He’s a PT Barnum. He’s a know-nothing. His latest: Musk thinks he knows more than transit experts.
You’re an idiot
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 15, 2017
The fracas began when Wired on Thursday published comments made by Musk at an artificial intelligence conference earlier this month. Musk said that
public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end?Musk further said that using public transit meant rubbing shoulders with
like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer. . . that’s why people like individualized transport, that goes where you want, when you want.
In other words, he rejects society, which requires you to cooperate with other people, that sometimes demands that you make compromises with others. And that’s the motivation behind his absurd proposal to rip up existing infrastructure in cities and replace it with a network of tubes to deliver his cars to places without him ever having to get out and see another human being.
I guess when you get a billion dollars you are expected to automatically become intelligent.
OK, I still think he’s a fraud, but I’m going to back off on the comparison to PT Barnum, since Barnum was a truly horrible, awful person.
He basically bought an elderly black woman.
Growing up in the antebellum North, Barnum took his first real dip into showmanship at age 25 when he purchased the right to “rent” an aged black woman by the name of Joice Heth, whom an acquaintance was trumpeting around Philadelphia as the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington.
You think that’s bad? How about this:
When she died in February 1836, rather than let her go in peace, Barnum had one more act up his sleeve: he drummed up a final public spectacle, hosting a live autopsy in a New York Saloon. There, 1500 spectators paid 50 cents to see the dead woman cut up, “revealing” that she was likely half her purported age.
I don’t think Musk is quite that bad.