Well yeah, given Russia has annexed Crimea for 8 years and nobody - I mean literally nobody who's crying against Elon - has lift a finger to free it from Russia, it's not hard to conclude that this is the status quo everybody can accept.
Many countries leveled sanctions on Russia after the 2014 invasion. NATO also started training the Ukrainian army. During the last 8 years Ukraine's army transitioned from a poor Soviet style army to a professional NATO style army. The world, Russia included thought Ukraine was going to fold like it did in 2014 back in February, but the people who had been involved in training the Ukrainians had other predictions.
Mark Hertling was among them. He's a retired US general who was involved in this training regime and he saw the growing professionalism in the Ukrainian ranks.
The sanctions on Russia did not force them out of Crimea, but they did hurt the Russian economy. Russia sank from the world's #7 GDP to around #11.
GDP by Country - Worldometer
All small details, doesn't change the fact that he didn't propose to give these land to Russia.
He did say
"- Crimea formally part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev’s mistake)."
Line one of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 says
"Respect the signatory's independence and sovereignty in the existing borders."
Budapest Memorandum - Wikipedia
Russia was a signor and Crimea was part of Ukraine then.
Those people are hypocrites and idiots who are against literally anything Elon does, their opinion is irrelevant and wrong as I have proven numerous times. Should be obvious that there're a few idiots in Elon thread that will dunk on him no matter what he does, they're no different from TSLAQ and thunderf00t.
And I don't see any way you can measure the backlash accurately at this point, we'll know more once some polls come out.
They implicitly implied it, and they didn't get a strong opposition because they caved in under 24 hours, Elon's initial poll probably lasted longer than that.
As for Elon's tweet getting wide coverage, how is this surprising? The main stream media is willing to do anything to discredit him, the whole Rahul Ligma episode should make it abundantly clear.
I don't dunk on him for everything. I always acknowledge that someone can be a genius in one area and an idiot in others. He has done some good things, but he's also done some things that shoot himself in the foot. Some of his ideas are really bad.
Lately most of his ideas have been bad.
His secret weapon that led to his successes is to go back to basic principles and build from there. That led to the SpaceX innovations, the success of Paypal, and made Tesla the first new viable car company in decades.
However it looks like he's abandoned the basic principles approach and instead is just winging it thinking his brilliance will win out.