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Do not forget that Musk’s businesses such as Tesla and SpaceX wouldn’t survive a day without US government help (yes Tesla too). Musk isn’t anti-establishment, he is a part of the establishment.
The establishment has decided to let Trump back on Twitter, despite the fact that a lot of people (probably half the country) will be enraged by this.
Why they did it is an open question. My guess is they're just throwing the right a bone to cool the tides a little. They're too busy "celebrating" a minor victory while the larger and more important battles of the culture war, i.e. entertainment media, journalism and education, will remain their provinces.
China and Russia would love to pay for SpaceX launches at market rates, and would spend a lot on technology too.
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I'd say he's an expert at exploiting the establishment to do things he wanted to do anyway.
Electric car subsidies were going to exist anyway, why not get rich off them and kickstart the industry? [late edit, I just realized how ironic it is to use the term 'kickstart' in the context of electric cars.]
The U.S. needs tons of launch capacity and will (over)pay for it. Why not get rich off it, Kickstart the industry, and maybe colonize Mars?
Nothing in this equation implies being pro-establishment.
What do you honestly think the counterfactual world in which Musk does not exist looks like?
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The Democratic Party would lose popularity if they ordered NASA to cut ties with SpaceX. It is possible to take money from the government without being beholden to the government if your companies are beloved by voters. I think SpaceX and Tesla are beloved enough that the government is stuck with them regardless of what Elon Musk says or does.
I would be willing to bet $100 that no statement the Democratic Party could make in its platform regarding NASA and SpaceX would move popular support for the party more than 2%. Most people just don't care.
2% is enormous.
Yeah, I'm a coward...the original draft of the comment said 1%, but I chickened out.
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I don't endorse the conspiratorial view, but if it were to happen, I'd expect something more like the EPA (and maybe NHSTA) adding a million miles of paperwork to every single thing every single business related to Musk tries to do, instead of an explicit order. It costs a lot less political capital to not pay SpaceX for services not rendered because their launch sites are limited to one launch a year.
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There are a lot of things that half the country was enraged by that happened over the last five years. A precedent has been set. This is not enough to stop any sort of political action any more.
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“Musk needs government subsidies for his companies” is not sufficient to assume “the establishment has direct control over Musk’s adventures in twitter”. This strikes me as conspiratorial thinking. There are plenty of ways that the Musk-establishment relationship could be coloured without him being an enthusiastic and willing member, or otherwise a directly and forcibly controlled party.
Sure, but I am yet to hear a good argument against conspiratorial thinking.
It leads to incorrect predictions if it makes predictions at all. It's usually used to explain rather than make useful predictions. It's model involves people smarter, more cooperative, and more disciplined than they really are. It promotes either inaction or ineffectual flailing.
Not compared any of the alternatives. Same applies to Hanlon's Razor, or various forms of "skeptical", "assume good faith from the system, or any other "respectable" type of thinking I see contrasted with conspiratorial thinking.
Again, same, except other types of thinking promote shrugging things off, and pretending nothing happened.
That's just flat out untrue. Conspiratorial thinking does not involve levels of intelligence, cooperation, or discipline beyond what we've already seen from human behavior.
You seem to be contrasting conspiratorial thinking with blind trust in authority. I don't think that's the only alternative. I think the default assumption is that any given individual or group is foolish and treading water and build your hypothesis up from there.
No, like I said, I'm comparing to a typical skeptical framework, commonly used to dismiss conspiracy theories. I see how "assume good faith" could lead to a misunderstanding, but I specifically brought up Hanlon's Razor to take "any individual group is foolish and trading water" into account as well.
Notice how that approach also explains rather than predicts, and promotes inaction.
You see a pothole in the road. If you believe that the government has left it there intentionally to punish your community because it's too white, you're unlikely to call 411. If you believe it's because the public works department just didn't know about it because they're mortal, you call 411.
You see evidence of Epstein running an underage prostitution Ponzi scheme, that the police were aware of it, and see them stand down when the federal prosecution gave him a slap on the wrist.
What do you do when you believe it was a conspiracy, vs when you believe it was incompetence?
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