Post #4054190
2026-07-24 04:41 UTC
I keep hectoring about this matter because without all that soppy gushy coverage of #Musk from the earliest days of his quite suspiciously orchestrated publicity campaign, in which Elon was seeded not merely into tech and business journalism but widely through U.S. #entertainment and even written into a #StarTrek series (thus subtly projecting Elon Musk into the distant future), it's doubtful that Musk could have gotten very far.
He was never good at anything. He was never actually good at anything, there's not a trace of evidence for Elon Musk's competence, yet merely because of all the publicity and because Maye Musk (probably) scammed Musk a ROYAL FELLOWSHIP of all things--like he was actually a real scientist or engineer and not a flim-flam man--everyone went along with it. @SciMag@flipboard.com and @arstechnica@mastodon.social etc. all went for it.
(cont'd)
Replies (1)
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@mxchara@seattle.pink 2026-07-24 04:44
Now I'm going to be a bit charitable here. While I do think that it's a scandal there's no general understanding of the sciences in U.S. #media and #journalism—and I'll go so far as to suspect that a number of top-level journalists are functionally illiterate, only able to communicate in slogans and jargon and simple charts—it should not have been necessary for @arstechnica@mastodon.social or @newscientist@mstdn.social or @TheEconomist@flipboard.com or ANY big news outlet to be scientists in order to notice that Elon Musk wasn't what his marketing campaign said he was. (cont'd)