Elon Musk had another bad week. He was interviewed, and the interviewer asked mildly challenging questions, and poor little Elon melted down publicly. It’s what he always done. He has the most fragile ego.
I agree with Jamelle Bouie that we need to push harder.
As he points out at the end, all of Musk’s enterprises seem to be papier mache facades. OK, SpaceX has a good technological core because he bought good engineers, but everything else is falling apart (and even SpaceX is floundering lately). He’s not worth a trillion dollars…and that already fell apart fast. Now is the time to make him squirm more over Tesla and Hyperloop and Neuralink and his fake androids and the hash he’s made of Twitter. He’s so mentally unstable it’ll prompt an unseemly collapse.
Then we have to work on Bezos…
Not often I see an idiom that is novel to me, so I looked it up:
(https://www.papermag.com/100-gecs-money-machine)
It’s fascinating to me how much some people with absurd amounts of money also have egos made of tissue paper, and also need control over as much of the public discourse as possible so that people can’t say mean things about them, or even imply they are mistaken or don’t know everything. But they also can’t shut up or stick to controlled media events.
Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
Wow. Just watched the video.
I can’t see the alleged problem.
I get it’s Jamelle’s personal opinion, but I am less than impressed by its lack of basis.
[relevant bit of transcript]
How that is supposedly a meltdown is left unstated. And that’s it. No other adduced ‘meltdown’.
The thing that should bother more people than it does, in that snippet, is that he immediately runs to, “I’m rubber and you’re glue.”
PZ:
Elia Ayoub (Journalist): “[Video clip] ‘I see, alright, fair point’ from the interviewer after Musk pulled numbers out of his ass [about USAID]. Musk clearly believes the grokified info swamp on the platform he owns. If you can’t push back on his bs don’t interview him.”
Musa Okwonga: “[Video clip] The editor in chief of The Economist referring here to the AfD’s leader [Alice Weidel] as a ‘perfectly thoughtful person’ instead of what she truly is—a driver and enabler of German fascism—is a huge part of the problem.”
Jamelle Bouie in the OP video: “After the interview on X, he basically spent hours re-litigating the entire thing, calling his interlocutor a traitor to the West, denouncing her for her perfidy in questioning him and pushing back on his claims.”
Sunder Katwala (British Future): A thread about Musk’s frequent use of ‘traitor’, including that instance.
And no one’s even mentioning
TheralinkNeuralink anymore. Does Neuralink even still exist? Have they got anything on the market yet?John: I agree with fishy here: it may not qualify as a “meltdown”, but his response was definitely rattled, defensive, and kind of childish; first pretending he didn’t care if people hated him, then insisting people hated the interviewer more. (And did he address the original question?)
PS @1: Sounds like the Chipmunks went death-metal-hip-hop.
Of course, having the orange pedophile in your corner can pay huge benefits. To wit, the pentagon announced a $1.8B contract with space to launch 18 falcon 9 vehicles with missile tracking payloads.
Just a coincidence, I’m sure.
Raging Bee, no, he did not address it. He used evasive bluster.
If that is being a ‘piss baby’, sure, but then, so is pretty much every single politician and public figure in any interview by that standard.
Me, I have personally seen proper meltdowns. Maybe even had one or two myself.
What we Aussies term ‘spitting the dummy’. Much excitement.
That was not that.
(I also now know what type of person Jamelle is, having checked a bit of his corpus, not just this video)
[now this is a meltdown!]
Raging Bee @7:
STAT – What does Neuralink want—to help people with paralysis, or prepare for a war with AI? (2026-01)
Dallas Express – First human transdural implant (2026-07)
It is? What are you referring to there?The latest Starship flight was pretty successful :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_flight_test_13
Looking at the timeline there you can see it met almost all its goals and so not sure where the idea that SpacweX is “floudnering” is coming from.
Felon Musk, OTOH, yeah, he is definitely floundering right now.
Musk enthusiastically closed down USAID directly resulting in the excess deaths of 600,000+ people and is on course to result in the deaths of millions more.
Even if it was at the direction of Donald Trump, as a “genius” the consequences of his actions should have been obvious to Musk.
