I agree with Stranger and I think you’re wrong. The fact that Musk’s strategic plan is not complex or sophisticated doesn’t make it not a plan. His whole plan is “wrecking ball.” Destroy everything. See what’s left. Go from there.
It’s idiotic, ignorant, and short-sighted. But it’s still a plan, and it’s exactly what he’s doing.
At BEST, I could imagine them thinking that what is good for THEM is - by definition - good for the country. I’m not really sure whether they actually think that expanding private businesses (and the wealth of those businesses’ owners) directly confers any specific public benefit. For example, does Bezos - or Sam Walton before him, REALLY think that allowing more people to buy and dispose of cheap stuff is a societal good? Or do they just come up with some explanation that allows them to justify their greed?
My guess is that their underlying belief is that growth, consolidation and increased profits confers some vague general benefit, combined with some general idea that business can do most things better than government. I doubt they worry overmuch about what really would be the best (to the extent that can be determined) for the society as a whole. They can assuage any guilt with token philanthropy.
I realize it is folly to try to identify a single clear explanation for complex situations. But I’m not sure any explanation fits better than:
Add in a good measure of “grab whatever data you can because you can use it to your advantage later.” These folk didn’t get rich and powerful by overlooking opportunities to maximize their advantages. Or by being overly scrupulous WRT respecting others’ rights and interests and doing what is “right” and “fair.”
High and dry, out of the rain
It’s so easy to hurt others when you can’t feel pain
– Hall & Oates
Also to install loyalist functionaries in government agencies far and wide:
Stranger
IIRC one of Project 2025’s goals is to replace a lot of elected positions with appointees to further enforce political loyalty and doctrine adherence. Not surprising Musk is leading the charge on that one.
Well, I don’t think Musk is really in alignment with the Heritage Foundation and the Project 2025 agenda, although they do have a few general aims in alignment. To the extent that DOGE is disrupting the regulatory infrastructure and dismantling government agencies from within, they are in concert but save for the Peter Thiel connection I don’t think they have that much overlap or share long term goals and will likely even find themselves at loggerheads over the fundamentalist desire for a Christian Nationalist theocracy versus the anarcho-capitalism of the tech broligarchs. But currently they are ‘fellow travelers’ on a path toward disestablishing the current administrative state.
Stranger
IS Elon really Afrikaans? I thought he is primarily of British descent (as opposed to Boer) and that English is his native tongue; supposedly, he learned some Afrikaans only in high school. However, this isn’t the first reference I’ve seen to an Afrikaaner background.
According to this, Elon Musk (b. 1970s) | WikiTree FREE Family Tree, one great-grandmother and one great-great-grandmother (the Therons) were Afrikaans, as far as I can tell. The Therons themselves were French on the paternal line, but seem to have married into Afrikaaner families. So he looks like he’s a little more than 1/8 Afrikaans by heritage, which isn’t much but isn’t nothing.
(Or Afrikaaner… I don’t know the proper terms with this group.)
No.
But us English South Africans also don’t want him.
I’d be surprised if he managed more than a passing mark in matric Afrikaans. Even though he portrays himself as Afrikaans.
Anecdotally, via a friend of a friend, etc, he was universally disliked at his senior school.
Not surprising, everything we know about him from his youth paints him as a pretty big weirdo. Remember that photo of him with the Liberty sign and leather frock coat? Yeah, I wish I didn’t.
If he has so little Afrikaans in his background, why does he speak such fucked up English? For example, when he says “world,” it sounds like “weld,” etc. But it’s not as though it seems (to me) that he has a consistent and flowing version of English that is simply of a different accent; he really seems to struggle with the language, like a non-native without much language ability who has nevertheless spoken English for a long time and has achieved some proficiency but has never gotten very good. (I say this as someone who taught ESL in Japan and has worked with Japanese people for a long time, noting various levels and types of English language proficiency.)
His accent is going to depend on his environment, not his heritage. If the Afrikaaner great-grandmother was the only one around when he dad was raised, or had a large close family or something, he could have more Afrikaans culture than his ancestry would indicate. I doubt it, though.
