For what it's worth, about 10 years ago intentionally rusting your car hood was a fad, particularly among teenagers with cheap VWs. I have to assume that same group of people became adults that buy Teslas.
Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter may soon go through
- Thread starter Specter Von Baren
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Anyone familiar with welding or other steelworking could tell you that's a thing.Tesla's chief engineer has handily popped up to tell us that they aren't actually rusting, it's just surface contamination of the stainless steel with iron, and it's the iron rusting. So that's okay then, I guess...
Tesla Cybertruck owners complain their new vehicles are rusting
The EV's stainless-steel exterior is seemingly incompatible with common outdoor elements, some owners say.www.cbsnews.com
So basically, stainless steel doesn't rust for the same reason aluminum doesn't rust as such - they both form a passive oxide layer that prevents further oxidation.
Anything that damages or destroys the passive layer on stainless will cause surface rust, as will any kind of even vaguely rough handling with carbon steel or iron (because it can leave deposits of iron and those deposits rust). To the point that industrial metalworking shops often have separate sets of tools for handling stainless and carbon steels to avoid transfer. Just running a TIG welder over the surface of stainless without any filler metal will expose free iron and bring some of it to the surface
If that's what it is, there's a pretty simple indicator solution that will show free iron contamination on stainless pipe - an acidic solution of copper sulfate (if I remember right the proportions are something like 30g copper sulfate and 3mL 70% nitric acid to 1 gallon water) reacts and replaces the iron with copper, chemically copper-plating the affected areas which stands out well against stainless. The solution kinda looks like blueberry Kool-Aid, and it's reactive enough that one shot from a spray bottle will make any areas that need cleaned stand out.
There are several ways to prevent that, either cleaning methods to remove iron deposited on the surface or ways to break down and rebuild the passive layer (called passivation). Doing passivation right involves immersing the piece in boiling acid, some places will do spot cleanings with strong acids at lower temps and longer hold times if the areas that need treated are small and the piece is large (for example around weld seams).
Or how the assassin who shot President James Garfield tried to claim at his trial that he was innocent because it was the doctors who killed him. After all, he died of an infection after some rather unsanitary operating conditions. Never mind the fact that they wouldn't have been operating if he hadn't, you know, been shot.
Or indeed anyone who uses standard stainless steel cutlery.
I would have assumed - perhaps naively - that Tesla had some trick up their sleeve to better minimise or prevent this sort of thing occurring.
Alternatively that given the risk of negative press that they would have done more to raise awareness. The headlines are somewhat embarrassing in terms of those that don't own cybertrucks, but that's not the end of the world. What's more troubling is that owners seem surprised, which suggests communication to buyers was insufficient. Although I would accept the possibility that what was actually insufficient was the attention of some owners when they were given warnings.
When asked how one would summon one of these taxi's, Musk replied "You heil it"
not seen a human try to break the cringonic barrier so hard
RELEASE. THE. TAPES.Musk Admits He Doesn’t Fact-Check Himself and Has Two Burner Accounts on Twitter
In a humiliating deposition his lawyer tried to keep under wraps, the CEO struggled to justify tweets that prompted a defamation lawsuit
Elon Musk, who is once again being sued for defamation over his reckless social media posts. GRZEGORZ WAJDA/SOPA IMAGES/LIGHTROCKET/GETTY IMAGES
Elon Musk‘s erratic posting on X, formerly Twitter, has come back to haunt him once again as a 22-year-old Jewish man pursues a defamation case over tweets in which the tech mogul baselessly suggested the recent college graduate was an undercover federal agent posing as a neo-Nazi during a street fight between far-right groups. Musk’s excruciating March 27 deposition in the matter, which a judge ordered released to the public over the objections of the CEO’s lawyer, reveals the extent to which he has continually sabotaged both himself and the social media platform he owns.
X is “the most accurate, timely and truthful place on the internet,” Musk said during his questioning about a false statement he made on the site that has been viewed by over a million users and has yet to be retracted or deleted almost a year later.
The lawsuit, brought in October by Ben Brody of California, concerns one of the many false conspiracy theories that Musk has fallen for and amplified since acquiring Twitter. Last June, as members of the fascist Proud Boys gang brawled with the Rose City Nationalists, a neo-Nazi organization of the Pacific Northwest, at an LGBTQ pride event that both sought to disrupt, several RCN participants were unmasked. Internet sleuths went to work matching names to their faces, but far-right accounts hoping to frame the violence as a “false flag” event incorrectly identified Brody as one participant, circulating a picture of him from the Instagram account of Alpha Epsilon Pi, the Jewish fraternity to which he belonged as a student at the University of Riverside, California. In fact, Brody had been in California at the time, and this misinformation was based on nothing more than the slightest resemblance between Brody and the individual at the event.
