I'm not the one who brought up Bill Gates.
No, I did mostly as an example of someone who could have been richer than Musk is or ever was by just
not giving things away
and didn't ruin his credibility. You're the one who viewed this giving things away and not ruining his own credibility as 'buying indulgences'.
I like that you can only argue with straw men.
I like that whenever you accuse me of that you end up arguing the thing you claim was a straw man of my making anyway.
First off, I said nothing about virtue signaling.
No, that was theprestige, who I also quoted because I was also responding to him. Did you see that? His post was the far larger one.
Nor did I say anything about any limit to the number of ways one could earn money. And none of the complaints you bring up here were even under discussion. What was being discussed was Musk making public statements that promised more than he was able to deliver.
What was under discussion were the ways that Musk ruins his own credibility. You were talking about a more narrow way, I expanded it, and now you're complaining that it was wrong to expand it because...my example was too good? Gates shows that all the 'well Musk made money' arguments about how
any given criticism of Musk handwave is wrong. For all his faults, all the ways he did anti-competitive things and should have been
more subject to anti-trust laws, Gates mostly didn't behave anything close to the way Musk has. You might argue that Jobs did that much more, but the criticism isn't that acting that way never works, but that you can still be critical of it because there are examples where it wasn't employed that did.
And even though that's not the only way to make money, Musk has been making money doing this. So why would he change? Do you think that analysis is wrong? You haven't actually indicated why.
If your 'prosperity gospel' adjacent reasoning is to be held as the only valid metric (it isn't but more on that below), then it's worth pointing out that he has also
lost a LOT of money doing this. It isn't remotely a stretch to point out that one tends to make more money when you don't ruin your own credibility. Musk made more before he set his on fire.
My post had nothing to do with supporting anything. It was merely an observation about human nature. People don't usually change their behavior unless they have an incentive to do so, and 8enotto didn't suggest any incentive for Musk to change what he was complaining about. Nothing about that simple fact of human nature is in any way peculiar to capitalism, so trying to insert your pet peeve into this when it had nothing to do with it isn't really showing me up.
Capitalism in general isn't a pet peeve of mine (I advocate for mixed systems), but the fact that you are talking about the incentives for these behaviors
and specifically citing making money as the valid metric for rewards, while at the same time pretending that the
capitalist system these specific behaviors by this specific person has nothing to do with your argument is fairly damning about your grasp of the subject or your honesty regarding your argument.
To break it down for you, Musk did these things in a capitalist system with incentive structures almost completely dominated by capitalism. There is nothing mitigating by claiming 'these aren't peculiar to capitalism'. It just doesn't have to be for it be where it is happening.
Which is where we come back to theprestige's complaint about 'indulgences' and your failure to consider incentives outside of 'making the most money' (a purely capitalistic framing); Bill Gates didn't make money giving his money away. What
incentives did he have for that? By your framing, what? Oh, that's right, people being critical of them and giving them valid reasoning to do things differently
could be an incentive even if it doesn't make money. Why couldn't you conceive of that? Why did theprestige think that the reasoning had to be 'buying indulgences' and not being convinced through reasoning? Why is social acceptance and acclaim not a valid incentive to you?
Now I would also argue that these incentives and disincentives are not enough and should be combined with a much stronger regulatory state. More enforcement and better laws protecting worker's rights, anti-trust, anti-fraud, and just basic oversight are needed. You know, the exact incentive structures that I from experience know you personally tend to be against, which is in line with an extreme formulation of capitalism, which Musk also endorses.
Pretending to not see the connection strains credibility. Some people
care about that in general, even if in specific it can be wise to disregard how one is viewed by specific groups.
