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Elon got harshly booed on stage with Dave Chappelle, and I am absolutely baffled. I thought the people who still enjoyed Dave's comedy post-The Closer (when he got deemed transphobic by left-wing activists) would be indifferent, if not positive, towards Elon Musk. But people who like Chappelle and not Elon are not only common, but the majority of the people in this audience. Did I miss something?
As a bit of anecdata, I've always liked Chappelle and always disliked Musk. From the start, I have viewed Tesla as part green grift and part cult of personality - I've enjoyed making fun of people that buy them for as long as the company's been around and that impulse hasn't left me disappointed so far. I do give Musk a lot of credit for how he's approached businesses, but I'd probably join in on the booing just because it's pretty funny. That he seems to be so thin-skinned and approval-seeking makes it significantly funnier.
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No mention of Bayes yet?
SF has so many progressive people that you will still end up with mostly progressive crowd at an event (Chappelle) that is slightly less progressive coded.
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I'm not sure the responses at a single comedy venue are a good stand-in for culture war attitudes, people might just think he's an asshole and not like him.
Regardless of that his response is deeply pathetic: https://i.imgur.com/jRyHIK2.jpg
He's doing the Boo-urns thing, talking like a dweeb "It's almost as if" and is way more insecure than the richest man in the world should present himself as.
How is that boo-urns? He's not pretending nobody is booing him, he is saying why he thinks he got more boos than usual. Is he just not supposed to say anything? Because this actually seems pretty reserved for Musk on twitter I think.
Well the obvious go-to snarky response would be something along the lines of "If you San Fransisco losers are booing me I must be doing something right." (https://youtube.com/watch?v=UgCK8PnFK_Y) Beyond that the response doesn't really matter, but the fact that he's trying to argue on twitter about the percentage of people cheering for him is just pathetic.
Oh it's definitely pathetic, I just think it's business as usual for Musk. My model of him is "nerd who became extraordinarily popular and has no idea what to do with that."
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Have you ever seen any of his Tesla unveilings? He seemed like a gigantic dweeb on all of them, especially when breaking the unbreakable window he was showing off.
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Maybe he just is a dweeb? He's shown himself to be thin-skinned and frankly pathetic on other occasions (accusing a guy of being a pedophile for criticizing his suggestions)
The "RL Tony Stark" image only held when he kept his mouth shut.
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Musk acts like an eight year old and I don't care that he's poking people I don't like; it's just embarrassing to be so rich and still be a tantrum-prone child
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“Pretty sure they weren’t booing; they were just shouting ‘Go Brandon’.”
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The short answer is that Musk has positioned himself as red tribe or at least anti-blue-tribe, whereas Chappelle has positioned himself as more like heterodox blue tribe.
The average view I hear about Chappelle from blue tribe people I know is something like "his latest stuff has been in bad taste and his quality has gone downhill lately, but he's still a comedy legend and Chappelle's Show was amazing." This type of person would still go to a Chappelle standup show, in the same way someone might go to a Paul McCartney concert even if they don't like any of the music McCartney has put out since the 70s.
The average view I hear about Musk from blue tribe people I know is "he's a narcissistic rich manbaby whose family owned slaves or something." In other words, just uniformly negative.
So I think there's a decent sized slice of the blue tribe that likes Chappelle but hates Musk.
I represent as sample of that population.
I think Chapelle is too in his feelings about people not liking his trans jokes, but he's still DAVE FUCKING CHAPELLE. Shit, I even liked most of his trans material, it's his bitching and moaning about being "cancelled" on his 73'd netflix special that's cringe.
Musk is just pure cringe top to bottom. I miss just thinking "his fans are lame as fuck but dude is launching rockets and popularizing electric cars and making long bomb bets on innovative manufacturing techniques" instead of "Oh, that insecure guy who called a recue diver a pedophile 'cause he didn't want his stupid submarine and who did all that Hyperloop snake oil bullshit and who did all that boring company snake oil bullshit and and and". Dude needs to take up boxing or mma or something and work up some self respect.
