To be clear, that any one human is in a position to “win or lose” this much money on a couple of business bets is a statement on out-of-control accelerating wealth inequality + inflation of stock markets more than on Elon’s prowess or incompetence as an investor.
This article is from almost a year ago. It doesn’t factor in the recent decline in Twitter valuation. That said, measuring net worth by summing together illiquid, unrealized shares in a highly volatile, overvalued tech company during a record high inflation event would always yield these kinds of headlines. It says nothing about the business or anything material really.
Rich lists are self-reported so even the bogusness of illiquid founder's shares in sweetheart deals doesn't get any journalists' hands dirty. Anything remotely plausible counts.
Do you just mean existing as rich as the stories depict? My understanding is that there is ample evidence Mansa Musa existed and ruled Mali: it's just the measure of his wealth that is questionable.
It’s clear that old school media _really_ does not like Musk or X and are doing anything they can to make him/them look bad.
But also, the more articles you write about “rocket man bad”, doesn’t it become more and more obvious what your bias is? It’s just a little on the nose at this point.
No wonder trust in old school media is at an all time low.
Which leads with the sentence: "Elon Musk, the world’s richest man; Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind; and King Charles among those weighing in"
I very much could see all 8 of those points being conveyed in a much starker light, or potentially selecting different points that were all abjectly negative - rather than the relatively expository nature of the article.
Exactly the same "old school media" published an article today entitled "Elon Musk visits scene of kibbutz massacre with Benjamin Netanyahu". The article mentions Musks recent post as the reason for his visit. A key take away from the article is Benjamin Netanyahu saying of Musk:
“I hope you will be involved. And the fact that you came here, I think, speaks volumes to your commitment to try to secure a better future.”
That does not square in the slightest with doing anything they can to make him/them look bad. It presents Musk as a reasonable guy who received praise from the PM of Israel. The article is here:
Sure, there are professional journalists who do deep dives into political corruption or nefarious dealings between corporations and lobbyists.
Then there are reporters. These are people who write stories for newspapers and are told by their editor to push a narrative because the owner wants to put pressure on a particular sector. They do what they are told because their paycheck is more important that unbiased reporting. Anecdotally I know I am exposed more to these hack reporters in my day to day dealings with my local media outlets than professional journalists and dare I say a lot of other people are too.
Every single media source is pumping out negativity. All sectors and all industries are constantly reported to be failing, a bad future ahead and wildly disconnected from reality.
The media has very few positive news stories and they are channelled along specific activities in life.
I can't imagine anybody valuing media now. Media is fundamentally worth less to read and participate in, than ever before.
Old school media now, is nothing like old school media then. Online media outside of a few places, is heavily manipulated and poisoined.
Musk puts himself in the cultural spotlight. It's no accident on his part, nor some plot by others. He enjoys the attention and trades on it as part of his development of wealth and power. Some of his contemporary and historical peers keep to elite circles and making boardroom deals, others to rallying public attention as part of the leverage they bring. He's unquestionably of the latter sort.
Because of that, people are intensely interested in the melodrama of his public life, and a capitalist or populist media would be foolish not to cover it. The theatricality of it all is his brand and something that he intentionally and specifically cultures. Where and if media organizations do develop a bias of unduly vilifying him, it's because he explicitly invites them to play that role.
It was the same way with Trump. People had, and have, no idea who the man is because they only consume this ultra-refined vendetta-hatred filled hit pieces with little connection to reality. 95% of journalists voted Clinton. We can assume roughly the same amount are now aligned against Musk.
You can listen to what these men actually say. They aren’t hiding anything. If trump says he doesn’t believe elections are rigged when he loses, and he wants to use the Justice department to go after his political enemies, you really don’t need journalists to explain this to you.
Trump lies blatantly to serve himself when you do listen to him directly. Recently he said that without fraud he won every single state in the 2020 election. There is no way a sane person can interpret that as anything but a blatant & dangerous self serving lie. The people who have the most damning things to say about Trump are the people who have lived & worked with him for years. The writer who shadowed him for years to write The Art of the Deal, and the many staff members he hired that would later resign and try to warn people about Trump.
I suggest going closer to the source (listening to what they say and do directly) than consuming carefully-selected information that comes to you through several layers of misdirection and alteration. One clear example was the recent set of Musk tweets that caused advertisers to pause their Twitter spend.
From my perspective, articles said he made anti-Semitic statements but I personally struggled to find the tweets themselves anywhere within the articles. Many people would read the headline, and take away that Musk is an anti-Semite without going further. For those who click the article they would still struggle to find out what exactly was said.
FYI. To the best of my knowledge these are the contents of the tweets in question. I leave it up to you to judge whether you think this is antisemitic or not. This is not content I have written and these are certainly not views I hold. However, I do think it is important to know and remember exactly what was said.
@breakingbaht
Okay.
Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.
I'm deeply disintereted in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don't exactly like them too much.
Well in the case of Musk, you can just listen to what he says directly, he blasts every thought out on that website, for better and worse.
The picture you get of him by listening to him directly is so different than how he is portrayed by these media organizations.
You can see it in the this particular case that has everyone calling him an "antisemite". Here is the full exchange:
musk: "You have said the actual truth"
musk: "The ADL unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel. This is because they cannot, by their own tenets, criticize the minority groups who are their primary threat. It is not right and needs to stop."
whatsupfranks: "Yes, but this is not fair to say or truthful to say that ‘Jewish communities’ promote dialectical hatred towards white. Say what you want about the ADL, but don’t generalize the Jewish community."
musk: "You right that this does not extend to all Jewish communities, but it is also not just limited to ADL"
musk: "And, at the risk of being repetitive, I am deeply offended by ADL’s messaging and any other groups who push de facto anti-white racism or anti-Asian racism or racism of any kind."