The strongest influence is going to be the speech community he spent time with from about 5 to 15 (“the language of the schoolyard”), followed by his home language and the language of the state (educational system and media).
For all I know, he has a speech defect and / or a brain defect affecting his speech, too. Happens. Or he could be putting on an accent to make himself sound distinct or (to his ear) intelligent; that also happens.
Personally, I think he talks funny because his parents are from different continents, he himself mixes with a wide variety of accents and dialects, and he’s a deeply peculiar person.
Interesting, thank you.
That’s a very polite way of describing a deeply disturbed person like Elon Musk.
Stranger
If Trump orders the invasion of Canada, Musk, as a Canadian citizen, could be interned as an enemy alien. This sounds crazy, but interning enemy citizens, in wartime, used to be commonplace, and it seems the kind of thing Trump would go for. And Trump is still threatening Canada this week.
Elon Musk became a naturalized US citizen in 2002.
Stranger
Yes.
But, unlike Ted Cruz, he has never renounced loyalty to king and country. Thus:
Canadian petition to revoke Elon Musk’s citizenship gathers more than 250,000 signatures
During World War II, being a citizen of both Japan and the U.S. of course was no protection against being interned. Being a dual citizen of Germany and the U.S. usually saved you from being interned, but Musk is a man with extensive Canadian business interests.
This talk sounds crazy today, but if we have American troops dying in a frontal attack on Parliament Hill, the U.S. will be a whole different country. And I have to take Trump literally until proved otherwise.
I mentioned this in the Cybertruck thread but I’ll mention it again here because this one sentence says so much about Elon Musk:
“I do zero market research whatsoever.”
First, one notes the stunning arrogance. “I know what the world needs better than the world does”. So he spends, what – a billion dollars or so – to develop a shitty, ugly product that has so far seen such terrible sales that it’s become one of the biggest flops in automotive history. Tesla is sitting on massive inventory that it can’t sell, existing owners can’t resell them, and Tesla is refusing to take them as trade-ins.
The second point is that the statement is so grammatically ugly that it’s hard to imagine it coming out of the mouth of a native English speaker. While we may not necessarily be able to articulate exactly why it sounds so wrong, it just does, and competent English speakers wouldn’t put words together that way.
The technical problem here that most of us just know instinctively is that “whatsoever” is a type of intensifier called a negative polarity item (NPI) that can only be used to intensify a negation, and “zero” is not actually a negation even though its adjectival form can be considered semantically equivalent to “no”. We say things like “no research whatsoever” and “none whatsoever”, but never “zero whatsoever”. That’s why Elmo’s sentence sounds so awkward and no one sensitive to language would ever have said it that way.
The man is a fool on many levels and Trump has turned him into a dangerous one.
That is an interesting analysis! It is indeed a clunky locution. I can see a native maybe stumbling into such a sentence, but with Musk it’s as if every sentence is a stumble of some sort. It’s really, really hard for me to listen to him speak, since it feels like such a struggle.
There are many areas in which we could analyze the abilities of native and non-native speakers of English, but one I’ll talk about (off the top of my head, inspired by your comments) is how hard the speaker is trying or not trying to speak above his skill level. We all know native speakers who are pretentious and try to use words and idioms they don’t really know how to use. Sometimes you can literally hear them straining for a phrase that is just beyond their grasp.
Well, Musk is like that but feels like a non-native version thereof. And in his case, he’s not trying to fly high like one of his explosive rockets but is struggling mightily just to cover the basics. Painful stuff.
And yeah, he’s dangerous and totally off the rails. It’s hard to imagine him not going straight to jail once the Trump regime falls (unless Merrick Garland is AG again, lol cry cry cry).
I think Musk on some level wishes to appeal to the coders and techies that he employs. This might explain wanting to be good at Diablo or wearing the “tech support” tee. The phrasing sounds like common slang - not grammatical, but saying nothing about fluency. It is an affection. It is not without arrogance but one does not doubt its veracity.