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Musk's Twitter is bizarrely unfiltered. I have stopped interpreting his tweets as carefully considered positions that he is endorsing so much as random thoughts that he is just throwing out there, some of which he seriously believes but others that are just ephemeral musings. The increasingly transient and momentary nature of the platform are conducive to this pattern of behavior. I don't see how he has time to do it, so I have to assume he essentially doesn't. It seems more important for him to produce tweets than to think about them for very long. At the same time, Musk is privy to information that the general public is not, and betting against him doesn't have a great track record however crazy his ambitions might seem. If nothing else, he is quite entertaining.
I'm highly sceptical that a slow, cautious, and careful approach would serve Musk's goals better. The road to success passes through many mistakes, so might as well get through them as fast as possible. This doesn't seem to be a new style for Musk, but rather it's just new that we're getting to see it in the open on X. On the other hand, he might just be having a mental breakdown.
And this is where the difference between a private business like SpaceX or Tesla and a democratic government comes in. A mistake in Tesla? "Oh well guys just wait for the cars a bit longer". A mistake in SpaceX? "Let's try another Starship"
A mistake in government? It can literally kill, it can have dangerous long term ramifications on both the lives of the citizens and the future of the country as a whole. And people will get pissed off way more. If you think customers can be angry about delays, wait till you see what happens if social security ever does get fucked with. Even with the relatively minimal and irrelevant cuts he's already been doing he's slowly racking up more enemies and pushback already, and not just from the Democrats, like even the Vatican was speaking up about some of it.
Poor aerospace and automotive engineering can also kill. Ask Boeing how that's working out for them (hundreds of deaths from the MAX debacle). SpaceX has a surprisingly good, if imperfect, record, but Tesla seems to get a surprising number of OSHA complaints, and some of their vehicle design decisions (the emergency door release in the back seat of the 3 series, and such) suggest they don't take safety as seriously as Toyota, much less Volvo.
Messing up the international relations that have led to 80 years with no use of nuclear weapons in combat has the potential to kill orders of magnitude more people than "hundreds" (and yes that's mostly Putin, and even on the less-culpable US side it's mostly Trump, but Musk is wading in a bit too).
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