Elon Musk

Musk’s alleged fortune comes from his close ties to the American national security state. SpaceX (Starlink) is the grid, the hardware.. Twitter the software. Neuralink is the human link hardware that will replace devices. And people think he cares about the people’s ‘free speech’. LMFAO. The guy is a deep state puppet actor. Wake up folks.

I don’t know a huge amount about Musk and his companies, but this sums up the issue for me.

Completely irrelevant conversation, but if he spends his life surrounded by sycophantic yes men, then you can understand how he’s ended up like this.

Americans love a hero to worship. That’s why they end up in these tribes of fans and that perpetuates these myths.

Musk nut swingers traverse boundaries of nation and identity though.

They are also the most entertaining, ultimately their whole raison d’être boils down to, “PLEASE PUMP MY CRYPTO BAGS ELON”

Edit: timely cross posting with that video above.

It’s obvious that all the tech bros blowing smoke up his rear have him deluded

This thread is revealing

No wonder he’s had to make staffing cuts!

1/ There is some pretty substantial context about Twitter's 2023 revenue and advertisers that I think partly help explains why Musk is really losing it…

And it involves upfront ad sales. Let me explain…

— Angelo Carusone (@GoAngelo) November 5, 2022

Musk’s alleged fortune comes from his close ties to the American national security state mining, getting a few bets on changing markets and tech spot on, and a good dose of subsidies and investors chasing those tech market bets.

Fixed that little bit for you. Can’t help you with the rest.

uhoh pic.twitter.com/wozmYlK7Ip

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) November 5, 2022

Musk’s alleged fortune comes from

…Borrowing money from his [insanely wealthy] dad and a couple of lucky investment guesses.

There’s no need for conspiracy theory crap when it comes to Elon, it’s all in the open. The weird thing is , Musk would just love that you think he’s some deep state actor, when he’s just a kid from wealth.

I quite enjoyed the BBC Sounds series on him. I binge listened to it this week. The guy who impersonates him is brilliant 🤩

During the dotcom years there were loads of companies all trying to do similar things. In some cases it’s pot luck which ones succeeded. Some of these dotcom billionaires often aren’t geniuses they just had an idea and got lucky with it.

What’s stopping the ex employees just setting up a better version?

You just described Bluesky I think.

Didn’t know about Bluesky, that’s interesting.

From the web:
“Bluesky is an initiative to develop a decentralized social network protocol. Organized by Twitter as a non-profit initiative, it was announced in 2019 and is in a research phase as of 2022. Bluesky is owned by the team itself, formally under Bluesky Public Benefit LLC, without any controlling stake held by Twitter.”

That’s the answer – when does it go live?

If I were involved in Bluesky I’d have a guerrilla advertising campaign ready to go before launch. Bluesky is a great brand name for starters.

Remember ‘The future’s orange”, I’m sure a campaign like that could work.

Something like “If you’re lost in a cloud, look for the Bluesky ”

1/ Here’s everything we know about the mass Twitter advertising exodus in plain language.

So, Elno acquires Twitter and advertisers are FREAKED. Would be a good time to reassure them, right?

Except Twitter’s Chief Revenue officer @SEP quits on Friday. Literally walks out.

— Brianna Wu (@BriannaWu) November 5, 2022

Jesus H Corbett /\/\/\

Elon Tweeted:
“Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists,”

This makes no sense to me, it’s hard to argue that nothing has changed when it’s reported that about half of Twitters employees have been let go.

Are these “activists” the same as the “tofu-eating wokerati”?

This makes no sense to me

Why are you against free speech? Are you some sort of commie to dare question the great Musk?

Are you some sort of commie to dare question the great Musk?

Musk (much like many super-rich and dictators and like some politicians) has surrounded himself with yes-men and acolytes his whole life.

Either he’s paid people to tell him he’s amazing or he’s got a bunch of groupies around him hero-worshipping the ground he walks on.

Dissenting voices are fired or slandered (like the cave rescue guy who told him his sub idea was bollocks, Musk called him a paedo). They’ve never been told they’re wrong so they’re conditioned to see themselves as geniuses.

Still trying to work out if he’s actually as dumb as he seems (but he’s just had vast wealth to hide some of it) or, like this Twitter thread, he’s a RW extremist…

The more Musk's actions don't make sense from a commercial point of view, the more I become convinced that this is about politics for him, specifically ingratiating himself with the American right and with Beijing. A brief thread with the evidence. /1

— Andrew Gawthorpe (@andygawt) November 4, 2022

Musk is the latest in a long line of businessmen who look successful. Typically they then publish a ghostwritten book explaining how great they are, which actually sells quite well, making them money and inflating their ego still further. All their subsequent business ventures crash and burn, because actually they weren’t that smart, they were just lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with the right people working for them. Examples that spring to mind are Alan Sugar and Lee Iacocca.

