The thing he actually doesn't want everyone to realise is that he is a dumbass billionaire who goes on costly trips all the time. As soon as the world sees him as the kiddo who happens to have whims and does whatever he want with the mass of money he has (he bought twitter just for fun?), his aura will be over.
I don't care about costly trips. I mean, he has billions and works a lot. Spending a million here and million there is pretty frugal compared to some other people who need to prove their worth by upping each other on who has the largest yacht in the world.
> I don't care about costly trips. I mean, he has billions and works a lot. Spending a million here and million there is pretty frugal compared to some other people who need to prove their worth by upping each other on who has the largest yacht in the world.
> What I do care about, though, is hypocrisy.
Turns out, you should care about both. First of all, his private jet costs as much as a yacht, plus he doesn't own a yacht just because he rents them...
> While Musk famously owns a $70 million private jet, he hasn't sprung for a yacht of his own (unlike his space rival, Jeff Bezos). Instead, the group chartered a vessel — called Zeus which rents for over $7,000 a day.
Is it just me or does $7,000/day actually sound very cheap? That's the nightly rate of, say, the nicest suite in a top-end hotel, but for a whole yacht. Maybe that doesn't include crew (besides the skipper, which the article says is included), fuel, food, etc.?
Renting yachts seems like a great mitigation to me. One yacht can service dozens of billionaires' 1-2 week vacations without sitting around in port useless 90% of the time.
He has a jet because, honestly, he is traveling constantly for his work. Call it a tax on running multiple large operations. Given his long work days I can see how the jet pays for itself many times over.
And renting a yacht for $7k is actually super cheap. I know people who spend more on champagne in a club in a single evening, and no, they are not billionaires.
Even if this yacht was rented 365 days a year, which I do not believe, this would be $2.5M / year.
Even if this absolutely worst case (I don't believe for a second that Elon is partying on the yacht for large part of the year) you could still rent it for literally hundreds of years and still not match the cost of just buying your own large yacht. Forget about insurance, maintenance and staffing costs.
If you want to pass judgment on what is and what is not frugality when it comes to billionaires, you need to expand your views a bit and stop thinking like a poor person.
Dude, he also has a $70 million jet, which costs about as much as a yacht. Let's be honest here.
> If you want to pass judgment on what is and what is not frugality when it comes to billionaires, you need to expand your views a bit and stop thinking like a poor person.
Also :-)))
We're not talking poor here. We're talking "makes more money in 1 month than the richest lawyer you know" rich.
> Dude, he also has a $70 million jet, which costs about as much as a yacht. Let's be honest here.
First, I am not your dude.
Second, please, read the comment before you respond. I addressed it.
$70M is a drop in the ocean when you are in tens of billions of dollars especially when it is your work tool that lets you move fast between locations and save couple of hours on each trip.
The person complaining about saying "dude" already lowered the tone of the drasticaly debate by saying, apparently without a hint of irony, "stop thinking like a poor person." So I agree there's a lot of low quality, revolting posts here but the use "dude" doesn't really scratch the surface.
It's kinda cool that 19 friends and I could take a day trip on Elon Musk's yacht for $350 each.
The last boat I rented charged $200 for a 2 hour session and had a capacity of 12 plus you had to drive it yourself, so his would be a definite step up, but it's pretty modest for a billionaire.
>As an individual, he has probably had net positive environmental impact than the next 1m people combined.
This is such a terrible mindset.
So we're going to allow the rich to do whatever damage they want to the environment, personally, if they construct widgets that are slightly less harmful than the next best widget?
It's this sort of hypocrisy that prevents people from buying in to the environmental movement: celebrities lecturing the rest of us while they don't alter their lifestyle one iota. The proletariat will never accept it.
Jury‘s still out on that, mostly because it‘s still up for debate whether replacing gas cars 1:1 with electric cars is a good idea.
I don’t doubt that we actually need electric cars, the important question is just whether that’s all we need or whether we need other transformations (radically fewer cars and less space for cars in cities, for example).
This second goal is something Elon has actively worked against, for example with his Hyperloop bullshit.
