alt Hacker NewsThat link denies the conspiracy theory?
> “Or did he just have an idea and blurt it out," I asked Vance. > "I'm 99.9-percent sure it's the latter," Vance tells me.
Also that to scapegoat Musk for killing the California train when California was perfectly able to kill it itself:
> Vance then brought up a valid point: "In all this time we've been talking about high-speed rail, there's still almost none that's built....
There is no conspiracy theory, that aside the link does not indicate that there is one? “Vaguely accurate” does not mean “untrue”, and Vance is clear that he is talking about his personal interpretation of what Elon Musk is documented to have said, which he does not refute.
I like the idea that “he didn’t say that” and “he did say that but a different guy feels like he probably meant something else” are so obviously equivalent that skepticism of that notion constitutes a ‘conspiracy theory’.
That aside I like that the guy whose opinion should be treated as indisputable fact said that he thinks that there hasn’t been any high speed rail built globally in the past decade, which is not even remotely true. Obviously if he meant to say in the US he would have said so, since his next sentence was praise of Musk’s world-wide achievements.
I suppose it’s possible that Vance either doesn’t know anything about high speed rail or was in such a rush to extoll the virtues of the CEO of Tesla that he just sort of blurted something out to make Musk look good?