The person above you is not wrong. Objectively people who fawn over Musks wealth and achievements without commenting on his nefarious qualities and blatant illegal behaviour recently need a reality check.
Not every mention of Musk needs to be accompanied by a disclaimer of not supporting his idiotic self-defeating politics. This isn't reddit.
Speaking of politics though, it was a bit jarring to see the "USA! USA!" chanting. I get the intent (disliking the government doesn't mean disliking America), but it's kind of awkward to see a large crowd of immigrants doing it as the admin their boss supports is pretty blatantly harassing immigrants regardless of citizenship.
that goes way back to the early days of spacex. its a jab at ULA that was getting their engines from Russia. and at Russia itself because Musk felt screwed when he tried to buy a couple ICBMS for his original mars idea.
I don't think it's unfair to make a comment about the guy building rockets also having an unhealthy interest in funding far-right fascist groups. Additionally the dude infiltrated the government and shut down all the agencies that were investigating his companies.
I feel this is definitely important to comment on when also fawning over the guys achievements. Is an achievement made in good faith if it was being investigated for criminal wrongdoing and then managed to make it magically go away.... I think not.
I have no idea what criminal wrongdoing you're referring to, and as for the other point, it's just so overdone at this point. Every time SpaceX is mentioned, you guys feel the need to shit up the discussion with your cynicism and repeating of things everyone has heard a million times as if it's novel insight.
We all know Musk is at best an absolute idiot when it comes to politics who's being manipulated by sycophants, and at worst, he's an evil fascist that is completely fine with wrecking everything that lets his companies actually be successful. But a lot of you guys think that's an excuse to pretend that he doesn't deserve any credit for anything. Even just acknowledging that he has done useful things in the past is apparently fawning over him.
Musk is easy to hate, especially here on HN but mate is the greatest salesman in the history of mankind and there is no one even close 50th. that I think is his greatest achievement even though he’s done a bunch of amazing things
I had considered adding how HN's darling's CEO, Tim, was also doing his part to support the American gestapo but figured that'd just be whataboutism (I think Zuckerberg gets hated on relatively similarly to Musk).
I just don't think every thread about SpaceX needs to be shitted up. It's unpleasant, like someone barging into a thread about some new exciting development/project in India or other developing country to rain on everyone's parade by saying that they should spend that money on getting everyone a toilet.
Does it need to be a competition in your eyes? Is allowing root-level access to the nations critical government infrastructure for his cronies and removing funding for organisations investigating his companies for wrongdoing the necessary broken eggs to land a flying skyscraper?
I don't understand why 'the ends justify the means' is a good answer.
Yes, you need to break some eggs to make an omelette, but you do not need to spend more than a quarter-Billion dollars to help elect an administration working to end democracy in order to build a new spacecraft. In fact the spacecraft development would likely go better without any political intervention at all; it is widely seen as a distraction, and rightly so.
The point was that it is and was completely unnecessary for the particular omlette of making new self-landing spacecraft to break the particular eggs of spending all that time and money on politics. They are two entirely different pursuits, negating the GP comment.
As for Harris, you are comparing an exaggerated number for total campaign spend to Musk's $250-$400 million spending as a single donor to a campaign in which he was not running. Comparing apples-to-apples, the Trump and Harris campaigns spent comparable amounts [0], and that is officially, not counting the massive media coverage Trump obtains for free.
It should be noted also, that to normal people, the answer is yes - any politician wasting taxpayer money is a huge problem. It is absurd when people bring up the whataboutism as if everyone is as politically biased as they themselves are.
Elon said the reason he spent that money was because he thought a Harris presidency would be a disaster for the country, worse than a 2nd Trump presidency. You may not agree with it, but that doesn't make it "nefarious" and "blatantly illegal."
I actually don't particularly like Elon and I don't like Trump or Harris and didn't vote for either. I also have no issues pointing out his accomplishments. I was pointing out that every time SpaceX or Tesla do something cool, people like you show up and have to make it political, which is super annoying and possibly a violation of the HN guidelines.