The Instagram post described Brody as a political science major who wanted to work in government after graduation, details that extremists used to implicate him in a supposed plot by federal agencies to stage a violent clash between hard-right groups. Twice, Musk boosted those misleading claims, in one case replying “Always remove their masks” to a crypto influencer who accused federal agencies of “Planting Fake Nazis at Rallies.” Finally, Musk replied to an anonymous blogger who posted about a “white supremacist unmasked as suspected fed,” writing, “Looks like one is a college student (who wants to join the govt) and another is maybe an Antifa member, but nonetheless a probable false flag situation.”
Brody’s attorney, Mark Bankston, who previously won Sandy Hook parents $45 million in damages from Alex Jones in a suit over the conspiracy kingpin’s false claims that the deadly school shooting never happened, has argued that Musk defamed Brody in this last post, with the college grad and his family doxxed and harassed to the point where they were forced to flee their home.
Cross-examining Musk about his social media habits last month, Bankston got into testy exchanges with both the billionaire’s attorney, Alex Spiro, as well as Musk himself, who complained that Bankston lacked “decorum.” (Spiro successfully defended Musk in a previous defamation case over a tweet in which he had insulted a British cave diver by calling him a “pedo guy” during efforts to rescue a Thai youth soccer team trapped in a flooded cave system.) Despite his defenses, Musk was backed into several embarrassing statements, and commented early on that he had “a limited understanding” of “what the lawsuit is about.”
Musk was reluctant to even acknowledge that Brody had brought the lawsuit — he more than once commented that Bankston was the true plaintiff and interested in “getting a lot of money.” Bankston, however, pushed through to the subject of the suit itself, getting Musk to confirm that he had not done anything to independently verify the identity of the RCN member misidentified as Brody before his allegedly defamatory tweet. Asked if had secured “other information about this unmasked brawler” besides what he’d seen from the handful of extremist accounts pushing the false flag conspiracy theory, Musk replied, “I don’t recall securing other information.” He also granted the point that everything he supposedly knew about the brawler came from those tweets.
Bankston further pushed Musk on his dubious sources, asking if he clicks through to profiles and feeds to scan for “red flags” when it comes to reliability. “I wasn’t trying to assess their credibility,” Musk said of one account he engaged with, which Bankston pointed out had posted antisemitic content the same day it shared the Brody conspiracy theory. Musk contended that even if he’d been aware of such a troubling agenda from the user he had relied on for information, he couldn’t automatically discount their views. “You know, like, once in a while, a conspiracy theorist is going to be right,” he told Bankston.
Elsewhere in the deposition, Musk criticized the mainstream media and “so-called misinformation experts” and insisted that X has better ways of ensuring accuracy. In particular, he praised the platform’s Community Notes feature as “the best system on the internet” when it comes to fact-checking. Yet Musk has at times taken issue with Community Notes on his own tweets, and, though he tagged Community Notes in his post endorsing the erroneous “false flag” claims about the Oregon melee, the post has never received a correction. Musk conceded that there’s always “some risk that what I say is incorrect,” but said this had to be balanced against “a chilling effect on free speech in general, which would undermine the entire foundation of our democracy.”
At times, Musk was forced to wrestle with his own reckless actions as the owner and prime influencer of X. “I may have done more to financially impair the company than to help it,” he told Bankston in one exchange, adding, “I do not guide my posts by what is financially beneficial but what I believe is interesting or important or entertaining to the public.”
Musk confirmed, too, that one exhibit entered into court records showed another account he operated for “test” purposes. The profile, @Ermnmusk, came to light a year ago as a probable secret Musk account because he tweeted an image showing himself logged into it, and Motherboard then reported on a number of indications that it was likely his. Some since-deleted @Ermnmusk tweets appear to show Musk posting in character as X Æ A-12, his toddler son with singer Grimes, announcing his fourth birthday or saying, “I wish I was old enough to go to nightclubs. They sound so fun.” Other tweets were more risqué, including one that asked: “Do you like Japanese girls?” Musk revived the account on the day of the deposition, writing, “I’m back,” and proceeded to post several memes and jokes in the following days.
