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posted by n1 on Tuesday April 25 2017, @05:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the kings-of-debt dept.

CNN reports:

A full-page ad in the Sunday editions of the Washington Post and The New York Times urged Tesla CEO Elon Musk to "dump Trump."

The ads were paid for by a startup investor named Doug Derwin. The longtime Silicon Valley resident told CNNMoney he shelled out $400,000 to run ads in the Times and the Post, as well as the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News.

It's the latest step in Derwin's $1 million bid to convince Musk he's failing environmentalists. He calls it "Elon Dump Trump."

Derwin said he didn't want to launch the campaign at first. Back in January, he was eagerly awaiting the arrival of his Tesla (TSLA) Model S electric car.

But as his Tesla was about to be delivered, Derwin said he caught wind of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick's decision to walk away from Trump's business advisory council, which Kalanick served on with Musk. Kalanick had previously defended his working relationship with President Trump, but public pressure mounted in the wake of the president's immigration order.

That's a lot of money allocated to deprive Trump of ostensibly good advice.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @03:43PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @03:43PM (#499338)

    Do we assume that this would necessarily be good advice because we like Musk, being the modern-age Howard Hughes? What about the very rich and successful Goldman Sachs people Trump is surrounded by? They are very successful and motivated people, but we assume they give bad, self-serving advice because we don't like them. Why is it a given that Musk's advice will be altruistic and not self-serving of him and his various enterprises?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @05:31AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @05:31AM (#499848)

    Because for going on two decades Musk has been shown himself, over and over, willing to risk it all for endeavors that aren't about maximizing profit but about maximal benefit to society.

    If you want to actually make money then starting an electric car company and an aerospace company are not exactly your top picks. And Musk wasn't just collecting the big venture capital bucks back then. He put literally everything he had on the line to keep these two companies going even when it looked like there was a very good chance both would collapse. There's even a nice joke about it. How do you become a millionaire in the aerospace industry? Start out a billionaire. Lots of really smart guys, including for instance John Carmack, gave a go of the aerospace industry, and they all simply failed. Non-combustion vehicles have an even worse progeny.

    Banks, by contrast, have shown themselves over and over more than happy to screw every single person in the world if that's what it takes to increase their margin 1%.