2w ago

Elon Musk calls homelessness a ‘lie’ and ‘propaganda’ — and Trump is listening

www.independent.co.uk Elon Musk calls homelessness a ‘lie’ and ‘propaganda’ — and Trump is listening

Trump and his billionaire allies are out of touch with a crisis facing more than 600,000 Americans, advocates tell Alex Woodward

Summary

Elon Musk has called homelessness a “lie” and “propaganda,” claiming advocacy groups profit from maintaining high homelessness rates.

Partnering with Donald Trump, Musk is pushing for drastic federal budget cuts targeting programs for vulnerable populations, including food stamps and healthcare.

Trump’s plan includes forcing unhoused individuals into treatment or institutionalization.

Critics argue these approaches criminalize homelessness while ignoring root causes like lack of affordable housing.

Homelessness in the U.S. has reached record levels, with 650,000 people affected in 2023, prompting calls for evidence-based solutions over punitive measures.

185 comments

Homelessness couldn’t possibly be the result of late stage capitalism though, right?
- It's a result of any stage of capitalism
  
  Excellent point.
- Artificial Scarcity
  
  It's also interesting to think about the level of artificial unemployment. In theory everyone could work.. and a lot less hours, and we would have no scarcity.
  We would never do it but I have a theory that we could set aside 20T (less than 1 year of GDP) and it would be enough money to build everyone in the U.S. a house and provide free housing for everyone in America, without ever touching the initial investment, and setting aside 3% to assure if we keep inflation below 3% a year if would cover housing indefinitely. That's based off the 2.5 people per household average, and building a new house every 30 years at a base price of $250,000. Which at mass production, would be the equivalent of a much more costly house. Could repurpose what we have to house people until everyone got moved in over a generation.
  What that does is free up ~$1400-$1900 dollars a month for the average household, and instead of having to stash money in savings over the worries of losing a job and becoming homeless (which stunts the economy), it incentivises people to go eat at a restaurant more often, have a kid they were worried about having, buy nicer things. All of which is spending money and boosting the economy. More kids... Less/near 0 homeless.. and booming economy that will offset the original investment. Stress levels down, happiness levels up.. which should also mean health issues should decrease.
  Who knows..
  (That's over 2T a year being added back into the economy, also we don't have to build all new, refurbish/keep older homes that people want works as well, figure out solutions that have less impact on the environment, and can plan more walkable, heathier towns when building them)

Elon Musk is a certified piece of shit.
- Elon ~~Musk~~ Cunt
  
  We've all agreed that cunt is not suitable to describe him as, per the Internet, "a cunt has warmth and depth"...two qualities that Elon clearly fucking lacks.
- We don't certify pieces of shit.
  We just set them on fire.
- How many keurigs do he think he weighs?
  
  Lol, Courics! Keurig is a coffee maker whereas Katie Couric is a piece of shit.
- Centrist?
  He has no moral code beyond what benefits him most. Even centrists have ideals they somewhat stick to. Elon just believes in whatever benefits him most in the moment. I think it is like a character trait almost, he has a great instinct for how to make money with (other people's) money. Kinda like the world class poker players. Doesn't mean I admire them, or hold more weight to their opinions.
  But people worship famous gamblers Why not someone who looks like they belong in middle stage of an Animorphs cover?
  
  Reread the comment.

Is there going to be room in the detention camps for the homeless?
- Instead of Jews, it's Hispanics. Instead of gypsies, it's the homeless. And instead of trans people....well that one is the same.
  
  What makes you think that Trump intends to spare the gypsies?
  
  Lolbruh, plenty of room on the cattle cars for all of the above. Maybe I’ll run into you.
- It's so easy to imagine camps where they implant the homeless with a neuralink chip, dress them up in an Optimus suit and put them to work in a mega factory.
  
  I think you would like the movie "Sorry to Bother You".
- Those camps will be the answer to homelessness if these ghouls have their way.
  
  They are having their way, there's no "if" anymore.
- They have to put that concentration of people somewhere.
- Aren't you listening? There are no homeless and there definitely aren't any detention camps.
  😉

What an objectively evil thing to think, let alone say.

“What you actually have are violent drug zombies with dead eyes, and needles and human feces on the street.”
Yo this is the most cartoonish out-of-touch shit take I've see. In an election that accused a disenfranchised minority group of eating people's pets!
- So the one thing that differentiates homeless people and CEOs in shit in the street?
  
  It Depends, thank you very much no further questions.
  
  The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to shit in the street.

"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.
"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"
- "If they would rather die, they better do it and decrease the surplus population."
  Fuckin' hell, fiction is a warning not a guide, you filthy-rich absolute cockwombles.
  
