The Billionaire formerly known as Musk...

[Nik_SpeakerToCats]

I kid you not:
Elon Musk has changed his X-Handle to something completely megalomaniacal...

It isn't 'Utterly Nutterly', it is worse, much worse...

I'm wondering when the first pics of him will emerge cuddling a disgusted, floofy-white cat...

[Jotun]

Blatant insider trading. And of course nobody is going to find anything because nobody is going to be looking, let alone looking (too) hard.

If that menatlist bawbag goes on like that, the IS gubbermint is going to land on him with both feet. Of an Imperator Class Titan (you know, the WH40k walkers with a freaking cathedral on their backs)

[Zen9]

Musk reveals that the Tech Bros, obsessed by their narcissistic need to excell, run counter to the interests of the nation.

Colour me unsurprised.

And lo, the Tech Bros have taken an L in the face of MAGA's essential base. Which is more tribal than propositional.
Because Americans be more than a Constitution.

If you dig deeper the whole 'pursuitof excellence' is BS. It's just a scam to suck immigrant labour dry and claim they want to work for less.
H1b isn't the cream.

How many lives squandered because you need to solve problems on the cheap and to hell with Americans who've sucked up mountains of debt to try to get into such an industry. Just chuck 'em away and import some low paid.

Can Musk see beyond his obsessions and ego?
What does it profit America to achieve the world, if it comes at the price of being American?

Could his opposites?
....
Hardly that why the Dems took such a loss.

Time will tell.
But Musk and Vivek just found themselves on the wrong side and it hurts.

[Pdf27]

He's a classic example of why too much money is bad for your brain - he's surrounded by people telling him his every idea is incredibly smart and the best thing ever. Exacerbated by spending far too much time on Twitter where every comment of his is massively responded to and debated - probably several hours a day when he's meant to be running multiple hugely valuable companies and taking on a major government role.

[Drunknsubmrnr]

Musk reveals that the Tech Bros, obsessed by their narcissistic need to excell, run counter to the interests of the nation.

Colour me unsurprised.

And lo, the Tech Bros have taken an L in the face of MAGA's essential base. Which is more tribal than propositional.
Because Americans be more than a Constitution.

If you dig deeper the whole 'pursuitof excellence' is BS. It's just a scam to suck immigrant labour dry and claim they want to work for less.
H1b isn't the cream.

How many lives squandered because you need to solve problems on the cheap and to hell with Americans who've sucked up mountains of debt to try to get into such an industry. Just chuck 'em away and import some low paid.

Can Musk see beyond his obsessions and ego?
What does it profit America to achieve the world, if it comes at the price of being American?

Could his opposites?
....
Hardly that why the Dems took such a loss.

Time will tell.
But Musk and Vivek just found themselves on the wrong side and it hurts.

I dunno about that. All I saw from the H-1B debate was the same people who become experts on submarines right after one implodes are now immigration experts. It’s a full Dunning-Kruger.

[Pdf27]

He also appears to be posting as "Adrian Dittman" on 4chan (since deleted), and it isn't a great look. This is after using the same name on Twitter to say nice things about himself.

[Jotun]

I am not gloating, but I guess a lot of conservative Musk simps are waking up to the fact that he is dangerous, and not in a cool, edgy way, but to the very fabric of society.

If he could, he‘d take over the country. That said, JD Vance is the literal sock puppet of Peter Thiel. Thiel made him, bought him.

The USA is one catastrophic heart attack, stroke or Adderall overdose away from literally being ruled by a tech billionaire.

[Zen9]

Some dubious takes on Musk and X (Twitter).

He's turned the business around from sucking on state teets to profit.

To be fair he banned the Child Porn and stopped the political silencing....which was very Deep State.
Ironic how the Lefties stomped off to alternatives only to find real Nazis lurked amongst such along with literally terabytes of porn of every type you really don't want to imagine.

To be frank he's not wrong to condem the Labour Party silence over the UK Grooming (Rape) Gangs.

But he showed he's not interested in preventing ethnic destruction in the name of a modest profit increase.
And his response to taking the L....childish.

[jemhouston]

Jotun, I would point out that thanks to my personal favorite boogie man George Soros, large chucks of the US legal and election systems was under his control thanks DAs and Sectaries of State (most states they control the election system). Not to mention the other officials he helped elect.


I think his high-water mark (I hope) was four years ago. Since then, voters recalled, didn't reelect them.


The US can get pushed and pulled, but it's designed when things go too far, people drag it back. In some places (Chicago, NYC), it's broke, it mostly works.

