Indeed, not a whole emerald mine, the same source:
We located reporting from as far back as 2009 and 2014 that said when Elon Musk (“Elon” hereafter) was a child in South Africa in the 1980s, his father (“Errol” hereafter) at some point owned “a stake in an emerald mine” near Lake Tanganyika in Zambia, not South Africa.
According to the article, the “rumor” started in 2014 when Elon went on an interview tour and SAID that his dad had an emerald mine to multiple publications. He told an elaborate story to one about riding in his dad’s plane full of emeralds and ak-47s
The research couldn’t find financial proof of any claimed debt, since Elon won’t provide any. But “hand shake” deals about illegal emerald smuggling tends not to have a paper trail.
Then, a year after this article came out, Elon tweeted “I’ll give a million doge to anyone who can prove it existed” and his dad replied that it existed and that Elon had been there.
Errol also went on an interview tour (after this article was posted) and told multiple publications that he did own a share of an emerald mining business. But Elon wasn’t lying because it technically wasn’t in a hole, but an outcropping!
Since changing his mind on the subject, Elon had since only admitted that his start up was supported by selling his own PC for 2k, a 5k gift from his “bro” and 8k from some other guy. But later a SmAaLL LoAn (as they like to say) of 200k from his dad and others. But that was later, you guys.
Everything I said was noted in the original source (including getting money from his dad, his own claims of being extremely wealthy, etc) but Elon’s subsequent tweet offering money for evidence and his dad replying to confirm that he owned one was great hilarity that I first saw on Reddit directly linking to Twitter.
I don’t get why people focus on the emerald mine aspect. Turning 200k into billions would be impressive regardless of where the initial cash came from, if he wasn’t just some lucky schmuck who’s shitty website got bought out in the Dotcom bubble.
Edit: Yikes, goes to show that Lemmy users can’t finish reading a comment lol
I’m not the person you replied to initially, I never said he didn’t have emerald money. Lol did you think it’s just you and one other person on the internet?
And apologist? The fuck are you talking about, my point is that Elon Musk is a fucking loser that won the lottery in the Dotcom bubble. Websites aren’t expensive, he didn’t need capital. He’s a narcissist who got lucky and mistook it for genius.
But seriously, can you people really not read two sentences before deciding someone is a “billionaire apologist”? Jesus dude.
“I don’t get why people focus on the emerald mine” and “Turning 200k into billions would be impressive no matter where the money came from” – both are things you said, both excuse the things we were talking about. Yes you called him a dip shit too. But apparently an impressive one.
I know you weren’t the initial comment, but this is a thread, which means you’re continuing a conversation. Away from the cruel exploitation of emeralds mines to who cares and he’s an impressive dip shit.
We’ll never know if 200k to billions is impressive because nobody else gets to have a 200k loan from their dad except wealthy people
I actually didn’t call him impressive. My quote: “would be impressive […], if he wasn’t […]”. But it is impressive that Elon Musk triggers so much rage in you that you can’t even read a comment that’s agreeing with you on what a fuck he is.
Have you ever actually had a conversation or do you just argue back and forth? This is how it works, you thread to related topics. This is a related topic.
Business loans don’t only come from a parent lol. Obviously the wealthy are born with a privilege that no bank loan can match, but there are wealthy entrepreneurs that didn’t start off with rich parents. There are also plenty of entrepreneurs that didn’t turn 200k into billions. I think we can pretty safely deduce that an ROI of 6 orders of magnitude is not standard practice, regardless of who your parents are. But again, you’re missing my point, that this “impressive feat” was actually all just dumb fucking luck.
“Nope just you” – You accused a dozen people who voted you down of not being able to read. You specifically said Lemmy users can’t read, so maybe the entire user base? By the way I didn’t vote down anything. You also tossed in a “you people” for good measure.
The “…” part dismisses the important bit of "regardless of where it came from. So it’s not read as “would be … if” but instead “would be … regardless” which might be everyone’s confusion by your comment?
Which doesn’t continue the conversation, but dismisses it.
