Owl convo (loosely) re: Elon Musk shenanigans

might as well touch on the musk stuff
since it’s pulp drama for the masses and it part of the back and forth of letting the different tribes in america feel like they’re getting a win every once in a while

That’s my baseline assumption. I also observe that Elon Musk is a proper psychopath, and not the harmless nerd he presents as.

in the aspie subtype, not the financial raider type, but agreed

Disagree, I don’t think he’s an aspie at all.
It’s POSSIBLE he’s both an aspie and a psychopath, but honestly it’s an old, old trick for psychopaths to pretend they have a bit of Asperger’s.
Enough that it’s really bad for the rep of autistic people in general. I’d present Zuckerberg as an example of actual aspiepath, and Musk doesn’t give off the same vibe of real social dysfunction.

a fair point
compare zuck’s sexual success with musk’s

I’d compare the aspie typecasting strategy to the pretense of billionaires of “coming up from nothing”.
“compare zuck’s sexual success with musk’s”
Exactly what I was thinking of.
That and Zuck’s presidential aspirations being completely laughable, even to ordinary people who daydream about how they’d live if they were billionaires. Musk’s presidential aspirations would be an actual threat, hence he doesn’t even whisper them.
Among Americans who worship financial success, you’d think there’d be one or two who would look up to the Zuck as a hero.
I expect Musk paid to have an image created for him, like Warren Buffet paid a marketing agency to create his public persona as “Joe Everyman” eating big macs and drinking diet cokes.

“Nerd Excellence” was clearly the initial brand
Once you get the space stuff in there, you get away from the nerd a bit which increases the mainstream appeal
people who are into space are nerdy, but big powerful machines have a traditionally masculine appeal

Now his brand is Heath Ledger’s Joker or Deadpool, which are real popular with Kids These Days.

yeah, basically
with the twitter stuff he’s moved into full on “agent of chaos billionaire”
definitely an image you can sell to people

It hits all the Last Man’s buttons.

whereas the zuck is a weird-looking guy who dresses poorly and has a frumpy wife. not aspirational
^yep
an ideal candidate for…whatever it is that is trying to be accomplished
which brings us back to the framing: enemy of the people or secret savior?

So you’re on board with the idea that Musk’s antics are scripted by someone.
The questions remaining are who and why.

technically speaking, i wouldn’t say scripted, but nitpicking about relative levels of control/organization/whatever is an academic distinction for us since we’re nowhere near the action
i floated last week that what he’s doing is basically a clean-up for the events of the three-year 2020, and this feels right to me
whether that is the ultimate goal, a step along some kind of path, or just a consequence of an entirely different project is not clear
i do think the idea that he wants to turn twitter into wechat but for the non-chinese world is a reasonable guess

My initial guess is that his purpose is to eat up news cycles.

lol

In sports terms, wasting time to run the clock out.
The analogy isn’t perfect because TPTB aren’t going for ultimate victory so much as “forever war” and continual consolidation while keeping the clock going.
I think if you’re TPTB then getting people highly engaged with any non-event for as long as possible is an unmitigated good.
In specific motivation terms…Banned Hipster did a series on the provenance of the Paypal mafia, but I don’t remember who bankrolled them.
Nor what their essential philosophy is. Thiel’s book was pretty good, but it doesn’t tell me what Musk’s philosophy probably is.
Or I should probably say fixations, because when you’re talking about psychopaths long-form thought trains aren’t on the table.
But even psychos have a course of development where they pick up ideas about what sorts of things it feels good to have and do.
In the case of my previous boss, he’s been spending his adult life paying for the “entrepreneurship experience” as Boneflour called it.
And, I suspect, cocaine.

lol
is that not part of the experience?

In his generation, absolutely.

[Doxxy digression.]

I don’t know if what I have would be properly described as an inferiority complex, but I definitely have a chip on my shoulder about something.
It could be something as simple as not getting laid while under the influence of healthy testosterone production.
But even if I were getting laid several times a day I think I would still sperg out about how everyone in the world is wrong about everything and by all appearances they’re doing it on purpose just to piss me off.
THAT’S NOT HOW YOU SPELL THAT
YOU COULD HAVE LOOKED THAT UP AT ANY MOMENT IN THE LAST 50 YEARS OF YOUR LIFE
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
I have daydreams about watching incompetent medical professionals kill me in slow motion by making unforced errors.
I’m reading the label on the bottle as they put the injection in the IV and they’re joking to the other nurses about how they’re so good they don’t even read the labels anymore.
It’s mostly anger that no one is kicking asses that are in sore need of kicking.
We should beat random people on general principle. I feel like when parents accidentally spank the wrong kid and are like “eh, he probably did something to deserve it”. That’s how I feel about people.
So that’s Elon Musk.

spanker or spankee?

I’d have him spanked on the grounds that he probably did something to deserve it. Builds character.
Maybe he would get attached to the spanker as a father figure, who knows how psychos process paternal abandonment.

now that’s a line of research that could lead to other insights…

According to Dr. Dutton, spanking has different effects by race.
It’s possible psychopaths react to it in the same way as blacks.
Generally speaking, my line has been that you aren’t allowed to have a billion dollars without getting a knock on the door from intelligence.

and let’s not forget musk is a massive DoD contractor

Yeah, so we shouldn’t be under the impression that he’s a rogue actor.

exactly

I have some copypasta for this…

When you have that much money and influence, the mafia knocks and offers you the choice to work with them or be destroyed. You aren’t allowed to have a billion dollars and be a private citizen, it’s too dangerous for the powers that be to let potential competitors accumulate power.

My neighbor explained that in Mexico his relative had a strawberry farm, and the cartel offered him “gold or lead”. He picked gold, and every harvest season some strawberries would go missing and he’d get an envelope of cash. Not a bad deal, the cartels know how to run a country properly. With Twitter it’s basically the same, just a bit more abstract. Gold or lead.

The problem we have here is our “cartels” don’t want our country to run properly because they feel like it’s not their home. The better off we are, the more it’s like having a bunch of rich billionaires running around doing whatever they want, and potentially competing with their real home country in Israel.

If you have a billion dollars, you can buy an army or a nuke. If you have “turf”, it’s bad practice to let someone on your turf have a nuke and continue existing.