I worry the narrative here is going off the rails.
A huge part of the Epstein saga was that he had connections to everyone, everywhere across finance, academia, entertainment, non-profits, etc and that he was constantly cultivating relationships, making and requesting introductions, giving and asking favors, etc.
Only a tiny percent of the connections ever had any interaction with sex workers or exploited girls. In many cases, Epstein was clearly using the girls as bait, to later blackmail or otherwise have leverage over men in positions of power.
The mere fact that someone interacted with Epstein shouldn't be treated as a smoking gun, if the emails are just related to regular business, fundraising, networking, etc, the odds are the person had no clue about Epstein's criminal activities and that they were in fact just 'marks' Epstein was using to grow his network of influence.
Obviously we all want the criminals to face judgement and the victims to feel justice has been done, but we can't accomplish that by just declaring the thousands of people who met Epstein to all be guilty by association.
When I was a kid the Detroit automakers bought air filters manufactured at a factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin and brake pads manufactured in Peoria, Illinois and lubricants from Fort Wayne, Indiana.
And the people working in those places provided the customer base for local and regional financial services, along with the rest of the commercial base that made small towns and provincial cities good places to live and raise a family throughout the 20th century.
And of course, a household only needed one person employed, so there was less pressure to move to a bigger city that could provide opportunities for two different careers.
> Remember that Musk grew up in Apartheid South Africa
And cited his opposition to apartheid as the central reason that he left the country as soon as he could, at age 17, because he didn't want to be a part of that system.
There are so many legitimate reasons to criticize Musk, but this isn't one.
You didn't mention how "opposition to apartheid" also meant avoiding mandatory military service. Interesting coincidence, I would say. Serious question: if one cared about ending Apartheid, wouldn't it be much more effective to do that from within South Africa than from across the ocean?
Considering who he is now, what he wants politically, who he supports and how he treats his employees ... is there really anything about him that makes it sound like a real reason?
Being a market maker doesn't provide any special information. I'm guessing someone misunderstood something like Level II quotes (https://www.investopedia.com/articles/trading/06/level2quote...) as being information that hedge funds / investment banks / pros have that retail traders don't... but it's just semi-public information that anyone can pay for access to.
Jane Street also isn't doing pump and dumps, they're not in crypto discord channels hyping some coin or running bot farms of twitter accounts to talk up some stock.
They run several different types of trading that might interact with other people attempting pump & dumps though, which could impact in either direction- plausibly they might do a momentum trade that follows the direction of movement or they might recognize a price discrepancy happening and trade against it.
More accurately, they have complex models pulling in many, many signals to inform trading, and I'm being a bit reductionist to categorize it as these two things.
That's not fringe at all. That was a claim made by anti-drug commercials that ran on TV across the US so frequently that it was satirized by South Park in 2002.
This seems like a lot of different people voicing different opinions and talking past each other. Roughly, I think you're jumping into the middle of a hypothetical conversation that went like this:
Person A: "It's bad that we throw people in prison for pot, and use possession of pot as a subtext under which to harass people, perform warrantless searches, etc. We should just legalize it."
Person B: "But it might be bad for children and teenagers if they get access to it"
Person A: "Okay fine, we legalize it for people over the age of 21, happy now?"
Person A could be said to have compromised or ceded-ground to person B here, even though they themselves might actually not even disagree.
It's maybe slightly less trivial to do, but still incredibly common to buy awards, recognition, press releases, positive reviews and commentary in publications.
You might be shocked to find out how much the performers being written about in magazines or discussed on TV shows is a direct line to the production company promoting them. Similar for awards.
> You might be shocked to find out how much the performers being written about in magazines or discussed on TV shows is a direct line to the production company promoting them. Similar for awards.
I mean Payola as a term literally came from bribing DJs on radio stations to play your / your artist's music.
For the same people accept Tether's claims of solvency even though they refuse audits and obviously lie about ownership of various assets. For the same reason people ignore wash trading. For the same reason people continue using Sam-coins even after FTX's implosion.
Because A) they're not paying attention, B) they're in denial and C) because they think they can profit in the short term before it collapses, or that the odds are in their favor to profit despite the risks.
