How do you lose an interview this badly to Don Lemon, of all people https://t.co/SM7NlzHqIi
— The okayest poster there is (@ok_post_guy) March 19, 2024
Maybe I’m just an aging Cynic, but it surprised me that none of the professional commentors I’ve read saw this clip and didn’t (ahem) grok that soutpiel Elon Musk lost it when a guy Musk perceived as Coloured didn’t automatically support him. Elon does not grant uppity not-Whites an audience! His minions failed him when they allowed this pretender into his magnificent domain!
NPCs are non-player characters — less-than-autonomous ‘filler’ in tabletop or video games, virtual-world spear-carriers. It’s become a gamer insult that ‘people who don’t agree with my opinions’ are ‘NPCs’… not actually human. Gosh, why would an Independent Thinker like Mr. Musk resort to neck-beard level slang like that?…
Easy to tell who is an NPC today pic.twitter.com/8u6IcUrehE
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 17, 2024
Sounds like the NPC chorus has some success. Did you watch the video? Trump is referring to job losses in the auto industry.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 17, 2024
Because Musk has openly, fully endorsed the Great Replacement Theory…
Based on the number of illegals entering the United States and stacking the electoral deck via the census, he is correct
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 17, 2024
From NYMag, in a Kara Swisher interview with Don Lemon:
… Lemon: When presented with facts about things that he tweets about, and I’ll still call it tweeting, about his posts. He didn’t like that. When I asked him about his, you know, his alleged drug use that’s been reported in The Wall Street Journal, very credible organizations. When I asked him about his ketamine use that he himself had tweeted about, he himself put out there, he bristled at that and I said, “I wouldn’t talk about these things, Elon. I wouldn’t talk about your ketamine use if you had not publicly said that — how would I even know about it?”
And he actually had a very good answer. He said, “The reason I talked about it is because I thought it would help people. And if you’re on SSRIs, maybe you should consider taking ketamine.” And I think he’s absolutely right. I myself have suffered from depression. He talked about depression and, you know, his use of ketamine. And I said, “I have suffered from depression, and I agree with you. You should try different things.” I used to do talk therapy, and my doctor actually tried drug therapy on me. I’ve done stories about people with PTSD who have done ketamine and other drugs, and it has actually helped them. So we agreed on that. But that went over his head. I don’t think he even heard it because I just don’t think that he liked sitting there taking questions from me, someone that he has a history with, and just being held accountable, and just being held to facts.
When I talked about DEI and about what he tweeted about — you remember the Alaska Airlines pilot who, when the door blew off and she landed the plane successfully. He said, somehow, that it was a DEI thing. I said, “But this is a woman who’s landed a plane successfully. That means that she is actually qualified to do a job. So I don’t understand why you’re tweeting the things that you’re tweeting. There’s no evidence of what you’re putting out there.”
And he said, “Well, it would just be awful it we’re lowering the standards on air safety and if we’re lowering the standards for medical school because of DEI.” And I said, “Yes, that would be awful, but there is no actual evidence that it is happening. So why are you doing it? It is hypothetical.”
He said. “All I’m saying is that it would be terrible and we shouldn’t do it.”
I said, “Yes, everyone agrees with that, but why would I say it, because it’s not happening!”
Swisher: Right. And what did he say? He didn’t like pushback.
Lemon: He didn’t. He didn’t like pushback…
PUSHBACK is what NPCs get!
The great replacement theory video that Elon Musk has pinned to the top of his feed is sick. And it shows that he’s turning X (formerly Twitter) into a safe space for far-right propaganda, writes @GregTSargent. https://t.co/PKvkx1YRFg
— The New Republic (@newrepublic) March 28, 2024
Hand to Murphy, when Trump loses (again), I’m not sure Elon will survive the blow to *his* theory of the universe.
War for Ukraine Day 765: Russia Is Attempting to Destroy Ukraine’s Power Generation System!
Baud
Replacing Elon would be Great!
Ten Bears
I must confess I think most people are NPCs … I don’t play games
Tony Jay
This exchange would fit right in with the crawling fawning.
Betty Cracker
Musk couldn’t even find an original way to express his personal anxiety about mortality and relevance.
Viva BrisVegas
This is the guy most likely to become the world’s first trillionaire.
Bring on the Biden Billionaire Tax.
Jay
@Viva BrisVegas:
bring on the tumbrels,………
Balconesfault
I’m convinced that Musk’s embrace of the right wing is twofold.
