Is mainstream media anti-Elon Musk?

First, “mainstream media” is a very easy way of hiding the fact that you’re talking about corporate media. And when you do speak of corporate media, we know that you’re including CNN, Fox, OANN, MSNBC, etc.

With that in mind, go ahead and present your argument. First, you need to establish your argument by describing what you would mean by bias. Then, you would provide many sources from corporate media to show some kind of pattern. Then you’ll need to refute this with the facts.

@crazyguy: “I am fairly active on a Tesla thread on Investors Hub. My question is well summarized there. Instead of copying and pasting it here, I am including a link”

I glanced at the link and didn’t see you do any work at establishing a corporate media bias against the Tesla corporation or Elon Musk. Maybe you should rephrase your question or start again and do the work of presenting your case.

The fact that he’s brash and powerful will always put many people off. Myself included. My personal opinion is that he’s a Trump era creation, and has always been more of a bullshit salesman than anything. I guess what I’m unsure about is whether the bullshit can be turned into gold or not. History has shown that big bullshitting d bags can actually pull off historic things sometimes, but it’s more of the exception than the rule.

“Mainstream media” aren’t monolithic, and musk is polarizing. You’re always going to have people go after him, on basically every platform. He’s rich and a big personality who defies norms and seems to succeed regardless. He makes himself a target of editorial discretion. The more people are interested in him, the more will be written about him, and some people hate him because he’s very hatable, so some of those articles will be critical.

You can’t form a grand thesis of “media” being “anti-musk” on so little information. From one perspective, they give him way more of a pass than they would have in the past. In a world of 20 years ago, people would be focusing way more than they are on how overvalued TSLA is, how it will never capture as much of the luxury car market as it needs to, and how it’s CEO rather than address these issues, prefers to dabble in market manipulation between doobies with joe rogan, laying out large amounts of other peoples money in a very volatile asset, and working on his side project of international rocket science and sales.

I don’t think he gets any more media hate than he deserves. They are right to scrutinize him, and perhaps the article you cited was somewhere between scrutiny and hit-job, but it was at least factual. I do not think he could easily be “cancelled” anyway, as he currently wields too much power.

The “minority” loves him because he smokes weed, does the memes, dabbles in vulgarity and disrespects those they see as mutual enemies. (like the orangutan).
What he is actually doing is not that impressive, if you really think about it.
Electric cars are nothing new, and for a long time, Tesla could not meet their production quota, and was losing money.
I guess it is kind of cool that his rockets can land by themselves after use, but everything else he does, are things that are old hat.
So he managed to send people to the ISS in his own spaceship. Cool. Space agencies have been doing that for decades.
And the only new thing about his Starlink satellites is that he is deploying thousands of them, which already has tremendously detrimental effect on earth-based astronomy, because his highly reflective satellites are ruining astrophotography and observations and are literally frying imaging sensors in telescopes.
People compare him to Tony Stark.
But in actual fact, he is Justin Hammer.

When the ESA intercepted and landed a probe on a comet, that was impressive.
When NASA lands a rover on mars, with a rocket powered skycrane, and which carries a helicopter, that is impressive.
Juri Gagarin as the first man in space.
Wernher von Braun sending the first man on the moon.
The Soviet Union building the first space station.
These achievements are things that impress.
Because those are things that have never been done before.

Musk, on the other hand, is just going where everyone has already been.

Not that I’m aware of. I watch the “mainstream media” channels that you are likely referring to, and I don’t get that impression at all. If anything it’s the opposite. They were all goo goo ga ga about solar and electric cars and since exploration etc etc.

@Smashley You say: My personal opinion is that he’s a Trump era creation. Musk wants to sound the death knell for the oil industry. He joined Tesla long before Trump and was a significant CEO at the time Trump took over.

I may agree that he shares some personality traits with Trump. But then many people do.

You also say: In a world of 20 years ago, people would be focusing way more than they are on how overvalued TSLA is. Did you forget Amazon? Or eBay? Or Peoplesoft (that is no longer in business)? And hundreds of other companies that could barely spell INTERNET?

More to the point you say the article that is the subject of my question was at least factual. Let us start with the headline: A federal agency warns Tesla tests unfinished driverless tech on its users? I read the letter from beginning to end. If the headline is factual, I will gladly eat the chair I am sitting on. The article is chockfull of inaccuracies and outright lies.