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I hear some very loud boos but it doesn’t sound like most of the audience is booing.
Yep. All I really hear is a loud din, and the actual balance of cheers/boos probably going to be influenced by where the person filming was seated.
And that's assuming the audio wasn't tampered with.
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I remember going to a punk show during the height of "rock against Bush" or whatever circa 2005-2007. Half way through the show, the band stopped playing, lowered a screen, and started projecting an anti-Bush video. Despite probably 80+ percent of the crowd agreeing with the politics, there was almost a riot. People immediately started booing and throwing things as the screen until the venue turned it off.
People really, really hate feeling like their status as a captive audience is being abused.
One of the reasons the wokening of sportscasting yielded lower audiences. Humans who feel constrained will either prefer to struggle against their shackles or accept them on a fundamental level and say they deserve them.
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I'd be interested to hear why you think this. I get the impression that there are loud voices on social media opposed to both Musk and Chappelle but I'm not sure that implies the converse, that people who like Chappelle must like Musk.
People hate Musk because he wants to allow transphobic (and other hateful) speech on Twitter. People hate Chappelle for being transphobic. People who like Chappelle are willing to tolerate his transphobia, so I figured they'd also be willing to tolerate Elon's.
Not that I consider either of them transphobic in any meaningful sense. The point is that the media views them as transphobic for having insufficient reverence towards trans people.
Right, but if neither Musk nor Chappelle are transphobic then transphobia isn't a metric people will use to judge them. So maybe despite what the media says, the average person agrees with you that neither of them are transphobic?
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Dave Chapelle is generally funny and Elon Musk is generally not.
Judging from the clip, the boos started as soon as Elon was introduced, before he had the opportunity to say anything that would get booed.
If I was at a show to see a comedian and some unfunny nerd took the mike, I'd probably boo as well.
I mean, I wouldn't, I was raised to think talking in the theater would lead to immediate divine retribution, but I can easily see why someone would (especially given that comedy show audiences have a tradition of heckling if they think you're not funny).
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nah. This is entirely related to twitter , if I had to guess.
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It was in San Francisco. Not exactly that surprising.
And yet San Francisco was happy to see notorious transphobic TERF and mild anti-Semite Dave Chappelle.
Blue elites may have developed a disdain for Chappelle. For the rank and file (and anybody who grew up with his old show), Dave still has the cultural cachet of being the 'the GOAT' and for his BLM sympathies. The trans stuff is at most slightly unfortunate in their eyes, but not enough to tip the scales.
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Maybe his opinions on the trans thing are less unpopular than the screeching media wants you to think. Or even: they screech precisely so no one can sit and have a sober moment to reflect how popular this opinion is. Instead the hope is that the media cacophony is loud enough to convince you it isn't and so you get cowed into silence.
Again: if the audience isn't bothered by Chappelle's trans stuff, then what could possibly bother them about Elon?
It’s totally possible that the blue tribe just doesn’t like Elon musk for reasons that aren’t directly related to his opinions on trans.
Identity, personal history, his personal behavior, take your pick.
Callous treatment of tech employees, especially politically active ones -- I'm sure there were a bunch in the SF audience.
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Well, probably no republicans in a chappelle crowd in San Francisco, at least- he’s reasonably popular among the red tribe elite.
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It might be petty but honestly I've always found his 'how do you do fellow zoomers' shtick kinda cringe. The thing where he pretends to be down with the kids and all their epic dank maymays, y'know? For some people maybe that's enough to tip the scales against him. Then of course there's just the fact he's the richest man on Earth, people might feel he's mishandled Twitter or some of his other ventures, that moment he called a guy who rescued a bunch of trapped kids a paedophile for no good reason, maybe other stuff I haven't heard of. Honestly I'm a bit confused by the notion that if you're anti-woke you apparently have to like Musk.
