Elon Musk: Genius Manipulator
As much as we need him, can we trust him?
I formed my first real impressions of Elon Musk today. I owe it to the power of active listening. With my eyes painfully shut for 30mins, I listened intently to what he had to say about the Twitter buy, saving Tesla from bankruptcy, his tough childhood, and why he Tweets unfiltered and without deliberation.
What you will read next is the impression he made on me. These are my takeaways.
Elon wants to save civilization.
That’s why he made an offer to buy Twitter, to give us back the power to exercise our constitutional right of public speech. He wants to grant us the ability to edit our tweets, but the finer details of how the action would undo or autocorrect the retweets and reposts that are multiplying and mutating across the Twittersphere - he is open to ideas.
… and I said to myself: Why is this guy so pretentious? Can’t the answer to why he bought Twitter be as simple as “Well, because I can, and I want to own the product that disrupted the media industry, giving every human on Earth or orbiting around us the ability to voice their thoughts from the comfort of their toilet seats. Because it is Crowdsourcing at its best, and I’m all about the crowd being the source of my wealth.”
I will never know (none of us will) whether it was just unmasked honesty or a smokescreen. But is free speech on Twitter truly what we need more of? Is that what will put human civilization on the right path to undo the damage we did, for the sake of future generations? Taking us to Mars seems more logical.
Elon created history with Tesla.
Even if you are reading about the world's richest man for the very first time, the one thing you know already is that Elon Musk = Tesla. He created the most successful Electric Vehicle on the market today. So bow your head to this man now because without Elon we would still be wondering if owning a Prius would send the wrong message of who we really are. But here’s something you probably didn’t know.
Tesla was on the verge of bankruptcy and for 3 years Elon worked with and slept at the plant, to save Tesla from following the track record of every automaker in human history, except for maybe Chrysler. He weathered those tough trying years and came out of it as a subject matter expert on all-things EV. He claims he now knows every part that goes into building a Tesla. I believed him.
…and I said to myself: Now that’s what I call honest straight-from-the-heart talk. I heard the voice of struggle and determination, from a respect-worthy innovative mind of the 21st century. Not god-like, just human.
Elon persevered as a child.
The best way to learn more info about what shaped someone to become who they are today is to take a peek into their childhood.
Elon opened a window into his difficult childhood where he overcomes bullying and Asperger’s syndrome, spends his nights coding strange symbols into a computer, and focused his days on fueling his inquisitiveness about the physics of things. Not a happy childhood, he said. It was very revealing to me and helped me in understanding the roots of his business acumen.
…and I said to myself: Now I know why his speech stumbles a bit at times. If he has overcome all of that so early in life, it’s no wonder he is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time. I think I should follow him on Twitter.
Elon tweets his wildest thoughts.
If I ask you to publicly tweet every single thought that comes into your head, would you be able to do it? Maybe at the right price? Well, I know I won’t / can’t do it. Call it the fear of social repercussions or the lack of clarity of thinking or a lack of confidence, I am not Elon Musk.
Elon claims that he just shares what he thinks about, laughs about, likes about, or wants us to know about. What’s wrong with that, you ask?
…so here’s what I think: We can only be so daring to expose our every waking thought to public scrutiny if we truly know that we got a hooked audience, a tribe that worships the pixels that paint his words. To be otherwise, I would say, is almost un-human.
Elon has proved to us that he only hits bullseyes. His skills come from hardships and his pursuit of knowledge, not luck. He is our Captain Kirk who will take us to new frontiers “to boldly go where no man has gone before”. What sets him apart from other visionaries of our time is that he is doing everything for that mission.
Then why am I still feeling reluctant to follow him? Is it because of my selfish human nature to only care about my duties and dreams?
Or is it that I am scared of blindly trusting one man with so much power?
Remember when we gave much more power to a businessman in 2016, and his negligence had caused the deaths of thousands of Americans during a pandemic. This is not a political statement nor do I have any political prejudices. It’s just what happened, and we all saw it happening before our eyes. More on my political povs in a future post: why every government is out for our blood. Until then…
Post Credits
This post is my immediate reaction to the Ted Talk podcast episode highlighting the key candid off-the-cuff responses from this interview with Elon Musk in April 2022. At the time I’m writing this I’ve still not seen the interview on video. From what I’ve heard it is one is for the bookmarks. Please do listen/watch and tell me what you think. How much of this assessment of Elon Musk is my skepticism, and what of it resonated with you?
Elon Musk himself seems to be a sexual harasser, and how it was handled by his company is totally unacceptable to me. I won't buy anything that has anything to do with him. We can do better than electric cars, which in the end usually rely on fossil fuels indirectly or use wind/solar that has negative impacts on dolphins, humans and other wildlife. Free energy is the way to go! Check out air-gen
nanopores.
"A team of engineers has recently shown that nearly any material can be turned into a device that continuously harvests electricity from humidity in the air. Researchers describe the 'generic Air-gen effect'-- nearly any material can be engineered with nanopores to harvest, cost effective, scalable, interruption-free electricity. The secret lies in being able to pepper the material with nanopores less than 100 nanometers in diameter...
"This is very exciting," says Xiaomeng Liu, a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering in UMass Amherst's College of Engineering and the paper's lead author. "We are opening up a wide door for harvesting clean electricity from thin air."
"The air contains an enormous amount of electricity," says Jun Yao, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst, and the paper's senior author. "Think of a cloud, which is nothing more than a mass of water droplets. Each of those droplets contains a charge, and when conditions are right, the cloud can produce a lightning bolt -- but we don't know how to reliably capture electricity from lightning. What we've done is to create a human-built, small-scale cloud that produces electricity for us predictably and continuously so that we can harvest it."
The heart of the human-made cloud depends on what Yao and his colleagues call the "generic Air-gen effect," and it builds on work that Yao and co-author Derek Lovley, Distinguished Professor of Microbiology at UMass Amherst, had previously completed in 2020 showing that electricity could be continuously harvested from the air using a specialized material made of protein nanowires grown from the bacterium Geobacter sulfurreducens.
"What we realized after making the Geobacter discovery," says Yao, "is that the ability to generate electricity from the air -- what we then called the 'Air-gen effect' -- turns out to be generic: literally any kind of material can harvest electricity from air, as long as it has a certain property."
That property? "It needs to have holes smaller than 100 nanometers (nm), or less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair."
This is because of a parameter known as the "mean free path," the distance a single molecule of a substance, in this case water in the air, travels before it bumps into another single molecule of the same substance. When water molecules are suspended in the air, their mean free path is about 100 nm.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/05/230524181948.htm
Free speech on twitter is an illusion. My understanding is that Elon is an elitist who fawns his PR job well. I am an advocate for a free exchange of ideas, including questioning science, elections and so on, while taking a firm view to remove anything that even might be child pornography and empowering users to fully ban abusive users from viewing or following or commenting, without removing them from the platform. If people choose not to be abused, then if it is empowered to fully remove them from an individuals experience, we need not argue about exactly what is abuse in ambiguous areas. Clear sexual harassment/stalking should also be banned, along with personal death threats. I believe genocidal speech should be banned, but "hate" is too broad...anything can be construed as hate if someone hates it.