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Careless People

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Re: Careless People

#321

Post by 542354234235 »

generic92034 wrote: post #70
aredox wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He doesn't care about Tesla anymore. His president will kill EV subsidies and give them to coal. He never cared about the mission of Tesla, and anyone working at Tesla who still believes in it is a sucker.

So, why is he not selling all his Tesla stocks, then?

First of all, there has been a significant selloff by Tesla top executives, including over $10 billion by Musk in the past 3 years [1,2,3]. The main reason he can’t sell of more is that he is still fighting in court to get his insane $56 billion executive bonus, which would be primarily in Tesla stock [4]. I say insane because it is over 500 times larger than any bonus given by any other company ever and is equivalent to giving every other Tesla employee an almost half a million-dollar bonus. I think we will see a lot more sell offs once the outcome of that legal battle is done, whether it comes out positive or negative for Musk.

More broadly, I think Tesla’s general valuation is a house of cards that his been hyper inflated by years of Musk lying to investors about future sales, future products, and future features. He promised a million driverless taxi’s that would make $30,000 profit each year would be coming “next year” in 2019 [5], that full self driving was coming in an update “next month” in 2020 [6] and wildly incorrect capabilities of basically every product ever released.

[1] “four top officers at the company have offloaded over $100 million in shares since early February [2025]… Elon Musk's brother, Kimbal Musk, who also sits on the board, unloaded 75,000 shares worth approximately $27 million last month” https://abcnews.go.com/Business/tesla-board-members-executiv...

[2] “Musk sold a total of 41.5 million shares of Tesla stock between November 4 and December 12 [2024]… The sales came not long after a October 19, 2022 earning call in which he told investors ‘I can’t emphasize enough, we have excellent demand for Q4.’… But when Tesla reported fourth-quarter sales, they were far weaker than forecast, and that sent stocks down 12%, the worst day of trading for the stock in more than two years.” https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/04/business/musk-tesla-stock-sal...

[3] “Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Thursday he does not plan to sell any more shares of Tesla for at least the next two years, after the billionaire and nascent Twitter owner offloaded nearly $3.6 billion worth of stock this week [2022] as Tesla's share price tumbled.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2022/12/22/musk...

[4] https://www.investopedia.com/elon-musks-multi-billion-dollar...

[5] https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/22/tech/tesla-robotaxis/index.ht...

[6] https://www.whichcar.com.au/news/tesla-level-five-absurd-say...

Re: Careless People

#322

Post by devin »

onion2k wrote: post #287
scruple wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea. What I do know is that there's no degree of hard work or talent that will make me a billionaire.

I'd argue that every billionaire has a talent for persuading capable people to join them on a journey. Having that skill alone isn't enough because you also need to pick the right journey at the right time, but not having that skill definitely means you won't be a billionaire.

Meh. If you get lucky once and make a chunk of money or were born into money, people will associate that success with skill rather than luck, and follow you hoping that luck repeats. You don't need the skill if you can point at a big house and a nice car.

Re: Careless People

#323

Post by dogleash »

optymizer wrote: post #280
xdkyx wrote: post #73

This may be a little naive from my side, but I'm wondering - is every big tech company the same as Meta and it's leadership? Or is there something special, a perfect storm of circumstances that we only hear so much about so many instances of outright - can't even find the right word here - evil, stupidity, brashness? If we assume that every big (let's say FAANG) company is the same, why we hear about Meta time and ti…

I was the TL on a Facebook app feature driven by us, the engineers, that was 100% in the category of "good for humanity and it solves a problem for billions of people". I had to fight internal org leads to launch it, because there was almost no benefit for FB. Jane leaked the feature and put this entire 'evil Facebook' shade on it, with no real proof, just wildly false speculation based on what she thought the featur…

You did something good while working for the devil, people were right to be suspect. You gain no redemption points from pointing out the people describing facebook as evil misunderstand the precise bounds of facebook's evil.

Also, you didn't address parent's question about the uniqueness (or lackthereof) of Meta. Feeling targeted because people on the outside don't have the visibility to properly understand the nature of the evil is shared with at least 3/4 of the remaining FAANG letters.

Re: Careless People

#324

Post by dartharva »

drdrek wrote: post #83

This is exactly the type of people the cultural purge in big tech came to flush out. Trying to change a multi billion dollar company from the inside is delusional, self serving, narcissistic and ineffective. Who the hell do you think you are in the great machine of 100,000+ employees companies, of billions invested in them. The change is going to be political, regulatory. These companies always can't change until reg…

That's what the author (the linked blog's author, not the book's) also believes and concludes his post with.

