I recall reading an interview with musk on wait but why (edit: https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/03/elon-musk-post-series.html ) where the interview mentioned researching musks intolerance for "boring" questions and even trolled him a bit.
Obviously the appropriateness is different, but this is not new behavior. Anyone trying to draw conclusions about the state of tesla from his behavior here is probably making mistakes (or at least using bad data) unless they thought the same BEFORE this call.
In my mind, the whole thing that turned this into a soap opera was Musk's knee jerk responses on Twitter.
Had he come back with a more measured response (like OXO did with Quirky) and just politely pointed out the inaccuracies of the article and made his same offer of "We'll provide a car to any journalist to do the same test and see what happens", I don't think we'd be discussing this right now.
The pretty clear motivation for this is recent negative (but factually true) news about Tesla, and Musk's desire to either end negative news about his company, or else get people not to trust such news.
An echo chamber may be exactly what he wants. And, well, there's precedent for this strategy working to an extent.
> Musk has a history of going after people who critisize him in public.
Does he? Can you name three cases?
> He (and his staff) have again and again attacked journalists, former employees, and anyone else who said anything bad about Tesla or Musk.
Again, can you name three cases where Musk went after a journalist or former employees, and we know, beyond reasonable doubt, that the victim was right - and not, in fact, lying through their teeth?
I ask because there is documented history of the reverse happening. Consider:
1. Top Gear did a hit piece on their first car, lying about its range (55 vs. 200 miles). This doesn't sound serious until you realize that, back then, people didn't believe in electric cars, mostly because of range worries. This kind of bullshit was arguably life-threatening not just to Tesla, but to the entire EV industry.
Anyway, Tesla sued for libel and lost[0]. Here's a kicker: they lost because the judge deemed Top Gear is an entertainment show and not documentary, therefore they're not obliged to be factually accurate.
2. The incident with Top Gear made Tesla install telemetry in the cars given out for test drives; this came in handy few years later, when John Broder from New York Times decided to publish a hit piece on Model S[1]. Tesla then released data from the logs, directly contradicting the story, and demonstrating that Broder put in extensive effort to fabricate the bad results he then reported on.
I can't blame them from being a bit sensitive after situations like these. For the past decade, there were, and still are, a lot of people standing to make boatloads of money from bringing Tesla and the EV market down.
Insufferable nitwit interviewers at New Scientist, not so much.
I am really sick of interviewers using language as a weapon and having hostile confrontational interviews with scientists and entrepreneurs, when the same interviewers and periodicals don't have the balls to even ask questions of the various criminals in society who are actually worthy of such contempt in an interview.
In particular, the interview starts with the phrase "You claim to be...". This phrasing establishes that the subject is suspected of lying. A respectful neutral question is "You have said that..." Such language use is not unintentional. It is designed to impeach the credibility of the subject in the reader's view by painting him as someone who is dishonest and can not be trusted.
I also suspect Musk is intentionally trolling the press at this point.
He'll say random flippant things in meetings he know will get leaked. Those things don't happen. He trains his employees not to trust the news and gets to make a point about news trying to find an axe to grind.
It's not my impression, either. Basically the only thing that might make Tesla look bad in this is if people believe that Tesla support personnel told Broder all the misinformation that he claims they did. I find it telling, though, that Broder has tried to move the debate from places where there is hard data to places where it's unclear what was said (since, I suppose, no one was recording that). He doesn't really dispute anything Musk says, but only tries to excuse it.
I'm usually on the side of not talking back to reviewers of your work, having read that advice over and over in essays and articles by wise authors and other creative types. In this case, though, everyone I've spoken to in person about this is convinced that Broder was just trying to tell the most entertaining story; Musk, given his accomplishments, naturally has higher credibility than Broder. It's a point in Broder's favor that all the people I've spoken with about this are technical types, who might be predisposed to side with Musk, but those are also the sort of people most likely to be swayed by actual hard data, which only one side of this argument has provided.
Absolutely. I mean, your post is glib to the point of reductiveness, but Musk has habitually lied about Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, the Hyperloop, Neural Link and just about every venture he's been in.
It's not hard to find a half dozen lies about each of those companies, to say nothing of his social media presence.
I'd happily float an innovator an occasional overreach. But it's dozens and dozens of times now and people still buy it.
I think there's another, more prosaic aspect to consider. It's possible that when Musk did his research, he found that the reasons tunnel boring were unreasonably slow weren't actually technical in nature. But actually coming right out and accusing an entire industry of essentially graft wouldn't be good PR. So he alludes to it by giving BS reasons.
That story doesn't reflect too well on Musk either.
Based on the rest of the article, I get the feeling Thiel is trolling because he can, and I wouldn't take his stories at face value: that said, making up stories involving other people isn't usually advisable. It may very well be exaggerated, though?
Edit: I didn't know the story had been mentioned previously, I take back my skepticism regarding that.
In context, he wasn’t being completely serious, IIRC. I think that was one of a list of fairly comic possible explanations for Musk’s recent behaviour.
Though, it’s probably as good an explanation of his nonsense as any, really.
Yes, I have a lower prior than you that Musk just randomly changes his opinions all the time for no reason. And I've asked for meaningful evidence that would help me update this prior. Is this really an unfathomably bizarre epistemic strategy to you?
No, I'm just connecting the data points between what Musk says, and what he does. Mostly between what he does, actually.
If you think that this is a farce, that's because we are living in one. I suppose it is possible that he is trolling us with his moderation policies...
It's true that this generates relatively low-quality commentary, but it's not clear to me how a discussion of the behaviour of a man who says one thing, and does another can do otherwise.
Having met Musk is irrelevant when deciding whether to trust the public statements of someone who has a long and well documented history of lying in public statements. In particular he has repeatedly lied about business related details, most notably claims of self driving readiness.
It doesn’t require strong opinions about Musk to understand the value in taking what he says with skepticism.
Obviously the appropriateness is different, but this is not new behavior. Anyone trying to draw conclusions about the state of tesla from his behavior here is probably making mistakes (or at least using bad data) unless they thought the same BEFORE this call.
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