- oil and gas industry
- ICE automotive industry
- telecom industry
- media industry
- and of course... Aerospace and defense industry (Boeing, Lockheed, etc.)
There are a lot of very rich very powerful people that want Elon to fail, and any way they can undermine him would be a win for them.
I say this as someone who really tries to have a balanced opinion on Elon and the topic as a whole, including recognition of all of Elon's flaws.
The military-media-industrial complex can be out to get Elon and spending a lot of money to turn the public against him AND he can have a lot of flaws AND he can be not as bad as everyone thinks because of said media influence.
Lockheed will of course be angling for this contract for reasons which have nothing to do with "undermining Elon" and everything to do with being keen on securing themselves more multibillion dollar prestige projects, as will Blue Origin, as they would under any other government and frankly NASA is quite entitled to reopen the contract if SpaceX doesn't hit performance milestones. Whether the alternatives are any more likely to deliver adequate solutions on time, and whether the current US administration can be trusted not to make decisions one way or another for arbitrary political reasons or straight up corruption is another question entirely.
(The arbitrary political reason in this case may be more a desire to do things on unrealistic deadlines to credit it as a Trump admin achievement than to punish or favour any particular individual, but it's not like they're reluctant to do that either)
And to your point about him spending more money then the rest combined, maybe, he did spend a lot on twitter, but I don't think any of us can actually know how much all those people are spending. It might be closer than you think. Also the anti-Elon media brigade started long before he bought twitter, it just wasn't focused on the general public, it was focused on amateur investors.
the idea that an uncoordinated group is spending more than $44b on defaming Elon and this is what made people go out and buy the "I bought this car before Elon went mad" and not any of the things he started doing and saying on his own very public platform is also too ridiculous for even a hardened Elon stan to contemplate, never mind someone trying to maintain a "balanced view" of his positive and negative qualities.
I noticed this pattern start in 2017 and watched how all narratives the media was peddling unfolded as untrue (Elon is a fraud, Tesla is going bankrupt). Then I noticed how the scale and scope of the anti-Elon narratives grew.
Yes, Elon did all sorts of egotistical things that didn't help. Yes, he deserves plenty of criticism. I'm not denying any of that.
But there are distinct quantitative financial dynamics here that can be traced back a long time that point at a "big problem" for some very rich and powerful people, and that's not even taking into account the potential lost future revenue of all the entrenched industries I mentioned.
So yes, I stand by my point. There is an anti Elon base effect going on and it's probably having a bigger effect on the situation than most people realize.
Your skepticism of my view without a substantive rebuttals (you aren't taking the most respectful interpretation of my point or "steel manning" it as they say), doesn't speak to me having an unbalanced perspective, if speaks to you having a narrower one, taking less scope across time and dimensions into consideration.
Have you done the math to estimate how much NPV Elon's companies threaten entrenched interests? Have you calculated the liability of the short positions against Tesla and how its grown over the last 8 years?
Do you know who pays for the media you consume? How much the publishers receive in revenue, and multiplied that over 8 years?
If Elon represents a $1tn threat to a bunch of random uncoordinated rich people, why is it so hard to believe some of them might have spent tens of billions (combined) on lobbying and "sponsored content" to fight back? No coordination is even needed on their part. Just a collective "oh man f#@k this guy" attitude.
Are you uncomfortable with the idea that your own strongly anti-Elon opinion might have been manipulated by a bunch of rich people? If you weren't constantly reading anti-Elon articles and social media posts, would you even care about it or be paying attention? All kinds of bad people do all kinds of bad things all the time and we don't hear about it. So why do we hear so much negative stuff about Elon specifically?
I have been genuinely curious about this situation for 8+ years now and I still am. I'm open to having my mind changed, but you need to bring novel facts, not just the same old "but Elon's bad and does bad things" like everyone says who has read a bunch of stuff slagging Elon. Saying something akin to "it's obviously Elon's fault because Elon is bad because everyone says Elon is bad" is not critical thinking, it's groupthink, brought to you by all the people who paid for all the stuff you read that says Elon is bad.
I love the way you talk about critical thinking and steelmanning, and yet write a wall of text characterising all criticism of Elon as that, whilst lacking either the critical thinking skills or the good faith to engage with my actual points, which were that the supposed "anti Elon base effect" had absolutely nothing to do with the fact Elon was best buddies with the Trump administration a few months ago and isn't now
Imagine seriously trying to argue that short sellers had more impact on Trump's opinion of Elon than Elon tweeting about Trump being in the Epstein files, or indeed that Sean Duffy would be fine with Elon running Twitter polls suggesting his "chimp skills" don't qualify him to run NASA if it wasn't for the pesky "baseline effect". I mean, I'd be the last person to suggest that Trump and his cronies were immune to groupthink or persuasion by moneyed interests, but I think there might be something else going on here, y'know...