[Jotun]

Jotun, I would point out that thanks to my personal favorite boogie man George Soros, large chucks of the US legal and election systems was under his control thanks DAs and Sectaries of State (most states they control the election system). Not to mention the other officials he helped elect.


I think his high-water mark (I hope) was four years ago. Since then, voters recalled, didn't reelect them.


The US can get pushed and pulled, but it's designed when things go too far, people drag it back. In some places (Chicago, NYC), it's broke, it mostly works.

Hopefully. As much as I detest the incoming US administration (no secret, that), I can absolutely do without Cyberpunk 2020/2077 becoming a reality.

[jemhouston]

About all we can do is hope Jotun.

[kdahm]

Musk is an ass. There's no denying that, and even his supporters agree that he is abrasive, demanding, not polite, and in general not a pleasant person.

The main thing that he is missing, despite all of his wealth, is someone to whisper in his ear, "This too shall pass." and "Remember that you are mortal." He has surrounded himself with sycophants and pushed away any who would tell him that he is wrong or misguided. That means the people he listens to are largely and echo chamber, and thus he is not getting the grounding that a person that denies him can provide. Also, his ego is larger than his net worth.

The person I think most closely mirrors Musk is Douglas MacArthur. Absolutely assured of his own correctness, incapable of hearing or recognizing dissent, and believing that anyone that disagrees is inherently bad and wrong. A classic high INT, very low WIS build.

[Johnnie Lyle]

Musk is an ass. There's no denying that, and even his supporters agree that he is abrasive, demanding, not polite, and in general not a pleasant person.

The main thing that he is missing, despite all of his wealth, is someone to whisper in his ear, "This too shall pass." and "Remember that you are mortal." He has surrounded himself with sycophants and pushed away any who would tell him that he is wrong or misguided. That means the people he listens to are largely and echo chamber, and thus he is not getting the grounding that a person that denies him can provide. Also, his ego is larger than his net worth.

The person I think most closely mirrors Musk is Douglas MacArthur. Absolutely assured of his own correctness, incapable of hearing or recognizing dissent, and believing that anyone that disagrees is inherently bad and wrong. A classic high INT, very low WIS build.

I’d say Musk is far closer to Ernie King than Douglas MacArthur, though J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie or Cornelius Vanderbilt would be better analogues. Musk and his companies are very effective at getting and building shit that people want and need than the competitors can - to the point that we’re seeing wholesale changes in industries that were stagnant, declining and vastly more expensive and niche for what they did driven almost entirely by a Musk corporation entering the realm.

He’s a ruthless, arrogant robber baron, but he’s also acting as a force of nature dragging entire industries where they need to go to be something other than an overpriced boondoggle laundering public money to rich corporations, Democrat donors and policy advocates. Just look at the absolute shitshows that are ULA or Boeing, or the entire NASA manned spaceflight boondoggle since the shuttle was scrapped. The only people dropping the cost of lift to orbit is SpaceX, the only company that can reliably deploy manned spaceflight to orbit is SpaceX, and they’re the only ones to increase the reusability and thus further decrease costs. The rest of the competition is so much more expensive and less capable it’s effectively money laundering.

Or lets compare Starlink to the Biden Administration’s much ballyhooed Broadband Initiative. How many billions of dollars has that horseshit spent and yet as not connected a single fucking person to the Internet. How many get Internet from Starlink? 4.6 million in 118 countries.

Let’s talk EVs. Tesla has the second largest marketshare of any EV manufacturer by sales, after BYD, with ~625,000 in the first half of 2024. BMW had a third of that, Toyota a sixth, and Ford one tenth of total sales. It’s an exaggeration, but not much of one, to say that Tesla drove the EV market, and they’re certainly the largest driver of the needed network to support EVs beyond your house - as shown by how Tesla’s charger port and Supercharger network are now the North American standard and rapidly being adopted by most major EV players.

His business empire gets shit done that needs doing in industries and arenas where competitors and government initiatives are content to suck so hard they would be better off lighting the cash on fire.

Twitter is probably the biggest outlier, given that Musk overpaid for it, took on a substantial debt load and lost advertising revenue, though it’s the debt that generates annual losses from the public estimates. But if it pays off in political power and influence to address the structural government roadblocks that imperil the more profitable (and useful) business enterprises, it will have paid for itself.

The reports of his management style also do not support the argument he wants just yes men. That doesn’t create the culture of continuous improvement we see. If anything, descriptions of his management style use “democratic” and frequently reference his desire for input, provided the data backs up the suggestion. If anything, the biggest criticisms center around a rep for driving people hard into the ground and burning them out. It’s get shit done now, not hold hands and sing kumbayah. We saw that most ruthlessly in the Twitter acquisition, where he absolutely junked a work 3 and bill 8 culture and fired shittons of people who wouldn’t get on board.

