The New York Times this week published a long interview with Elon Musk, most of which was a discussion of his personal life and his engineering work.
He presented himself as smart, quirky and cheerful, and you can read that in full if you are interested in the personal life of Elon Musk and his perspective on technology.
However, we are most concerned with the absolutely dank and cunningly inserted redpills he dropped on the unsuspecting interviewer, Maureen Dowd.
For many of the coastal elites for whom a Tesla is a status symbol, Mr. Musk’s laissez-faire approach to the pandemic was disappointing, and sounded way too Trumpian. In the spring, when his California factory was shut down, he called stay-at-home orders “fascist” and tweeted, “FREE AMERICA NOW.”
“I think the reality of Covid is that it is dangerous if you’re elderly and have pre-existing conditions,” he said, adding: “It absolutely makes sense to have a lockdown if you’re vulnerable, but I do not think it makes sense to have a lockdown if you’re not vulnerable.” He said he may have had Covid in January and he wears a mask on the factory floor.
The Tesla-loving liberals were horrified again by a May tweet, “Take the red pill,” an allusion to the pill Keanu Reeves takes in “The Matrix” that lets him see the truth.
The red-pill image has become linked with the fringe right and men’s rights activism. It blew up when Ivanka Trump retweeted it and said “Taken!” and when Lilly Wachowski, a creator of “The Matrix,” then cursed out both Mr. Musk and Ms. Trump. (Even Grimes’s mother, a Canadian journalist, tweeted her dissatisfaction.)
Mr. Musk said he did not have a political message. “No, it’s just: Accept reality as it is as opposed to what you wish it were.” Of Ivanka, he said, “I think she was interpreting it through more of a political lens then it was intended.”
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“You know, I’m not sure that everything is so political,” he said. “To be totally frank, you may be interpreting this through a lens where you think everything is totally political because you’re political. But I think the general public does not see everything through a political lens. I would say the amount of thought that the general public puts into politics is quite low. They’re mostly thinking about their day and their direct relationships and their work.”
OK, he might have a point. But what does he think about Biden?
“I just haven’t had much interaction with Biden,” he said. “I talked to Obama much more than Biden.” He notes that he was such a fervent Obama supporter that he once waited in line for six hours to shake Obama’s hand when he was running, adding, “the poor guy was so tired at the end of the night.”
Mr. Musk continued, “Obama was great. Biden, I just don’t know. It’s hard to see through the noise. But is he — are all his mental faculties there or not? I can’t quite tell. It would be helpful to see him in a debate scenario or something like that. Does he have his stuff together or not? I can’t tell.”
Despite the fact that he wants someone in the White House who has his stuff together, he encouraged Kanye West’s bid for the presidency.
“I’ve known him for at least 10 years, maybe longer,” he said, noting that while they see each other about once every six months, they text “fairly often.” Mr. West recently tweeted a picture of the pair — both wearing Yeezy sneakers — with Mr. Musk’s Sorayama sculpture of an android woman looking at a one-way mirror. Grimes, who took the picture, is reflected in the frame.
“I’ve done my best to convince him that 2024 would be better than 2020,” Mr. Musk said, so that Mr. West wouldn’t be accused of splitting the Black vote with Mr. Biden.
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Warren Buffett is overrated.
Hahaha. Um, I think he has managed to create a great image for himself as a kindly grandfather, which is maybe overstating the case.
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Mark Zuckerberg is a sociopath.
(Laughs.) Ah, oh, man. (Laughs some more.) Ehhh, Mark Zuckerberg has some issues, we all have some issues. My concern with Facebook is that he just has absolute control over Facebook with the way the voting shares are structured. And it’s also structured such that the Zuckerberg dynasty will have control over Facebook and his great-grandkids will control the thing. So I think we ought to be careful of creating dynastic wealth in the U.S. Just generally, an aristocracy of wealth is a cause for concern.
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You’d rather be a meme lord than a billionaire.
Probably true. You know, you need resources in order to make life multiplanetary. That’s the reason I’m accumulating resources. But I don’t otherwise care about resources.
It is legitimately believable that he doesn’t care about resources.
Basically, the only people who do care about amassing quantities of resources that are unusable by a single individual are pathological neurotics who are also fear-driven control freaks.
Jeff Bezos, for example, doesn’t even use the resources he acquires for the most obvious and practical purpose, which is that when it comes to women, they’ll let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.
Last time Bezos grabbed a woman by the pussy, he slipped and fell in.
They had to call a crane to have him pulled out.
Why would someone this age, who isn’t even trying to grab women by the pussy, take that many steroids? It’s bizarre.
Elon Musk is apparently a weird person, but not in the sense of being deranged.