internet. And Musk can keep his genius legacy alive.
- The_Stone 10mo agois it really 4D chess to imagine that a man under investigation by the federal government would desire to benefit from being given express permission to reduce force and efficacy of agencies directly threatening him? I don't think Musk having bad faith intent shows him to be intelligent, more just greedy and selfish, but I think it's actually more irresponsible to believe that he had absolutely no idea what he was doing
- pfannkuchen 10mo agoUnder investigation for what? Like the self driving claims thing or something nefarious?
- __s 10mo agohttps://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/28/elon-musk-doge-conflict-of-interest https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/28/elon-musk... False claims of self driving is half of it, at 1B
- pfannkuchen 10mo agoThat falls under “dishonest stuff companies do all the time”. Unless there are major political points to be scored by nailing him (which there may be now, don’t get me wrong), this would get a slap on the wrist. The cars do drive themselves, they have for awhile, Tesla never claimed it was perfect, they only claimed it would be perfect in the near future and musk plausibly could have (delusionally) thought this so there is no case (not saying he isn’t dishonest, though, that’s just not how the legal system works). So I don’t think being looked at for the kind of stuff many companies do all the time explains <checks notes> infiltrating the government and personally disrupting the people investigating him, in public. If he’s worried about a financial hit, souring Tesla’s reputation as he has is obviously not worth it. If he’s worried about prosecution, surely he would be better off being nice to everyone in politics, not pissing anyone off and strongly supporting choice causes off the mainstream radar that happen to be in the interest of politicians. So if he is doing it on principle, he just needs to be hubristic and reckless and possibly very autistic. If he is doing it to mess with the people investigating him, he needs to be outright stupid. Hubristic and reckless (and autistic) are much, much more realistic adjectives for Musk than “outright stupid”. I know a lot of people will just assert that he is stupid, but if you yourself are sufficiently intelligent and you listen to the guy talk for a long time, you can at least tell he isn’t stupid. You can tell because he doesn’t do the rhetorical things stupid people need to do in order to mask contradictions or logical holes in what they are saying. They always do it. Even smart people sometimes do it quite a bit, like Steven Pinker for example m. Musk very rarely does it, and when he does it’s so completely obvious you can tell he’s bad at it and didn’t get where he is by being good at it.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- jakobnissen 10mo agoI don't think that's right - although of course we are speculating about what's happening inside the head of Musk. Musk strikes me as an juvenile and naive man, precisely the kind of man that would take a hatchet to a complex system while believing he is competently reforming. His experience with taking over Twitter probably reinforced his belief that you can move fast and break organisations and, despite all the moaning from liberals, nothing bad will happen in the end. So Musk is exactly the man to honestly believe in what he was doing, and he was immersed in a right wing echo chamber, which for 50 years has been talking about government waste. Don't ascribe to malevolence what can be explained by incompetence.
- fakedang 10mo agoYou underestimate Musk too much. This was years in the making. He basically made a $200 million bet on the USG, one that translated into hundreds of billions. This was all calculated, and the veneer of government inefficiency was good enough to mask his actual objectives. I can say this confidently because that's what I would have done too, and I'm not half as smart as him (given that I haven't built a Paypal or a SpaceX myself). That's what anyone in such a privileged position would have done. The upside to doing it that way was just that much massive.
- braebo 10mo ago> That's what anyone in such a privileged position would have done. That’s what anyone who’s self-centered and morally bankrupt enough would do perhaps, but no, not “anyone”. Some people are committed to being good (or at least striving towards it). Your take strikes me as sociopathic at worst, and misguided at best. Much like musk, to your point.
- margalabargala 10mo agoOn the other hand, getting into "such a privileged position" of hundreds of billions has the sociopathy you mention as a prerequisite...
- conartist6 10mo ago
- brnt 10mo ago> Perhaps because disrupting things was the actual goal It surprises me if anyone thought anything different. I mean, how could you think anything else if yo know what group of cronies there people are? It's like Americans forgot all about what was wrong with the Rockefeller-era oligarchy. Even the MAGA slogan is just a copy from back then.
- browningstreet 10mo agoElon's still pumping his DOGE work and the Cybertruck daily on his X account.
- UltraSane 10mo ago[flagged]
- NedF 10mo ago[dead]
- cma 10mo agoCybertruck may have a big customer with $100million+ orders, wouldn't count them out: https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/spacex-buying-unfathomable-number-cybertrucks https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/spacex-buying-unfath... Big NASA money involved like the earlier bonds the same company bought from SolarCity.
- NuclearPM 10mo agoLess than 2000 trucks is 100 million dollars? And even then, this is meaningless for a Ponzi scheme “worth” $1.5 trillion. 0.0067% Do you still think your claim makes sense?
- margalabargala 10mo agoIt's not meaningless, because the stock price is based on vibes. Losing a big CT sale is bad vibes. If the finances don't matter on the way up, why would they matter on the way down?
- cma 10mo agoThey said they only sold around 5000 of the trucks in the quarter. Was only responding to the stuff about Cybertruck. It seems like a material portion of its sales are to his own other company.
- 10mo ago
- jimmydoe 10mo agothe goal is to keep attention. maybe disrupting things badly is more preferable as that gets more attention, but ultimately the impact is good or bad doesn't matter at all.
- bigbadfeline 10mo ago> the goal is to keep attention. A strong claim is severely weakened by lack of evidence. In this case, all evidence points to the claim being untrue. > but ultimately the impact is good or bad doesn't matter at all. That's essentially a rewording of the above claim and again without evidence. In fact, it's detrimental for the perpetrators of disruptive actions to attract attention to them/selves when these actions don't achieve their purported benefits. If they wanted only to simulate activity, they'd have used less damaging to themselves ways to achieve it without inflicting damage to the system. The latter is so important that it excludes accidental or PR-related actions to that end.