  I seem to recall seeing a Christmas Carol story with Trump when he was last president in which the spirits tried warning him and he didn't get any of it, thinking that everything was just showing that he's the greatest. Accurate.
- I love it when the educated turn up to comment

How far up the ivory tower do you need to be to ignore homelessness by denying its existence?
- It’s an old old myth. Ronald Reagan said that everyone who is homeless in America is by choice since there’s so many shelters and charities already. It’s incredibly out of touch, but today people like Musk brag about their ignorance.

So... You think people who are homeless are just lying about not having a home?
Can we check this fuckstick for brain worms or just if his brain looks like swiss cheese?
- It's so much worse than that. From the article;
  “Homeless is a misnomer. It implies that someone got a little bit behind on their mortgage, and if you just gave them a job, they’d be back on their feet,” he told former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson in October. “What you actually have are violent drug zombies with dead eyes, and needles and human feces on the street.”
  Basically, it's not the "homeless" part of "homeless people" he thinks is a lie.
  
  This take is infuriating because it completely ignores the unobvious homeless (or unhoused). If homeless equates to “drug zombie,” then you can say shit like “this person chose to be homeless so they could do drugs” or “they deserve what they get because of drugs” or some other awful sentiment I can’t articulate. It completely erases homelessness because of bigotry, domestic abuse, low wages, lack of opportunity, etc.
  And to top it off, Musk can literally afford to never go to the places where you’d most likely see his version of the homeless.
- I think the idea is they are too lazy to work for rent. If they really wanted they would go to work and not be homeless anymore. And if they are not able to find any job, they can always do forced labor in a prison system. That's how it was in the USSR. People in power really like this kind of a system
- He doesn't actually believe anything he espouses. He only says these things to further his goal of self enrichment to our detriment.
- Would it even matter? We're already gonna have a brainworm running the DHHS....
  Maybe all these numbnuts are brainworms driving human meat suits.

Fuck you, I kinda rely on that shit to feed my family because my employer doesnt give out any annual increases or anything. I also use the state health insurance and my wife uses other government assistance programs. Dudes really just want me to protest outside of the White House.
- Dudes really just want me to protest outside of the White House.
  Dudes want you to die.
  
  Yeah, he's going to gas anyone outside the white house. That's not a bad reason to protest, though, honestly.
- I'm afraid that Americans are about to find out that the right to protest isn't one that fascist dictatorships are too keen on. They really enjoy killing and jailing dissidents, though.
- You going to try to get a better job or just keep taking pay decreases year after year?
  
  Apparently no one wants me. Never stopped applying.

Can't he fuck off and die on Mars already?
- Someone should tell him that we know more about the mountain and canyons of Mars than we do about the depths of the ocean... and tell him that carbon fiber actually IS the best material for a submarine... and tell him that the best shipwrecks to go to are WW1 military shipwrecks...
- If these people really think that all it takes to get wealthy is hard work then they have the chance soon to prove it by going to Mars starting from scratch and see whether they can get themselves wealthy again through hard work. If they don't I guess they don't deserve these riches anyways.

Musk just went from giant douche to pure evil.
The man is literally insane now.
I suppose it's good he moved to USA, he is fitting in nicely.

Market Capitalism needs homelessness.
If you will not make the owner's money through labor, You will help them make money as capitalist scarecrows. A warning to any laborer thinking of failing to comply.
You WILL serve the owner's greed disease, or else.
It would literally be cheaper to house them without conditions than all the conditioned programs and homeless encampment clean up costs.
But that doesn't send a message of fear.
Herp derp Freedom 🇺🇸
- If there's one homeless person on the street, people will say "they're lazy, you need to work harder". If there's 100 homeless people on the street, people realize "something's wrong with our society/system", and demand change.

Homelessness is a lie and propaganda? That's news to all the homeless people I used to regularly interact with when I worked down town.
- can you imagine how happy they will be? "How did I fall for this? I was really convinced I was homeless!"
  
  "Have you tried living in house?"

Kind of like the "self-made billionaire."

Depose Musk

Wow, I didn't think I could hate him more. But - here we are.
- Im almost convinced Trump is picking the worst people possible so he looks good in comparison...
  
  If you're picking shitty people it doesn't make you look good, it makes you look like a shitty person for picking shitty people.

"claiming advocacy groups profit from maintaining high homelessness rates."
Uhhh . . . how? "You there! Go be homeless! I need to profit from your utter lack of income."
- Social workers making literally tens of thousand of dollars a year off of this. That's enough to be rich according to people who make that much while eating a french fry.
  