I’m sure there are plenty of people getting 200k dollar loans out there. Vast vast majority? Nah. That’s the “we” I’m talking about. It at least seems like each billionaire came from rich families, even though it’s trendy to pretend they’re self made, but we can’t prove anything either way because it’s all hidden. Self made with Harvard connections for the win!
Oh, and yes I hate Elon Musk, like anyone who is using their power/influence to cause harm to others. Dude’s attacking Wikipedia right now for fucks sake.
People pile on downvotes before they finish reading a comment, welcome to the internet. If you think downvotes mean anything then you must be real new around here. But the bizarre part is that you’re still arguing like I’m disagreeing with you lol. You pretty much just expanded on what I said about wealth privilege in #4 in an argumentative strawmaney way to make an entirely different point than where we started, so who’s moving goalposts?
Got it, downvotes are random from stupid people who don’t read I guess. Except that time it was “just me” then it went back to the others, too, again.
Instead of arguing that you disagreed, I offered a suggestion of why (now 22 people) thought you were being dismissive or apologist or otherwise didn’t like your comment (unless they’re all just stupid and can’t read).
And replying to your thought on “plenty of entrepreneurs” is a strawman? You brought it up. I was talking about getting money from family. The ones who had college paid for and got family loans and pretend to be self made. Then you brought up bank loans and entrepreneurs. So I did what you said and continued the thread. Websites like to make lists of handfuls of people who didn’t do it with connections.
You might be thinking that getting an x-ray every day is bad for the miners, but this is a ye-olde look through machine. Yes it’s bad for the miners, but the guy looking at it is putting his face and uppee body right in the beam here. And I’m guessing he does hundreds of these a day.
Then again, old timey x-ray machines were pretty soft, so (edit) AND the miner is getting big dose of alpha and beta radiation too. And at least the technician isn’t breathing coal dust, so it’s probably a toss up who gets cancers first.
X-ray tubes, old and new, use high energy electrons that impact a metal to create the beam. Alpha and beta emission is from radioactive decay which is an entirely different phenomenon. But yes bathing your body in X-rays is bad for you
Sorry, I had a brainfart there. You’re completely right.
The tube itself emits xrays, but soft xrays have a very high chance of being absorbed by Carbon, Nitrogen and Oxygen. And since that’s mostly what makes up a human, that’s kinda bad.
Also he’s digging up diamonds, which is in rocks full of radioactive materials. Diamond mine tailings are famously radioactive (and interesting) due all the thorium and radium in them.
Both people in this picture are being abused by the company. The difference is that the company also lets the white guy abuse the black guy, and for that reason, the white guy feels superior.
This is one of those things you see in fascist governments. As long as people are able to abuse someone, they’ll accept a much worse station as well as a lot of abuse themselves.
@Tar_alcaran ... if the miners even lived long enough to get cancer.
Diamond miners during Apartheid were working in unsafe conditions for ridiculously low wages, often coerced into being there, and at relatively high risk of tuberculosis.
I’m happy to hear that the statu finally was put up. There was so much debate and arguments about it, mostly about it encouraging violence especially if taken out of context and also her still living family being unhappy with the portraition of her.
I remember the debates but I never actually heard how it ended.
The man hit by Danielsson was identified as Seppo Seluska, a militant from the Nordic Realm Party later convicted for the torture and murder of a gay Jew.
Runesson’s photograph was published the next day on the front page of the Swedish national newspaper Dagens Nyheter, and on April 15 by two British newspapers, The Times and The Daily Express.[3] Another photograph taken by Runesson during the event shows the 10 Neo-Nazis being chased, pelted with eggs and violently confronted by a crowd made up of hundreds of attendants of the left-wing rally joined by local Växjö residents. One of the Neo-Nazis was kicked unconscious on the ground, then saved by one of the protestors who reportedly took pity on him. The far-right activists eventually managed to shelter in the toilets of the city’s train station, hiding there for a few hours until the police transported them away.[3][5]
I think hitting them with a purse, throwing eggs and making them hide in toilets is fine, but the unconscious thing isn’t something I would recommend. They probably already have brain damage, they’re nazis.