Surely you’re missing the greatest living example, who manages to convince gullible half-wits that he’s some kind of business genius, despite all the evidence to the contrary…

Actually, there appear to be a growing list of similarities between the two of them

Fair point @binners, I did consider editing my post to add the godlike genius that is Donald Trump, but I knew someone would be along to do it for me. I still think it’s entirely possible that far from being a billionaire he could be technically bankrupt. Certainly would be if he had to return all the money he just stole rather than earned.

Trump always worked on the same principle as Robert Maxwell. If you owe the bank thousands of pounds, it’s your problem, if you owe them millions, it’s their problem.

The only money Trump genuinely made was when he had millions in capital that daddy gave him when New York was effectively bankrupt (a situation deliberately engineered by financiers) so had to have a fire sale of all their property

Apparently, being in the right place at the right time, with suitcases full of your dads money is what marks you out as a business guru

Trump has only ever been a grifter and Elon Musk seems to be cut from the same cloth

The amount Twitter is worth as a business must be going through the floor by the day. He’s properly Liz Trussed it!

He’s properly Liz Trussed it!

I like that as a phrase.
The Guardian used Trussterfuck the other day which I also enjoyed.

44 days and her name is a euphemism for a complete catastrophe! Wonder how long it’ll take for Musk to reach the same levels of meme?

With marketing managers looking where they’re going to spend their budgets, it’s all about optics.

If you look at the people leaping to Musks defence, they’re all far right nutjobs for whom ‘freedom of speech’ seems to involve their right to be be really abusive and offensive

With friends like those…

I imagine those who haven’t pulled their advertising already will be looking at all this and reaching the same conclusion as those that have already headed for the exits

If you owe the bank thousands of pounds, it’s your problem, if you owe them millions, it’s their problem.

Actually that’s true of most of the millionaires / billionaires who are on paper value. In a way they borrow to spend so cannot be taxed (not salaried). How that works I don’t know go ask the accountants.

The problem with blue sky, Twitter, Facebook and the rest (including this place) is the success largely comes down to the the moderation. Get it right an people will want to stay and discuss. To tight and it becomes an echo chamber, too loose and it’s a bear pit.   I can’t believe that Elon didn’t see that and it looks like he wanted it a bit more open but whether or not that is possible is a different matter. This stuff is super finely balanced.

Musk is a pretty fascinating case study tbh. The successes and disasters pretty much all come from the same source- that he’s a loose cannon with nobody who tells him no and enough resources to not need much support from outside people who would also tell him no. But the more it goes on, the worse it gets, as tends to be the case with these things. Obviously more so if you have aspergers, adhd, and a shipping container full of good weed.

It’s frustrating because you can’t quite separate the things that makes him call random people paedophiles, or say cars have “autopilot” then act surprised when people think they have an autopilot, or contradict himself in 2 adjacent tweets, with the things that makes stuff like a falcon heavy happen. And more so, happen quickly. That’s really dependent on having a shortfall in people with common sense. So it’s just a matter of degrees but it’s so hard to say where the line is, til you’re way over the line.

I think when it comes down to it Elon Musk is a bit of a fascist.

Like I mentioned earlier, a bit like that other rocket man and doubtless his hero, Wernher Von Braun. They’ll both cosy up to any regime, autocratic or otherwise who will fund their fantasies.

Both have no moral moral compass, their particular dispositions leaving them devoid of empathy. Their ambitions for mankind are for mankind as a species, not as human beings.

For only $8 per month.

And now he's suspended! OK! Third base! The Aristocrats! pic.twitter.com/CabYTH2Xmj

— Mike Rothschild (@rothschildmd) November 5, 2022

I’m not a Twitter user. I thought it’s raison d’etre was that it was way of quickly sharing short messages. I’ve viewed various tweeks via this thread and the Ukraine thread and can see that videos and photos can also be shared.
The product doesn’t seem particularly rich in terms of functionality.

So I was kinda surprised to learn that they had a workforce of 7500…anyone have any background of what all those 7500 employees did? For a “software company”, Id assume a large percentage of those employees were developers but did they sit around all day twiddling their thumbs cos I can’t see much evidence of “product”!

Or where they all content moderator’s? If so, and they’ve fired half the moderators, that doesn’t bode well…

Or where they all content moderator’s? If so, and they’ve fired half the moderators, that doesn’t bode well…

Certainly many of them are/were, remembering that different jurisdictions have different laws on what can be posted and stopping obvious (and not so obvious) hate speech I can see how the workforce could get large.

I only use it for looking at stuff on the Ukrainian war and some political stuff and even then, not often.

I won’t have the app installed so I run it in a tab on my mobile. I don’t want it to be too accessible for me. I find it hugely toxic if I spend any length of time on there, it really gets me down…

I’m not a Twitter user. I thought it’s raison d’etre was that it was way of quickly sharing short messages. I’ve viewed various tweeks via this thread and the Ukraine thread and can see that videos and photos can also be shared.
The product doesn’t seem particularly rich in terms of functionality.

