I like how in today’s world and especially when it comes to Musk things cannot be as simple as incompetence. It has to be some 4D chess move. Like a reverse Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which might be/maybe/perhaps explained by 4D chess move. It’s like 4chan leaking all over the Internet. And Musk can keep his genius legacy alive.
is it really 4D chess to imagine that a man under investigation by the federal government would desire to benefit from being given express permission to reduce force and efficacy of agencies directly threatening him?
I don't think Musk having bad faith intent shows him to be intelligent, more just greedy and selfish, but I think it's actually more irresponsible to believe that he had absolutely no idea what he was doing
That falls under “dishonest stuff companies do all the time”. Unless there are major political points to be scored by nailing him (which there may be now, don’t get me wrong), this would get a slap on the wrist. The cars do drive themselves, they have for awhile, Tesla never claimed it was perfect, they only claimed it would be perfect in the near future and musk plausibly could have (delusionally) thought this so there is no case (not saying he isn’t dishonest, though, that’s just not how the legal system works).
So I don’t think being looked at for the kind of stuff many companies do all the time explains <checks notes> infiltrating the government and personally disrupting the people investigating him, in public. If he’s worried about a financial hit, souring Tesla’s reputation as he has is obviously not worth it. If he’s worried about prosecution, surely he would be better off being nice to everyone in politics, not pissing anyone off and strongly supporting choice causes off the mainstream radar that happen to be in the interest of politicians.
So if he is doing it on principle, he just needs to be hubristic and reckless and possibly very autistic. If he is doing it to mess with the people investigating him, he needs to be outright stupid.
Hubristic and reckless (and autistic) are much, much more realistic adjectives for Musk than “outright stupid”. I know a lot of people will just assert that he is stupid, but if you yourself are sufficiently intelligent and you listen to the guy talk for a long time, you can at least tell he isn’t stupid. You can tell because he doesn’t do the rhetorical things stupid people need to do in order to mask contradictions or logical holes in what they are saying. They always do it. Even smart people sometimes do it quite a bit, like Steven Pinker for example m. Musk very rarely does it, and when he does it’s so completely obvious you can tell he’s bad at it and didn’t get where he is by being good at it.
It's not 4D chess to hurt the agencies that regulate and investigate you. It's the opposite of 4D chess. There is no secret plan, not conspiracy theory, no clever chess move.