Once you've grasped the idea that people's change of opinion of Elon might be more swayed by him personally insulting him than business interests which have been threatened by Elon for well over a decade now - probably more when he was at peak popularity - you'll be shocked to learn that people also have strong opinions on politics independently of Tesla short interest, and that Elon might have been prominent in that sphere lately...
Fun fact: I work in the same industry as Elon and hear positive sentiments about him all the time, sometimes managing to be well-reasoned, sincere and gushing. Also quite a few negative ones from people who depend on his business continuing to do well for their livelihoods, some of whom even worked with him in the past. The social media account which has had the most negative impact on my opinion of him is @elonmusk. It's amazing that you are "genuinely curious" about trends in opinion of Elon Musk, believe they owe a lot to social media and appear to be unaware of this heavily promoted account which keeps upsetting demographics that were previously neutral or favourably disposed towards him. Wonder which moneyed interest that represents...
I don't disagree with the majority of what you're saying, except for the exclusion/rejection of the baseline effect.
So to steelman your perspective is to say the topic of this entire thread (proposition of a change in nasa's plan) is entirely due offensive things Elon has said on Twitter, and probably in another contexts, including (but not limited to) him criticizing Trump's bill, making the Epstein claims, offensive polls about the NASA chief (which is a really good example to hold up). Basically him being brash, offensive and placing his ego above maintaining certain relationships. Maybe characterized as his tendency to be offensive and disagreeable. And yes, I do see all these and yes they aren't helping, and they probably have a material impact on the situation.
To steelman my argument is to consider that in addition to all the points your making (not instead of them) there is also a money-power-struggle going on behind the scenes, and a lot of what we are seeing are second or third order consequences of that. One way this might be happening is that these interest sabotage something, Elon learns about it behind closed doors, and then lashes out in public in a childish manner.
So please understand that my lack of acknowledging your points wasn't as dismissal of them it was the opposite. I didn't mention them because I agree with them. The focus of my comments were what they were because I was trying to make a case for an additional effect at play.
If you want to convince me there isn't a baseline effect at play like I'm trying to point to, what would do so is not pointing to more examples of Elon being stupid on Twitter, it would be to somehow convince me that the extremely wealthy and powerful interests that seem to obviously want Elon to fail actually want him to succeed or don't care either way. That's a hard case to make, but I would be really open to it, because it's the thing most likely to shift my mental model of the situation.
It's kind of like you're talking about the weather and I'm talking about the climate. You're refusing to entertain my climate perspective. I'm not refusing to entertain your weather perspective.
I mean, it's hard not to notice a large number of extremely wealthy and powerful interests that obviously want Elon to succeed. Investors in his companies for one, whose stake in them obviously exceed the short sellers which is why the share prices of his public companies are what they are and entities holding short positions haven't been crushed by short squeezes. Nobody with the slightest understanding of stock markets believes there's a $40B incentive to character assassinate Musk there, even if if he wasn't capable of alienating people himself.
The fact some of the people who don't like Musk are rich is moot. Nobody needs to spend $40b drawing attention to Musk's politics because he's done that himself. When he didn't do that barely anyone cared.
The entities that wanted electric cars to fail wanted electric cars to fail when Tesla was the only game in town, but that was a time when most people didn't know who Elon was and those that did tended to admire him. On the other hand I don't know who the CEO of the world's current biggest and fastest growing car company is, never mind what their politics are. This isn't because Big Oil wants people to buy BYD or Geely, it's because the CEOs of BYD and Geely don't wade into culture wars on multiple continents never mind buy the entire social media platform to promote those tweets just in case anyone had any doubt about whether they wanted people to know about them.
I'm sorry, but if you're going to make the extraordinary claim that Musk bought a website to become social media's most prominent figure and opted to use that pulpit to culture war against the demographic that bought his cars, and now to personally and publicly attack both sides of the aisle that funds his space launch services because special interests are somehow forcing him to do that, the burden of proof sits squarely on you.
And if your "mental model of the situation" refuses to countenance the possibility Elon speaking out against people and the things they believe in might be sufficient cause for them to dislike him unless you can be convinced no wealthy third parties disapprove of Elon, then please at least have the decency to drop the veneer of openmindedness...
I don't know how you can expect to change my mind when you communicate with me so disrespectfully.
That said, I fall into this trap too sometimes, so I will be quick to forgive if you are interested in reconciliation and a constructive dialogue.
If not, then I guess we are done here...