The only human being Elon Musk cares about is himself. He is a profound narcissist.

THEY'RE STILL WORKING ON REACTOS?!

Next you'll tell me Haiku is still an option.

"If people start flocking to Linux"

Will this be the year of Linux on the desktop?!?

Slow down, sometimes it takes a few years, or 32 years in this case, to get something right.

Waymo or Tesla? Waymo is so far ahead of Tesla that how can even the most gullible investor think they are every going to catch up?

Fair!

No, I don't have severe cognitive decline

He fell asleep at his own Cabinet meeting.

Energy experts too, which is probably more credible than a minimally-educated dementia patient.

Great advertising for their AI.

They have been saying that since the 1990's. We've constantly been told that personal hardware would be pointless and everything is going back to old school server-workstation architecture, and it still hasn't happened.

"He'll be milquetoast and set it up such that the theorcracy can agitate and con it's way back into powe within a few years."

Is he milquetoast or can he set it up so the theocracy can come back? Seem like mutually contradictory things.

Anyway, the Iranians want the Shah. There is no organized internal opposition force, he's moderately well-respected, he hates the theocracy (so why would he reinstate it?), and he's pledged supporting democracy.

The Sam Altman types, and the Thiel/Musk types especially, want technofeudalism with them on top. For some of them the "good of society" factors in but it is always after this.

We would certainly be at a disadvantage if Russia was able to copy rockets that constantly blew up shortly after launch.

Telescreen monitoring would have required a crazy amount of manpower.

Probably the closest real-world analog was the East German Stasi, which may have accounted for nearly 1 in 6:

The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi's case, there would have been at least one spy watching every 66 citizens! When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens. It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests. Like a giant octopus, the Stasi's tentacles probed every aspect of life.

— John O. Koehler, German-born American journalist, quoted from Wikipedia