I watched the 50 minute TED discussion between Elon Musk and TED owner Chris Anderson.
A few thoughts…
Amateur communicators
They both seem nervous and stutter a lot. I would think they’d practice public speaking or get consultants or coaches to assist them with this. I found the conversation painful to listen to.
Uh, um, er, uh, uh…
Twitter banality and free speech weakness
Chris asked Elon some fairly nuanced questions and Elon was lazy in answering. “What free speech would be allowed?” “Oh, whatever the law is”. Lazy. If I wanted to change from free speech, I’d do it by demanding governments give more free speech, and not make up a false claim (“Twitter is the town square”) and pretend governments have gotten in right.
It’s well known that free speech enemies in the Biden White House have been abusing their power and calling social media companies to censor things they don’t like, and getting people they don’t like banned.
It’s also not credible for Elon to be a free speech advocate when he is deeply in bed/partnership with the Chinese Communist Party, the greatest enemy of free speech in the history of humanity and the greatest source of lies and the greatest mass murderers in history, with over 100 million murdered in 8 genocides.
If Elon really wanted to help free speech, he should speak out against social credit scores, which a way to punish people for speaking freely by taking away food, travel, hotels, Internet, etc.
Still childish about cryptocurrencies
Elon says he likes Doge because he likes dogs and memes. 87% of humanity, which Elon claims to love, lives in hell with unstable currencies that have no convertibility to outside those countries because no one wants to use them unless extorted or blackmailed into using them.
Elon still doesn’t seem to grasp the importance of decentralized nongovernment money to have free speech and for humanity to flourish.
How to succeed Elon style is not American
When richest man in the history of the world takes about what he did to get there, everyone interested in success should listen and emulate.
The three big take always were that Elon read many books seeking to understand truth, he enjoyed programming, and he endured pain for three years to learn how to scale up manufacturing. The USA has many strengths, but having people who read and who do deep dives into manufacturing are not characteristic of Americans. It’s easy to be an American who never read a work of nonfiction, and to live one’s entire life knowing nothing about manufacturing.
Elon seems to have a huge blind spot
The most interesting part for me was hearing Elon say we needed to have 300 Terawatt-hours of batteries to move to “sustainable” transportation, power, etc.
That’s supposedly 1000x what we have today.
I see no evidence that Elon has done the math about how he or the USA come up with the cobalt, lithium, cesium, or rare earth metals to make this transition. I guess he just thinks his Chinese Communist Party parters will endlessly provide this, and not try to use political coercion to determine who gets what minerals for what purpose.
It’s amazing to me that Elon does not see that to have both free speech and the sustainable future that US and other non-CCP affiliated companies need to have access to mine these minerals.
Nothing about space
That’s an odd omission. I would have thought Elon would want to talk about why we need to colonize and terraform Mars if he’s going to spend 40 minutes in front of a TED audience.
Child-like mind
Elon’s reference to the Ted the bear movie to the owner of TED with a chuckle shows me that Elon is a big kid, with his inner child still viewing the world through an adult body and a $250 billion wallet. Since I’m also child-like, I like and relate to this.