Philip Low Unmasking Musk
79 comments
·February 1, 2025nothrowaways
oskarkk
> All his talk about getting to Mars to "maintain the light of consciousness" (...) is actually BS
While I hate Elon's politics, I love space exploration, and I believe his motivation with SpaceX is sincere. From the start he made SpaceX with the goal of getting to Mars, and after all these years SpaceX is actually getting near the capability of sending tens of tonnes of cargo to Mars. He's been talking about getting to Mars for more than 20 years, he became a member of the Mars Society in 2001 and wanted to fund a small (unmanned) Mars mission[0], when he wasn't yet a billionaire, but very rich from PayPal, and before SpaceX was founded. Then he invested a big part of his fortune in SpaceX, which was a very risky bet. Even in the early days of SpaceX he planned to make a big rocket capable of getting a big payload to Mars[1] (the "BFR" that the 2005 article is talking about is today's Starship). I wish he had stayed focused on Mars, instead of making Earth's dirty politics even dirtier.
[0] https://spaceref.com/status-report/marsnow-19-profile-elon-m...
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nothrowaways
I frequently read "bullied in highschool" thing affecting his adult life.
If it's affecting him this much, Why can't he get a professional psycho therapist and move on?
sidibe
He's tweeted multiple times that his tombstone will say he never went to therapy. It is a major point of pride, he is too superior to need that
Edit: example https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1763054266762121517
deepfriedchokes
[flagged]
MrMcCall
[flagged]
zozbot234
The problem with the easy "Musk is just a narcissist" take is that most narcissists don't do things like create a world-changing mass market for electric vehicles, reusable rocket launches, "Starship" spacecraft (which gives us capabilities that we lost with the Space Shuttle disasters, and can do a lot more besides), or indeed, all of those at once.
kevingadd
I understand that it's easiest to associate all those achievements with Musk, but he didn't do any of those things. He isn't a specialist in EVs (or even a founder of Tesla, he came in long after it started), he's not a rocketry expert, etc. He's just a business guy. There are plenty of business guys out there.
Hikikomori
Or he saw some great business opportunities and did it to enrich himself?
kurikuri
I’d argue that no narcissists did all of those things. Elon doesn’t like patents and doesn’t share credit for IP he has no connection to other than ownership, so he didn’t do any of those things.
codr7
This post just leapt 10 positions down on the front page.
Never saw that before.
archagon
Bizarre. I also saw this. The thread went from nothing to [flagged][dead] over the course of about a minute without going through an intermediary [flagged] phase. Fortunately, it's vouched back to life for the time being.
Yesterday, I posted an "Ask HN" on the same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42892245
I wonder if there's some sort of coordinated flagging of Musk-related topics going on, especially given Musk's ongoing (and possibly illegal) government interference. The fact that the flags seem to come so rapidly (enough to mark [dead] within ~30s) is suspicious to me. Can dang comment on this?
thwackamole
Unfortunately, this sort of thing happens all the time, you just happened to notice this one. It's not only Musk-related posts, either. Negative submissions about Altman also get flagged and disappeared. The mods don't seem very interested in countering this behavior. Often it's weakly supported by claiming the discussion is low quality. (Which is often true, but not imho a good enough reason to suppress the topic rather than enforcing comment guidelines.)
defrost
Flags and vouching come more from the user base than from dang who more often trails in late.
There are very strong pro and anti Musk camps on HN, evidenced in any Musk related thread. These are not necc. large populations but they are quite active.
DemocracyFTW2
> I wonder if there's some sort of coordinated flagging of Musk-related topics going on
my impression as well
77pt77
> Can dang comment on this?
LOL! The naivete...
sho_hn
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42902355 also disappeared from the front page very suddenly earlier. This also gave me the impression there's either more active moderation of a certain class of stories atm, or the audience is flagging them a fair bit.
dang
It has been heavily flagged by users and also set off the flamewar detector.
moffkalast
Nah this happens a lot on HN, every so often I see something interesting on mobile, and go to reply on desktop maybe 10, 20 minutes later and I just can't find the link anymore at all without directly typing the id from mobile into the address bar, shit just disappears entirely on a regular basis. Not even flagged, deleted, or anything obviously wrong with the post at all, they just get silently delisted.
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sebazzz
I really recommend a RSS reader for this reason, it does not have bias.