@ragingloli You say: What he is actually doing is not that impressive. You do make one exception: his rockets can land by themselves after use. Other than that, you say everything he does are things that are old hat. Let us see:

1. He not only made electric cars cool, but he also made them practical.
2. He invested in the chicken (Superchargers) and the egg (the cars) simultaneously.
3. He made the great State of California realize the folly of spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a bullet train that was outmoded before the first dollar was spent. Unfortunately California still managed to throw $70 billion down the rat-hole.
4. In a matter of weeks, he came up with a White Paper on the hyper loop. He was smart enough to realize that he already had too much on his plate, and therefore licensed the technology.
5. His Spacex does the same things that have been done before; but he is making the wheel far more efficient.
6. His Boring Company grew out of a personal commuting problem. This guy thinks of ways to address problems that we all see but take for granted.

@ragingloli Need I go on?

@JLeslie If you watch mainstream media channels like CNN, MSNBC and CNBC, then you know that Musk defied the great NEWSOM. He incurred the wrath of the establishment that was all about the science of Covid. Until then he was an acceptable representative of the Democratic Party. It was only then that the vitriol started.

@crazyguy
I find your defence of the man far from convincing.
P.S. his “hyperloop” so far is a horrible joke.
That demo he did, with his short, rickety tunnel that you could only move in at a snails pace? Laughable.

@ragingloli You are so out of touch it is almost laughable!

Hyperloop: See https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54838982

Boring Company: In early 2019, The Boring Company began working on a government-sponsored project in Las Vegas. By mid-2020, following the completion of boring the first two TBC tunnels in the city, two additional private projects were in the works. Fromhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company

Except of course that article you linked is about one of Musk’s competitors.
Musk’s demo was this embarassing display

That one of his companies (Neuralink) performs medically unnecessary tests on live animals is enough for me to dislike the man. That and his Starlink project. Beyond that I just find him generally off-putting, but that alone wouldn’t be a big deal. It’s usually easy enough to ignore odious personalities.

I agree that Musk is a genius, or at least exceptionally intelligent. That doesn’t mean he can’t be wrong about things. The problem with people who are very intelligent and successful is they can fall into an overconfidence bias trap. Experts will tell you that you can’t make an EV that anyone would want to drive, or that you can’t make one that people would want to drive that would cost less than a supercar. They tell you that it’s impossible to build a new car company from scratch in today’s America. They tell you you can’t land booster rockets and reuse them. And when you manage to beat the odds over and over again, you likely lose perspective on the value of the opinion of experts. You can believe yourself to be smarter than you are in unrelated areas (like epidemiology) and publicly advocate for some dangerous policies. It’s also possible that Musk knew these ideas were bad, but had other motivations (like the survival of his company) that he believed outweighed the importance of communicating truthfully (which would be especially evil). He may have even made the utilitarian calculation that a successful Tesla catalyzing the transportation industry away from fossil fuel was a “greater good” than the loss of life from the pandemic that his comments might produce.

As far as the media is concerned, they are owned by a handful of corporations. Many of their advertisers have a vested interest in seeing Tesla fail. The media also has a pro-sensationalism bias because they need clicks. It’s easy to write one-dimensional good-guy/bad-guy narratives to drive clicks and thus revenue. Just ask Meghan Markle. Musk is eccentric, successful, and in some ways personifies the “ubermensch” rags-to-riches fairy tale that a neoliberal establishment likes to peddle to their audience to justify historical levels of wealth and inequality. “Hey Ernie, if you just worked really hard you’d be a mulit-billionare too. The reason you’re poor is that you’re not working hard enough. It has nothing to do with your circumstances, opportunities, education, etc. Now go back into the mine and bring me more coal.” This kind of figure is ripe for clickbait articles from all angles.

Musk can be his own worst enemy. He was told in no uncertain terms to STFU on twitter, and now he is being sued by a shareholder for his out of control tweets.

That is Musk’s fault not the mainstream media.

You blame the media, my question to you is why do you want to kill the messenger?

@crazyguy – Elon Musk, the legend, is a newer phenomenon, and I think it probably only works in this time period. The Trump comparison, to me, is less about attitude and more about the ability to create value out of little substance.

I’m afraid I don’t understand the comparison to Amazon or eBay.