Why has even HN comment field lowered to nothing but blind hate? Say what you want but the man has reformed rocket technology and jumpstarted the world's shift to electrical vehicles, both against all odds. Hate-takes like this are silly.
I do give him credit for those things, but the guy is one of the most powerful people in the world and uses that power to bully. He keeps using his position of power to punch down at people who usually don’t deserve it. It’s petty and pathetic.
For example, twitter’s former head of trust and safety had to leave his home recently because Musk told his fawning followers that he was a pedophile. It’s not even the first time Musk has called someone a pedophile unfounded.
> For example, twitter’s former head of trust and safety had to leave his home recently because Musk told his fawning followers that he was a pedophile.
Uh no. He simply posted a screenshot from the guy’s thesis.
> Uh no. He simply posted a screenshot from the guy’s thesis.
That is BS. Musk posted it with this false comment, which he knew would enrage his followers (and it did, I saw tons of "all pedophiles deserve to die" about Roth after this):
> Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis.
Which is, unsurprisingly, the exact opposite of what Roth was arguing for. Here is what the DailyMail (not exactly a liberal rag) said about Roth's thesis:
> Roth wrote that, as underage youngsters use the app anyway, an age-appropriate version should be created to offer help to LGBT youth
In other words, he specifically wanted to separate kids from an app that was intended for adults.
Now, people can definitely debate in good faith whether Roth's argument is a good idea or not - I think it's most definitely not. But it's not because of the absolutely false trope that Roth wants to make kids available to adults, which is basically what Musk has deliberately whipped up his followers into a frenzy about.
When a very powerful man with a large following “just posts a screenshot”, he is supposed to be unaccountable for the actions his followers take, even if his additional context dog-whistles to his fans that the guy is a pedo.
When a relative nobody “just posts already-public information about a physical object”, suddenly that’s not just worthy of a ban, but of a nuisance lawsuit.
What you and I think are not really important in this conversation. Elon believes that the Woke Mind Virus is an existential threat to mankind. Perhaps he has been infected.
He also misrepresented what the thesis was saying in the same tweet, deliberately playing into homophobic tropes associating gay people with pedophilia.
It's possible to think he has done good things in the past, but is doing bad things in the present. And to believe/worry that his present (and future) actions may cause his 'net effect' on the world to become negative.
Adding to the "Too many of the good things he’s done seem to be despite him." - there was this tumblr post that passed by here on HN by someone who claimed to've been an intern on Space-X:
I never understood the point of the cake story, and it all might be total BS, but the longer this current saga goes on the harder it is to totally disregard the bit about "managing Elon".
Hate is not the opposite of worship - he can be great in some areas and a "dumbass billionaire" in others.
Looking at history, I can't imagine there's any useful technological advance (or adoption thereof) that depends on any individual - if EVs were meant to be successful I believe they would've been with or without Musk. Same goes for anything Space X does. Same goes for anything _anyone_ does. If you believe the world would be notably different without any one individual in it, that's what you chose to believe, I see no evidence from history for that.
Does he have valuable skills? I'm sure - if nothing else marketing and persistence. Was he involved in important stuff? Evidently. Did he get lucky? Absolutely. Does whatever perceived or actual good he did excuse the perceived or actual bad? Not in my opinion.
Naive people and children fall victim of hero worship.
Adults and people who can think for themselves are beyond that and understand that it's humanity as a whole which progresses forward, humans just make a fuss and all sort of drama to be the person who gets the merit and gets to sign off the progress do jour.
Musk got to sign off the peculiar niche of EVs and rockets which are niches nobody else wanted because they are dependant upon political support.
Agreed. Surely the workers would have gotten together on their own, pooled their resources and achieved at least as much as they have if it weren't for Musk.
/s
Seriously, this is just blind hate. He's a deeply flawed individual and I definitely think he's a jerk, but he's at least he's taking risk on creating something actually new.
The richest people I know made money on "safe" industries like civil engineering and plastic bag manufacturing.
Pushing the aerospace industry? Challenging the petrol status quo by making EVs viable? Credit where credit is due, he put in the investment and pushed people to make it happen. Obviously not single handedly, but surely accelerated it.
