The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, continues to burnish his reputation of having the world’s thinnest skin as he lashes out at Crikey reporting about his lack of technical ability.
Earlier this week, Crikey published a wide-ranging interview with the Australian co-creator of Dogecoin, Jackson Palmer, talking about cryptocurrency, grifting, Clive Palmer and… Elon Musk.
Palmer recounted an interaction he had with Musk that showed the billionaire businessman lacked basic coding skills.
“I gave it to other crypto influencers,” Palmer said. “Elon reached out to me to get hold of that script and it became apparent very quickly that he didn’t understand coding as well as he made out. He asked, ‘How do I run this Python script?'”
(Python is one of the world’s most popular coding languages. Running some code written in Python — known as a script — is a very basic task that any person with basic technical capacity can do on a standard desktop computer.)
Despite ostensibly running a handful of companies and being in the midst of a maelstrom over sexual misconduct accusations, Musk responded to Palmer’s claims, which he presumably came across during his routine consumption of Crikey.
“You falsely claimed ur lame snippet of Python gets rid of bots. Ok buddy, then share it with the world …” Musk tweeted.
Palmer quickly responded that he had in fact made this script public back in 2018. That didn’t deter the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive officer from continuing to mouth off about Palmer, calling him a “tool” and claiming that his children could write better code.
The claim that Elon Musk couldn’t complete a basic programming task clashes with his carefully crafted public image as a visionary, hands-on technocrat. He’s also been a big booster of Palmer’s Dogecoin in the past.
Despite his involvement in the creation of the memecoin-turned-top-cryptocurrency, Palmer has denounced cryptocurrency.
There’s a vast swirling sea of programming languages – Pythons popularity is relatively new but there’s plenty of places where it wouldn’t be used.
“How do you run this?” is a reasonable question if he’s never used python. I’ve never used python in anger, or go or rust or PHP or TCL or lisp or Lua …
Mind you I no longer care about such things and none of the above means Musk isn’t a dick. But he’s not a dick because he’s never used python.
What stands out more than his knowledge of software environments and willingness to google or not, is that despite his growth to become a world leader in certain fields, he has not shaken off his adolescent cultural affectations.
Insult humour and gratuitous oneupmanship are handicaps unbefitting of a person of Musk’s stature.
Never used PHP, TCL or Lisp? Wow you are missing out on so much fun :P. Musk may be a dick, but it’s not because he didn’t know how to run Python
You can be a very experienced programmer and yet have never run a Python script. Musk was entitled to ask ‘how do I run this?’. Of course he could have looked it up using a search engine but perhaps he wanted to get to know the person who sent it. Programmers tend to get tunnel vision and think that the coding world they live in is everyone else’s coding world. A bit odd to broadcast a personal interaction like that with the whole world.
Fantastic that the world has another guy to volunteer to do mental gymnastics in defense of a billionaire.
Your argument is really that Elon asked “how do I run this?” as some sort of opener for a conversation with a random person that wrote an anti-spam script? The same Elon Musk that literally has hoards of crypto boys publicly expressing their utter disbelief that anyone wouldn’t want to see his penis because “he’s the world’s richest man”? Can you honestly in your heart of hearts say that you legitimately believe that?
I am a software developer and have dealt with all sorts of brash developer personalities. I have never ever experienced the specific sort of tunnel vision you are describing. Developer tunnel vision is thinking that a software development or computing skillset is the only valid display of intelligence or competency. This is not what Palmer did. He specifically called Musk out on his weird portrayal of being some sort of ‘tech genius’ instead of just being a dweeb with money and a fetish for computers.
I’m just a very experienced computer programmer who has never run a Python script. And I’ve worked with ‘boss types’ who ask how to do relatively simple things. The interaction seemed pretty normal to me, not really worth any print space. Certainly not some ‘gotcha’.
The implication I got was that ‘programmers should be able to run Python scripts’. That’s all I meant by ‘tunnel vision’.
If I call you a “tool” and claim my children could write a better comment to Crikey than you, Chris Murphy, would you think I am a great leader of men?
What if I call you a “pedo guy”?
I was speaking about Musk in the guise of a fairly average IT manager. I was just speaking about the initial interaction, not the follow up from Musk.
Musk rating the code is fair game I think. He’s obviously the kind of person who likes to hit back. However the “pedo guy” bit over-does it – makes him appear to have the sensitivity of a child. In my book Musk’s need to over-react would disqualify him from getting very far in life. Obviously I need to revise my book…
The final chapter on Musk hasn ‘t been written. It won’t end nicely for the PEDO GUY.
I’m also a, now retired, experienced programmer who’s never run a python script.
I agree it’s not the only measure of technical ability. OTOH, I’d do a quick search on how to run it before shooting my mouth off.
Get to know him and to save some time too. You can’t really separate those two. Palmer presented as a ‘timely solutions’ kind of person Musk might want have a working relationship with. He probably assumed Palmer didn’t adore him quite as much as those crypto boys you speak of, and that was a good thing.
Think the ranks of Elon Musk fanboys and apologists are sufficiently swollen without you adding your good self to their numbers.
This juvenile reaction from Musk fits into an existing pattern of behavior with Musk actively seeking to craft an image as a tech genius, when he very clearly is not. See also, buying into Tesla and then taking legal action against its actual founders to demand founder status for himself. He’s a business person, from a rich South African family, whose success is linked to his privilege.