GeoAtreides
i would recommend: https://hn.algolia.com/
with "last 24 hours" selected
it shows all submissions and cuts through the censorship
akerl_
I flagged this because watching rich tech bros slap each other around is not something I consider to be a thought provoking topic for discussion.
nothrowaways
I think the community can learn from it.
codr7
Flagging makes things disappear, it's bad when it happens to truth.
akerl_
There are plenty of true things that are not relevant or productive topics here.
DemocracyFTW2
it is also about learning who this guy who is already impacting the lives of uncounted people
bag_boy
No disrespect, but who is Philip Low?
archagon
Scientist and CEO of NeuroVigil.
trogdor
That’s not saying much. Read the “Careers” section of NeuroVigil’s website:
https://neurovigil.com/index.php/about-us/careers-form
They are ‘recruiting’ student interns. But only after a ‘traditional three-day vetting period.’ I kid you not.
As much as I dislike Elon Musk, this guy is a quack. Gives me strong Tim Ferriss vibes, only less polished.
It looks like NeuroVigil has been effectively defunct for over a decade.
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gnschenker
Big words of a man with an even bigger ego. But let’s leave the persons aside and compare businesses. It only takes a quick query to ChatGPT or other AI to compare NeuroVigil and NeuroLink. The first one monitors, the second one actually enables severely handicapped people to get their life back. Which one would you think has the potential to do more good to humanity?
scotty79
I think soon any post about Musk will get auto-flagged. He made himself too terrible to not get people fuming whenever his name popps up.
kanavs
This is a bad article. Probable coming from Phillip Low's own inadequacies and childhood trauma. So much stuff in there that is just factually incorrect. "All his talk about getting to Mars to "maintain the light of consciousness" or about "free speech absolutism" is actually BS Elon knowingly feeds people to manipulate them." How do we know this for a fact, when soo many people have said the opposite 'Elon genuinely believes what he says..', plus you get to witness his good deeds in public as well. Every time there is a natural disaster or a war, he puts so many of his own resources to work (Starlink, tesla cars, SpaceX for bringing the astronauts home, etc.). The other reasons are probably the dumbest I have ever seen, it made sense for this post to get traction on X/bluesky, but on hackernews, it just seems absurd.
_DeadFred_
If you are talking about the current astronaut situation SpaceX was already contracted to bring the astronauts home by Nasa all the way back in August, way prior to the recent theater between Trump and Musk.
https://www.npr.org/2024/08/24/nx-s1-5087892/nasa-starliner-...
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nothrowaways
> as sons of highly accomplished men.
I can agree, Errol had an amazing journey
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nothrowaways
> This is the email I sent him around that time: "Elon, Only one of us apparently knows the difference between Science and PR, and between friendship and phonies, and unfortunately you ain't it. Let's cut ties here. Your NV stock is not being transferred, and if you try to transfer it without my consent, in contravention of your stock purchase agreement, I will have to shove my boots. so deep up your derrière, legally, that your pissing contest with Bezos will seem like it was from another life, one you want to get back to. Good luck with your implants, all of them, and with building Pottersville on Mars. Seriously, don't fuck with me."...
Wow
> All his talk about getting to Mars to "maintain the light of consciousness" or about "free speech absolutism" is actually BS Elon knowingly feeds people to manipulate them. Everything Elon does is about acquiring and consolidating power. That is why he likes far right parties, because they are easier to control. That is also why he gave himself $56 Billion which could have gone. to the people actually doing the work and innovations he is taking credit for at Tesla (the reason he does not do patents is because he would not be listed as an inventor as putting a fake inventor on a patent would kill it and moreover it would reveal the superstars behind the work). His lust for power is also why he did xAl and Neuralink, to attempt to compete with OpenAl and NeuroVigil, respectively, despite being affiliated with them. Unlike Tesla and Twitter, he was unable to conquer those companies and tried to create rivals. He announced Neuralink just after I invited his ex-wife, which she and I notified him about, to a fundraising dinner for Hebrew University in London (The fact that she tried to kiss me - I immediately pushed her away - while taking a photo at that event, even if playfully, clearly may have added to the alienation and possible emasculation he may have felt when she spoke to me in a pool at a party when they were together and she was naked. To not be disrespectful to her or to him, I stayed but looked at the sky whilst talking to her). I fired him with cause in December 2021 when he tried to undermine NV. It is ironic that years later, he clearly tried to undermine Twitter before buying it, and in my view, blowing it up and using it to manipulate the masses to lean to the far right in country after country, including the USA...
Wow