Nor do I think Musk would really listen to “this too shall pass.” He’s too much of a guy who has built his empire by intentionally sailing close to the wind, and the risks have substantially paid off. He would probably ignore that as timidity or naysaying.

But he gets shit people can’t think possible done, or gets people to get shit people can’t think possible done. So more Ernie King, but more driven and less rage, but the same sonofabitch attitude to get shit done.

[warshipadmin]

The slightest of nitpicks

" It’s an exaggeration, but not much of one, to say that Tesla drove the EV market,"

Not an exaggeration at all. Tesla demonstrated you could build a broadly acceptable BEV with 2005 tech. Admittedly it helped that he'd accumulated cubic dollars to pay for it but that isn't the point.

[Pdf27]

I need a popcorn smiley for this one...

[Micael]

I need a popcorn smiley for this one...

I wonder if Musk has ever reflected on the fact that his paternal grandmother was British and that this means that he is eligible to claim British citizenship. That could get interesting.

[Simon Darkshade]

It is unlikely, given that whilst one can stand for Parliament as a dual citizen, it would involve actual hard work other than on Twitter; and there would absolutely be some glaring conflicts of interest given his role in the Trump Administration.

That isn't the interesting part here, for me at least. That would be Musk overshooting his mark and influence, and doing so just 36-48 hours after starting to put uncomfortable screws on the Starmer Government in an area where they are potentially vulnerable. Why? Because he got sucked too far down the plughole and ended up swirling around the Tommy Robinson ultra-fringe crowd.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/0 ... -move-yet/

Tim Stanley
Forget the $100m – this is Farage’s smartest move yet
The rupture with Musk is a turning point for Reform – a chance to purge the party of some of the uglier ideas Farage has promoted

The split between Elon Musk and Nigel Farage is inevitable and welcome. It erupts at a turning point for Reform, when it stands on the cusp of becoming a serious party of opposition, and so must make a choice: is it a coherent conservative party or the party of white resentment? The latter will thrill a few bots online, but it’ll never win a parliamentary majority and wouldn’t deserve to. Nigel needs to take a stand against the nativists.

When I interviewed him a little over a week ago, he called Elon a “bloody hero” – and you can see why. He’s a brilliant businessman. His purchase of Twitter has been a win for free speech. But the entrepreneur is used to being able to say literally whatever he wants without consequence, while Nigel has been trying to persuade his way into Parliament since 1994. Musk is unsuited to the statesmanship required of machine politics; Donald Trump giving him a department to run is a mad gamble. Over Christmas, he came out in favour of greater skilled migration, forcing many to ask why he had signed up to Team Trump at all.

The answer is a confluence of interests between capitalism and populism. Musk is a futurist who believes society has to be engineered to maximise his returns, from cutting regulation to boosting baby numbers to supporting the right kind of immigration, which means weeding out anti-Western cultures. British conservatives might agree with aspects of that programme in isolation. There are subtle differences in spirit that can be summed up in two pseudonymous words: Tommy Robinson.

Elon tweeting that Reform needs a new leader – as “Farage doesn’t have what it takes” – clearly refers to Nigel’s feelings about this ghastly individual.

Many Americans believe Britain is occupied by Islamic rape gangs protected by socialist bureaucrats, and see Robinson not as a rabble-rouser or charlatan, but a free speech warrior; one who comes with the added frisson of being working-class (to the Silicon Valley rich, Luton appears exotic). They’ve been told this not just by Robinson’s surprisingly powerful North American lobby but, let’s be honest, by British Right-wingers who have profited from presenting their country as ground zero in the collapse of civilisation. Into the ranks of Reform, the natural home of the dissident Right, have thus been drawn online agitators; disaffected, poor whites; and young, intellectual conservatives radicalised by the horrors of Rotherham rape gangs.

People who like Farage tend to like Robinson. The irony is that Farage does not. He says he walked away from Ukip in 2018 over its obsession with Islam and Robinson, making it clear in the years since that Robinson would not be not welcome in Reform.

Farage is, at heart, an old-fashioned Thatcherite, arguably a classical liberal, who wants to reform Britain in order to preserve its benign character – to reduce immigration to alleviate the conditions under which racism might flourish. He has purged his candidate list of extremists. He appointed a Muslim as Reform’s CEO. I’ve no doubt the mini-Musks have been pushing Farage to embrace Robinson, and he has ardently refused – risking Musk’s much-hyped donation, perhaps, but with an eye on the broader, domestic coalition Reform has to build.

