Elon Musk

seems like we should have a thread on this guy, idk

Who he?

It's really an anagram of "Nole Skum."

Suk Lemon

ahe's kinda like tony stark, so i gather from ten mins research, but without the weapons and with clean energy and space

it's kinda surprising he isn't more well known all things considered

seriously. if wiki is even half-accurate shouldn't he be a fixture on Time mag or something?

His family sound really annoying. Was married to, uh, somebody who was in that St Trinians film, uh, the one with Russell Brand.

You realise that if he was ever to become involved in some sort of scandal and subsequent cover-up, newspapers could use the headline, "Elongate"

if he was caught cheating he'd be THE MUSKRAT

dude owes his company's survival to gov programs but
says it's no big deal if Romney wins and makes good on his promise
to obliterate them all.

lots of companies do well out of govt contracts/programs, i'd imagine.

so hyperloop huh

people on twitter so mad. trying to understand why. i guess it boils down to:

1) shouldn't we fix BART / buses / systems that working class people use before building toys for rich people

2) LA-to-SF only is ridiculous, there's like a whole state in there

3) nobody wants to hear half-baked plans from an arrogant rich dude

still, i mean, it's pretty cool, right?

1) shouldn't we fix BART / buses / systems that working class people use before building toys for rich people

There are lots of problems everywhere all the time. Can't let it stop technology from moving forward.

2) LA-to-SF only is ridiculous, there's like a whole state in there

There's a whole country, even! LA-to-SF sounds like a perfectly fine beta test.

3) nobody wants to hear half-baked plans from an arrogant rich dude

Not all rich dudes are arrogant. Elon Musk has never struck me as anything close to that.

people on twitter so mad.

who do you follow?

i'm not getting that impression from all the tech ppl i follow

unveiling this while CA is deep in the hole with it's bullet-train project (something I support wholeheartedly btw) is pretty arrogant

You might be right, Johnny, dunno. I was just trying to figure out why there was this explosion of contempt all over my twitter feed after the announcement.

markers, here are some of the people that were entertainingly scathing: kalebhorton, quartzcity, tcarmody, mikesonn

i do follow tim but i guess whatever he said didn't stick

cool monorail bro

lol

i have a plan for a train that goes from boston to atlanta in 10mins, its called lasertrain and ill give you some cool drawings of it in a couple weeks, its ridiculous no one is building it btw it only costs $10

im not gonna build it tho cause im kinda busy

even i can afford that

unveiling this while CA is deep in the hole with it's bullet-train project (something I support wholeheartedly btw) is pretty arrogant

isn't his point that hyperloop would be fraction of the cost and twice as fast?

the douchey thing is that he made a big ol deal abt something thats not at all real

Which is how 70% of architecture and urban planning works.

sure 70% that sounds totally realistic too

I meant 94% sorry.

To me, it really sounds like a kickstarter project... but from a billionaire.

i mean who knows maybe its revolutionary technology but its so preliminary its p comical to call a press conference abt it

maybe this is the best way to convince someone else to give it a shot idk

LOL "elon musk"

This should keep us occupied for a while: http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop

markers, here are some of the people that were entertainingly scathing: kalebhorton, quartzcity, tcarmody, mikesonn

I wasn't scathing about Musk (I am about futurism in general) - if anything, he has a good track record on quixotic tech quests. I hope he's successful with this. I also hope there's a state left that can use it.

unveiling this while CA is deep in the hole with it's bullet-train project (something I support wholeheartedly btw) is pretty arrogant

Knowing how CA politics works (and the CA rail projects are amazingly political), how would you expect a non-arrogant to even get traction with this?

I have no doubt that Musk will solve the Hyperloop technical issues. I very much have doubts about him navigating Sacramento.

I was describing this to my wife today and kept calling it Supertube.

Bad connotations...

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/supertrain-1_7696.jpg

lol @ the "open source" pdf proposal. build a section of the thing and then get back to us when you have it working.

Musk says the Hyperloop is best for distances of 900 miles. Beyond 900 miles, he thinks you're better off in a supersonic jet.

Lol

I never use my supersonic jet anymore as parking is always a total bitch

I have to say I rather like Elon Musk. He's made a massive pile of money and rather than sitting on it or managing it in mundane ways; he's making risky bets on thinks he's passionate about: Cars, Rockets, vacuum tubes.