First, he hates that government has the power to regulate anything… how he treats his workers, workplace safety at his plants, consumer protection standards, etc. All those can put guardrails on his conduct, and he can’t abide guardrails because he knows he’s smarter than anyone creating/enforcing guardrails.
Second, he hates being called out for saying stupid shit, and he likes to shit post and repost shit posts.
If you have a 1970s South Africa attitude towards a lot of social issues … and your ego makes you spend an inordinate amount of time on social media… you’re going to say or repost some stupid stuff. And the criticism came from the left.
So he had to embrace the side that cheered his shit posts, because ego.
piratedan
motherfucker rolled a 4 on Charisma, any DM knows you gotta adjust initial reaction scores from there.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Why do I get the feeling that whatever* replaced him would be worse.
*not an accident
Matt McIrvin
Do you know who you can massacre without consequences (if the game let’s you)? NPCs. His dismissal contains the same threat he’s discounting. “Only a non-person world think we’re dehumanizing you, ” he’s saying.
MattF
Musk is a shitposter, a troll— a pie filter just for Elon would be a good thing. He believes his wealth allows him to say or post whatever, and that appear to be true, unfortunately. Fair to ask if he’s degenerating as we watch. Ugh.
m.j.
The only tough thing about his childhood was the prospect of having to share.
Jay
Had to add this,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2m-08cOAbc
satby
People who see other human beings as NPCs are sociopaths. Really a lot of ink spilled trying to say anything but the truth about Elon, tfg, MTG… a lot of them. Maybe we should figure out a way to build a society that doesn’t elevate and reward sociopathy.
Anne Laurie
To be fair, both of his parents were crazy, their genetics were… less than stellar, his father was physically & emotionally abusive, and there were a lot of sudden disruptions depending on the old man’s latest ‘business idea’.
Not that many of us have not survived worse childhoods without growing up to be monsters, but I wouldn’t have wanted to live Elon’s childhood myself.
RedDirtGirl
Imagine being so rich that no one will tell you your facial hair looks like pubes.
Betty Cracker
@satby:
QFT.
RedDirtGirl
Also, since open thread, can anyone direct me to the math video that was posted in a recent comment thread here? I meant to watch it, but got distracted, and don’t remember where it was. Thanks.
Matt McIrvin
“NPC” is mass shooter and Nazi language. Basically his response to people who worried about being killed is “we’ll kill you first”.
AM in NC
@Balconesfault: Also, Grimes and the other women kicking him to the curb, and his daughter very much publicly rejecting him, have pushed the rightwing, misogynist man buttons in him.
Like with Taibi, et. al., it’s a toxic stew of racism, sexism, and “you’re not the boss of me”-ism
Spoiled, entitled children
TBone
A deep dive into fElon’s depravity:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the/
Long read but edifying. He’s SUCH a schmuck.
pluky
Now I want to see Trevor Noah interview him. Comedy chops and native understanding of EM’s cultural tics. Just give me time to pop much corn first.
m.j.
@Anne Laurie:
Their genetics?
BlueGuitarist
@RedDirtGirl:
https://balloon-juice.com/2024/03/28/a-good-combination-entertainment-and-education-open-thread/
Princess
Sociopaths think everyone other than them are NPCs. That’s practically the definition of sociopathy.
ETA: I see satby got there first. And his attraction to the GOP needs no special parsing. He’s a white supremacist. Period end of report. There’s a natural affinity.
Lot of people in this thread doing backflips to parse Elon’s vibe as if he’d be a natural Dem were it not for one weird factor, like mean wives or concern with over regulation.
RedDirtGirl
@BlueGuitarist: thank You!
Anonymous At Work
If Elmo were truly looking at the future, he’d root for Biden, to tank Truth Social. If TFG wins instead, Truth Social will be the platform on which government decisions are announced, all Cabinet members will have accounts, etc.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
We’re all suffering because there’s a large cohort of middle aged people who can’t handle being middle aged. They didn’t grow up, they just got older.
different-church-lady
Someone just needs to call him an asshole to his face.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Princess:
I started playing D&D in 1975 and never did I think I’d live to see the day that such a basic element of the game would be used in mainstream commentary like this.
JML
It’s depressing to me that an old bit of terminology from Dungeons & Dragons is being used in such a dehumanizing fashion. Feels like another example of how the internet can ruin anything.
Freemark
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: well it moved to video games then to mainstream. Many of those using it have no idea the origins were before video games. Or that most of those kind of video games started as computerized D&D.
Chris Johnson
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: It’s a really vital part of Russia’s plans of civil war for us.
