Elon Musk Deserves to Lose
He'll burn it all down for the giggles, the likes, the attention.
Sree’s newsletter is produced with Zach Peterson (@zachprague). Digimentors Tech Tip from Robert S. Anthony (@newyorkbob). Our sponsorship kit.
🗞 @Sree’s #NYTReadalong: Sunday mornings, 8:30-10 am ET, we read a print newspaper aloud on social media with a fab guest. We’ve been doing this for 9 years. Videos of our eight most recent guests: Rashmee Roshan Lall, Shawna Presley Vercher, Subodh Chandra, Rajesh Vetcha, Marcia Stepanek; Melissa Ludtke, Eric Weiner, Cauvery Madhavan. Check out our archives here. The Readalong is sponsored by Muck Rack. Interested in sponsorship opportunities? Email sree@digimentors.group and neil@digimentors.group.
🚀 Last week, we told you about an amazing webinar about space exploration I hosted with Indiaspora, NASA, Axiom Space and SAJA. Meet real-life astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla in the recording!
📰 Have a kid in your life (child, grandchild, niece/nephew, neighbors, etc)? Here’s a special treat. The print-only NYT for Kids section focused on the elections is usually available only to print subscribers. With special permission from the NYT, we are able to make the PDF available on our website until Election Day. Scroll down on that page, grab the PDF and save it for later. As always, we'd like to give a special shoutout to Tom Jolly (NYT Print Editor), Wayne Kamidoi (NYT Art Director) and Molly Bennet (NYT For Kids Editor) for their support.
***
ONE OF MY FAVORITE LINES IN THE BIBLE (I was born in a Catholic hospital in Japan and studied in Christian/Catholic institutions in Fiji, India, the U.S.) is, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has gained everything, but has lost his soul along the way. I am proud that I wrote in my newsletter in 2018 that he should get off Twitter. But I am less proud about what I’ve gotten wrong about him.
Since he bought Twitter and proceeded to set it on fire, I have written eight essays about him (good lord!). I thought the $44 billion he spent on the platform was a waste of money. I was wrong. In fact, it’s a great deal.
Buying a presidency, buying a country, for $44 billion is a steal.
He fooled us all, even his biggest critics, by pretending he’s a centrist, a reasonable man, someone who wanted what was best for his fellow human beings. Instead, he saw in Donald Trump and X the perfect opportunity to promote himself and his warped view above all else.
You’ve seen the reporting that Elon was working illegally on his startup after dropping out of Stanford. “We don’t want our founder being deported” was just one of the concerns of shareholders and colleagues. Read the Washington Post story by Maria Sacchetti, Faiz Siddiqui and Nick Miroff.
You’ve seen him cheerleading wildly at the Nazi rally (as one of the speakers called it) at Madison Square Garden.
You’ve seen how his pro-Trump super PAC is running ads in Michigan that claim Kamala Harris is too pro-Israel. And ads in Pennsylvania that claim she is too pro-Palestine. Is that disingenuous? Yes. Is it as bad as being “in regular contact with Vladimir Putin since 2022?” Probably not.
The Wall St. Journal reported last week on how Musk (with all his U.S. government contracts) is in close touch with Vladimir Putin.
From the report by Thomas Grove, Warren P. Strobel, Aruna Viswanatha, Gordon Lubold and Sam Schechner:
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a linchpin of U.S. space efforts, has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin since late 2022. The discussions, confirmed by several current and former U.S., European and Russian officials, touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions. At one point, Putin asked the billionaire to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, said two people briefed on the request.
This sort of contact with this particular dictator is beyond the pale. Here’s why, again, from the WSJ piece:
Musk has forged deep business ties with U.S. military and intelligence agencies, giving him unique visibility into some of America’s most sensitive space programs. SpaceX, which operates the Starlink service, won a $1.8 billion classified contract in 2021 and is the primary rocket launcher for the Pentagon and NASA. Musk has a security clearance that allows him access to certain classified information.
It would be naive to think things like this wouldn’t happen, especially given Musk’s industrial exploits, but the idea that he “regularly” talks to Putin out of earshot of US government officials is truly dangerous. The WSJ piece states that the conversations are “a closely held secret in government,” and, “Several White House officials said they weren’t aware of them.”
Combine this his propensity to share and amplify mis- and disinformation and his unique ability to commit election tampering.
