The guy made fun ofspoke dismissively about Musk’s submarine as an unworkable solution to the problem at hand. Boo hoo.
That’s hardly the same as publicly and repeatedly slandering someone as a child rapist with zero evidence to back it up.
ETA: going back to read the diver’s original comments the tone wasn’t even “mockery” so much as a frank, exasperated statement about how there was no way the submarine could make it through the cave passages they were facing. Others involved in the rescue effort clearly shared that assessment, they just didn’t say so in a way that hurt poor widdle Elon’s fee-fees.
If by " spoke dismissively about", you mean telling him to shove his submarine up his ass? And by “an unworkable solution to the problem at hand” you mean accusing him of doing nothing but staging a PR stunt, then you have given an accurate accounting of took place. Thanks for straightening me out.
As of today there’s a fuckton more evidence that Musk built the submarine as a PR stunt than there is that the diver in question is a child rapist. For one thing, Musk apparently showed up in the cave itself when he had no need or business being there other than as a PR stunt (he was quickly asked to leave).
The diver stated an unflattering opinion of Musk’s “backup plan” for the cave rescue. Musk retaliated with a full-out slander campaign against one of the people whose work actually helped save the lives of the children in that cave rescue. Screw him.
That’s the job of a modern PR firm. They are professional trollies in the sense that they know how to provoke a reaction and divert attention. In doing so they create a rabid fan base that acts as a (free) force multiplier. They do it with Musk, they did it for Putin, and they’re doing it for your favorite actor or band.
If they are paying burl I hope they get their money back. Their posts are neither swaying me to the cult of Musk nor distracting from what a jerk he is.
Honestly, I used to think Musk was pretty cool. Using his influence and money to make products that make the world a bit better. Seemed different from the Typical Gates or Bezos style of exec. I was never a fan boy. But had a casually positive image of him.
But starting with the BS he pulled with his personal assistant the facade has steadily fallen away. It wasn’t pulled away by the mean bloggers. It was Musk. Musk is now his own worst PR enemy. All the PR flacks should stop bothering with posting online and instead take turns knocking the phone out of Musk’s hands.
My understanding is that the professional “influencers” don’t generally go outright flame-warrior. Nobody ever argued anyone into anything in the history of the internet, and arguing about the merits here probably doesn’t help Musk anyway.
Instead, it’s about changing the conversation. That might be a “hey, I’m just asking questions…” approach, or it might be a “OT but can you believe what Trump just did” tactic, or even a trolley-but-unrelated-to-the-topic-at-hand “your mom” thing.
As for knocking the phone out of his hands, well, I don’t disagree but (a) he’s still the boss of them and (b) he’s almost as useless to his companies without a public presence than he is with a bad one. Musk’s job is and has always been, since the moment any of us mortals first heard of him, to perform the Elon Musk Experience. In public for us, and in private for investors. He’ll either right the ship of his brain or he won’t, but becoming a boring beige CEO isn’t going to work for him or his companies.
What a brave new internet world we live in, that has such creatures in’t.
Yes! Anything Boing Boing posts about Musk I take with a grain of salt. But in the last few weeks the Musk defenders (and Musk himself) have converted me from mostly neutral toward Musk to flat out not liking him.
Yes, I see this. Sometimes it is effective. The Musk defenders just seem to be bad at it.
Yes, sort of a rhetorical suggestion. I don’t expect anyone that needs a job to tell him no.
Not “magically” no, but if you saw somebody *casting lustful looksgazing longingly at the youngsters in the area you might get the idea that it could be a thing. And as @Al_Estok mentions elsewhere, it’s well within the realm of possibility.
So yeah, straight out calling him a pedophile is dumb as hell give Elon’s level of visibility, but I wouldn’t discount it entirely on those grounds.
That assumes that there is a “look” to a pedophile, that people who’ve been molested have some special insight into how they might “look.” Which, I think, we’ve established upthread, he wasn’t actually molested as a kid? Did I read that upthread?
He was invited, he didn’t just show up. He was ‘quickly asked to leave’ because they had important shit to do, not because he was overstaying his welcome as part of a PR stunt, which he wasn’t.
Musk and the SpaceX engineers only got involved because they were asked to come up with a backup plan, in case the water levels started rising quickly and they didn’t have time to implement the main rescue plan.
Wow, thought crime; that’s totally a reliable metric.
O_O
That dubious “logic” implies both that Musk somehow actually saw the other man looking at children in such a manner, and that’s there’s some sort of gaze that readily identifies sexual predators (Hint; there isn’t.)
Hell, did Musk even know Unsworth personally, or anything about the man before the guy deigned to impugn Musk’s brilliance by criticizing the proposed endeavor as a self serving non-solution?
And I wouldn’t count it as even remotely viable, based solely on the unfortunate fact that Thailand has a thriving child sex industry.
And I’ll reiterate one last time; at one point after the initial backlash, Musk apologized and deleted the offending tweet; why would he do that, if it was a legitimate accusation of a heinous crime?
I don’t think he ever met him, if he knew anything about him he seemed to be insinuating he got it from people he met there, but he gave no specifics, see the emails he sent to the buzzfeed journalist:
These emails contain the only real defamatory statements from Musk, the twitter comments are unlikely to hold up to the US legal definition of defamation. Also, the fact that these comments are in a private email, not meant for publication, may provide an out for Musk in the US as well. It will be a lot harder for him to defend himself in the UK if Unsworth goes ahead with a UK legal action as well (which he has said he will, but I don’t think has actually happened yet), the onus will be on Musk to prove he genuinely believed the statements to be true.
THERE IS NO WAY OF DETECTING A SEXUAL PREDATOR JUST BY LOOKING AT THEM.
Or by how someone looks at other people.
(If there were, please believe that women would have utilized it fucking eons ago.)
I don’t know why you’ve chosen this particular hill to die on, but your efforts are really starting to come across as intentionally obtuse sea-lioning.
I think a law firm will take a client like Unsworth on contingency, considering the depths of the defendant’s pockets and the likelihood Unsworth will prevail. There are only so many delaying tactics you can use in court, especially when the fight can’t revolve around facts (which are difficult to dispute) but damages. Unsworth might not get that much, monetarily, but something tells me Unsworth doesn’t want that much.