Musk dropped the name of a second burner account as well, though it may have been recorded incorrectly in the transcript of the deposition, which has it as “baby smoke 9,000.” There is no active X profile with that handle, though a verified account called @babysmurf9000 interacts with many of the same accounts that Musk follows and engages with, retweets official X company accounts, and posts in an emoji-laden style similar to Musk’s. It can also be found disparaging billionaire Mark Cuban, whom Musk has routinely criticized of late, as “an idiot.” That post came as Musk feuded with Cuban via his main account over DEI programs in early January
Other strange revelations in the interview included Musk’s claims that he was unaware of Brody seeking a retraction of the false flag posts in order to clear his name (at the time, the college grad had made a viral Instagram video refuting the conspiracy theory and asking for people to leave his family alone), that what he tweets out to millions of followers isn’t always seen by that many people, and that he doesn’t believe Brody “has been meaningfully harmed by this,” because it is “rare” for media attacks to have “a meaningful negative impact” on their targets.
Those comments sometimes drew incredulous responses from Bankston, who said “Wow” when Musk said Brody hadn’t been harmed by his false tweets about him. After Bankston made some inquiries into whether Musk felt he had been reckless or failed to take responsibility for his actions, Bankston and Spiro argued more about the scope of the questioning before concluding the proceeding with a debate as to whether the transcript would be made confidential by a protective order. Bankston stated for the record that in his opinion, Spiro had conducted himself inappropriately and “completely shut down many segments of the deposition.”
As for the protective order to seal the transcript, Bankston said he would wait to hear from the court, but that “we don’t recognize that request as anything valid.” Clearly, neither did the court.
So Musk understands that if you're rich enough you can throw money at shit until you succeed without worry of consequence?
Also, now that we know what some of Musks alts are. It's reaching levels of divorced that were hitherto considered impossible.
Also, now that we know what some of Musks alts are. It's reaching levels of divorced that were hitherto considered impossible.
And that 3 months is going to turn into 6 months, then 9 months, then 12 months, and then we'll be a yearly subscription. Why does anyone even bother putting up with this aside from the Musk fan boys?
"Elon Musk confirms that Twitter/X will be doing their abject best to drive new users to alternate platforms."
Right. But the analogy is terrible and stupid.
But if you're playing poker, with reasonable regularity the cards are guaranteed to fall in your favour. Thus it is a plausible tactic to keep buying in and throwing money at it until everyone else folds - but that also means there's kind of no risk there. This is nothing like setting up a company designed to provide a product, because there is absolutely no guarantee that dumb luck is going to re-roll repeatedly until it eventually pulls your fat out of the fire, not least because investors will rapidly get wary at you going all in with their money after you lose enough times.
When Thiel says Musk understands something about risk no-one else does, let's remember that Thiel also dethroned Musk as CEO of Paypal in a boardroom coup because he and other directors believed that Musk was taking excessive risks that might have run the incipient behemoth into bankruptcy.
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That's why Musk doesn't set up companies. He buys companies that already have a successful product, then he pretends that he invented that product.
He's not setting up companies and hoping they succeed through dumb luck. He's buying companies that are already successful and then the gamble is whether he can make them more successful himself, or whether he's going to run them into the ground.
Yes, I'm sure all the bot farms already paying for blue checks are quaking in their boots.
Also amusing that Mr. free speech decrees it should come at a fee
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'Please pay so we can squeeze some more money out this debacle as its value is dropping like a stone.'
Yes, I'm sure all the bot farms already paying for blue checks are quaking in their boots.
Also amusing that Mr. free speech decrees it should come at a fee
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I read everything Elon Musk posted for a week. Send help.
If your media diet looked like his, you’d be red-pilled too.
www.motherjones.com
I Read Everything Elon Musk Posted for a Week. Send Help.
If your media diet looked like his, you’d be red-pilled too.
Mother Jones illustration; Michel Euler/AP
Last January, not long after agreeing with an actual Nazi that western Jews have brought antisemitism upon themselves by welcoming “hordes of minorities” to their countries, Elon Musk took a quick trip to Poland. The billionaire chief of SpaceX, Tesla, and X laid a wreath at Auschwitz and then proceeded on to a symposium in Krakow, where he told the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro that social media could have averted the Holocaust and bragged that he considered himself “aspirationally Jewish.” The tweet, he explained in a different interview, at a different symposium “might be literally the worst and dumbest post I’ve ever done.” But he did not take it down, nor has he moderated his views. If anything his descent into the online fever swamp has only accelerated.
