Really? He explicitly says "This is not a demand or an accusation or a plea. It's a polite request from a huge fan." It seems like he's asking as politely as possible. It's not "you should give us this," but "hey, you know what would be cool? giving us this."
The issue is that nobody is going to see it that way without actually reading the page, and let's face it, not an amazing amount of people are actually going to read the page. The majority will just see titles like this one, which mention nothing about a polite request and instead make it sound like a plea from a Tesla relative to fund this idea. Now if he doesn't fund it the media may pick it up and make him look bad, even though that's not the intent of The Oatmeal's post here. Noting that, I don't see why they didn't just ask in private instead of something public like this.
Also worth noting, the last thing I read was that Elon Musk had to borrow money to get through the month since he sunk all of his money into his companies and he didn't have enough on hand to spend, so I'm not exactly hopeful that he'd be able to do this. Obviously he could sell some stock or similar to get the money, but I doubt he'd really want to do that.
I have to agree with you. The fact that he is going through Musk's finances, measuring how much money he can make by Tesla's stock bumping up a point, and stating that the publicity of this Oatmeal article will be measured (in hopes that it has a positive impact) all seem, to me, like a back handed plea.
He's also stating that the name / technology has entered the public domain so he knows that Musk is doing nothing wrong by using it and naming his company with the family name. I've got to give him credit for a creative approach to raise the money but it really feels ugly and backhanded. If it gets funded -- great! I just don't know how I'd feel in Musk's shoes considering it opens him up to future things he should donate to because he is using somebody else's work / tech to piggy back his way to where he is now: success.
> The issue is that nobody is going to see it that way without actually reading the page, and let's face it, not an amazing amount of people are actually going to read the page.
The issue is that people in general need to be more thoughtful in general rather than spouting off knee-jerk opinions. That statement that "nobody is going to see it that way" sounds like an appeasement to the mob.
I mean, that same mob were the ones who were shouting very loudly about electric cars getting set on fire.
