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There's something not right here, I hear familiar bells of dissonance. I notice I am confused.
Opposition to immigration is the principal impetus for the right. Not just the American right, opposition is the common view among the native peoples of all western nations. The belief of what to do isn't uniform, but "Too many, greatly reduce" is dominant. Musk shows an awareness of this, he's also shown an awareness of the discussions of the deep online right apropos "You have said the actual truth." He should know. Consider also his loudly backing AfD, a party that can be defined by its opposition to immigration.
If Musk believes all humans are fungible economic units, how does he turn right? If his shift as has been supposed by many including myself was about viewing the left as a threat, how does he not view the right as a graver threat for their anti-immigrant sentiment extending to close the tap on his source of engineers? How does he ever buy Twitter? Or, after buying it, carrying out the lifting of bans, diving into the discourse of the right, and seeing there "No we mean literally all of them are going back," realize what he's courted, renege and cut a deal? The media would need maybe two weeks of news cycles and his image would be rehabilitated for the normie masses while in the background he received the necessary assurances of allowing him to continue his corporate administration as he sees fit. But there again, if how he wants to manage his corporations by his ostensibly aggressive prioritization of foreign labor, why does he ever consider the left a bigger problem than the right?
I had more and I cut it down and now I've again written more than I think I need because I'm pretty sure all of you reading this knows all of these points. What I run into is that for the last few years for Musk, though really it seems it's been basically all of his career, people have bet against him, for the absurdity of his ideas, for supposed incompetence, for ignorance, more lately for him being "evil", and they've lost every time. This must be stressed enough, they have lost every single time. Or at least every single time it's mattered. So I look at him and wonder, how does he believe the FEU view? He's not evil, stupid or incompetent. Did he just not know what's actually happening?
People are complex but plenty of times it is the mundane or contradictory explanation rather than the fun/schizo/5D chess theory. I'm probably grasping at nonexistent straws, as I so often do. Sure, he believes in this one area of hyper-pure tabula rasa egalitarianism, despite living a life of evidence against it. Sure, he holds the root ideal that underlies the California approach to homelessness and crime, not to mention trans advocacy, he's just not extrapolated one more step to shake it off.
Still I think a possible explanation for his response is this: he believed talent came from India because he had convincing, not necessarily good and certainly not great, but convincing enough reasons to believe it did. In a very short period of time he has since discovered those hiring for his corporations have prioritized Indians because they are Indians, have praised and promoted along Indians because they are Indians, and may be benefiting in appearances from work done primarily by not Indians, all while repeatedly rejecting superior talent because they are not Indian. And so he has struggled, in recognizing his mistake and perhaps in rationalizing against a roiling blood rage at not simply being taken for a fool, but taken in such a way that it is a direct attack on his life's work of getting off the rock and making humans an interplanetary species.
I don't know. Again I'm grasping at straws in seeking fantastic explanation over the simple and probable one. But, and I'm paraphrasing what Sam Hyde said in his video, if this is a real belief for him, not something from a lack of knowledge and understanding but something he won't get past, he's not the man we all hope he is, and he will lose.
Even setting aside every issue besides immigration, it is possible to believe importing "top 0.1%" skilled engineers is a net-positive without believing that importing masses of economic 'refugees' and illegal immigrants is. Masses of migrants (and their descendants) are a tremendous net-drain on the government budget and societal resources, commit more crime, etc. while small groups of elite immigrants would not be. "People who want to immigrate" is a category that selects for people living in bad countries, and since one of the most common reasons for countries to be bad is the average intelligence/etc. of the people who live there this selects for bad immigrants, but "people who are allowed to immigrate" can be selective in the opposite direction. This just doesn't seem difficult to understand if you actually read him describing his own beliefs and don't strawman it as him supporting the current H-1B system.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1873187030785769964
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1872374103983759835
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1873191959441084531
The issue I'm having is that the current H-1B system is does not stop at importing the top ~0.1% of engineering talent, and originally he was talking about expanding it even more. As an Elon-skeptic I don't really trust him, and I see his post-pushback justifications as damage control, but even taking them at face value, he just badly mishandled the entire conversation around the issue.