Turns out it’s incredibly important to get Americans to dehumanize each other to the point that they’re considering each other NPCs and ready to start shooting. It has to be pushed beyond normal levels of ‘not liking your asshole neighbor with different politics’.
That is because our governmental system tolerates dissent on a grand scale, is in fact designed around it. Our politics isn’t like NPCs and a great hero who wins, our politics is like baseball and football. We play-fight and maintain our team colors and some degree of distinction from each other, but the game goes on and will return for another season.
Fascism breaks that (and wouldn’t survive very long, especially in America). We are a very tough target for fascism. For it to take hold, it’s gotta sell a whole lot of Americans on the idea that in fact there is only one right answer and we have to stop, y’know, being Americans and go be something else, most likely in some sort of fealty to a king.
I mean… been there, done that? ‘Hamilton’ was huge for a reason. Americans define ourselves as rebels barely getting along. Fascism has to get us to define ourselves as serfs to a true leader. That ain’t even working completely among Republicans, which is itself amazing.
different-church-lady
@Chris Johnson: “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.”
Josie
@Chris Johnson:
Thanks for this. I find it an impressively simple explanation and totally reassuring.
eversor
Calling Elon a gamer is insulting even to the worst of gamers.
This is a man who paid other people to play games for him and level them up and was all “check out my build, I’m doing this right!” which is missing the fucking point.
See when you play a game like say Dark Souls (this was not where he commited his crime) you can do it thousands of ways. You want to be a black dual katana weilding samurai sort of character it’s THERE! You want to be woman who wields a giant battle hammer and just crushes people? You can do that. You want to run around ass naked and shoot fireballs at people you can do that too! Make it YOUR game.
But there are what we call try hards. Which are the people that just copy another persons build because it’s the most effective at whatever. PVP, PVE, long list. But everybody hates those fuckers. Then there are people who pay other people to play the game for them and get all the achievements and power up their characters. People hate them more.
Elon managed to violate both these codes of conduct and make it worse. He clearly download dumped a build but managed to pick a shitty one. Then he clearly paid someone to run through the game with it (you can tell if someone knows how to play or not rapidly if you ever played that game). Then he bragged about it. Then he rage ran away when called on it!
So Elon Musk is bad at vidjya.
@Freemark:
The top current game on PC is Baldurs Gate 3 which is DND. Not only that but virtual tabletop games and DND over Discord are massively popular with the youngs.
Raoul Paste
@satby: Exactly right
Ivan X
@TBone: I read that too. Zitron writes with a righteous fury.
Jinchi
He will take it as proof that the Democrats accomplished their nefarious mission.
Citizen Alan
@Chris Johnson:
Comments like this disturb me because they force me to confront the extent to which i have been drawn into the same mindset. I don’t want to view maga voters as members of a completely different and intrinsically hostile species. But they all but demand that I do so. I genuinely question whether anyone who actually had a soul could say and do the things that they do.
RevRick
Clearly, under Musk’s belligerent ego lies a boiling pot of shame. You can see it in how flustered he gets in the interview. His white supremacist ideology cannot allow him to be one-upped by those he believes inferior. The very fact that Lemon questioned him throws him in a tizzy.
StringOnAStick
I talked to a friend last night at a party who had the exact opposite take on the Elon Lemon interview, he said Lemon did such a bad job that it made Elon look good. He was demanding I listen to it and he bought Elon ‘s “DEI brings down the level for everyone, do we really want doctors that are less capable because DEI dropped the standards for med school admissions?”. I told him Elon is a white supremacist and I had no interest in hearing anything he had to say.
VFX Lurker
Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste touches on this, as did Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts. Ordinary people can and will do horrible things under the influence of a caste system.
You don’t need monsters to fuel American slavery, Jim Crow and Nazi Germany. Maybe you need monsters to start caste systems, but the majority need not be monsters to uphold it.
Bill Arnold
@StringOnAStick:
Heterogeneity through immigration[1] is one of the main strengths of the United States of America.
People who don’t understand this, and rant about the desirability of a homogeneous population, are simply confused and ignorant. Monocultures tend to be stagnant, and more vulnerable to disruptions.
[1] The various Native American cultures were/are also pretty heterogeneous in aggregate, to be clear.
Bill Arnold
Musk NPC comment (the one linked above) is pathetic is a few ways.
It is incorrect as a matter of fact, and anyone who says Trump was talking only about the auto industry is willfully deaf.
The text in brackets is my reading.
It is dehumanizing people, some of whom could (and have) run circles around his “free thoughts”.
And it is objective evidence of his limited self-awareness skills. (FWIW, Mr. Musk is gullible, and also easily manipulated.)
