Do a lot of lefty journalists have "bitch eating cracker syndrome" in regards to Elon Musk?

123

Ṁ194

Ṁ230

resolved Jan 1

Resolved as

75%

ALL

Resolves to my confidence in the proposition at closing

Get Ṁ200 play money

🏅 Top traders

#	Name	Total profit
1		Ṁ25
2		Ṁ6
3		Ṁ2
4		Ṁ2
5		Ṁ1

11 Comments

11 Holders

18 Trades

Sort by:

predicted YES

This market is not funny. It's not fun. -- Billy Crystal

So top google search result for "why do people hate elon musk" is this, and I went through it point by point, and all of it is a stretch at best, or an outright lie at worst.
https://www.greenmatters.com/community/why-do-people-hate-elon-musk

1. "tesla mistreats workers"
It has 3.6 on glassdoor, compared to 3.9 for Hyundai, 4.0 for Toyota. Modest difference, but nobody should care except people thinking about working there and weighing it against the benefits. Consensual work is none of third parties' business.

2. "covid misinformation"
The specific things they quoted from Musk weren't wrong:
"the coronavirus panic is dumb" - people definitely overreacted in many ways, see zvi's blog
"covid is not very deadly" IFR is approximately log-linear with age, (0.01%% for 30-year olds, 0.1% for 50-year-olds, 1% for 65-year-olds)
"young people aren't vulnerable" see above, can be interpreted in an absolutely correct way.
"some deaths were misattributed" Also absolutely true that some hospitals were reporting anyone who died WITH covid but not OF covid towards the covid death totals.

3. tweeting "awful things"
a. "I keep forgetting that you're still alive"
Bernie is really really old, way past the point of any sane retirement age, and his involvement in poltics has been a net negative for humanity. He's a soviet-sympathizing fossil from the 60s rehashing discredited socialist policy. He kind of deserves the ridicule.
b. "sexist joke"
consisted of a one-liner about founding a university with the acronym TITS. Peurile, but anyone who's offended by that is being hypersensitive and that's their own problem.
c. "misogynistic comments towards sen warren"
This one is an unambiguous lie by the article writer. There's nothing gendered about this exchange.
Warren: "Let’s change the rigged tax code so The Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else."
Elon: "And if you opened your eyes for 2 seconds, you would realize I will pay more taxes than any American in history this year"
Elon: "Don’t spend it all at once … oh wait you did already"
Referring to the enormous public debt and deficits

4. He's a billionaire
And that's a good thing. It means he provided orders of magnitude more value to other people than the average person ever will. There was a bit of a pigouvian subsidy to electrify the automobile industry, but aside from that all the money he made was from giving consumers what they want.

5. musk accused of sexual misconduct
a. seven tesla workers sued it
Nothing to do with musk personally, and the author seems to be trying to sneak in a false connotation otherwise with their text. Every employer as large as tesla has at least that many sexual harassment lawsuits.

b. the flight attendant
Even if we take the anonymous friend's uncorroborated story at face value (lol), the flight attendant already got $250,000 of compensation for the horror of being asked a question

@JonathanRay
1. I don't think glassdoor is reliable enough to claim that. This one I'm undecided.
2. I agree with you.
3. I disagree. Bernie's involvement in politics has been a net-positive and Elon's has been a net-negative. Even if you disagree with me, that doesn't mean he deserves to be made fun of over something mundane like this. The fact that he's old and still cares about the future for those younger than him should be celebrated. As for his "socialist" policies, he is really not too different from center-left "social democrat" European leaders politically, who have had great success. He is very politically different from the Soviets (except maybe Gorbachev). Also, Trump is almost as old as Bernie and Elon's never gone after him, because Elon always targets the left. Of course they're going to dislike him back. And, Elon has evaded taxes a multitude of times, so his defense about one specific year doesn't really matter.
4. I disagree. I don't think more money = providing more value to people. The electric car market would still have got big had he not entered it.
5. I agree with you.

I think leftists are angry with Elon Musk because of specific things he's done. I don't think it's "bitch eating cracker syndrome" because they would be angry at everyone who took the same actions. He clearly feels the same way about them.

@ShadowyZephyr

3. He pays all the taxes he's legally liable for. Unrealized capital gains aren't taxable until you sell the stock and realize the gain. Maybe this is a bad tax system, but it's not elon's fault that the system is bad, and not his obligation to pay more tax than he's required to pay.

4. Every time a purchase takes place, it's because the purchaser values the product more than the money he's paying for it. At this late date, Tesla is still the only company turning a real profit making EVs (BYD was recently revealed to be fraudulent in that regard).

Bitch eating cracker syndrome is sort of a "death spiral of negativity", towards a particular person. Some people have such a strong prior of "elon bad" that they'll find it much easier to believe any negative claim about him, disbelieve any positive claim about him, and misinterpret neutral events (like eating a cracker, or posting a dog meme on twitter) as evidence of his badness. It is easy to find a lot of neutral things about Elon being cited as evidence of his badness.

@JonathanRay
Exploiting loopholes in the law and then shrugging and saying "well it's LEGAL" doesn't make it good. I never claimed he broke the law, but he did evade paying his taxes through loopholes, which doesn't make him a very upstanding guy.

Maybe you're right about Tesla, consumers buy because they value the product more than their money, but that doesn't make Elon look better in and of itself. Him hoarding profits instead of donating them makes him look worse, in fact.

I don't think people find it easier to believe negative claims about Elon. I think most of the left was happy with him because he brought attention to electric cars, even though he didn't reflect their beliefs. Lately he has been completely ridiculous on Twitter, even endorsing Matt Walsh, and he's getting called out for it.

@ShadowyZephyr it's not some obscure black-magic tax loophole. It's something everyone who owns stock benefits from. Capital gains aren't taxed until you sell the stock. Nobody donates extra to the IRS because they feel guilty about their unrealized capital gains. It's unfair to hold Elon to a standard no one else meets.

In absolute terms, he's paid more in taxes and donated more to worthy charities than almost anyone who ever lived. The fact that people wanted to pay so much for his products, increasing the denominator for his effective tax rate, is not a strike against him.

@JonathanRay Yes, it is something all stock owners benefit from. But that doesn't mean it's not stupid. It's simple, if he didn't exploit the loophole that other billionaires exploited, he would be more well liked than them. It's a standard that millionaires/billionaires SHOULD meet, not unfair to hold them to it. It's not just Elon, leftists don't like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos either for the same reasons. "Bitch eating cracker syndrome" implies they hate everything he does just because it's him, when the same standards ARE applied to other billionaires, they just also fail.

How much you've donated doesn't matter that much, just subtract the person's living costs from the amount they make and take the % they've donated to charity, that's a lot more useful of a metric. Not saying Elon Musk is the worst person ever when it comes to this, but he's far from the best.

Out of the 5 points you made, I think only 5 could be used as evidence of "bitch eating cracker syndrome" as you call it, but even that is probably just people trying to get clicks, rather than trashtalking Elon for no reason. I agree with #2, but the same journalists who called out Elon Musk for his statements about the coronavirus called out other people making similar statements, even if they were right.