He seems like kind of a dick

  • bluerabbit
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    4 years ago

    Yes, those are the flaws I was referring to. My point was that it doesn’t make sense to judge Musk on the quality of his socialism because he isn’t a socialist and doesn’t act like one. To bring it back to the OP, one could certainly argue that supporting continued capitalism qualifies him as a bad person due to all these unwanted side effects, without further analysis. To me that would be unhelpfully reductive (although it would make answering future /c/asklemmy posts like these fairly easy).

    However if you are willing to peer into the capitalist context and look for some shades of grey, it’s clear that he has been involved in improvements over the status quo. Of course he hasn’t personally designed rockets or dug the required rare earth magnets out of the ground. The people who did that matter very much but they aren’t the topic of this thread. Musk played a more abstract role in building companies which reduce the resources required to launch satellites and drive cars. It is not easy or trivial to go from having a bunch of money to having SpaceX. I give him credit for his ability to do that.