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For a couple years before the twitter thing, I was starting to see verbal skirmishes between journalists and Elon. Given that he codes grey-tribe tech and the general hitpieces that have been done on him for awhile, the real reason people are bothered by Elon is just that he is the enemy. It has nothing to do with trans issues. Any lists that someone gives (e.g. Breeding kink) is not a reason to hate him, but those items do work as nice excuses.
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Elon's "transphobia" isn't the only thing that he gets heat for. There's a classism aspect as well, where the mere fact that he's the richest man on Earth makes him disliked by a lot of people, and his irreverent shitposting on Twitter on top of that exacerbates things, regardless of the contents of his shitposting. Chappelle himself doesn't tend to touch on class division all that much in his comedy, but it wouldn't surprise me if his audience tends to skew a bit on the working class side, given how much of his comedy tends to poke fun at the upper class. They might not have the burning hatred for Elon that so much of the upper class does, but having someone you just know primarily as a rich pompous twit - the richest pompous twit - come out when you just wanted to get some laughs from the funny man you paid likely hundreds of dollars to see is probably not the most pleasant surprise.
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His shitposting.
His buying of Twitter
The report about him settling sexual harassment lawsuits
His weird breeding fetish
His oversaturation and the way certain types really praise him? (This might have actually gotten weaker recently, as he's gotten more polarizing)
Him proposing dubious projects like the hyperloop
Him taking over a social media site and firing a bunch of people in what many people (who don't give a shit about business reasons) could find off-putting.
The general "unblue" vibe he seems to have picked up recently (or was imposed on him)
The media told them he Did A Thing That Was Bad but it was something they actually care about as opposed to the trans issue.
Perhaps the simplest and already stated above: Him not being a comedian, which is what they paid for? People don't necessarily want to pay money to help a rich millionaire comedian live out his culture war skirmish and fete his new allies.
(Not trying to rebut you in particular here. This is a rant I've had building up for a while, and you provided a lead-in.)
It's funny: I'm having trouble remembering when he proposed something that didn't strike lots of people as highly dubious. I'm most familiar with SpaceX among his companies, so I'll use examples from there. Some of his absurd ideas:
A private space company without lots of legacy engineering expertise, many billions of dollars of government money on cost-plus contracts, and so on. This was considered somewhere between unlikely and impossible -- Everybody Knows that space is the exclusive domain of governments and their closely-affiliated contractors. (I was online at the time, and I remember the ridicule!)
Lots of people were dunking on the idea of propulsively landing Falcon 9 lower stages -- on tiny barges in the ocean, of all things! -- and the jeering intensified when the early landing attempts kept turning into an entertaining procession of explosion videos. Then one day they stopped exploding, and kept on not exploding at least 9 times out of 10, with reliability improving over time.
A satellite internet constellation in low-earth orbit?! The dumber critics complained that it would have horrible ping times (because they got LEO confused with GEO), and the smarter critics thought that launching thousands of satellites that you have to replace every 5 years would be so ludicrously expensive that it would be a complete non-starter. Today there are more than 3000 mass-produced Starlink satellites in the sky; cost estimates look surprisingly good now, and are set to become much better with Starship launching. They're also trying to turn it into a military-contracting cash cow by offering the US DoD some capabilities that it badly wants, with their very-dramatically-named Starshield program.
Speaking of Starship, it has been ridiculed quite a bit, though the specific contents of that ridicule have been forced to change over the years. At first the problem was that they were trying to make a high-performance methalox engine of a type that had never successfully been made before -- but between some fancy new alloys and GPU-aided combustion chamber modeling, they managed to make the engine work. Then people were laughing at the idea of making the body out of steel plates welded together by guys whose previous job was water tower construction -- but it turned out to work really well in practice. Now people are scoffing at the idea that the $/kg to orbit could be anywhere near as low as SpaceX is predicting... and we'll see how that goes.