You’re probably better at spotting the lies than I am, but the majority of it seemed acceptable by modern standards. I understood there was some fudging about what “self driving” meant, but I read that as the agency that wrote the memo being confused, and the author just kinda going with it. And yeah, headlines are written by a different people, and it’s simply much more likely to be wrong. That phenomenon is incredibly prevalent, though it certainly does signal some editorial bias.

@ragingloli Is that right? From the linked article:

The concept, which has spent years in development, builds on a proposal by Tesla founder Elon Musk. Some critics have described it as science fiction.

@Darth_Algar I watched the video that probably triggered your response: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqbQuZOFvOQ

My reaction on watching the video was “Cool!@ those pigs look normal and are behaving very normally!”

@gorillapaws You bring up a great point. Overconfidence can be even worse than under confidence. I know because my golf shots have suffered from both phenomena!

I am surprised that you specifically called out epidemiology which I consider to be a pseudo science, given the fact that most of their findings have been changed over the years: Mask-wearing, herd immunity, spread from surfaces. I am waiting anxiously for their latest finding to be changed: that fully vaccinated people can still spread the disease.

So whatever Elon did in Fremont was no more unfounded than the order to shut down the plant.
I agree with you on this statement: Many of their advertisers have a vested interest in seeing Tesla fail. However, you failed to address my specific claims about why the article seems to be based on a fantasy.

@zenvelo Like Musk, I have been right many times in my life without any acknowledgement of that fact. Have I also been wrong? Yes. But that has never stopped me from investigating new frontiers.

@Smashley The reason I mentioned Amazon and eBay was that they were also way overvalued in the 90s internet bubble. Or so people thought!

I do not see that the NTSB is confused about “self driving”. Any more than the author was confused about the letter. I am convinced it was a deliberate attempt at a hit job.

@crazyguy Well, there seems to be issues with what Tesla named a thing versus what it actually does, so it seemed to me like a couple regulators got spooked.

Gotcha about the 90s bubble, but frankly, Amazon was overvalued then, and it took 10 years of innovative future driven thinking and world changing new products to get their stock price back to pre 2000 levels. Kind of hard to predict that one. The business model of growth before profit always had a huge upside in digital spaces, though. I don’t really see the same for a car manufacturer.

@Smashley FSD, which stands for Full Self Drive, is intended to live up to its name. some day. In the meantime, it is just a kid of ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance System). As is his well-known won’t, Musk over-promises on schedule, but he has rarely over-promised on eventual capability. Therefore, I have zero doubt that some day, FSD will come to pass.

The NTSB gave some comments to NHTSA about a proposed new rule. They know full well what Tesla has, and they did not get spooked. They tried hard to postpone the eventual rollout.

@crazyguy

You should know better than to make assumptions.

@Darth_Algar WTH are you talking about?

@crazyguy

Jesus, you can’t even keep up with your own postings in the same thread.

It’s nonsense and frank stupidity to assume that Musk’s incentive to keep his factory running is irrelevant to his rejection of measures dictated in the public interest. And any knucklehead who believes an inoculated individual incapable of carrying and transmitting the disease to which they themselves are then immune, is unfit for consideration, let alone tolerance. It is only fitting that Musk flee to a “slave state”. Here’s hoping the rest of you Orange county “Confederates” rush off to suffer with him.

First time I ever need to consider such idea. In the Netherlands the MSM is certainly positive about Elon Musk, can this be a domestical thing in the U.S? As far as Musk shows up in dutch news reports, its mostly positive and certainly not anti-Musk.

It’s another absurd fantasy concocted by conservatives here who regard any bad news around their pet causes as fiendish invention from biased media.

@Cornelis1977 The US MSM has two sides: the WOKE side, and the others. Elon was woke until he defied the great NEWSOM. Now he is just another.

@Cornelis1977 It’s crazy but true. A normal person would reason that this guy is a media darling. But here in America, if conservatives didn’t have identity politics they’d have no identity at all.

@Smashley @Cornelis1977 I am not really certain whether Musk is a conservative. He is anti-oil, presumably anti-coal, pro-Green (his cars are vegan – there is no REAL leather); not exactly conservative traits.

I live in the Southeast part of the US we have “Teabaggers” Republicans that are vegetarian, veggies and fruit and grains but no meat.

He defines himself a fiscal conservative.

He’s an opportunist, and he’s smart. He also has the sense to see the right side of history regarding the future, and is certainly motivated toward its exploitation.