Peke Daddy
How will Sunk Elmo survive degradement of his reality? He will construct another one in his head explaining it and off he’ll go.
Citizen Alan
@Bill Arnold: You know, everyone’s been so caught up in the “bloodbath” part of that comment that the idea of a 100% tariff on all foreign made cars is apparently not even worth mentioning. As if there would be no negative consequences if every Toyota, Honda, and Nissan dealership in the country all went bankrupt the same week. (And presumably every car dealership period that makes American cars that are manufactured in whole or in part in other countries.) The biggest group of cry-babies whining that Shitgibbon wasn’t hurting the right people, IIRC, were the soybean farmers who were shocked when he–literally on a whim!–started a trade war with the Chinese that resulted in Chinese tariffs on soybean imports that devastated American soybean farmers. Luckily, he spent most of the money supposedly raised by those tariffs on Farmer Welfare.
Ruckus
@Balconesfault:
If you have a 1970s WHITE South Africa attitude towards a lot of social issues … and your ego makes you spend an inordinate amount of time on social media… you’re going to say or repost some stupid stuff. And the criticism came from the left.
Enhanced it for you…..
And now of course there is the knowledge that in the 1970s in SA there would only be white attitude expressed, heard, spoken.
Ruckus
@Kay:
I’m not sure you didn’t just describe humanity in a nutshell. I believe that humans for ever have had a segment that can’t see past the tips of their noses (maybe because of where those noses have often been parked….) It was like this when I was a child but the one thing that was different – we had very little way to see anyone beyond individual eyesight.
The world 75 yrs ago was no where near what it is today. What is different is that we can see a hell of a lot more of it a lot easier. We can easily and actually rather cheaply literally fly around the world. We can communicate – like we are doing now, with people around the world that we’ve never met in person and likely may never do and believe me that is a LOT different. We can see the world from our couches and lounge chairs – in all it’s glory, humanity, crap, and wonderment. This is my 75th year on this planet and I can tell you that the world of today in many ways is different in so many ways that never could have even been imagined and the same in many ways that is as old as humanity itself. We have built in emotions and that has not changed since the first one of us walked upright. We use them in all ways from very well to absolutely horrible, as has existed since day one. We just live far closer, with less room for air and stupidity. Yes a lot of humanity is on the side of OK to great. But there is and always will be the segment that is on the side of not so OK to pure shit. We’ve had laws and penalties for breaking them for centuries and that really hasn’t ever stopped the self entitled side of humanity. Often has made them pay for their crap, possibly slowed them down a 1/2 a mile an hour or so but hasn’t stopped them or their behavior. It’s humanity, in all it’s good and in all it’s shit. I don’t see it changing soon, at least not at anything considered fast.
Chris Johnson
@Citizen Alan: Oh, you absolutely should confront whether you’ve been drawn into that mindset, because they’re doing it on purpose (i.e. Russia)
That’s the whole purpose behind infiltrating both left and right wingers. There’s no point trying to manipulate only ONE side. Civil war requires effectively manipulating BOTH sides. This is why you have fake leftists like Jimmy Dore, TYT etc. and their ilk.
At this point I just go by the eventual payload. Whoever they claim to be or whatever they claim to think, if it gets down to civil war and antivax propaganda and race war, I’m not interested and I suspect ’em of being info soldiers.
Yes, you have to confront whether you are being drawn into a mindset of othering a subset of your fellow Americans where you legit believe they have to be exterminated or expelled. Fighting, fine: some things are worth fighting like hell over, but remember we’re not supposed to get to ‘everyone left is good and fine’. We’re supposed to be living with a crapload of static, argument, and discontent. That turns out to be the best way.
ElectricalEngineerGuy
@TBone:
The article was very good except for the Tesla & BYD parts. Tesla & BYD parts are almost completely wrong.
I think the article is right that Elon is racist, has emotional problems and also that the Tesla board is not protecting shareholders.
But the Tesla EVs right now are the best EVs on the market. By end of 2025, Cybertruck will be most sold EV pickup in U.S. The next gen car (model 2?) was not supposed to be out in 2023 and will not take as long as 2027 to arrive (Next gen car will ship in 2025). BYD is only competitive in China and may never be competitive to Tesla in Europe and North America.
linnen
@ Chris Johnson;
Why push the blame away from home-grown sources to a third party like Russia when that kind of bigotry and ‘othering’ is grown from domestic sources and cultured and nurtured by domestic actors.
Sure Russia is helping it along, but this kind of activity will NOT go away if Russia is removed from the equation.