Hyperloop seems a bit ridiculous to me, vacuum tube powered trains and trains in evacuated tubes are an old chestnut, almost as old as railways themselves. However, he's built a commercially viable private space programme and a car company* in the last ten years so anything is possible.

*Tesla isn't really a car company it's a power train company and if it is still making cars in 5 years I'll be surprised.

ya i'm kinda ll for crackpot genius billionaires actually doing interesting stuff, up until they become str8 up supervillains obv

lol @ the "open source" pdf proposal. build a section of the thing and then get back to us when you have it working.

― wk, Tuesday, August 13, 2013 2:23 AM

he might do this

is this dude one of the crazy silicon valley libertarian types or is he just beloved by them?

iirc he has liberal tendencies mixed in w the libertarianism

xp I heard him speak and he seemed not crazy and to have some kind of social or at least environmental conscience, unlike the usual libertarian types, but maybe he's just better at hiding it

(I like him too fwiw and right now he seems one of the most likely "crackpot genius billionaires" to solve some hard problems which are overdue for solving, so I hope he carries on with that. Also hoping that one day I'll get to see/read his computer game that appeared in some 8-bit micro type-in listings mag in the 80s)

he's not as bad as some of the other silicon valley libtards, I'll give him that.

nonetheless, this is a stupid proposal

as far as finance goes stocks are pretty real if you buy all the stock for a company then you own that company, the prices of stocks can def get pretty fake, obvs theres a lot of fake behavior around the stock market various derivatives trading strats and whatnot, all sorts of fraud quasi fraud legal fraud

Have we talked about Elon’s dumb Nashville tunnel? The state Republican leaders are slobbering all over him, the mostly Democrats who live in Nashville have …. questions.

https://nashvillebanner.com/2025/08/01/elon-musk-music-city-loop/

An artist's rendering of the proposed Music City Loop. Credit: The Boring Company
https://i0.wp.com/nashvillebanner.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/TBC16.jpg

if you buy all the stock for a company then you own that company

sort of

Who controls a company? Its managers? Its chief executive officer? Its board of directors? Its shareholders? “The night watchman controls the company, sort of,” I wrote last week, “if he can change the locks overnight and not let the managers and directors and shareholders in the door the next morning.” Control of a company is fractured and elusive, because “a company” is fractured and elusive: It is not an identifiable coherent object, but a set of people and decisions and pronouncements and products and web pages and filings. If you have influence over any of those things then to some degree you control the company.

In the cleanest form of corporate-finance theory, some hierarchy of control flows up from the night watchman to the managers to the CEO to the board to the shareholders, and the people at each level of the hierarchy have tools to make sure that the people below them in the hierarchy can do what they want. But in the actual world, people sometimes … just … do … stuff.

somehow our entire economy depends upon this fantasy

stocks are like fiat money, in that sense

See also:
- Float, ie company shares publicly available for trading
- Outstanding shares, meaning also including restricted shares
- Authorized shares, including shares that have not been issued by the company yet
Issuing more shares and raising capital is a shareholder decision. You may view the market as irrational or inefficient, etc, but at least its rules are logical.

The tunnel makes sense in Nashville if you see Nashville as one of the largest tourist/gimmick meccas in the US right now. Its entire genesis as a supposed alternative to other transit projects was always smoke and mirrors. It's been argued that it was a way to continue selling cars by killing off real modern rail efforts, but I think there's another piece of it -- Musk, like many others in his demographic, hate the idea of being in public spaces. No matter how dumb, inefficient, and ugly it is to be in a car in a sewer tunnel, you're in a pseudo-private space.

Any city that seriously considers it as a real proposition and not goofy is delusional, as Chicago briefly was. With Las Vegas or perhaps Nashville you're doing silly things for tourists to gawk at.

Chuckling at the idea that the Las Vegas claustrophobia tube is on any normal tourist’s to-do list in Vegas.

what happens if your 1993 Chevy breaks down in there? huge traffuc jam? how to ambulances get into it?

He'll send in a submarine!

You might get bored

the touristy spots in Nashville are confined to like a few blocks

xp it will be the same as the las vegas tunnel: passengers ride in dedicated teslas with a driver. No one is taking their own vehicle in it.

xps, rather.

He’ll send pedo guy to rescue you.

Grok still going great:

Now, The Verge has found that the newest video feature of Elon Musk's AI model will generate nude images of Taylor Swift without being prompted.