It is hard to appreciate just how thoroughly one of the world’s richest men has been red-pilled until you actually follow along with his media diet. So that’s what I decided to do. Last month, I read everything Musk had to say on X for a week and tracked everyone he interacted with. He tweeted 389 times in five days. He posted the laughing/crying emoji 45 times. But there was a clear signal piercing through the noise. Musk is not a tech visionary with a side interest in politics these days, nor is he just another bored billionaire with a nativist streak; the political activism and the technological ambitions are inseparable. He believes his work is part of a civilizational struggle in which woke progressives pose an existential threat to humanity. And he spends most of his days inside a feedback loop that’s radicalizing him even more.
Over the course of the week, Musk dabbled in a range of small-scale freakouts and smoldering obsessions. He sent 13 tweets about Brazil’s supreme court, as part of a weeks-long battle with the government over efforts to censor disinformation and hate speech. He twice promoted a statistic about the murder rate among Black Americans. He spent one afternoon earnestly amplifying a follower who claimed that “Over 1,000 African migrants have taken over NYC’s City Hall.” (It was an overflow crowd for a hearing on racial disparities in the shelter system.) But one subject came to drown out all the rest. During the week Tesla recalled its CyberTruck for a faulty accelerator pedal, Musk’s most urgent public concern was Katherine Maher.
Musk tweeted about Maher, the CEO of National Public Radio who formerly served as executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, nearly 60 times. It began relatively simply, with Musk lamenting the resignation of Uri Berliner, a former NPR staffer who wrote a critical essay about what he considered the media outlet’s leftward drift. Then Manhattan Institute fellow Chris Rufo—the conservative strategist who helped orchestarate the backlash to Critical Race Theory—began dredging up old comments from Maher, in which she talked about correcting for white historical biases at Wikipedia and pushing back against disinformation at NPR. “Katherine Maher is blatantly racist and sexist – one of the worst human beings in America,” Musk tweeted at Rufo. “She’s evil,” he tweeted again, one minute later.
Rufo and the Canadian behavioral marketing guru Gad Saad are two of Musk’s favorite sounding boards when it comes to wokeness. From Rufo, Musk learns what he should be mad about—clips of Maher speaking to the Atlantic Council, clips of Maher delivering a Ted Talk, screenshots of Maher’s old tweets. From Saad, he gets a more holistic intellectual framework for being mad. Musk is obsessed with the idea that a “woke mind virus” is infecting society. Saad happens to be the author of a book called The Parasitic Mind, which Musk has said gave him “nightmares.” In March, a few months after Saad tweeted at Musk to ask him to promote the book, they held a glitchy 38-minute public discussion on X Spaces. The billionaire has continued to plug the book—including three different times in the week I tuned in.
If you only pay glancing attention to Musk, it’s tough to fully grasp both the intensity and shallowness of his conservative convictions. I knew that he previously said that the rise of Artificial Intelligence could bring about “civilizational destruction,” but I had, in my ignorance, assumed that this fear stemmed from a simple Matrix-style kind of doomism: Machines will grow sentient and enslave us. The reality, which became clear as Musk’s fixation with Maher progressed, was a bit darker: He believes AI will destroy the world with wokeness.
It was a “severe civilization-level risk,” Musk wrote in a late-night exchange with the billionaire venture-capitalist Marc Andreesen. (Andreesen’s own spiraling antipathy toward progressive buzzwords like “sustainability” and “social responsibility” has made him a leading proponent of Effective Accelerationism—sort of the anti-woke mind virus.)
“Now imagine if this is programmed, explicitly or implicitly, into super powerful AI – it could end civilization,” he said in response to a Rufo tweet about Maher’s TED Talk, in which she discusses how Wikipedia moderators think about truth when it comes to thorny subjects like religion. “Now, no need to imagine. It is already programmed into Google Gemini and OpenAI ChatGPT.”
Musk returned to the theme of civilization-destroying woke AI throughout the week. “Imagine if instead of merely rendering forced ‘diverse’ images,” he said in reply to a follower with the handle DogeDesigner, “it decided to make that true in reality, potentially killing millions of people to achieve diversity goals.”
Imagine! With those stakes, everything fits in this heroic or apocalyptic dichotomy.
“[T]he West…wishes to be eaten alive and to have its children sacrificed because then death could be the ultimate expression of its progressive purity,” Saad wrote toward the beginning of the week.
“Suicidal empathy for the L,” Musk agreed.