It’s really useful for following news feeds, etc. Nearly all the people I follow are blue checkmark journalists, academics, or sportspeople/teams. I follow a few parody accounts, but block anyone who is an obvious troll or spreader of disinformation.

Elon’s plan to sell blue checkmarks will make it much more difficult to separate the useful stuff from the sewage.

The blue checkmark simply meant your identity was verified.
Scammers would have a harder time impersonating you.
That no longer applies. Good luck out there!

— Elon Musk (@Wolfiesmom) November 5, 2022

I thought it’s raison d’etre was that it was way of quickly sharing short messages.

It was many years ago along with the 100 something character limit. I thought it was pretty good back then but now it just has overlong posts, vides and a LOT of adverts and recommendations – none of which existed 10 years ago.

I only follow a small number of people and never read any comments made back to their posts and find it okay but it is definitely worse to use than it was when it started.

So I was kinda surprised to learn that they had a workforce of 7500…anyone have any background of what all those 7500 employees did? For a “software company”, Id assume a large percentage of those employees were developers but did they sit around all day twiddling their thumbs cos I can’t see much evidence of “product”!

Global platform, operating across dozens if not hundreds of languages on however many software platforms there are; the coding, security and moderation requirements for all that plus standard back-office admin (HR, legal, finance…). Fairly easy to get to 7500, I’d have thought!

He’s insane – fire all your IT security staff, then ask all blue tick users for their credit card info to pay $8 a month. Erm… Nope!

For a “software company”

Yeah, that’s what Elon thought he was buying as well. I mean obviously it uses software, but that’s not how or why it makes money. It’s like saying Space X is in the rocket fuel burning business, or Tesla is in the recharging business.

So I was kinda surprised to learn that they had a workforce of 7500…anyone have any background of what all those 7500 employees did? For a “software company”, Id assume a large percentage of those employees were developers but did they sit around all day twiddling their thumbs cos I can’t see much evidence of “product”!

Or where they all content moderator’s? If so, and they’ve fired half the moderators, that doesn’t bode well…

Even if they were all content modoraters its not very many. Think of the volume of content Twitter sees everyday and the volume and content. Social media companies don’t really like to talk about who is doing the moderating or how. So you wouldn’t really know if any of those 7500 are moderators or whether thats a service they outsource. Think I heard in a article yesterday that theres 4 people moderating all of Hungary’s twitter output.

There was a BBC doc, no longer on iplayer sadly, called ‘The Cleaners’ about the outsourced moderators who have to view and moderate around 25000 images and videos a day of child exploitation, terroism, live-streamed suicides. A guy who’s had to watch so many beheadings he can tell from a picture of a severed head how sharp or blunt the knife was and how long it would have taken the victim to die.

with Elon making these cuts his ““Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists,” I’d imagine the outsourced moderation is much lower hanging fruit than the tech-bods and board room folk. Its not a cut you need to announce because companies don’t really announce the existence of these external contracts in the first place. It may well be true the policy hasn’t changed but that doesn’t preclude cutting the staffing and resourcing to enact that policy.

Again I’m not a Twitter user, but the impression I’ve built over the years is that it started as a neat, concise idea when users were limited on characters. The feeling I get now is that to remain ‘relevant’ the platform has had to first of all court enough contraversy in the form of celebrities and prominent bigots shit-posting and subsequently serving some sort of ban. The other string to their bow seems to be the general laziness of mainstream journalist (of all Stripes) wherein simply reposting and/or quoting tweets in their own articles now seems to count as “journalism”.

The influencers all use YT, tik tok and insta now don’t they, so really all Twitter had from it’s relatively small, incestuous user base seemed to be the ability to be used as an tool with disproportionate influence over plagiarists contributing to other media and news channels. But with Elon alienating a significant chunk of those more mainstream users, that could well diminish.

It’s just a platform at the end of the day, I really think people should be prepared to ditch it if it descends into being a toxic, unmoderated, alt-right “hellscape”. Elon doesn’t actually have a magic touch and he’s not a visionary. If he’s going to start courting the American right wing media more using a business that was never really intended for that he’s welcome to find out just how choppy that rollercoaster is on his own…

The other string to their bow seems to be the general laziness of mainstream journalist (of all Stripes) wherein simply reposting and/or quoting tweets in their own articles now seems to count as “journalism”.

Good journalists use Twitter to publicize their work, they have written an article and want to let their followers know. That’s very useful and not lazy.

The problem with Twitter is that getting noticed means saying something that nobody else is saying. The easiest way to do this is by shitposting. The only way to make Twitter useful (at the individual user level) is to block shitposters.

I think Cookea was referring to news articles based on random quoted tweets usually outraged at something.