It’s not blind hate. People see the man for what he is, a douche bag and a charlatan, and are calling his behavior out. His luck in this world (and he has been incredibly lucky) is irrelevant.
Anyone paying attention to his tweets can tell this is obvious fake front that he tries to maintain (one that actually works on a lot of folks). On some level it's probably technically true part of the time, counting long flights in his private jet as "working", etc.
To be fair, I do think there are people who work hard, especially founders. There are also vocal pretenders like Musk. My guess is that the folks who do work really hard are probably the least likely to go around broadcasting that fact. That was my experience, at least.
I was never VC-backed but I did a couple runs (combination of bootstrapped and angel investment) and I worked like crazy all the time. I never really thought about the amount of work I did until after (I was too busy worried about failing). I never discussed the amount of work I did with anyone, especially not publicly, because I never felt like it was anything to brag about (I still feel this way). This post is probably my first public mention of it TBH. :)
Elon has recently come out as concerned for his life. Death threats and what not. Someone tracking his every move is of concern under those circumstances.
Why not? He is CEO, he owns the jets. If he wants to take a 1 hour meeting in person in another state that is his call.
If people have a problem with the carbon footprint they should be promoting all around higher energy use taxes. Not using a strawman against someone they hate.
Certainly it's his perogative and he's free to do what he wants. If I had as many businesses as he does, I would think a teleconference would be a more efficient use of my time, rather than the time spent physically traveling somewhere.
It's not about providing info that he flies a lot, but about sharing his live location without consent. Imagine someone kept posting a tweet about your every trip - when you left, when and where you will arrive. Twitter TOS are one thing, but I'm quite sure such things break EU's GDPR laws as well.
A lot of public figures are under scrutiny like this.
You ask others to imagine what it’s like to have location shared without consent. But, you’re ignoring all the shit Elon does as well as all the ways he voluntarily forced himself into the public eye.
Elon wants the luxury of saying and doing anything he wants without accountability. This is a tiny way for the public to push back. No sympathy.
Musk is doxxing someone while having banned the jet tracker he accused of doxxing (which was using public information...
) AND multiple reporters just reporting the story.
It's about tracking a plane which ALREADY has its location tracked by a transponder and published publicly. Like every other non-military plane in the world. Nothing is unusual there, except that this data is posted to Twitter.
Investors and marketwatch is very interested in this data. Because it can be used to build cases on mergers, bankruptcy, management changes and so forth.
If the private jet of a Shell manager is seen to fly to a Phillipine island a few times in a month, and the private jet of a manager of a Phillipine drilling company then flies to Amsterdam, it's likely that Shell is going to buy, build or anything over there.
First of all, when you're the CEO of what, 5 companies at the same time? you're probably not working that much. Or being a CEO should be a part time job, 20% of regular working hours.
Secondly:
Twitter is in San Francisco, Neuralink is in San Francisco, Tesla is in Austin, The Boring Company is in an Austin suburb, SpaceX is in the LA metro area.
I'm quite sure there are regular commercial flights each day between Austin, San Francisco and LA.
Let's be real here, he just uses a private jet because it's cool and convenient.
He was kinda forced to buy twitter in the end. He made a bid, but then the marketed turned red, and then didn’t want to buy it anymore. Now he is stuck with a company which generates less earnings than the interest costs from the buyout credits.
That’s also why he is even firing the kitchen staff and selling their kitchen appliances. He is so desperate for money to keep this company from bankrup.
Which is also probably the reason why he plays with QAnon stuff. I think he is speculating on someone to take twitter away from him. Maybe.
he wasn't "forced", he signed an agreement to buy it, and then did.
he failed to do any due diligence before signing and failed to include any outs in the agreement in case he changed his mind, but that's just stupidity or laziness, not being forced into something.
That’s like saying “I just bought a house for $4.20 million because I think 420 is a funny number, but now I’m suing the seller because I just realized I can’t afford the mortgage payments because my stock portfolio declined in value after the purchase”
That’s life. No one should have sympathy from Elon for making bad financial decisions. He’s smarter than that.
