A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Apr 9, 2023

So the world’s smartest man is out there, doing the sort of stuff that the world’s smartest man does.

Everybody knows he’s the world’s smartest man, because he’s the world’s richest man—though maybe not anymore, but let’s table that quibble, because these things are difficult to track, and whatever his ranking, he’s possessed of a wealth inherited from the wreckage of an apartheid state that he’s now grown into a boodle as massive and indestructible as a continent.

https://armoxon.substack.com/p/the-worlds-smartest-man-doesnt-want

The World's Smartest Man Doesn't Want You to Read This on Twitter

Let this sink in.

The Reframe
Show threadA.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Apr 9, 2023

Having indestructible wealth means he’s the smartest man in the world. If you were the world’s smartest man, after all, you’d have turned your inheritance into the world’s largest fortune, and since you haven’t done that, you aren’t the world’s smartest man. Why, you might not even be a man, the definition of which is something the world’s smartest man seems to have some opinions about.

Where was I? Oh yeah, the world’s smartest man. He’s doing the sort of things the world’s smartest man does.

Show threadA.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Apr 9, 2023

He’s sending us to Mars by 2022, for example. Well, that was the timeline in 2017. I think it’s something like 2028 now, which is about how far in the future 2022 was in 2017, I notice.

It’s a specific amount of time: soon enough to get excited that the smartest man in the world is sending us to Mars, but not so soon that we pack our bags.

I don’t know if he’s defined “us,” but one thing is clear: the world’s smartest man is sending some value of “us” to Mars, and you shouldn’t doubt it.

Show threadA.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Apr 9, 2023
Oh! and he’s saving the world by moving it from fossil fuels to electric—electric cars, that is. The world’s smartest man bought a pretty slick electric car company from people less smart than him, who created the actual technology. Luxury cars are an attainable thing for everyone in the world who needs transportation, that’s for sure, and so it will definitely scale globally in ways mass public transportation will not—which is the sort of thing you know if you are the world’s smartest man.
Show threadA.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Apr 9, 2023
And the world’s smartest man seems particularly adept at saying things that will make the market excited in one way or another, either in a positive way or a negative way, and he seems fairly adept also at, before he says these sorts of things, doing things with the stocks of his publicly traded company that will benefit him, even if it doesn’t benefit for example his company or his shareholders or anybody else. It’s the sort of thing you know how to do when you are the very smartest.
Show threadA.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Apr 9, 2023

Or for example he is going to build a hyperloop that will revolutionize transportation. It’s only going to cost 10 billion of our Earth dollars to build and it’s going to be like a "cross between a Concorde and a railgun and an air hockey table" according to him. It’s going to use magnetic levitation and vacuum-sealed tubes to transport people at 700 mph to their destinations.

It also never worked and was never even built or even funded.

Show threadA.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Apr 9, 2023
High speed rail is, unlike the hyperloop, something can be built and would transport people at high speeds. You might think the world’s smartest man proposed the hyperloop specifically to prevent high speed rail from being built, but you may only think that b/c you are not the world’s smartest man who happens to own a car company, and also he admitted to his biographer that this was exactly what he hoped would happen to California's high speed rain plan, in the context of his proposed hyperloop.
Show threadCharlie StrossApr 9, 2023
@JuliusGoat Footnote: high speed rail is something that HAS BEEN BUILT FOR OVER FIFTY YEARS NOW, AND IS PROVEN TO WORK AND EVEN TURN A PROFIT (when treated as infrastructure with benefits for the wider economy rather than crudely assessed against cars or planes without accounting for the associated highways/airports and road deaths).
Show threadDenis BuckleyApr 9, 2023

@cstross @JuliusGoat

Hi Speed Rail?
Except when it's built by the incompetent Tory administrations that've been in power here for the last 13 years!

Show threadCharlie Stross
@wellingtonrock @JuliusGoat It's hard to remember now but the UK led Europe in high speed rail in the mid-seventies. Only then … Thatcher!
Apr 9, 2023 at 2:18pmWeb