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Musk patent
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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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what?
I think they are either refering to child labor in cobalt mines, which was used for Tesla power elements, or to his father's emerald mines. There's no evidence of direct people-owning slavery in either case, still a lot of shady and immoral (and probably illegal) practices to earn money in both of them.
His parents owned an emerald mine during apartheid where the working conditions for miners (all black, of course) could accurately be described as slavery. He was literally walking around with emeralds in his pockets like some fucked up little prince.
Anyway, that's how he got his startup capital.
Billionaires being pieces of crap, what a surprise.
Yeah, almost as surprising as rain in Scotland or drought in the Sahara 🤷
There's no need for anyone in the western world to frown upon that. Literally all of us started out with the wealth that our ancestors violently extracted from colonies.
Just because you didn't personally inherit millions doesn't change the structural fact. All our industries jump-started by getting stuff from colonies. It was a big rush among the colonizers, and those who didn't do successful colonize are not among "first world" countries today.
Musk is guilty of much, but his sin in benefiting from his parents sins is different from yours only in scale.
Except I don't deny my privilege, which is on such another scale as to be in a completely different world.
Besides, he doesn't just pretends to be self-made, he downright believes that his success comes from him being a genetically superior genius. He is consciously siring as much offspring as he possibly can (10 so far, 9 surviving, one of which publicly disowned him) to provide the world with future heroes. To call him a regular level narcissist would be akin to call a tiger a slightly oversized house cat.
Lastly, I refuse to buy Nestlé products because some of them were made using slavery. Musk made his first fortune on the backs of slaves, treats his current employees as similarly to slaves as he can get away with and subjects them to both racist and sexual abuse.
I may have the privilege of being born a cishet white male in a rich country, but that does NOT mean that I'm the equivalent of Apartheid Emerald Boy. Scale matters and immense differences in scale matter immensely.