They can’t stand to see an African-America become so successful.
That has been my reply to liberal friends when they mentioned their disdain for Elon Musk. Being a public school teacher, I’ve had many colleagues who didn’t share my political persuasion. Most were top-notch people.
My brother Dave has observed that I enjoy making provocative statements. He’s right, but I doubt that I’ve ever said that I hate a particular politician, or really anyone. Hillary Clinton is wicked and repulsive, but hate is too strong.
Hate is visceral and emotional. To hate someone is to admit that you are too weak to resist their power to get under your skin and wound you.
I was surprised when a tech-savvy friend told me the he hated Musk. He is involved in teacher’s union politics, but isn’t emotionally brittle and I’ve never heard him defend the wacky side of Progressive politics. He’s like a Joe Rogan liberal, without the masculinity.
My tech-savvy friend told me this before Musk bought Twitter, and when asked, couldn’t explain the hatred coherently.
I don’t get it. Envy could turn into hate, but there are plenty of billionaires without obvious qualities. Musk earned his wealth by developing technologies that are making dreams come true.
Electric cars are a niche market, and don’t make sense for most people. Crunchy liberals despise the icky, mechanical nature of internal combustion engines. Musk build the electric car market. The Tesla is cool and fun. I’m not nuts about that, but do endorse the development of the Telsa Powerwall for home electrical storage.
Elon Musk established the commercial space flight industry. In two years, astronauts are going back to the Moon. That wouldn’t be happening without Musk. He leveraged that success to implement practical satellite internet with Starlink, making the internet available anywhere on Earth.
The Neuralink brain-computer interface is having some success in allowing paralyzed people to interact with the physical world. That is an unalloyed good.
Then he bought Twitter, and allowed conservatives to speak freely.
My tech-savvy friend was a big wheel in the union. He knew my politics, and always thought it was bullshit that I was compelled to contribute to the union. At that time, teachers who were not in the union, had money deducted equal to the union dues. It was called fair-share, and went to the union anyway. My friend tried to get the contract changed to allow me to designate a charity to receive the money.
Before that happened, the Supreme Court, in the Jarvis decision, eliminated fair-share.
There is no evidence that my tech-savvy friend went crazy, and could no longer look at political differences in an objective way. My friend and I never discussed Musk buying Twitter, but I doubt that he endorsed radical censorship of conservative views. I don’t get why Musk bothers him.
Some complaints about Musk are just dingy. From Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)
This dude is probably one of the most unintelligent billionaires I have ever met or seen or witnessed,
That’s just stupid. Musk is a real-life Tony Stark. He is the big dog in several tech industries. Musk can be criticized for plenty of things, but being unintelligent is not one of them. For instance, Musk seems to be unusually bad at naming things. ‘X’ is just not a serviceable name for Twitter.
The comment from AOC is particularly rich coming from her. She was a waitress and bartender before she was elected to Congress. Okay, that’s not fair. She did graduate from Boston University, but she does say stupid stuff on the regular.
My tech-savvy friend rose in the ranks of the NEA to a position that took him to Washington several times per year resulting in him meeting many congressman and senators. He told me that he was surprised how dumb most of them are. Not dumb decisions, but when talking to them, my friend said they are just dumb.
AOC is noticeably dumb in a field of dumb people. Yeah, okay, it makes sense. Only a really dumb person would say something so catastrophically stupid.
Now that Musk is dismantling the administrative state for President Trump, it makes superficial sense that Democrats would hate him. They should take a minute to think it through. They are incredibly craven to defend government corruption and degenerate bureaucracy.
They can hide the facts for a while, but Musk does own ‘X’ and other tech billionaires who run other social media companies, are aligning with Musk. The Democrats are burning themselves down.