Reading this exchange, it's clear to me that musk does not hate jews.
However, these media orgs took only the first message out of context and declared that musk hates jews.
He has had other exchanges with the president of Israel and leadership of the ADL, but those have also been conveniently left out.
Trump is a different story, I don't really know much about that because I'm intentionally tuned out of politics.
i'll never understand the point of information like this aside from the desire to paint someone in a bad light because of some narrative.
i even made sure to go to the science section of theguardian and searched for spacex, because i thought, maybe there are different sections that focus on more optimistic takes of what Elon is doing, but of course all of the headlines are extremely negative
"Rows and rockets blow up as Elon Musk’s firms endure turbulent weekend"
"SpaceX’s Starship reaches space for first time but explodes moments later"
"SpaceX delays second test flight of world’s largest rocket until weekend"
this stuff is so cringe and so obviously biased/tainted
Those last two headlines seem quite factual. The second headline, AFAIK the Starship was not expected to explode at all, thus the accolade of "reaches space", "but explodes moments later" seems to be pretty accurate & fair. That is what happened.
English isn't my first language but "but explodes seconds later" implies to me the fact it reached space doesn't actually matter and the whole thing is a failure.
"I had a beautiful wedding. The walls were yellow", isn't quite the same and "I had a beautiful wedding, but the walls were yellow."
In the same way, it would be more neutral (at least to my French speaking ears) to say "It reached space and exploded seconds later."
Your example is actually spot on: "I had a beautiful wedding, but the walls were yellow." Did the walls being yellow make the wedding a disaster? No, but did the yellow walls somehow lead to a less than optimal result? Yes.
In the first statement: "I had a beautiful wedding. The walls were yellow", it is almost misleading because the statement is withholding the idea that the yellow walls were a bad thing.
It's up to the reader to decide how bad the walls being yellow were. Some readers may decide that the wedding was completely gashed, others may decide that it was 98% great.
Another example to consider: "I had a beautiful wedding, but the cake was not enough." vs "I had a beautiful wedding, the cake was not enough". The latter is not as clear, was the cake just so good that it ran out? The first one, implies that there was a greater expectation. Which goes to my point, it's a big omission if you leave out the idea there was a greater expectation.
Counter-point, how to state that the rocket was not meant to explode, but did?
> "It reached space and exploded seconds later.""
This is actually confusing to me, was it supposed to explode seconds later? Was this actually a test of a ICBM and not a spaceship?
Further, is this statement actually not a bit too neutral? Almost to the point of not acknowledging that yeah, this was not 100% success. It's almost a bias in the other way to not even acknowledge that this was not an intended outcome.
(A) Could we say: "It reached space, exploded seconds later, and was a complete success for SpaceX."
(B) Or could we say: "It reached space, but exploded second later; nonetheless a big success for SpaceX."
I believe what you may have inferred was something more like: (C) "It reached space, but exploded seconds later; a complete disaster for SpaceX"
Your valuation of whether the 'but' is a negative judgement or a matter of fact that the full goal was not achieved, I believe is your bias.
> English isn't my first language but "but explodes seconds later" implies to me the fact it reached space doesn't actually matter and the whole thing is a failure.
I don't think that is the case at all. The word 'however' could have been used just as well here.
"We ran a good race, but finished second". The 'but' does not imply a negation of all success, but instead a lack of achievement of all successes.
I speak French, it's effectively the same. "We went for 100%, but in the end got 90%". "On voulais 100%, mais a la fin on a gagne 90%". Presumably the end goal of the space ship was not to explode in space, but to also return as well.
It all comes down to an expectation that the rocket was to do more. If said with a simple "and", it's unclear whether that was the end goal or not. I suspect you're perhaps reading mal-intent where there is really none.
The goal of spaceX was to spend 90 minutes in space and then return to Earth.
The 'but' in the sentence to say: "some of that goal was achieved, but not all of it", is not manipulative. I recommend reading that exact article to see that it's not overly negative nor overly positive. Relative to the goals of SpaceX, what else was the headline supposed to say?
> SpaceX’s uncrewed Starship spacecraft, developed to carry astronauts to the moon and beyond, reached space for the first time on Saturday but was presumed to have failed minutes later.
> It was Starship’s second test after its first attempt to reach space ended in an explosion earlier this year.
> The two-stage rocket ship blasted off from the Elon Musk-owned company’s Starbase launch site near Boca Chica in Texas, east of Brownsville, on a planned 90-minute uncrewed flight into space.
> If successful, the rocket would have ended up landing in the Pacific ocean near Hawaii. The company hopes the rocket can eventually manage a trip around the Earth, which could take an hour and a half.
> The two stages of the spacecraft successfully separated about two and a half minutes into the flight, but shortly afterwards, SpaceX announced that it could not find a signal from the second stage, which it declared lost.
> The company believes the rocket’s self-destruction mechanism was set off after it lost the signal.
> SpaceX’s second flight is an improvement on its first test launch in April, when both stages ultimately exploded four minutes into its flight. The spacecraft’s first stage, nicknamed “Super Heavy” for its 33 engines, had failed, causing both stages to explode.
What's cringe is starting a tunnel company where a couple hundred people work in apparent seriousness, who think they are building their careers, when the whole thing is built to divert public support from providing more public transit.
You can freely be disgusted by Musk himself in all sorts of fully justified ways, and still recognize these kinds of "news" pieces as the tabloid-like, simplistic, sensationalist garbage they are.
The somewhat object outlet I follow was recently painted as government-funded media so I kinda understand the resentment. Private outlets are far worse tho.