  Oooo. "Tens of thousands" you say? It almost sounds like keeping people from dying in the street should be a full-time job.
- He's sadly got a bit of truth there.
  I've heard it called the homeless industrial complex, groups get public sector funding to purchase necessities and camping equipment for distribution. Occasionally drop shipping it and paying themselves or some other double Irish maneuver.
  Then the encampment gets bulldozed/ razed/ robbed/ flooded and its all destroyed along with any progress the unhoused have managed and all their belongings and reserves.
  And they get handed new tents and socks and instant ramen etc.
  Meanwhile the persons medical care from sleeping outside skyrockets occupying a large chunk of their discretionary time. As a huge obstacle to getting back on their feet.
  So the government is paying someone to help them sleep outside, and paying for the consequences of them sleeping outside, and collecting no tax revenue.
  Might as well just give them an apartment, if the cruelty wasn't the point that is.

Of course it's a lie. With his money, he could end it overnight.

Elon Musk is actually bullet proof. Impervious to bullets. I guarantee it.
*Ymmv
- He sure is!

Sir, you can't sleep here.
"Didn't you hear? I don't exist."

Fucking piece of shit. How are gonna stand this, bullshit....

He says it’s a lie because he thinks those people are just NPCs
- He thinks everybody is a NPC, as do all sociopaths.
  
  I think he is in a special group of sociopaths.

Forcing the homeless into privately run concentration camps. What a sick bastard.

Living on latitude 60 where being homeless can (and sometimes does) kill - I think the first step is giving a person who is homeless a place where they can set up a (semi)permanent home. That will go a long way towards solving the underlying issues which a shelter system cannot address.
A relevant paper from the EU Commission:
In February 2008, the Finnish government adopted a programme aimed at halving long-term homelessness by 2011. Referring to the “Housing First” principle, which considers that appropriate permanent accommodation is a prerequisite for solving other social and health problems, the programme seeks to reduce and gradually abandon the use of conventional shelters and change them into supported rented accommodation units.
Outcomes via OECD:
While there is no OECD-wide average against which to compare Finland’s homeless rate of 0.08%, other countries with similarly broad definitions of homelessness provide points of reference, such as neighbouring Sweden (0.33%) or the Netherlands (0.23%). [1]
Finland’s success is not a matter of luck or the outcome of “quick fixes.” Rather, it is the result of a sustained, well-resourced national strategy, driven by a “Housing First” approach, which provides people experiencing homelessness with immediate, independent, permanent housing, rather than temporary accommodation (OECD, 2020).
Getting better outcomes than neighbours is a reliable indicator that a policy does work.
P.S.
Regarding Musk:
"Downregulate Musk" will be my anwer to any mention of this election-buying oligarch, probably for a while. A kneejerking far rightist is no person to call any policies.

Someone tell me how this guy is NOT an idiot but smart, and got rich by being smart. This line of thinking is just going to incite a civil war and tank the economy. Everyone is three meals away from a revolution.
- He made his fortune the honest way, by profiting off of the slave labor in his father's Emerald mines.
- Nah musk was born rich. Blood diamond wealthy. However just enough stupid "rich" fucks buy into his stupid branding: ie the cybertruck
  
  Is that vehicle even successful? It may be the bubble I'm in but that makes The Homer look like a sexy sports car.

Just think how much more productive they'll be as prisoners working as slave labor. Why spend money fighting homelessness when you can make money off it instead? Everybody wins!
Well, everybody that matters anyway.

You can just tell these fucks have never been outside of an environment meticulously prepared for their pompous spoiled presence.

He's, like, been outside, right?
- I'm being honest with you, I don't think I've seen him outside before.

Once upon a time, I was saving for a Tesla. Not anymore. The end.
- Going for a Nisan Leaf?
  
  That would actually be one of reasonable choices. Most e-cars today are over-engineered and too complex for the users' good, but Leaf has been on the market for very long, has gone though many generations and repair shops generally know their way around it (even I have taken apart a Leaf's battery). If Nissan's engineers aren't fools, they have solved most issues.
  Tesla is a smartphone on wheels, and a maintenance nightmare. Also, it has the highest rate of fatal accidents in its category. Even if it didn't earn Elon a penny, I'd not recommend it.

Here's my pipe dream
Shit gets worse, were all homeless, we protest, they sick AI drones to kill us but oopsie, the AI botnet escapes, decides ~1000 bullets is far more efficient than ~1B, and neutralizes wealth in a highly organized and efficient attack.
- Or it could spiral, decide that if everyone’s dead no one can suffer anymore.
  
