zlacker

>>prawn+(OP)
Difficult not to see this as anything other petulance. It's Musk's site and he's free to do whatever he wants with it, but this seems squarely against "any legal speech will be allowed"

>>hackca+O1
Not that this is a good defense, but I think "genuinely scared for his or his child's safety" is a real possibility. Especially if he (rightly or wrongly, no comment there) thinks someone threatened his child... well, protecting your children is one of the more powerful instincts humans have, one of the handful powerful enough to outweigh an ego like Elon's. Plus he has to be at least a little frazzled by Twitter having no credible plan for being financially solvent after scaring off all the advertisers, so I'm guessing he's not doing cold, rational threat assessments of anything. Maybe that interaction of fear and irrationality does start overlapping with petulance too, I don't know.

I think people should take into account that something deep inside Elon knows he's in deep shit, and is probably contributing to him taking rash actions and generally lashing out. He was never a wise man, but I still suspect we're seeing him at a low ebb of rationality. Again, no sort of defense: this is a problem entirely of his own making.

>>andrew+O7
> I think "genuinely scared for his or his child's safety" is a real possibility.

I think he's scared for his own safety. In fact he has basically said as much. As rich as he is, he still owes a lot of money and favors to a lot of people. Some of them are quite powerful and ruthless. They're likely displeased at how he's pissing away the value of an asset in which they have an interest. Just because he's paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get him. If I had the kinds of friends or enemies that he has, and particularly if I had been busy converting the first into the second, I'd be worried too.

>>notaco+cn
That's as good of an explanation as I've seen so far. The only problem is that nothing that he has done so far would reduce that exposure, in fact plenty of his actions increased it.

>>jacque+Hp
Right, that would be the "rash actions and lashing out" part. Decisions made in fear are pretty well known for making things worse, not better, even directly with respect to the reason for said fear.

>>andrew+Yz
That is approximately what I was getting at, so thank you. The guy's obviously operating in a fog of fear. This is probably exacerbated (if not caused by) his notoriously bad sleep habits, and/or whatever chemical help he uses to sleep at all. What's amazing is that so many people don't seem to recognize. I guess they just never lived in environments where you learn to recognize the signs.

When you're in a persistent fear state, rational decisions become almost impossible and actions directly contrary to one's own interest become commonplace. It's like the skier who's trying to avoid a rock, but keeps staring at it and naturally starts turning toward it instead. Sometimes it's better to look away, even literally, toward the path you should take instead. Unfortunately for us all, Musk so far seems unable to do that.