I went to university and did one year of arts. They told me you had to be ‘adversarial’ like a lawyer. Every comment I made in a tutorial was supposed to be understood from me having a position, for or against. What’s wrong with just saying the truth as best it hits you, not taking a side?
Musk was entitled to ask how to run a Python script. He was entitled to trust that his interaction with Palmer would be kept out of the news. To put it in the news was kind of geek-ish (“you’re dumb b/c your can’t do something I can”). I’m not so much fighting for Musk as for ‘someone in his position’. He was unfairly tricked.
And now to be really honest I have to say that my trigger wasn’t a defence of a person in a situation, so much as the defence of a computer language in a situation. If people who program really knew programming languages then Clojure would have assumed the mantle as the language all programmers should be familiar with.
He is literally the world’s richest person, is consistently awful, and he himself is constantly attacking people in less privileged positions (see: calling a hero who assisted in the Thai cave rescue a ‘pedo’ because Musk’s feelings were hurt when no one wanted his impractical miracle midget sub; trying to coerce his employee into a sex act in exchange for a horse; emotional abuse of first wife).
The inability of the average white male to resist jumping in to defend Musk is UTTERLY befuddling….
Of all the people who actually deserve sympathy, this is the guy you’re going to stand up for and bring out the ‘let’s be polite/decent/respectful’ tone policing card for? Have you ever feel the urge to intervene when a person with far less privilege was being personally abused or bullied online – female journalists and politicians, Grace Tame, Brittany Higgins? Maybe you do in fact jump to their support too.
Musk should buy himself a thicker skin and focus his self proclaimed genius elsewhere (maybe stopping the systematic exploitation of and discrimination against people of colour who are employed at his Tesla factories? Parent his hoard of children?). The sycophantic rush by a specific cohort to jump to Musk’s defence at every poorly thought out Twitter stoush, is truly a great mystery of our time.
Wow! Why onboard all that other stuff? I didn’t see myself defending a particular person called Musk. I haven’t jumped personally to the support of Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins, but read about them with great concern.
On the question of defending women, I do feel that Crikey doesn’t do enough for the point of view of women who have been sex-trafficked, and have petitioned various editors a few times, in one case to see if they were interested in me writing an article. I’ve even written letters to every senator on the subject of sex-trafficking. I can send you more information if you are interested. This country doesn’t do nearly enough. The politicians and journalists (with some exceptions) just don’t seem to care enough. Now I’m trolling too, and there’s nothing wrong with it.
Fair enough, Chris, I’ll take it under advisement, but damn! it’s hard not to enjoy seeing Musk taken down a peg or two. This is the man who wanted to buy enough of Twitter to control it and police everybody’s freedom of speech, after all. Same man who’s said and written some very ugly things about people and groups of people very publicly because his carefully crafted public image gave him the platform to do so. Definitely not the sort you’d make your child’s godparent, is he?
What a storm in a teacup – I prefer Monty Python.
So – the question for you then Cam – is any publicity good publicity? Any impacts for Crikey/you from a man with 93m followers getting in a Doge fight?
half of them don’t log in to Twitter more than once a month (like me) and never read Musks twits….?
Musk should get his arse to Mars and stop scrapping with people on Twitter.
This is all just gossip, the lifeblood of the vacuous.
Trash.
I know code, but I don’t know much about twitter. The code in question seems to be here: https://gist.github.com/ummjackson/8fe9ef99819777c2e6655b5e71dd61ac, but that doesn’t seem to “remove all bots”. It just explicitly blocks anything by users that have “XRP” in their name, or description. I would not expect a bot to advertise itself so readily. XRP seems to be about the “Ripple” crypto-currency. So I suspect that Elon has a point: this code doesn’t find bots at all, and running it requires first registering a Twitter “app” by going through some registration process at the twitter web site.
Why do you put the phrase “remove all bots” in quotes when it appears to be your own phrase and not a quotation? That’s not something Palmer has ever claimed AFAIK and it’s not anything Musk said either AFAIK. So it looks like your own strawman, which you have knocked down successfully.
Sure. The article quotes Musk saying “gets rid of bots”. So I paraphrased loosely, but I don’t think too far from the mark. To be sure, that’s not what Palmer claimed in the article. Automatically detect and report cryptocurrency scams is more the flavour there, but it only does that if you can assert that all, or even many cryptocurrency scams can be identified by the inclusion of the string “XRP” in the name or description, and that seems a stretch: I hadn’t heard of XRP at all until I searched for it while writing that comment.
It still remains (as explained elsewhere and at length in academic and technical papers) that identifying “bot accounts”, which is one of the things that Musk is asking of Twitter, is by no means easy. Or even on-point. For example this one on The Conversation the other day: https://theconversation.com/how-many-bots-are-on-twitter-the-question-is-difficult-to-answer-and-misses-the-point-183425
[For some reason Crikey doesn’t let you delete your own comments?]
Didn’t even know that you could edit them? How’s it done?
Great question, Andrew! I’ve been around here for years and I don’t know how to do that, either.
That is not the code. What you’ve linked is a script to block fanatics of a particular crypto clogging your feed. The script he is talking about uses a Levenshtein distance ratio to report bots with fake usernames. This would have worked in 2018, back when bots didn’t meaningfully attempt to hide they were bots, because there wasn’t any real attempt to get rid of them. In 2022 his script would fail for the simple reason that most bots today have more than 100 followers.
The actual code is here: https://gist.github.com/ummjackson/ff58651f2804227e5e09b54abc5e8cb1