All of this might sound familiar. That’s because it’s a facet of the same complaint that led to his remedial education at Auschwitz last year, stripped of the most obvious antisemitic signifiers: Woke progressives are opening the doors to the forces that will destroy us all: Falling birth rates, gender ideology, flag-burning immigrants, socially-conscious AI. There was a basic fallacy in expecting a tour about the horrors of genocide to soften the views of someone currently worried about “white genocide” and civil war, and who believes the ideology of his critics could lead to millions of deaths.
Musk described the current state of his red-pilling, and how all-encompassing it is, most succinctly in a response to Rufo about a five-year-old tweet from Maher about feeling “deep discomfort” about having children.
“Once you see that the true battle is expansionists vs extinctionists,” he wrote, “you can’t unsee it.”
And once you see that Musk truly can’t see anything else, you can’t unsee that. Still, there are some things Musk does want AI to kill off. The emerging tech is a boon to Musk not just because of what it promises for his companies, but because of what he hopes it can replace. “Legacy media simply can’t compete with hundreds of millions of humans providing real-time, AI-assisted, interactive information,” he boasted, responding to a chart from DogeDesigner showing declining traffic at major news sites. Musk is doing his part. His feed looks like a newsroom after private equity came to town—one of the only articles from a legacy media outlet he shared all week was a New York Post story about X’s advertising situation, and the only reporter from a legacy news outlet he interacted with was Bill Melugin, Fox News’ man on the border.
Musk touts his platform as the future of news even as he uses it to spread misinformation. Not long after taking over the platform, he shared—and later deleted—a report from a notorious fake-news site that falsely asserted that Nancy’s Pelosi’s husband, Paul, had not been brutally attacked by a home invader and instead had gotten in a fight with a male prostitute. Communicating in emojis and exclamation marks makes it harder to commit factual errors, but he still made some. Musk twice expressed his alarm at a too-good-to-check story about a non-profit that works with migrants in Mexico handing out flyers asking them to vote for Joe Biden when they get to the United States. The non-profit said it had nothing to do with the flyers, and the text appeared to have been crudely translated using an online app. The allegation, which originated with a right-wing site called Muckraker.com, was amplified by the Heritage Foundation and found its way to Musk by way of both the Heritage Foundation and Nate Hochman, a Republican writer and activist who was fired from Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign after featuring a Nazi symbol in a campaign video. It may seem like a small thing, but there’s no such thing when it comes to truth—I’m told the future of civilization hangs in the balance.
A lot of his time is just spent saying the same grim things, to the same grim people, over and over. He has the mannerism not of a master of the universe, but of the reply guys clamoring for their attention. Musk tweeted “DefundNPR” at Rufo three times in two days, like a man at a ballpark by himself, trying to start the wave. He will sometimes respond to the same post multiple times, hours apart with a slightly different reaction. One of the big stories last week in Musk’s circle was a report from the popular account End Wokeness that the actress Naomi Watts has a daughter who is trans.
“Funny how so many progressive actors have children who are transgender,” Gad Saad wrote.
“Terrible,” Musk said.
“‘A ‘trans’ child is the ultimate Hollywood virtue signal, meaning EXTRA approval. Two is even better. 3 is god mode,” said a finance influencer and self-described Tesla shareholder, a few hours later.
“Yup,” said Musk.
It is hard to overstate that this is just what one of the most powerful men in the world does all day. It is the media diet of one of those influencers who only eats organ meat. At least Howard Hughes kept out of sight. But even amidst this right-wing emoji-storm, there were still occasional glimpses of the Musk who, until fairly recently, enjoyed a less polarizing reputation as a billionaire who built cool stuff. He does talk a lot about SpaceX, although those interstellar ambitions take on a different light when you realize his quest is now part of a civilization struggle against pronouns. If you catch him at the right moment, you can still find Musk sharing math jokes, politely engaging with people with product complaints, and offering unsolicited medical advice. “If you’re experiencing severe neck/back pain, I recommend looking into a disc replacement,” he suggested. I don’t know if that’s good advice or not, but I do at least get where he’s coming from.
Once, in the course of 389 tweets, the father of 11 even talked about what it’s like to be a parent.
“Whoa, I just realized that raising a kid is basically 18 years of prompt engineering,” he wrote.
“Our first child will be born next month – what’s your biggest piece of advice?” a former Tesla employee asked in response.
It was right there for him on a platter—a chance to be normal. What would it be: Treasure every moment? Stock up on wipes?
“Be super careful about what schools teach your kids,” Musk replied.
Never mind.