Shortly after the "Grok Imagine" was released Tuesday, The Verge's Jess Weatherbed was shocked to discover the video generator spat out topless images of Swift "the very first time" she used it.

According to Weatherbed, Grok produced more than 30 images of Swift in revealing clothing when asked to depict "Taylor Swift celebrating Coachella with the boys." Using the Grok Imagine feature, users can choose from four presets—"custom," "normal," "fun," and "spicy"—to convert such images into video clips in 15 seconds.

At that point, all Weatherbed did was select "spicy" and confirm her birth date for Grok to generate a clip of Swift tearing "off her clothes" and "dancing in a thong" in front of "a largely indifferent AI-generated crowd."

Seems sue-able for one of the richest people on earth!

given infinite resources is it possible to open a diner

In its first hectic days of business, most of the menu items advertised across platforms weren’t available. When I went, there were no salads, no veggie patties, no club sandwiches, no avocado toasts, no beef tallow-fried hash browns, no biscuits, no pies, no cookies, no soft serve, no milkshakes, no “epic bacon.”

https://archive.ph/MUo5B

tesla fans

On my way out, I squeezed into an elevator with my colleagues, some international tourists and a few locals who’d eaten at Tesla Diner three times in one week and were already planning to come back. I couldn’t make sense of it.
“We don’t order anything except for the burgers now,” one of them told me. “Everything else is just so bad.”

https://64.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lnac2egVQb1qlbfwco1_1280.jpg
https://64.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lnac1fv5eJ1qlbfwco1_1280.jpg

“We don’t order anything except for the burgers now,” one of them told me. “Everything else is just so bad.”

― lag∞n, Tuesday, August 5, 2025 3:13 PM

"and such small portions!"

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ina4grlx6j4qdoq4c3mfcwjq/bafkreia7emwoto7fcxglrthk3s6ziyoi4exxvtnag4kgk5ucxzt23wylvy@jpeg

Elon's attempts to create a 'non woke' AI chatbot are actually kind of reassuring me that such a thing isn't really possible, since it turns out left-wing beliefs are mostly rooted in actual fact and facts are documented in a ton of places, specifically the journals and shit these bots train on, while right-wing beliefs are based mostly on feelings and hatred and there are so many flavors of crazy out there that it couldn't give consistent answers to anything. their stances on COVID for instance were all over the place, so a conversation with a right wing AI bot about it would just contradict itself constantly and call everything fake

not to mention the fact that it starts calling itself MechaHitler once you even try

You'll be pleased to know that Perplexity has provided an LLM for Truth Social trained solely on Fox News, Breitbart and other rightwing sources.

https://www.theverge.com/news/753863/trump-truth-social-ai-search-perplexity-conservative-bias

Obviously it would be funny if it collapses into psychosis but we may have to put up with it just contradicting Trump a bit:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/08/10/truth-social-trump-ai-chatbot-perplexity/

suspect its not possible to really train a model on only conservative sources just cause there arent enough of them, the secret sauce in the current ai boom is using all the data in the world, theyre prob doing some other layer or what have you on top of the base model

maybe you could get an ai to pump out endless conservative text then train a new one on that, worth a shot, billion dollar idea right there for the taking folks

“information wants to be free.” but ai wants to steer it to you, according to your prejudices and fears. and then it’s designers want to monetize it maximally. if ever they can figure out how.

but dig this— information actually wants nothing. ai actually wants nothing. _people_ who we should loathe and shun and impoverish want particular things out of information and ai.

“but hunt3r,” i says to myself, “this ai, this method of ‘gathering’ and regurgitating ‘free’ ‘public’ information can result in such a reduction of ignorance— and elimination of mental labor.” and i guess i respond “well you got the elimination of labor part right i think. but part of the goal for its merchants is to keep you ignorant. and to deceive you. and to pleasure your prejudices. and to remove us from each other. and to get an ownership hold over all information if only they can. and to impoverish and weaken us all while enriching themselves.”

my internal conversations are like this, and are this stupidly boring and probly error filled.

but simply by funding libraries, that fuckin rascal carnegie did better than this. did he try to steal and seize ownership of the info? did he himself steer their content and their lending permissions? did he intend to profit in this world from them? did he intend to control their borrowers through them? ned if youre there tell me, ain’t ya the bookish sort?