Re: Careless People

#325

Post by dartharva »

baritone wrote: post #54

I look forward to reading the book, but I’m not anti-Zuck. Individuals can change the world. Groups with ideology can change the world. This is why many of us are here at HN- for the discussion of ideas and for idealism. Few want to be supreme jerks that ruin things on a massive scale. Zuck, if you’re reading this- thanks for being part of the thing that allowed me to continue communication with my friends when they…

You talk as if you'd have had no other means of communication had Facebook not existed. Your delusion would have been funny had you not also implied you intend to subject your children to the same poison too.

Please, for God's sake, don't.

Re: Careless People

#326

Post by caseyy »

diggan wrote: post #113
caseyy wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many things to be said about open-source projects and, more broadly, the capabilities of the open-source community. The most capable parts are for-profit organizations that release open-source software for their business imperative, public benefit companies that write open-source software for ideological reasons but still operate as businesses, and a tiny number of public benefit organizations with unstable…

I think you've kind of answered a different question. Yes, more LLM models could be created. But specifically Llama? Since it's an open source model, the assumption is that we could (given access to the same compute of course) train one from scratch ourselves, just like we can build our own binaries of open source software. But this obviously isn't true for Llama, hence the uncertainty if Llama even is open source in…

I understand I was supposed to say “no” and question the open-source label. We’ve heard many arguments that if something can’t be reproduced from scratch, it’s not true open-source.

To me, they sound a bit like “no true Scotsman”. Llama is open source, compared to commercial models with closed weights. Even if it could be more open source.

That’s why I looked at it in a broader sense — what could happen in an open-source world to improve or replace Llama. Much could happen, thanks to Llama’s open nature, actually.

Re: Careless People

#327

Post by siavosh »

sokoloff wrote: post #318
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do. 108 Billion humans have ever lived on planet earth. 8 billion-ish currently. Most of them live lives that in no way reflected on their hard work and talent, but rather their circumstances, starting with where and when they were born but encompassing a million different contingencies outside the control of their hard work or talent. So do you think you have talent and hard work greater than 99% of those many bil…

Pick any of those 8 billion. Have them work half as hard. Have them have half as much talent. Do their outcomes remain the same , get better, or get worse? You’re arguing that there are other factors that also influence outcomes (and that those other factors are stronger forces). I agree with that point, but that’s not a refutation to the notion that the coefficients on talent and hard work are positive, nor a convin…

Can anyone benefit from working 10% harder or smarter? Undoubtedly. But success isn’t linear. It’s clear from the zeitgeist that the ultra-rich and powerful—past or present—aren’t working a million percent harder or smarter; their positions are more accurately explained by structural advantages. The first million might be 95% hard work and talent. The next million, probably a bit less so.

Re: Careless People

#328

Post by sepositus »

hermitcrab wrote: post #214
piva00 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't listened to the talk but read Mobiot's book when it came out last year :) On the same vein, I'd recommend "Capitalist Realism" by Mark Fisher, Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine", and even the original "A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto" by Charles Peters to understand how the term is slippery and diverged a lot from the original manifesto. And I'm not an anti-market, full-blown communism person. The feeling I have is t…

>And I'm not an anti-market, full-blown communism person Also, it is interesting that you feel the need to say you aren't a communist before criticising the current system. I guess that is a sign of just how entrenched it is.

I see it more as a sign of how few mainstream alternatives have been proposed. I've been guilty of generally assuming a communist bent when I see a negatively zealous response to the "free market" ideology. I don't act on the assumption, but from my experience, it tends to be the most common result.

Our political system seems hell-bent on only ever having two solutions to a problem, though.

Re: Careless People

#329

Post by jkestner »

optymizer wrote: post #280
xdkyx wrote: post #73

This may be a little naive from my side, but I'm wondering - is every big tech company the same as Meta and it's leadership? Or is there something special, a perfect storm of circumstances that we only hear so much about so many instances of outright - can't even find the right word here - evil, stupidity, brashness? If we assume that every big (let's say FAANG) company is the same, why we hear about Meta time and ti…

I was the TL on a Facebook app feature driven by us, the engineers, that was 100% in the category of "good for humanity and it solves a problem for billions of people". I had to fight internal org leads to launch it, because there was almost no benefit for FB. Jane leaked the feature and put this entire 'evil Facebook' shade on it, with no real proof, just wildly false speculation based on what she thought the featur…

What was the app feature you worked on?

Re: Careless People

#330

Post by dreamcompiler »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #9

> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet). Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have th…

I think power sometimes leads to this kind of insecurity, but a bigger factor is that people with narcissistic personalities often succeed because ordinary people are unaccustomed to dealing with them. Narcissists often come off as unusually competent, confident, and intimidating. This leads normies to want to follow them and give them what they want.

Narcissists are always extremely insecure, usually because someone crushed their ego during childhood. (There also exist people with intact egos who are simply arrogant; I'm not talking about them. The arrogant are easy to distinguish from narcissists after you study them a bit.)

My point is that Zuck was probably very insecure before the creation of FB, and he became rich partially because he was an insecure narcissist.

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