Is it accurate to say Tesla democratized EVs? The Roadster came out in 2008 but was over $100k. Over its lifetime they only sold around 2500. It was always a rich person's car.

The first 21st century EV in the US that was aimed at a more mainstream mass market was the Nissan Leaf which launched in late 2010, and in the first year sold 4x as many units Tesla Roadster's lifetime sales.

Tesla took a significant step toward an EV for the less rich with the Model S in 2012. It was still a lot more expensive than a Leaf (about 80%ish more for a base Model S) but way less than the Roadster.

The Leaf was the world's best selling EV in 2011-2014 and 2016, and in 2020 was the first to reach 500k sales.

It wasn't until 2017 with the model 3 that Tesla had a car that, like the Leaf, was priced in the range typical middle class families could afford. That's when they took off, and they caught up and passed Leaf in cumulative sales in early 2021.

Yes, credit where credit is due, he achieved a lot, and was instrumental in both SpaceX and the whole EV transition.

He just took a wrong turn and seems hell bent on staying on it.

- he most certainly did not democratize EVs, although he said the plan all along was to make cheap EVs it wasn’t until other car companies started “democratizing” EVs that his had was forced (and delayed)

- we had internet (and still do) in planes that have nothing to do with starlink

Nothing productive will come out of this conversation.

There are a lot of people who are unhappy with the steps the government took to crack down on COVID misinformation, and some people are still upset about Twitter's decision to limit spread of the Hunter Biden laptop story (which was entirely unilateral, and reversed within 24 hours).

Both of these took place in 2020, when Trump was president, but of course Trump's greatest coup was to make everybody think Biden was president in 2020.

The administration put pressure on tech companies to make them censor people for "disinformation". For example:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/mark-zuckerbe...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...

Fair enough, I see that online all the time. Here’s my take.

Raising your hand alone is a common gesture that pretty much everyone has done. Saying “my heart goes out to you” gives plausible deniability. But making the hand gesture while clicking your heels together and snapping to attention with a stern jaw-jutting look on your face is pretty unmistakably a nazi salute.

Elon has publicly denied it was a nazi salute, but any normal person would go a step further and also disavow neo nazi ideology in the same breath. But doing that would break the dog whistle effect.

Some people say he’s just trolling, and yes, Elon likes to troll. But trolling or not, it has the same effect if you don’t also renounce neo nazism. It normalizes and shows you are comfortable with it.

Can I prove he’s a neo nazi? No I haven’t gone through his wallet and found his membership card. But his support for the AfD and all his great-replacement-theory adjacent talk are strong signals.

Musk's gestures: https://x.com/BartoSitek/status/1882081868423860315?t=8F0hL-...

Those other people's gestures: https://x.com/ExposingNV/status/1881647306724049116?t=CGKtg0...

Notice anything different?

No they haven't. You've likely been misled by seeing still images of their hand in that position, whereas if you see the video, then it's clearly nothing like a Nazi salute. Meanwhile, the video of Musk makes it incredibly clear that it's a Nazi salute and he has not denied that as far as I know.

His politics also seem to align very much with white supremacy and the far right.