B-but it's literally Nazism to refuse to tolerate Nazis!!!1! (Never mind the fact that tolerance would be the thirst thing to go in a Nazi-dominated society.)
This looks like a fluoroscope, basically an X-ray that is constantly turned on. The tech is looking at a live X-ray view, not a film transparency.
The radiologic exposure for both of them is orders of magnitude higher than a normal x-ray that we think about. A normal xray exposes you for less than a second, this is bombarding him with X-rays the entire time he is standing there.
It’s bad for them, but imagine this doctor. He has to examine every one of them every day. If he didn’t die of cancer he must not have lived very long.
Just because a guy in the past was a doctor doing shitty things is no reason to shit on x-ray techs. We really shouldn’t put one type of work above another.
X-ray techs don’t have a hippocratic oath to violate. That’s the thing separating the two in this context. If you don’t want to call him a technician, that’s fine, but he disqualified himself of being a doctor and I hope he got same the cancer he was giving out.
I dont understand why your shitting on this guy. Whats he supposed to do, organize a coup in the slave mine? How do you know the tech wasnt trafficked himself?
Basically the miners there are more likely to be coerced, through things like having been fined and the "pass" system, not trafficked.
In the case of the technician, he is almost certainly a free person. Working class whites normally earned at least 10x the wages in SA mines, even for the same job. But it is unclear whether he belongs to the Apartheid classification "white" or "coloured" (who had less rights and lower pay).
What people are shitting on is his participation in a system of oppression and segregation which devalued the lives of Black people. These mines had incredibly high tuberculosis rates too. He is also using medical technology in a reckless way that causes harm.
But I think you are right in pointing out that to some extent he is a victim of his situation /lack of education, even if he has more privileges and a better situation than the Black mine workers.
And no Dubya. I think in a long term view, Dubya was far more destructive than Trump has been so far. That of course could change if he gets reelected.
Dubya's Iraq delusions cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. But Dubya didn't threaten the fabric of our democracy, nor did he encourage internal divisions and hatred.
Without Dubya, we wouldn’t have Trump, Putin and possibly Xi. After Clinton the US had a very high prestige in the world and even their antagonists were more likely than not to try and not piss them off too much. After the Iraq invasion the US lost all claim to being not just another imperialistic power and this definitely emboldened the others. Any idea that rules and international law mattered went out of the window. Add to that the normalization of torture, unrestricted mass surveillance and open disregard for democracy and we have a lot of the ingredients for the mess we’re in right now. And let’s not forget the 2008 financial meltdown which contributed to the feeling of disenfranchisement that drives a lot of the present day political divisions. So in my view Dubya really fucked shit up and we’re all still paying the price.
Oh, Dubya DEFINITELY fucked shit up and set things in motion. He is one of the worst presidents, just above Ronald Reagan. But Trump, tied with Andrew Johnson, has him beat, I hold.
Dubya was fucking horrendous, but nothing compared to trump, the most damaging traitor in American history and potentially the proximal cause of the loss of the Republic.
Trump made the racists and fascists feel confident and united. Trump undermined our allies, all of our institutions, the courts, the judges, the police, the press, anyone who doesn’t do exactly what he wants. Dude invited Russia to flood our country with disinformation and conspiracy nonsense in a way that resulted in millions of unnecessary deaths during the pandemic. For a while it was like another September 11th was happening every single day. Even the most conservative numbers for death estimates from COVID are like 15 times the number of Americans who died in Vietnam. Dude tried to deploy troops in America against people who protested things he did. His administration was a formalized system of bribery, nepotism, and influence peddling. He tried to unilaterally pull the US out of NATO. Everyday was a nightmare of chaos and lies.
