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This is not the main thrust of your post but I've been on Twitter myself a bit lately and Elon Musk really is not a high quality poster. Charitably I think he just doesn't really spend that much time on high quality political discussions and his political diet seems to be heavily weighted by low effort right wing shitposters. The guy is running several very large companies, I'm not knocking his intelligence or whatever, but his posting is very low quality. I wouldn't take anything he says that seriously. I don't think I've ever seen a political take by him that even reaches the median post, not even top level post, of this forum. I really would quite like to like musk, he's culturally on my side by being someone who builds impressive things, but he's definitely not pumping out impressive political takes.
He's most often scanning the headline, trusting the shitposters, and then hitting repost. I did follow him at some point, but you can tell that he's starting to panic and resorting to just filling up feeds with a repost of
WowandThis is insaneinstead of adding even a lukewarm take or analysis to anything.As you said, he's busy. I sometimes have to just punch out a link to a thoughtful article to my reports at work instead of warming it up for them in the microwave with some Thought Leadership. But yeah, he's not a high quality source of information.
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Probably true. He's out there retweeting quite a lot of partisan stuff. Maybe he was pent-up from being (for Elon) relatively circumspect for a few years before? Surprised me still though, because the tweet wasn't just off the cuff in the sense that it's seven (twitter-sized) paragraphs long (!!)
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No, he isn't.
He's put some world class people in charge of his various companies to run them. Elon Musk is maybe the single best identifier and motivator of talent the world has ever seen. He's done some majorly impressive things across very different industries.
And he really wants to be seen as an genius engineer. Which is super sad to me. Dude is a world class talent picker and he has a reality distortion field that turns well adjusted smart people into cult members in their obedience.
But check out his Twitter avatar. Dude's self-conception is already out of this world.
Yes and no. I didn’t read the Musk biography by Isaacson, but I read last weekend the new book “Reentry” by Eric Berger about SpaceX from 2010 - 2022. There is also a prequel “Liftoff” about SpaceX early times. I can both recommend glowingly. He truly did build SpaceX from the ground up. He did know nothing about rockets so he learned everything he could and even Russian rocketry manuals! Since Twitter he became more absent though (which Berger counts as a big negative), first because he focuses so much on the business of the new company but also because he is addicted to tweets.
Anyway this is of lesser importance. Aquota point was that garbage in produces garbage out, and I think Musk is victim to that on X. Snarky soundbite discussions (or mastodon or thread) are rotting the brain of everyone not counterbalancing it with more deeper longform material.
I don’t know him, maybe I am unfair to him and he does have deep discussions with very important people in the Bay Area we could never even dream about reaching. He could just phone Nobel prize tier economists to invite them to dinner! Hire policy experts. Or ask any Senator about their opinions. But instead he shitposts when he is bored.
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