Wednesday, November 02, 2022

You Don't Have To Hand It To Him

"We" all know now that Musk is a malign idiot, but in April people were still writing embarrassing things like this:
Much of this has been built on the back of public subsidies, government contracts, loan guarantees and tax credits, but I don’t take that as a mark against him: He’s the best argument in the modern era that the government and the private sector can do together what neither can achieve apart. If anything, I fear that Twitter will distract Musk from more important work.
Being a Muskologist was one of my more annoying weird hobbies, as the gap betweent the reality of his endeavors and coverage of them was always vast. I have no interest in Musk the man, but my associated weird interests brought me there.

The man's been lying about everything for years, and while there are a couple of exceptions, almost none of his "important work" is what people think it is, and it's all pretty much hit a dead end at this point. There will be no robotaxis, there will be no mission to Mars, there will be no hyperloop. There will certainly be no brain implants.* All of these things were carnival barker scams, ways of keeping the hype going to goose the stock price and keep the free government money coming.

*I always forget about Neuralink, one of his more frightening scams because you know he's going to do human trials some place they let him.
Musk, the world’s richest person with an estimated $256bn fortune, said last month he was cautiously optimistic that the implants could allow tetraplegic people to walk.

“We hope to have this in our first humans, which will be people that have severe spinal cord injuries like tetraplegics, quadriplegics, next year, pending FDA [Food and Drug Administration] approval,” he told the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council summit.

“I think we have a chance with Neuralink to restore full-body functionality to someone who has a spinal cord injury. Neuralink’s working well in monkeys, and we’re actually doing just a lot of testing and just confirming that it’s very safe and reliable and the Neuralink device can be removed safely.”
You're all just monkeys to him.