Here are two perfect paragraphs from Wired:
When Musk, who has described himself as a “free speech absolutist,” took over Twitter in 2022, he almost immediately fired the vast majority of the company’s trust and safety employees, the people who keep hate speech and mis- and disinformation off the platform. The following year, Musk slashed what remained of Twitter’s election integrity team, posting, “Oh you mean the “Election Integrity” Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.”
Hate speech on X increased under Musk, and last year European Commission vice president Vera Jourova said that of all the companies under EU scrutiny, X was “the platform with the largest ratio of mis- or disinformation posts.” Musk also reinstated the accounts of people who had been banned from the platform, including conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.
Zooming out a bit, I cannot recommend this episode of the Politico Tech podcast enough. The guest is Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard and MIT and author of the forthcoming book, “Tech Agnostic.” I have always seen secular humanism as sort of this weird juxtaposition of devout religiosity that was oddly full of itself, but, when applied against the backdrop of two decades of turbo-charged awfulness, it works as a framework for critique. The way Epstein explains how Musk, Peter Theil, Marc Andreesen and their ilk behave in public, and what they expect from every single person on the planet in terms of buy-in, is truly brilliant. It also fully explains why Trump and Musk are so attracted to one another—they crave both attention and subservience.
These people hate you. They will sell any and everyone out if it means even the slightest of short-term gain. They have both proven this time and time and time and time again. Do not let Musk win.
— Sree | Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn | Facebook | YouTube / Threads | Spread
DIGIMENTORS TECH TIP | Western Digital and SanDisk: An Amicable Separation
By Robert S. Anthony
Each week, veteran tech journalist Bob Anthony shares a tech tip you don’t want to miss. Follow him @newyorkbob on Twitter and check out his 1.1 million followers on Pinterest!
For years Western Digital and SanDisk engaged in a lively battle in the data-storage market until the two companies were “married” in 2016. Now, after some bad press for the SanDisk label last year and other market challenges, the brands are separating—which might be a good thing.
Western Digital, founded by a Motorola employee as General Digital Corporation in Newport Beach, Calif. in 1970, and SanDisk, co-founded as SunDisk by three immigrants in Milpitas, Calif. in 1988, were separate companies until Western Digital acquired SanDisk for close to $19 billion in 2016.
Both brands have proven popular with photographers, video editors and other professionals thanks to their wide range of data-storage products ranging from tiny removable memory cards to large hard drive arrays for corporate use.
However the SanDisk brand took a black eye in 2023 when some Extreme and Extreme PRO solid state drives (SSDs) failed, causing some users to lose large volumes of data and at least one popular tech website to stop recommending SanDisk SSDs. However, based on the lack of recent user complaints, Western Digital’s issues with SanDisk SSDs seem to have subsided.
But now the brands are headed their separate ways in a move which puts hard disk drives with mechanical components under the Western Digital umbrella while SanDisk moves to a separate website and handles products with flash memory such as USB flash drives, memory cards and SSDs.
According to Western Digital, the separation “will better position each franchise to execute innovative technology and product development, capitalize on unique growth opportunities, extend respective market leadership positions, and operate more efficiently with distinct capital structures.”
Translation: By separating, each company can respond faster and independently to changes in the hard disk and flash memory markets. Issues with one brand—like the SanDisk SSD problems—will no longer affect the other.
For consumers some things will stay the same while others will change. If you opened a Western Digital account before Sept. 27 a SanDisk account will automatically be created for you, but if you created a WD account after that date, you’ll have to manually create a new SanDisk account. WD and SanDisk will now have separate product-support operations.
Both brands have recently added some color to their consumer product lineups. SanDisk offers Pokemon-themed microSD cards designed specifically at Nintendo Switch users, but the cards can be used in any compatible Android smartphone or other mobile device. The microSD cards come in capacities of 256MB ($40), 512MB ($70) and 1TB ($150).
Earlier this month Western Digital introduced the WD My Passport Ultra 20th Anniversary Edition portable hard drive to celebrate the anniversary of its My Passport line of hard drives. The unit comes in a colorful emerald metal case, has a single USB-C port and comes in versions with capacities of 2TB ($90) and 6TB ($200).
Still befuddled? A list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) on the changes at WD and SanDisk are on both companies’ websites.
Did we miss anything? Make a mistake? Do you have an idea for anything we’re up to? Let’s collaborate! sree@sree.net and please connect w/ me: Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube / Threads / Spread
There's a reason he likes the letter X so much.