  Eh, can't argue with that logic.
- Or:
  Shit gets worse, we're all homeless, we protest, they sick AI drones to kill us, but oppsie they were made by Tesla, so they break down and malfunction in the rain and fall apart. So we trebuchet the billionaire class into the Grand Canyon during a giant party.
  
  The AI drones are actually just hired actors in skin tight robot suits with cardboard flaps for wings.

Man, jus the absolute cruelty and heartlessness of this.
- As always, it's the point.

For someone that claims to be so data-driven, I'd be curious what data he is looking at here when he calls it a lie. I will say that it is factual that the US spends a lot of money on homelessness and we still have homelessness, but the existence of homelessness is not something I would call a lie.
- If his data driven claims aren't just complete bullshit, the data he is talking about tells him that saying this type of shit will get him something he wants. Whether homelessness is real doesn't matter to him.
  If his data driven claims are bullshit, he probably saw a homeless person who didn't look exactly like a Hollywood movie homeless person so, per his tiny, tiny idiot brain, they must be faking homelessness.

He's completely detached from reality.
- Always has been.

Elon is just one $400 billion hospital bill away from being homeless like the rest of us.
- He's also one investor meeting away from being six feet under.

Seems like a great place to start after virtually the entire country praised the actions of a man who killed a CEO for exploiting poor people.

It is so disgusting. Print out this news article, stick it to your wall. Read it every day to remember why these people are a disease to society.
- Better yet, stick on public walls

I suggest to remedy what must clearly be a misunderstanding, we give him a deep and personal insight: Cut him off from all of his assets, give him nothing but a set of cheap clothes and kick him to the curb.
Of course, we'd need to make sure his billionaire buddies don't help him, but maybe we can just enroll them in this experiment too.
Actually, they might just promise someone a reward once they get access to their funds again, so we need to make sure that this can't influence the experiment. Maybe we could just seize the assets without giving them back? With their hard work, surely they can get back to where they were, pulling bootstraps and all.
- Sounds like a remake of Trading Places.
- 17 years ago
  
  10 days seems too low to fully grasp the misery of long-term homelessness, and a few millionaires isn't quite the same as a few billionaires. Still, I like the premise.

Trump’s plan includes forcing unhoused individuals into treatment or institutionalization.
The good old Victorian approach
- Sounds about right. Someone has to make a buck off of them. Just like our incarcerated people.

trump already believes homeless people are richer than him because they don't hold debt.

Yeah, it's not the homeless people that are victims of a cruel society that has not only abandoned but also ostracized them. It's the wealthy that have to share an imperceptible amount of their wealth so that they have somewhere to sleep.
- Just another "first they came for..." thing with the rich. As soon as they put all the homeless into for-profit labor camp prisons, the poor are next.

You reap what you sow. I hope you will suffer for your stupidity.
- He will be fine but others less fortunate will suffer.

Is this a dead cat?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_strategy
- I'm inclined to agree. The idea that a cabinet-to-be is able to make headlines during a lame duck session is... well, I don't think it's normal, but I may be misremembering.
  Nothing earth shattering today (Dec 13) but a few noteworthy things on AP: https://apnews.com/hub/congress
  
  I've also been wondering that. Seems like news about the incoming trump admin is 10:1 against the outgoing administration. I don't think that happened in 2016?
- Check the see also for a chuckle.

This is the danger of elite projection. What his life is like must be how other people's lives are like.
He was successful. If he wanted to get a job, he could. If he did work, he got paid.
If these people aren't doing that, it must be their fault, and they need "treatment" (via institutionalization) in his mind. It couldn't possibly be because to get a job, you often need existing housing, but to get housing, you need money from a job. Or the fact that people like him don't pay enough.
It's always their fault. Individual responsibility, meritocracy and all that jazz.

Every action involves a reaction.
You cut taxes? What will be lost? This is not an exception.
Half million people that have literally nothing to lose (even a prison may be a safer place for them) is quite an army. Desperate people are famous for doing desperate things.
This will not end up well and not only for the homeless
- I'm sure he recognizes this, but also recognizes that he won't be on the first front of that particular fight.

What happened to "make Orwell fiction again" Elon?

Clearly we can solve homelessness by simply terraforming Mars and moving all the homeless there, right?
- Why terraform before sending them there?

Ah yes, it is a "life style" choice and all that jazz..... Not at all the inevitable result of decades plus of poor governance/systemic failures.

It’s rather interesting to see trump falling for the same bullshit he feeds his devoted minions.

Likewise I call billionaires a lie and propaganda.

It was only a few months ago this tool was complain about how dangerous the homeless were @ the San Fran Twitter HQ.

Easy for a billionaire to say.
- Sorta like Dejoy covering his ears when he doesn't want to hear something. They are at a child's maturity level.

185 comments