Over the years one starts to notice a pattern here. Musk has proposed a lot of things that ended up changing after being found unworkable or suboptimal, but in general, I'm wary of saying that any of them are obviously not going to work. If nothing else, he employs engineers who are capable of doing back-of-the-envelope calculations.
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The expansion is that western civilisation is fucked.
To expand the expansion further: around the gay marriage debates of the 2010s, a losing rearguard argument was put forward by the anti side that I nonetheless think was sound. It goes: expanding the concept of marriage such that it could include gay couples without self-contradiction means changing what all marriages are about. Or more precisely, affirming a change which had been underway in high Western culture since the 60s/70s.
This was the change whereby marriages went from being a cradle for families and child-rearing, to being a site for self-fulfilment and self-actualisation. Marriage's telos was to be fulfilment, and a right to marriage therefore follows from enlightenment rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". No-one within the thinkable window in the 2010s was going to make the argument that gay couples couldn't pursue happiness and shared fulfilment as effectively as straight couples, so excluding them from marriage became artirary, a relic of an earlier belief system. A 1950s vision centred on nuclear families ironically began to look a bit camp (the sincere concern with flower arrangements! A man's wedding is the absolute zenith of most straight men's concern with flower arrangements).
There's a pretty direct line from no-shame divorce to gay marriage. The internal logic leads naturally there, as was pointed out many times by both pro and anti sides (Jon Stewart voice: "What sanctity?? [Republican] is already three-times divorced, and my great aunt Ethel is dancing her tuchas off at over-70s singles nights at the [conservative place]. What are gays going to do to this institution that you haven't done already?)
Anyway, back to the West being fucked: in a context where marriage is a thing that some people like to do because it's fulfilling (and self-fulfilment is high status, marriage is decreasingly for the hoi polloi, who probably are fulfilled by like nativism or something idgaf), then there's only a weak vestigial pairing between pairing and rearing. At this stage the link between the two is like having English mustard with steak; some people like it and it's a traditional combo, but others find [the continuation of the human species] a bit uncomfortable and that's okay.
This is the sense in which, post-2010s, all marriages are gay marriages. "If you don't like gay marriage then don't marry someone of the same sex!"
Too late, Jon Stewart from 2010: I'm now gay-married to my straight spouse.
Hence, together with the brittle crystalising of sexuality taking place in modern culture (you may have one of several dozen/hundred sexual tastes, that's consumerist liberation, but your predilictions must be ordered and legible. Disordered, messy, dangerous sex goes back in the "problematic" box) it follows naturally that the act of sustaining the human race becomes kink #312a, and a rather outré one at that.
It's funny in a late 20th century UK sitcom way; the empire shrinks and crumbles, we are reduced, but there are bleak gags to be had.
A final note: the reason why this "kink" is a bit outré is due to demographic anxiety in whites, which by the way both isn't happening and is A Good Thing. I've never heard anyone criticise a profoundly fecund NBA player as being possessed of a breeding kink.
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Yeah, the last thing I think about in relation to Elon is trans issues.
That said, these days I'm mostly just disappointed in Elon. I wouldn't boo him, but I wouldn't cheer him either.
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This was my interpretation as well. If the show was in LA I think it would have gone differently.
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This surprised me as well.
I was thinking of trying to analyze the potential political motives, but that is probably pointless. With a small enough crowd you can have a single table swing the mood of the entire room. And a "boo" isn't the clearest signal. They might be booking him because he booted Kanye off Twitter, or booing him because he allowed Trump back on Twitter, or some parochial issue like not enjoying his presence in Austin. Or all of the above, because you don't need to coordinate with others on why you are booing someone.
Of all of the reasons they booed him, this is not among them lol. Probably they would have booed Kanye too.
Probably because Elon is just another version of orange man bad.
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They might just find Elon Musk an annoying, faintly ridiculous figure, and not certainly someone they are interested in hearing about when they've come to see Dave Chappelle, a figure who (unlike Elon, generally) is consistently funny and tells good jokes.
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