The parent comment, and the series of messages they linked to, are such peak "terminally online" content that I suspect nothing one can write here can help.
The paranoia and distrust is so intense that every statement will be seen as a coded phrase, "dog whistle" or obscure reference to some sinister thing.
Which is particularly unfortunate, because I think Elon's tweet is genuinely wrong and bad. But it kinda feels like these people need to disconnect from the internet and go for a walk. Maybe have a real life conversation with a real life regular person on the other side of the political aisle.
What are you talking about? This rhetoric isn't a dogwhistle anymore, it's literal neonazi language going back to the David Duke/KKK days. Same for so-called "remigration" which has been coming up with stunning regularity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remigration. When I was growing up you would become a social pariah for spouting this kind of stuff.
I don't get it. Are you waiting for someone to literally say "I fucking hate brown people and love Hitler" before calling them out? For what it's worth, we're basically already there. See Trump's recent remarks about Somalis. EDIT: and somehow I forgot the time when Young Republicans were LITERALLY PRAISING HITLER, then doubled down when exposed: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/14/private-chat-among-...
You're blind to what you don't care to see, I guess. As for people on the opposite side of the political aisle from me, they're busy dragging Latino children out of schools and abducting people who overstayed their visa to Salvadoran torture camps, or supporting the same, so fuck their inhuman politics very much indeed.
The social media post you orig linked to has none of that
While I agree with the general problem, you do yourself a disservice by using such a poor example with so many more potent ones out there. You also do a disservice to the movement to fight back by making easy examples for "look at how out of touch they are" (i.e. making mountains out of mole hills when you could point out the actual mountains)
Sure, there may be more pressing matters than the richest man in the world enthusiastically boosting Tweets that describe Western civilization as getting raped to death by the unnamed (you-know-who-I-mean) Others, but it is absolutely part of the same white nationalist zeitgeist, lexicon, and community. The rhetoric Musk uses is *identical* to what Miller and the White House, Reform, AfD, etc. are using to dehumanize immigrants and to direct racial hate and violence towards them. And it’s just one example out of hundreds.
I can’t do anything about Miller being a ghoul, but if I can help one or two people have second thoughts about using Twitter or Grok, it will be well worth it.
The dynamic seems to be identifying some phrasing as a secret neo-Nazi dogwhistle and haranguing people who use it. However, that doesn't effect any change, so a new word has to be identified as secretly neo-Nazi. Repeat ad infinitum, until the terminally online exist in such a rarefied universe that 99% of all humans are secret neo-Nazis.
This is bad, because it both 1) waters down actual neo-Naziism (which is fringe and rare) and worse 2) alienates people to the point where they support non-neo-Nazi but bad policy.
(For me personally, my take on "Western Civilization" is along the lines of Gandhi: I think it'd be a wonderful idea.)
An interesting secondary affect of this, is that today Wikipedia is flooded with misleading attribution in the opposite direction, from presumably well-meaning groups and individuals who are overzealous in their goal of writing the women back into the record.
I'm of the view that acknowledging the systemic discrimination that prevented women, Black people, and even working-class whites from having the opportunity to pursue scientific research historically is better than rewriting history to elevate tangential assistants into leading researchers. But, maybe diverse representation in the stories we tell is more important for the future than accuracy of those stories, it's hard to know.
A huge part of the Epstein saga was that he had connections to everyone, everywhere across finance, academia, entertainment, non-profits, etc and that he was constantly cultivating relationships, making and requesting introductions, giving and asking favors, etc.
Only a tiny percent of the connections ever had any interaction with sex workers or exploited girls. In many cases, Epstein was clearly using the girls as bait, to later blackmail or otherwise have leverage over men in positions of power.
The mere fact that someone interacted with Epstein shouldn't be treated as a smoking gun, if the emails are just related to regular business, fundraising, networking, etc, the odds are the person had no clue about Epstein's criminal activities and that they were in fact just 'marks' Epstein was using to grow his network of influence.
Obviously we all want the criminals to face judgement and the victims to feel justice has been done, but we can't accomplish that by just declaring the thousands of people who met Epstein to all be guilty by association.