What exactly is the point of shaping the future if you don’t care about the people who will live there?
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In a world where culture and identity have been stripped down leaving nothing but an efficient skeletal chassis, what is left to do that has any meaning?
Manifest destiny is the mid-life crisis of the nouveau riche.
Some dumb fuck is selling a book and you swallow the bait, hook line and sinker to give it free promo! I have a bridge I’m selling - any chance of some sweet front page exposure if I make up some bullshit?
A contextless excerpt from an email, unproven and unattributed to anyone. Seems legit.
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Yeah, to a band director, being late is just as bad.
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To be fair, if Elon Musk was being a douche to me I’d go with anonymous leak too so that I’d live a few weeks longer after the Space-X Cyborg Valkyrie-warrior drones were being programmed with Musk’s kill list.
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What a jerk, wasn’t the employee who wanted to see his child born also changing the world, changing history and knowing what his priorities were?
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“You’re grandmother’s not going to be less dead if you don’t make that funeral.”
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You obviously don’t have adequate access to quality cheeseburgers.
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Christ, what an asshole.
Who cares what milestone the project was under. Sorry, I think the milestone of “birth of my child” trumps the work milestone. Sort of like the milestone “death of my father/mother” might do so.
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Spin me the scenario where this out of context excerpt looks good in context. I can’t think of one.
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There’s no proof whatsoever that the exchange was over the birth of a child. The dude might have taken the day off to get a midnight launch copy of CoD and get drunk for all we know.
Generally speaking, if someone is selling a book they are going to bring up the most clickbaity part they can, especially if it’s about someone who is otherwise as well regarded as Musk. How can you be sure that the “employee” really was an employee and that he didn’t have an axe to grind? Did the author see copies of the emails?
All of these questions are important and none of them are addressed.
Also, this is Business fucking Insider dude.
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Because if you want to get things done, the worst possible way is to invest the allotted time in arguments. Look at the time spent discussing one stupid card game here.
In ten minutes this will fizzle out and people forget.
Tomorrow, will they remember this nanoaffair brouhaha, or spaceships and electric cars?
Just ask any of the (legions) of sci-fi authors who can’t write decent characters. Whatever it is, it’s very attractive.
With wildly varying standards of rationality that is.
Washington Post better?
Let’s just say this quote is actually in the book and not something anyone made up, I’ve seen it a few places.
I’d be the last to accuse RMS of being diplomatic, quite possibly even to the extent where it is counterproductive to some of his objectives(not on a grand scale; but potentially in burning out individual contributors); but he has that ‘prophet-crying-out-in-the-wilderness’(who also isn’t the CEO, or your boss) thing going that makes his potentially abrasive aspects less menacing.
Between the fact that he hasn’t exactly climbed the ladders of temporal power, and thus has very, very, few people who have to put up with him on pain of penury; and is well known to be a ‘go to him to receive strong and bitter truths about technology’ sort of person, so the shock is mitigated.
Doesn’t make it any less tactless; but does make it easier to write off as ‘aspect of deeply quirky person’.
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Why should I care?
Sorry, “remembered in history” is greatly less important than this moment, now, with family. The birth of the child greatly outweighs “I was a cog in a historically notable sociopath’s production machine helping him get the credit for ‘great’ things.”
I’ve done my time in the trenches doing that at one of the biggest tech companies of the world at the time. It is worthless, really, for personal satisfaction when held against the day to day act of living.
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o.O
dude… you should know better.
This WaPo garbage is the same promo nonsense as the Bullshit Insider article. It might be in a book but that doesn’t make it true, especially when the person to whom this supposedly happened is anonymous. What’s the value in being anonymous? If this actually happened then Musk already knows who it is.
PS: I thought I made my views on WaPo clear yesterday 