It's a lottery system, it rejects "0.1% engineers" even as it lets in lower-skill immigrants so long as the lower-skill immigrants are above the minimum threshold. It could instead do something like auction off the slots to the highest bidder or hand them out in order to the highest wages offered and it would become dramatically more selective even if it expanded. I don't know what reforms if any the Trump administration will actually pursue, but they're not incompatible goals.
Right, so maybe it's not the greatest idea to tell people who are against it in it's present form, and don't like the idea of expanding it, to fuck themselves in the face?
I mean, we are talking about a guy who called a rescue diver a pedophile for not taking his offer of assistance (that might not have worked).
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Two things:
Elon also has a child who went trans and I'm sure that helped his turn to the right.
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One thing that is ignored in this debate is the petrodollar. The US prints money like crazy but keeps the dollar high by pretty much forcing the world to buy American dollars. Don't participate in the American racket and end up like Iran. This means that there are too many dollars and the prices in the US have shot through the moon. The US has become an excessively expensive country with an economy based on finance, insurance and real estate.
This kind of worked when the US was technologically vastly superior to the rest of the world and could force people in other countries to trade bananas and oil for Ford cars. As the rest of the world has been catching up in terms of tech, it is harder for the US to compete when housing prices are multiple times higher in Seattle compared to China or Poland.
American engineers with 100k of student debt, living in mediocre million dollar Seattle homes with 2000 dollar a month medical insurance for their family and who need two cars for their house hold simply can't compete on a global market. There aren't that many technologies that the US is that far ahead that the American company can charge an absurd premium.
The US doesn't seem to want to give up on the empire business so the result is to not lower costs but to press living standards down. Silicon valley real estate has to keep being at an inflated price but US companies can't pay 150 dollars an hour for mediocre web developers for their website when companies in other parts of the world pay 20.
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He's at least theoretically a software dev at heart -- which means I'd be pretty surprised if he hadn't Noticed (tm) that some people contribute less than zero to a group project and developed a dislike for these guys. Particularly considering his (apparently) ruthless behaviour at companies that he owns.
I'm kinda skeptical that he actually wants to hire a bunch of H1-Bs at his current companies -- he seems to be notoriously competence focused, and surely industry savvy?
IDK what to predict, but wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing just kind of goes away?
Elon got out of the coding business before the first great bulk of outsourcing and insourcing. So he probably hasn't personally dealt with the "best and the brightest". I'd be all for Elon bringing in any engineer he had to supervise, PERSONALLY. I doubt he could stand these bozos any more than I can.
However, I reject anything that stinks of "if only Comrade Stalin knew". While I am tempted to make an exception for Elon, I won't. He knows. He's probably fired some of these people who were taking up space at Twitter. If he wants more of them it's because he sees some advantage in having them here.
Meh, even if all he ever did was a group project at Waterloo, he's surely familiar with the phenomenon -- IDK if he has some secret plan where cheap shitty devs are useful to him personally, but it seems kind of counter to my impression of how he runs his businesses.
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This makes his recent move very baffling. If he alienates the MAGA base enough to piss off Trump he is going to be left in the wind with no real allies and a lot of enemies.
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It wasn't this sudden.
There was always a considerable amount of resentment against Elon Musk on the far-left because of his South African background. But the first brick in the anti-Elon wall was his intense opposition to COVID lockdowns -- this allied him with the right almost immediately on an issue of intense salience. Then, he bought Twitter, with the intent of reducing its censorship of conservatives. In other words, he conquered territory the left considered neutral and made it conservative (because opposing conservatism is "about human rights, which aren't political"). This instantly made him a pariah.
Him actually allying with Trump was just the last brick -- but those two issues massively turned the left against him.
Eh, I thought the real backlash always started with those kids trapped in the cave and him calling that ex-pat diver a pedophile over being told that his submersible idea was bad. It wasn't exactly partisan, but I think that was the beginning of the polarization.
Plus, also, I think people were looking for anything to make Elon and Tesla's fanboys shut up, and it just escalated from there.
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