He’s a monster.
Against that, Elon’s fragility under cross-examination is trivial in comparison.
@ 12 StevoR
https://financialpost.com/investing/spacex-falls-below-ipo-price-erasing-trillion-value
But that’s the featured headline!
You yourself claim Jamelle made a trivial claim, andywuk.
Makes for good clickbait, but no substance.
StevoR @12.
In the Infinite Thread, I linked a Pamela Gay thread about SpaceX’s prospectus.
Wikipedia – Initial public offering of SpaceX
@ ^ CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain & Silentbob – 30th July 2026 at 10:57 pm : Okay. So financially, verty temporarily on the gauge of rich folks feelings a.k.a. stock market not in terms of actual performance I gather. Fair enough albeit not sure how much meaning and significance to give the stock market since it fluctuates and changes so quickly and means so little in tangible, longer lasting, real world terms.
.***
Novara media has this discussion on Musk’s interview – Elon Musk Gives CHILLING Interview To The Economist lasting for 20 mins.
LABEL
CompulsoryAccount7746, SpaceX is not Elon Musk. Nor is USAid. Nor is Neuralink. Nor is the Boring Co.
(Metonyms are figures of speech)
John Morales: This thread was 33% Morales. It’s too much. I’m asking you to cut back, to maybe no more than 20% Morales, which ought to be an achievable goal for the future. I may later ask you to pare it back further in future threads.
@16,
“With no established profitability or comparable metrics/benchmarks to draw on, analysts default to appending a large, generically bullish percentage gain rather than genuinely differentiated valuation work”
I recommend anyone interested in the AI and SpaceX Ponzi watch Cory Doctorow’s recent interview with Jon Stewart.
Essentially, AI companies currently spend one trillion a year, and earn 50 billion in revenue. Every new customer makes it more expensive for them, because it increases their use of power and computing. Apparently with the NASDAQ trickery (accepting SpaceX on the index) certain funds were forced to buy the share, even if they questioned the price. It’s all to prop up an industry that is losing comical amounts of money.
@12 StevoR
The problem with SpaceX is two fold – 1) He, and his “engineers”, keep insisting on making a stupidly big rocket as the final goal (even if they have a functionally OK one now). This is a basic physics problem. No one had developed a fuel system, or an engine system to go with it, which can provide sufficient thrust to launch such a thing, safely or otherwise, outside of some insane theories involving the literal use of micro-nuclear detonations. 2) When NASA set goals, they managed to do all this, already, in arguably less time, with fewer overall problems, because, with some specific exceptions, they a) had fairly decent safety standards, which improved over time, at least up until a combination of complacency and pressure to run more and more missions, with less and less resources, and time between launches, led to a degradation of those standards. SpaceX seems to be on a damned speed run towards this state, driven in large part by the fact that Musk himself, and his crazy Mars obsession, is the primary source of the push to get this working as fast as possible, how ever idiotic the end goal may be, and the number of partial or complete failures that have happened due to this… But, yeah, of course, they claim all those (many, many, many) oopsies are “as designed”, somehow…
About the only thing they have done right imho, so far, imho, is not put too many people, a teacher, or Big Bird, on one of their flights, and had it explode on launch yet. And, frankly, I don’t trust them to not do all three at some point (or the equivalent), having “solved all their problems”, then being disastrously wrong, the second they say so.
There are too many egregious, wasteful, criminal actions by the elongated muskrat to list here or almost anywhere. It is my fervent wish and hope that he and all his destructive, misbegotten projects ‘disappear in a little cloud of greasy black smoke’.
I’m all in favor of stressing Musk. He needs to learn actions have consequences.
For those wanting some schaudenfraude, Scroll Deep yt channel has this entertaining 10 mins long video – Elon’s week from hell – here posted 3 days ago.
@22. shermanj : As long as that doesn’t include SpaceX as a space agency I’m cool with that.
I hear he had better luck with NarwhalLink. It actually works pretty well; but it only connects to Arctic toothed aquatic mammals. Something about seawater conductivity and the capacitance of a long spiraled tusk. /s