What's really shocking to me is how bad Musk, a self-professed "seeker of truth," is at identifying false information. He consistently promotes theories which can be proven false with just cursory research.
only so many ounces of brainpower available to spend per day, and his seem to be focused on cars and rockets, mostly. no reason to challenge ideas and assumptions if they don't stroke your ego or improve you bottom line.
and that leaves out deliberate signaling / "4-D chess", if he's sober enough to play that game -- and he might be.
I mean NASA launches through SpaceX because they’re the cheapest provider of mass to orbit. NASA is making a lot efforts to not use SpaceX for everything like the lunar lander program but is limited by the fact no one else is seriously competing with SpaceX
Musk's idea of "free speech" and it's role in democracy is a common misunderstanding and distortion.
"Free speech" doesn't guarantee no repercussions for what you choose to say --- particularly when what you're saying is not true.
Bottom line: If you have no idea if something is true or not, the best plan is probably just to remain silent --- otherwise, you may end up with legal trouble like Musk.
Lies won't save democracy and may just make you look like a fool --- for either telling or believing them.
The common thing in the US is “your right to swing your arm around ends at my face”, if you promote lies and people get hurt or die as a result you’re reasonably accountable for it.
On their own, whether a case is civil and whether the case is between only regular citizens has nothing to do with free speech. The First Amendment applies to government enforcement of civil lawsuits. In the US, if I write a social media post "John Doe is a bad person." with no other context (opinion, not a statement of fact [1]), then my post would be not defamation and also would be free speech, even if my post were to damage John Doe's reputation.
Defamation is not protected speech i.e. is not free speech. Elon Musk's party is arguing that Musk didn't defame Ben Brody.
This used to be a popular explanation for Trump being a loud, weird idiot.
It was kind of reassuring to think he was really an evil genius using chaotic BS to cover up his crimes.
Turned out the reality was far more depressing and openly doing cringe racist stuff and openly committing crimes was actually what attracted his fans and followers, not something he had to hide from them.
I blame Boris's buses. At one point, Boris Johnson, apropos of nothing, claimed that he made models of buses to relax. This very likely _was_ an attempt to distract from/mess up search engines for the embarrassing Brexit bus. This somehow metastasized into "all weird embarrassing things that Boris does are actually a masterplan to distract from something else", and, presumably on the theory that all oafish politicians with weird hair are pretty much the same, transferred to Trump.
In this particular case, the revelations in the deposition aren't all _that_ damaging; they just make Musk look stupid, irresponsible, and confused. So doing other embarrassing stuff to distract from them feels counterproductive.
but Boris' antics did carry over -- Trump used them a lot. during the impeachments anytime something especially damming or annoying would pop up he'd tweet something silly. when the Magninsky Act was discussed he sent a big ole screed about how he was banning transgender folks in the military -- an issue the military didn't care about and had mostly solved.
this may be just that Elon is losing his filter and doesn't have to care -- TSLA still hasn't cratered for some freakin reason...
