Maybe three or four years ago I thought that musk was basically something like the second incarnation of Howard Hughes. Some sort of eccentric high tech aerospace industry misunderstand genius.
Now I can clearly see he's just some guy who is both smart and also a raging narcissistic asshole who came from daddy's apartheid era emerald mine money.
Turns out that shitposting your way through life like an edgelord 14 year old boy on the internet is not an admirable lifestyle unless you are a hardcore musk stan.
I read the other day that Hughes suffered pretty severely de-habilitating mental illness, and that it isn’t fair to him to compare his decline to Elon. He had severe OCD, allodynia, and other things driving his increasingly erratic behavior.
Additionally there is fairly good evidence he screwed up his lower back in early plane crashes and took an increasingly assorted and unusual series of addictive pain medication after age 40+. The 1930s through 1960s were not exactly a golden age of harmless non-addictive pharmaceuticals.
From that article, it certainly appears true that his dad once held shares in an emerald mine. ("This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia.")
I mean, 1980 Zambia is literally apartheid era. That's a statement of fact.
You don't like the associations that "apartheid" evokes? And yet, for an emerald mine in Zambia, apartheid was certainly a big factor in the working conditions there. The mines in Zambia (mostly copper) benefited the most by apartheid, where white workers were paid over ten times what black workers were paid. Even during the 80s, when supposedly the color bar had been dismantled, mines got around that be defining all black labor as "local" (even if the workers were immigrants) and white workers as "skilled expats" (even if the whites were born next door). [1]
Mining, indeed, was heavily tied to the apartheid from the very start. [2]
So it's very relevant that it's an "apartheid era." You could not invest in a mine in Zambia or South Africa without knowing that you were investing into a apartheid system, and hoping to make money off the backs of the apartheid abuses.
> imply a not insignificant portion of daddy’s money came from that mine
Yes, I agreed that that wasn't backed by known evidence in my statement above.
Using my numbered list above (arrow is chain of relevance):
2 -> 1 -> 3 -> 4
If you’re getting tripped up about apartheid and the mine being separated, just combine them.
1+2 -> 3 -> 4
In GPs post, 2 is not relevant to 4 unless you establish 3. Unless GP is trying to make an unfounded claim that “Elon’s current state is associated with the crimes of apartheid” (where associated means having a not insignificant impact on that state), including 1+2 isn’t relevant. It’s irrelevant that it’s an apartheid era mine because it’s irrelevant that it’s a mine. 4 is not associated with 2 by way of 1+3 like, IIUC, GP implied.
Hughes as a company did a lot of cool stuff way after the ww2 era, in fact Boeing's satellite business for large and serious commercial and military geostationary satellites is what used to be Hughes in El Segundo CA, acquired about 20 years ago.
The trouble is that all the cool stuff was also the stuff that Hughes Jr never really cared for. Lasers, Radar, electronics escaped his interest. Hughes wanted you to build world class airframes and sadly this is the one thing Hughes Aircraft never really did well.
Hughes (now Boeing via McDonnell Douglas) helicopters are quite something. The 500 is generally regarded as quite the hot rod (especially compared to the 206/407). You can even get one in single rotor configuration (NOTAR). Hughes left quite a legacy beyond the Spruce Goose and hopefully El Muskrat will too. It'd be a damn shame if he succeeds in completely destroying Tesla and Space-X.
Oakland PD has a couple of 500s which is neat, but what always brings a chuckle is the tale of how New Zealand farmers went all in on the 500 because nothing else could touch the performance for… hunting deer.
>Turns out that shitposting your way through life like an edgelord 14 year old boy on the internet is not an admirable lifestyle
Unless you do it to the outgroup. Then it's fine! Laudable even!
Same as shutting down journalists and other accounts. It was nothing to fret about when the opposite side used to do it, "they were misinforming or borderline bad anyway, and they could always start their own blog or something, so it wasn't censorship" and so on.
The Twitter of yore shutting down conservatives and other such "controversial" opinions. I don't care much for bipartisan politics, but the partisan bias in all this is palpable, as is a "the tables have turned and we don't like it so we revert to general principles we pissed on before" vibe ...
It's also comic: pundits pissing on free speech (tons of cheering when people were cancelled before, and lots of articles on how it's justified and free speech is not the be all end-all) making a u-turn to call for free speech and condemn Musk's account shutdowns now, while Musk and co that was defending free-speech before is now censoring accounts, while the "free speech" proponents in the previous round are now cheering him for it...
Now I can clearly see he's just some guy who is both smart and also a raging narcissistic asshole who came from daddy's apartheid era emerald mine money.
Turns out that shitposting your way through life like an edgelord 14 year old boy on the internet is not an admirable lifestyle unless you are a hardcore musk stan.