zlacker

>>prawn+(OP)
So this is how Twitter goes out: not with a bang but with a seemingly endless stream of stories about the little ways Elon is ruining the service each day.

Just staggers me that Elon could have just… not done any of this. And yet here we are. He’s had to sell billions in Tesla stock to finance this ongoing mayhem, this is surely going to be up there as one of the greatest examples of hubris in modern business.

>>afavou+n6
Elon's slide into max doucheness is a real shame. I used to tell my kids he was one of the most admirable people around for jump starting the EV industry (yes, I know he didn't do it all).

Then came the pedo guy comments. I cut him slack, he must be tired/strung out, he'll apologise. He never did.

Now he's become like a meme of himself, or perhaps just himself as he always was but now right out there, and it's not good to see.

>>abraae+U7
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.

>>walrus+M8
> came from daddy's apartheid era emerald mine money

This doesn’t appear to be true

https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...

>>r3troh+Gd
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.")

Whether that made him millions is less clear.

>>SamBam+Tg
> his dad once held shares in an emerald mine in Zambia

Is not equivalent to

> came from daddy's apartheid era emerald mine money

“Came from” and “apartheid” are doing a lot of work here. That sentence is written in such a way to:

1) imply a not insignificant portion of daddy’s money came from that mine

2) associate that mine with all the bad things we associate with apartheid

3) imply daddy’s money had a not-insignificant impact on Elon’s outcome

4) so it can then associate Elon’s current state with the crimes of apartheid

If the above isn’t true, I have a hard time understanding why GP would mention apartheid or the mine.

>>r3troh+5k
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.

1. https://theconversation.com/zambias-copper-mines-hard-baked-...

2. https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/cjpmefoundation/pages/...