I don’t think it’s about whether what he did with Tesla is good (it is at least debatable whether it is unilaterally good given they are anti-competitive in the EV market). It’s rather about the pretense for the good thing. Elon isn’t driven to help the environment. The sum purpose of Tesla’s operations isn’t environmentalism, else they’d not be selling carbon credits to ICE manufacturers, incentivising them to avoid EV production.
And it’s not even just that “the good” was only to make money, it’s that it’s as a member of the landed gentry he had the opportunity to throw many things at the wall that failed before the Tesla takeover stuck; his ‘intervention’ is simply a VC success story by happenstance.
Taking this at face value, is what he did with Tesla really laudable at all? It is a lucky byproduct of elitism.
The Nazi enabler part being the bad side, you’re saying we should to reconcile this with the good side. I’m saying the good side is actually just some good shit that happened. Attributing it to Elon would be a mistake because of all of the times he did the same thing with the same intent and it never amounted to anything. For the truly good person, their opportunities to do good things would have been well exhausted before the Tesla opportunity arose. If we’re trying to balance the perception of how good we are it should be a function of the proportion of the things we do that are good vs. bad, not a function of how many things we have the means to try.
I don’t think it’s about whether what he did with Tesla is good (it is at least debatable whether it is unilaterally good given they are anti-competitive in the EV market). It’s rather about the pretense for the good thing. Elon isn’t driven to help the environment. The sum purpose of Tesla’s operations isn’t environmentalism, else they’d not be selling carbon credits to ICE manufacturers, incentivising them to avoid EV production.
And it’s not even just that “the good” was only to make money, it’s that it’s as a member of the landed gentry he had the opportunity to throw many things at the wall that failed before the Tesla takeover stuck; his ‘intervention’ is simply a VC success story by happenstance.
Taking this at face value, is what he did with Tesla really laudable at all? It is a lucky byproduct of elitism.
Add “born privileged, into wealth” to Nazi enabler.
You’re right to critique his motivations.
How’s that?
The Nazi enabler part being the bad side, you’re saying we should to reconcile this with the good side. I’m saying the good side is actually just some good shit that happened. Attributing it to Elon would be a mistake because of all of the times he did the same thing with the same intent and it never amounted to anything. For the truly good person, their opportunities to do good things would have been well exhausted before the Tesla opportunity arose. If we’re trying to balance the perception of how good we are it should be a function of the proportion of the things we do that are good vs. bad, not a function of how many things we have the means to try.
Fair point!