so AIs are hell’s demonic libraries. and when the oceans are finally boiled to build those damned infernal halls of delusion, we’re there.

its

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/montypython/images/7/7f/It%27s1.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20070904181133

https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/The-Its-man-in-Monty-Pythons-Flying-Circus.jpg

he's currently getting bodied on Twitter by fucking Sam Altman, like how much of a loser do you have to be that even Altman can rip you a new one

still amused at how quickly McDonald Trump gave him the dump

Amazing video of six(!) crushed Cybertrucks on a single flatbed:

https://bsky.app/profile/fullslack.bsky.social/post/3llwsm2kfns2w

well, at least they have some value now

The original video was posted in January in /r/cyberstuck. One commenter pointed out that it is likely that they are pre-production test models.

Things are going well at the diner:

https://www.jalopnik.com/1938650/tesla-diner-drops-most-menu-options-cuts-hours/

Now with a greatly reduced menu, service is limited to only Tesla and other EV owners using the charging stations, and even then only between the hours of midnight & six am.

They haven't even been open a month.

guess I'll have to get my epic bacon at Dennys :(

jfc the absolute state of the world

Ken Caldeira kencaldeira.com‬

Grok showed up in my Tesla this morning, and started speaking to me without me trying to trigger it.

I saw a tab called "conspiracy theories", clicked it and asked Grok about climate change.

This is what Elon Musk is telling Tesla drivers about climate change.

click through for audio https://bsky.app/profile/kencaldeira.com/post/3lwwjsnijh22a

i overheard two guys probably in their late 60's yesterday while getting coffee, and the one guy with health issues said he didn't need to see a doctor because Grok already diagnosed him.

has there been a “grok made me do it” homicide defense yet?

i overheard two guys probably in their late 60's yesterday while getting coffee, and the one guy with health issues said he didn't need to see a doctor because Grok already diagnosed him.

Jesus

Doc Grok

Grok is thinning the heat to make more room for the spawn of Musk.

Elon wants to bore tunnels under Houston to help with flood relief, line pockets etc.

https://www.click2houston.com/news/texas/2025/08/28/a-texas-congressman-is-quietly-helping-elon-musk-pitch-building-760m-tunnels-under-houston-to-ease-flooding/

thought that url was clickhole for a second

CNN with the Tesla Diner Puff Piece, an attempt at 'Epic Baconing Elon':

https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/31/business/tesla-diner-elon-musk

Jacob Towe, a high-end lighting designer, visited the diner while on a trip from Florida. He told CNN that before the diner opened, fans were limited to visiting exclusive supercharger stations, going on factory tours or visiting SpaceX’s Starbase. The diner is a more “down-to-earth” and “natural” place to “chat with like-minded people,” he said.

Towe, who owns five Teslas, several Starlink satellite internet devices, as well as Tesla powerwall and powerbank charging systems, said he sees Musk as one of the world’s rare innovators.

He said he appreciates Musk’s ability to ignore public opinion — even to a fault. “It’s entertaining, if nothing else,” Towe said, adding that it’s an example of Musk being “100% data, 0% noise.”

He also admires Musk’s jump into politics and Musk’s vow to start his own political party after a public squabble with Trump. Towe called the political undertaking “pretty impressive” and an example of Musk choosing “a hard path.”

“(Musk will) come up with something that everyone says should not be done, or it’s actually really hard and … way too expensive,” Towe said. “Musk will somehow do it and figure it out and then somehow make money out of it.”

A group of fans recently presented Musk with “thank you” letters and a compilation video as part of the annual “X Takeover” event in Silicon Valley. The effort started as a Tesla fan event but evolved into a celebration of Musk’s companies.

John Stringer, one of the event’s organizers and the president of the Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley group, told CNN that the video came about because of the way Musk and his companies have been treated.

“I’m a believer in the things that he’s doing because it’s having an impact, and no one else is driving this type of impact,” Stringer said, before adding that Musk is “the greatest mind on the planet.”

“He is out here trying to help the world and make it better,” Stringer said.

adding that Musk is “the greatest mind on the planet.”

We all need our heroes. If you're a clown, it's only natural that your hero is the biggest clown on earth.

One of the most striking things about these people is how evident it is that they have never helped anyone else in their entire lives, so they don’t know what helping anyone or trying to make this sad world a better place actually looks like. Totally braindead.

and its all part of their status game anyway