I’ve forgotten more horrible shit than I ever remember from the Bush years. Bush was George Washington compared to Trump. You can pin GWB with starting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and manufacturing the consent to get us there, but that’s about it. The whole war in Afghanistan is kind of overshadowed by the absolute disaster of the withdrawal, negotiated and agreed to by Trump’s administration with the sole purpose of tripping up Biden during his first 100 days, and he sold out our allies and loyalists to do it, not to mention majority of people in Afghanistan that never wanted the Taliban in charge. I agree GWB was the worst president since Andrew Jackson, but Trump is so, so much worse.
How would he be a martyr? Hinckley didn’t shoot him because of his politics, he shot him because he was insane and thought killing a president would make Jodie Foster notice him. He was originally planning to go after Jimmy Carter.
thought killing a president would make Jodie Foster notice him.
I have to wonder if that’s some narrative they came up with to prevent copy cats.
I know it’s a conspiracy thought, but at some point I realized the government has zero actual reason to be transparent with the public. They could really just say whatever they want and none of us would ever know the difference.
I’ve always thought that. It’s the same with a mass shooter decades back whose name I don’t know. They blamed a brain tumor, and maybe he really did have a brain tumor, but that the tumor caused the aggression and lack of emotional control that caused him to murder a bunch of strangers is an absolute wild fantasy, the plot of a bad movie, and represents at best an impossible to possibility, let alone probability. Took up in a tower and started blasting. He had a typical childhood, that was absolute abuse by modern standards, had all sorts of problems, was totally decompensating, and the feds and the media latched onto this brain tumor narrative. The scientists were absolutely clear that such a narrative was total speculation and that science had no ability to make such a determination, anyway.
It wasnt until this very moment that I realized I’d like to see a new Ace Ventura movie starring Jim Carey updated to match his years of experience of dramatic role expansion.
holy crap but makes sense. When I was a kid they did not initially use the lead covers and then later they did. Seems like between 70 and 80 they started treating them much more seriously.
And then someone pointed out the little measuring machine with the sliding parts on the ruler works just as well without the whole “staring into a primary x-ray beam all day” thing
Damn, here I thought I was living in a capitalist dystopia. Truly, the race mixers pulled one over on me. Must be the mixed blood in me making me vulnerable to communist brainwashing.
Wait, wait. I’m worried what you just heard was, “Give me a lot of bacon and eggs.” What I said was, “Give me all the bacon and eggs you have.” Do you understand?
It’s so EASY to operate even a WOMAN can do it! BUY the POWER MOWER OF THE FUTURE and you’ll have more time for YOU to drink BEER, SMOKE and beat the KIDS!
Oh, I wasn’t trying to invalidate your point. Personally I’m into Star Trek style meritocracy. If your wife is a bodybuilder she isn’t going to need to ask you to open the jar lid for her.
Violence against nazis ought to be legal. These are monsters who have committed genocide and routinely kill their target demographics. Punching a nazi is self-defence, this lady is a fucking hero.
This woman is a hero. Punching a Nazi is always right, but it's not always legal (nor should it be). I feel comfortable holding both of those stances at once.
yeah how cool would it be to have militias fighting in the streets again. the world is so boring without political violence and car bombs blowing up little children
You’re right. It’s even more justified to kick Nazis out of private spaces. If you let known Nazis into your space, it’s a Nazi space. Of course you can do other things to fight Nazis, but we must make ideas that are as terrible as fascism unacceptable in public. Ideally, we’d force cops to crack down on Nazis through laws. This would get rid of open Nazis while also forcing some of the worst cops off the force. Nazi cops would need to persecute people who think like them or risk losing their jobs.
Justification of genocide will never be acceptable, but as the bullshit between Israel and Palestine clearly shows, humanity isn’t ready to outlaw it. Due to the ludicrous destructive power humanity possesses, ideas incompatible with the existence of benign human difference are incompatible with peace. All popular religions can be just. All cultures can adjust themselves to exist with the rest of the world. However, tolerance has to be mutual, and if someone holds on to intolerance as an idea, we must not tolerate them for that idea. There is no peaceful or tolerant version of fascism, so it can never be allowed.
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