Consider the crude mathematics: for every far-Right vote Reform courts, it loses 10,000 moderates. Goodbye constituencies such as Guildford or Peterborough. But an alignment between Robinson and Reform would also be morally unconscionable.

Conservatives believe order is the basis of liberty: Robinson is a jailbird. Conservatives have no argument with true Islam, which venerates tradition, community and charity. Few would seek to curtail religious expression. They wouldn’t wish to treat one British citizen any differently from another, seeing nation as family – and an exclusive relationship at that. It is intriguing that Reform has sought Musk’s money for its own purposes yet wishes to end foreign ownership of utilities, endorsing the nationalisation of water as it follows the logic of populism towards the common good.

Whatever Musk says about wasteful government spending, his companies have flourished thanks to state investment, while he’s argued for technological acceleration in the private sphere that would destroy blue-collar employment. Quite what Elon wants to preserve about Western civilisation, I’ve no idea – given that his ultimate goal appears to be to abandon Earth for Alpha Centauri – and I’m sceptical, too, about the “cultural Christianity” he espouses. Like so many of its converts, he doesn’t seem to drive old ladies to church or ally himself to the teachings of Christ that put the last first and vice-versa.

He has every right to comment on our politics, much as Keir Starmer took the knee over America’s, but his language promotes upheaval here, possibly violence. This is the antithesis of conservatism, which aims to conciliate and unite.

Trump will in time also fall out with Musk, probably over protectionism. Trump, who wants to save US jobs, loves tariffs; Elon prefers to cut them. In the past, Elon donated to the Democrats; it is context and self-interest that aligns him with the Republicans today. Farage, if he’s smart, will see his own rupture as a chance not only to distinguish himself from Musk but also clear the stables of some of the uglier ideas he has promoted.


.......................................

At the end of the day, Musk is a dilettante when it comes to politics and deep ideas, and is one prone to lashing out in bizarre ways at those who disagree with him or have the temerity to say 'no' - recall his branding of a doctor involved in the Thai cave rescue as a paedophile. He may have great influence and be correct on a whole host of areas, particularly in the Americas, but it was a very apt statement by kdahm that he has no one to be a 'Memento mori' figure.

[Zen9]

Well this is getting interesting!

Trump has thrown his lot behind Musk on H1nb, which shoes Vivek's attitude isn't going to get constrained.
Now they be in power, they don’t need their base.

Because betraying MAGA for Elite billions is......a 'no-brainer'.

And this really shows why Musk has used his voice over the Grooming (rape) Gangs. Distraction.
Moving on.
Forger your betrayal, accept infinity immigrants and don't expect a job to pay enough.
Ever.

But don't worry, because the MAGA assembly has enough propagandists to keep the narrative away from this. While Musk bans or shadow bans voices of criticism and dissent.
++good

This puts the Farage business into perspective. A Distraction and maybe Musk realises certain Reform figures be getting ever more hardline. They need to disarmed in the Billionaire view, lest they close the door on their favourite instrument of anarcho-tyranny.

Insert Tommy Robbinson as Distraction.and division. He continues to perform as needed to keep the masses divided and the working class leaderless.
The performance continues!

Better than any soap.
Shame it's consequences will be felt by so many.

[brovane]

Musk is an ass. There's no denying that, and even his supporters agree that he is abrasive, demanding, not polite, and in general not a pleasant person.

The main thing that he is missing, despite all of his wealth, is someone to whisper in his ear, "This too shall pass." and "Remember that you are mortal." He has surrounded himself with sycophants and pushed away any who would tell him that he is wrong or misguided. That means the people he listens to are largely and echo chamber, and thus he is not getting the grounding that a person that denies him can provide. Also, his ego is larger than his net worth.

The person I think most closely mirrors Musk is Douglas MacArthur. Absolutely assured of his own correctness, incapable of hearing or recognizing dissent, and believing that anyone that disagrees is inherently bad and wrong. A classic high INT, very low WIS build.

From reading books on Musk, Musk does listen to dissent. You just got be ready to backup what you say and he doesn't suffers fools. If you can defend your position he will listen. I have come to the conclusion that Musk is a "Operator" and cares more about getting things done than people's feelings.

LeMay.jpg

[Pdf27]

LeMay did things by the book, and fired people who deviated. Musk rips up the book if he doesn't like the way things look aesthetically. There's a world of difference here - Musk just thinks he's LeMay.