I’m pretty sure that upthread someone said that Musk has farmed out the exec-level type jobs to other folks AND he’s hired another PA to do the actual PA stuff.
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You are dwelling on the narrative of, in those two weeks he realized he could keep up with her tasks, or delegate them to others. I think what me and others are saying is… likely other things were realized in these couple of weeks. He may have found she had been doing things he didn’t approve of. We don’t actually know, so why this has sparked such a response is a little odd to me… Unless you are already wired to be anti-Musk or anti-corporation in general. Which I have no problem with, but it is a biased perspective, potentially.
Musk may be a dick, but he’s, in my utterly unprofessional opinion, obviously aspy, and obviously a genius. Why anyone would expect such a personality to be “humane,” I’m not sure. I certainly don’t worship him (or anyone, beyond the fact that I worship everyone, because I’m a nondualist and this is how we roll) but geez, give the man some credit. First mass-produced and popular electric vehicle (named after an awesome chap), major solar/renewable power company, reusable rocket ships to outer space… Maybe he is a dick, but give the man some credit.
He was born into privilege, leveraged that advantage into a windfall profit during the casino days of the tech boom, and has spent his time since then in an attempt to create the STARK program.
Is he the worst of the aristocrats? No. But he’s just another greedy white guy with an obscene amount of largely unearned wealth. He isn’t an inventor, he isn’t an engineer, and he isn’t a hero.
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Daaaang!!!
Edit:
But really, I’m curious what about his bio you so recoil against. I’m no Elon Musk expert, I’ve never read a bio. Is it cuz he’s a white South African? I’ll give you privilege there. But are you asserting more than that? What specifically about the companies he runs/founded – Solar City, Tesla, SpaceX – do you apparently find so appalling? Isn’t there something they have, that Exxon, internal combustion, and Boeing don’t quite have going on?
One might almost think you know the guy, and have some beef…
Edit 2: Not to mention, Hyperloop, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company. This guy is the cool version of the James Bond villain, versus the blah Trump/Putin version, come on!
Nothing.
Of the 0.0001%ers, Musk is one of the least obnoxious.
But the “good” Prince is still a fucking aristocrat.
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BTW, you know that weird wedge shape that the “T” in the “Tesla” badge makes?
That represents a single segment of a rotor/stator pair in a AC polyphase induction motor, a type of motor invented by Nikola Tesla
All Tesla Motors cars are powered by just such a motor: a three-phase four-pole AC induction motor.
In a blog post, “Motor City”, Tesla Motors co-founder Martin Eberhard discussses induction motors, and why Tesla Motors is called Tesla.
CleanTechnica has all the tech details for gearheads:
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I wonder what Elon thinks of this?
Not sure anyone here’s really interested in hearing his side of the story, given the general tenor of the comments above, but there’s more in his Tweet-stream from today if anyone cares.
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Musk is a capitalist. He owns things. He isn’t an engineer.
Sorry, but when you say that Musk isn’t an engineer, I can only conclude that you don’t know him at all.
You’ve certainly never worked for him.
He actually IS an engineer. A rather brilliant one, in fact. Ask anyone who works with him. He’s not just an “idea guy” paying other people to build things, he’s a genuinely talented, highly skilled hands-on engineer and designer — a very valuable one, in fact…
The capitalist who just pays other highly-skilled people to build rockets is Jeff Bezos.
(He’s the bald one.) (-:
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Yeah, probably not a good moment to ask for a raise 
I’ve been ruminating on the creations of brilliant engineering minds and what it means for society.
I keep short-circuiting to ‘we’ve got trouble’. When AI really kicks in, it’s basically going to fire everybody. Because the people creating it … have an almost total lack of empathy for human relationships.
OMG, right?
It’s still an insult to Tesla, IMO; he was not only a brilliant inventor, but he was also an altruist who wanted to actually help the rest of humanity, not just make a profit from it.
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I’m dwelling on the narrative we were actually given in the story. You are positing that maybe he figured out that she was doing things he didn’t approve of. If so, why did that not figure into the story as he told it, and why did he offer her a position elsewhere in the company? Any set of facts could be true, but if we are just going to make up our own facts because anything could be true, I think we should at least try to argue we have a good reason to believe them based on the information we have.
If I were trying to convict him of being a dick to his assistant in a criminal court then the story as printed might not be enough to get past the “reasonable doubt” test. But using that test to decide whether the story appears to describe a dick move is, to my mind, reflexive deference toward authority.
While people sit in this thread trying to defend Musk (i.e., insist we shouldn’t judge him because we don’t know), Musk himself clearly knows only a total shithead would do what he has been said to do, and has said it never happened.
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I have to concur that this is exactly what we’re seeing in this thread; along with some people taking it very personally, for some odd reason.
I drew my conclusion that this was a dick move based on the actual info provided in the story, not any hypothetical extrapolations about what Musk’s possible motivations “could have been.”
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This isn’t so much Musk’s side of the story, but reality. I seriously don’t think that Musk would post easily fact-checkable lies like him giving his assistant 52 weeks of severance pay when he made a reasonable decision to restructure. (If he did I’m sure we’ll hear about it in the next day or two)
The idea that people have been defending fictional-Musk’s actions when real-Musk thinks they are deplorable indicates to me that the question of who is biased for or against Musk is really not the issue here. But perhaps the headline of the thread now ought to be: “Business Insider reflexively defends indefensible actions because they thought that Elon Musk did it.”
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That was shitty of him. What about what the nurse could tolerate?
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Oh please… I’ve known plenty of people on the austism spectrum who aren’t completely and utter assholes. I’ve also known plenty of folks who are certified geniuses (meaning they’ve been tested and have a high IQ), same thing, they aren’t dicks. Why are people who are austic or “geniuses” given a pass for being assholes? Just because someone has a high IQ or has a different way of understanding the world doesn’t mean they should be exempt for basic human decency. If he thinks he’s too smart or clever to treat people with respect, why should any of us give him a pass on that? Fuck that noise. I’m sick of people like Musk being applauded and sucked up to, because some people think he’s the bee’s knees. He’s not a god, he’s a human being and he should maybe treat others with a modicum of respect.
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Good question; right along with why are wealthy people so often given a pass for being assholes?
It’s like some folks didn’t get the memo:
Sticking up for someone who’s a jerk just because they are rich won’t make anyone else ‘rich by proxy.’
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Thanks for that fun bit of logo design background.
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