Elon Musk
Elon Musk is a grifter and billionaire asshole who likes to be known as the founder of Tesla. He is a scion of a rich-as-fuck family that made their fortune ruthlessly exploiting the Black working class in South Africa (I think mining emeralds?). Some of the things I know him for are:
- hatred of public transport (to the point of basically reinventing underground train systems in the form of the “hyperloop”, but wanting it to be really inefficient with every single train car being basically a modern-day motor car)
- some crusade to do with space travel (SpaceX, which he ultimately wants to lead the colonisaton of Mars?)
- having some bizarro fetish of himself (as an ultra-rich person) being some kind of superior being to the rest of humanity and needing to “spread his seed” to spawn as many children as possible to pass on his superior genes… 🤢
- sending up loads and loads of Starlink satellites to expand internet access, even though there are better ways to expand internet access that don’t involve cluttering the sky with fuck-tons of junk, so much junk that the very field of astronomy is threatened (see this Vox article )
- torturing monkeys in some kind of “Neuralink” project
- being accused in California of running racially-segregated factories
- the low pay and poor working conditions of his factories
- offering to give the UN $6 billion if they could provide a costed plan for ending world hunger; the UN did, but Musk did not front up the money
- buying Twitter in 2022
- see my blog post when that was first announced in April
- once the purchase went through in November, he immediately set about running Twitter into the ground. He sacked most of its workforce (either directly or through a bizarre “sign this agreement agreeing to unbearable working conditions, or else I’ll take you as having resigned” stunt), stopped moderating far right content, allowed Donald Trump back onto the platform, loaded Twitter up with an obscene amount of debt to the point that they have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in interest each day…
- the website has broken down in a variety of ways since (sometimes temporarily, sometimes not), given the lack of engineers still employed to maintain or fix things
- third-party clients got unceremoniously blocked, so the only way to use it now is through the website or its horrible ad-ridden in-house clients
- however, the announcement that the API was to be shut down altogether from early Feb 2023 seems to have been quietly forgotten and never implemented
He also has A TON of fanboys on the internet who are all obnoxious as fuck.