this all comes down to Elon's perceived alignment with power in the us government.
When you are aligned with the political power, you will sail through policy reviews, milestones and never see an audit or investigation.
when you are not, you will face never ending snaggles and red tape, threats of jail time, OIG investigations, endless proposal rejections and an unwavering ability for procedural outcomes to break in ways more painful to your goals.
I've experienced it from both sides and when the tide turns it is a very ugly and sobering realization of endemic dysfunction in our government.
All because people believe the big boss will reward the bureaucrats who torment their perceived ideological adversaries.
I don't understand how anyone can say this when Musk has been granted preferential treatment by the government across multiple cases. He's received very lucrative contracts that fund and subsidize his company, Neuralink has received expedited treatment by the FDA for their research. This has held true across multiple administrations.
preferential treatment over whom? he had to sue for the right to even compete for launch contracts. he's gone through hell getting Boca chica through an environmental review, and he was only recently considered to be right of center. at best it could be argued that he received preferential treatment until he publicly politicized himself.
edit:
He's also been shut out of the Biden administrations public initiatives on electric cars. an industry Tesla single-handedly created. ostensibly due to being non-union.
Most of that is BS of course but I get your point. His companies have received billions in tax breaks and NASA contracts, then supports Trumpism, Kanye and segregation.
he doesn't support any of those things and never did. but even if he did, it is still worth supporting him because of the actual positive change in the world he has manifested by having the balls to try. results are what matter, not his political beliefs or personal associations.
Preferential treatment over who? He's the only game in town for half the things he's working on and still has to fight tooth and claw for support. The guy is funding Starlink for Ukraine out his own pocket (or at least was last I heard).
People are so envious that Elon is a genius and one of the greatest men of our time (and not them) that they can't think straight about him.
Name one entrepreneur who has close to the track record of success he has had? He was even a major key funder of OPENAI that is all the rage these days.
Politicans hate him because people can see he actually cares and is competent in a way they aren't and so is respected and applauded for it. While they are more often than not mediocre men who can barely fix a kitchen sink.
what, really? not even spacex turns profit with it's gvmt contracts...Tesla turned a profit by his manipulation of initially the market, then latterly the crypto market, but despite making the cars dirt cheap (and it shows), he still couldn't make any money for over a decade.
He consistently misses but he knows where to make his money: conning vc, and getting his fans to dance on crypto.
He's a two-bit conman whose success is not in being an innovator but sometimes being ftm, he's going to be pushed out of every industry he's playing in eventually.
His one original idea: TBC...hahahahaha.
A clown who gets high off his own hype and the worship of smooth-brained fanboys.
I don't have sources handy just at the moment, but I've seen it reported by (what appeared to be) some fairly reputable outlets. It's possible it's untrue, but it all seemed to check out.
I think it's less about government alignment and more about vested interest alignment. There are a lot of people who want Elon to fail in everything he does and a lot of them have a lot of power and influence to help make it happen.
So why don’t the same people want Tim Cook to fail? Maybe if Elon was not tweeting obscenities at US Senators about their penises and ejaculation, perhaps like, maybe, people would not be having knives out for him? Just a thought.
Tim Cook doesn't have the entirety of the oil industry, the automotive industry, the power industry, the aerospace industry, (formerly) the payment processing and banking industry, and now the medical industry standing to lose trillions of dollars from stuff that he's doing. Tom Cook's scope and influence is also massively smaller than Elon's and tremendously lower stakes.
you're right there, both aspects certainly play a role. similar attacks we're launched by conservatives on fauci because he was a high profile target perceived to be on the opposite side:
>One particularly horrific experiment Fauci’s NIAID apparently paid for involved locking beagle puppies’ heads in boxes with sand flies, which were given hour-long intervals to feast on the poor dogs’ faces. Weary of the suffering dogs’ helpless cries, the experimenters arranged to have them “de-barked” – a barbaric procedure known as a cordectomy.
judge for yourself whether this is better or worse than neuralink but it was allowed to proceed until there was a political reason to start digging for dirt.
This article is a repost from RT, as mentioned in the tiny italic footer.
Even with that in mind, the authors themselves state these are "alleged" accusations lacking any sources or evidence. They mostly just claim over and over Fauci himself "bankrolled" these experiments and was the mastermind behind this supposed9 torture.
That's specifically NOT the way bureaucratic agencies, including the NIH, work at all.
I don't support animal cruelty whatsoever. And animal well being genuinely matters to me at all times. However.. vaccines, medical techniques, and pharmaceuticals that have transformed human existence in the last century and a half by saving billions of lives have often required animal testing during development. In the end, the only other option is doing the same things on humans.
The perfect example is the history of snake venom treatments. Rabbits were used to test the hypothesis of building an immune response via low dose titration of the poison overtime. Then you can take the plasma from their blood and harvest the antibodies to use as an antidote to a specific poison.
Fast Forward, we currently use horses to create the antibodies by dosing them with low levels of whatever venom youre trying to treat over the course of a year. Then, harvest their blood plasma and you have yourself antivenom.
Sounds terrible right? I'd disagree if one of my loved ones had just been bitten by an incredibly poisonous, rare snake requiring these seemingly cruel medicines to save their life in the matter of an hour. Plus the process is actually painless and harmless to the horses thanks to modern science.
Don’t forget that the horses are basically a living breathing pharmaceutical factories for the specific anti-venom they are used for, they are incentivised to look after the horses very well in order to avoid not only replacement cost, but wasted hours of specialised labour, and future lost revenue from the sale of harvested anti-venom products.
The “harvest” is basically a horse sized version of the sort of blood donation we do routinely for humans.
When you are aligned with the political power, you will sail through policy reviews, milestones and never see an audit or investigation.
when you are not, you will face never ending snaggles and red tape, threats of jail time, OIG investigations, endless proposal rejections and an unwavering ability for procedural outcomes to break in ways more painful to your goals.
I've experienced it from both sides and when the tide turns it is a very ugly and sobering realization of endemic dysfunction in our government.
All because people believe the big boss will reward the bureaucrats who torment their perceived ideological adversaries.
/cynical rant from someone going through it.