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practical_romantic  1yr ago (text post)   3279 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 23, 2022

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What do you think motivates Elon Musk to do some of the weird things he does? He has a lot of tweets that feel like /r/iamverysmart material, like saying chess is a simple game and now that we have computers games like Polytopia are way better. Or how he tried to buy twitter, then back out of it after already signing a contract saying he would leading twitter to sue him to force him to buy. Or offering his analysis of the Ukraine-Russian war on twitter, which even if you would agree the broad strokes of his suggestion were good, Twitter's really not a good platform to share nuanced geopolitical analysis to try to encourage peace.

Is he just doing stuff for attention? Does he think he's genuinely making a world a better place with those actions? Does he have some sort of social media manager planning this stuff to keep his name in the news and stock price high? Is he just bored and tweeting/making impulse purchases to pass the time, like what everyone else does just on a much larger scale? For the life of me I don't know why he does what he does.

Or offering his analysis of the Ukraine-Russian war on twitter, which even if you would agree the broad strokes of his suggestion were good, Twitter's really not a good platform to share nuanced geopolitical analysis to try to encourage peace.

I don’t think he is in position to significantly influence the Russia-Ukraine war in any case, but that way, at least, when the dust settles he can point at his tweets and present himself as a benevolent figure who tried to save lives.

He's was already influencing things more than almost anyone else who's not a major politician or military figure with Starlink. And I'm sure he has the leverage to get in the room to talk to people who can make direct decisions, if nothing else but because he was providing that Starlink to Ukraine. Or even if he didn't, he could've written a more nuanced blog post on a substack instead of a couple short tweets.

Thinking history will prove him right and he just wants to get his prediction in early and publicly is certainly possible. I don't know if it sounds likely to me though.

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