Elon Musk

Excellent name for a book

Yep, very good name, very astute given the subject matter!!! lol!

Can someone explain the clever joke?

If you have to expain the joke it kinda ruins it, but here goes…

“Character limit” is the title of the book.

Twitter increased the text character limit per tweet a while back, so now you can type a ‘missive’ rather than a ‘one-liner’.

But it also works on a higher level… as in, the personal intelect/character of Elon musk, has reached its technical limit.

Ah okay. I suspected that was it but thought I was missing something.

One of those days.

I have only just seen this :

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/21/elon-musk-backs-down-in-his-fight-with-brazilian-judges-to-restore-x

That is quite a comprehensive defeat for Musk considering the rhetoric coming out of him recently.

Yes, but in the meantime, he’s been focussing his efforts on generating AI images of Kamala Harris in a bright red Communist uniform and posting them on X (this is the first time Google has even seen this image) saying this is how she sees herself.  Additionally stating that under Harris and the Dems, SpaceX will never get to Mars despite almost all of his big ticket contract items having been made under democratic governments (Obama and Biden) and NASA funding only restricted in both administrations due to vast external circumstances (financial crisis and covid).

Bell End.

What Musk wants is to do whatever he wants without ANY oversight.  He wants to deregulate rules regarding space flight (SpaceX), environmental damage (SpaceX Tesla), social responsibility (SpaceX, Tesla AND X) etc.  He wants to stop any form of unionisation or worker rights for any of his workforces.  He wants to pay little or no tax on salary, profit and shares.   DT is highly likely to give him that so long as he keeps massaging the big orange Wotsit’s ego (all articles), bank balance (contributions) and balls (X interview).

What Musk wants is to do whatever he wants without ANY oversight.

He’s a on a continuum of tech bosses  who seem to genuinely think that becasue they’ve made money 1. the normal rules shouldn’t apply to them and 2. they should be allowed to make decisions outside of their organisations that effect the rest of us becasue they consider themselves to be v smart despite all the evidence to the contrary.  c.f. Peter Theil’s comments on democracy for example

If you would like to have a giggle at the automotive dumpster fire that is the Tesla Cybertruck then head on over to https://www.reddit.com/r/CyberStuck/

nickcFull Member
What Musk wants is to do whatever he wants without ANY oversight.
He’s a on a continuum of tech bosses  who seem to genuinely think that becasue they’ve made money 1. the normal rules shouldn’t apply to them and 2. they should be allowed to make decisions outside of their organisations that effect the rest of us becasue they consider themselves to be v smart despite all the evidence to the contrary.  c.f. Peter Theil’s comments on democracy for example

I’ve just bought a Tesla, the douchebaggery of Musk made that decision a fair bit harder than it would otherwise be.

Ultimately though, it seems particularly for the course.

On a regular basis, I use the services of corporations headed up by Gates, Zuckerberg, Bezos, the Google gang as well as the faceless bosses of various financial institutions.  Subverting democracy and scrambling for money and power is life to them.

I wonder which of them will be considered the dodgiest of them in fifty years time?

My gut says Google, closely followed by Gates.

I use the services of corporations headed up by Gates

What corporation does Gates head up these days?

All the ones that ‘they’ don’t want you to know about, obvs.

For all the shady stuff Gates has done, he has also done/is doing a lot of philanthropic work too, regarding malaria, infant mortality in India, etc. Maybe just because he’s getting old wants to leave a better legacy but in my mind it does help offset his past dickishness?

Does Musk do anything similarly altruistic or is he just a total C unit?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/09/cards-against-humanity-sues-spacex-alleges-invasion-of-land-on-us-mexico-border/

The makers of the card game, cards against humanity,  bought some land on the Texas / Mexico border to wind Trump up over his border wall, and they now claim SpaceX illegally occupied and trashed the land, and are taking legal action against SpaceX.

What is the shady stuff Gates has done?

He was ruthless in the early days of MS, had relationships with Epstein and others, etc, but nothing compared to Musk.

had relationships with Epstein

Everybody had relationships with Epstein if you were in big money. I used to work in those circles and I met many full on legit criminals and gangsters who had connections with all kinds of people, as well as meeting billionaires, footballers and other sports stars, and even Elon Musk once too. On one Mexican trip I was effectively kidnapped by a crime lord and met the vice president of Mexico within the space of 48 hrs. Both in relation to the work I was doing.

People have a tendency to completely overplay these things. There’s good people and bad people, and while they’re not going to invite them round for dinner, in most lines of business they’ll often end up doing business in some way anyway.

I agree, but Gate’s continued the relationship after allegations came out and only once they became irrefutable did he start to distance himself.  Whether this makes him a bad person, of just someone who believes in innocent until proven guilty, or even just someone who try’s to maintain relationships/friendships, that’s up to you to decide.  I was just publishing facts.

To my knowledge and unlike Musk and Bezos, Gate’s has always treated his employees fairly, but was brutal in business, which, well, sometimes that’s business, but he most certainly leveraged MS market share to hammer that home.

Whilst I do have a problem with SM and Facebook, I don’t so much with Zuckerberg. Meta do seem to try to do the right thing whilst maintaining their business.  They seem to be horribly inept at doing the right thing, but genuinely do seem to try.

On one Mexican trip I was effectively kidnapped by a crime lord and met the vice president of Mexico within the space of 48 hrs. Both in relation to the work I was doing.

Drugs Mule?

Whilst I do have a problem with SM and Facebook, I don’t so much with Zuckerberg. Meta do seem to try to do the right thing whilst maintaining their business.

How can you have a problem with FB but not the guy who runs it and makes all the decisions?

Anyway I’m not sure stuff like this is the sign of a company trying to to the right thing:

Phone numbers given to Facebook for increased security via two-factor authentication were repurposed for targeted ads by the company

Facebook allowed users to purchase ads targeted towards racist interests like “Jew hater” or “Nazi Party”

Facebook got caught collecting SMS and call metadata from users of their app on Android phones, sweeping up names, phone numbers, and the lengths of each call made or received.

Facebook for years used an app called Onavo to learn how long users spent on competing apps and what websites they visited

Facebook gave certain business partners like Amazon and Netflix preferential access to user data, allowing the tech giants to skirt the company’s usual privacy rules

Despite Zuckerberg’s opinion piece in the Washington Post publicly calling for privacy regulation, Facebook’s public policy team lobbied to prevent such legislation from passing in California

….and so on and so on. There’s lots more of this stuff.

IMO Zuckerberg is another one of the classic silicon valley libertarian entrepreneurs -like Gates was – IE almost entirely amoral when it comes to making money, and will cross any line (whether legal or moral) until a court forces him to stop.

Because Zuckerberg doesn’t authorise all decisions, but when called to account ALWAYS takes the heat for his staff as through the decisions were his and then tries to change it for the better.  Thats not amoral.

Hmm. I feel that a CEO sets the tone and culture of an organisation. And the culture at Facebook has been, consistently over nearly two decades, that anything goes until a court tells you to stop.

He could have changed that culture if he wanted FB to obey the law, even if he wasn’t actually approving all those decisions at an operational level.

Facebook is the digital equivalent of selling fags. Technically legal, and some would say respectable, but you’d have to be doing some mental contortions to not be aware of the harm that you’re perpetrating.

and much like selling fags, it pays well enough to motivate the required mental contortions

It’s very difficult to make a case for Facebook/Meta as a company that “tries to do the right thing”. Their business model is based around scraping as much data as possible from users and making it as difficult as possible for users to have any control over how that is done. They have repeatedly avoided or delayed implementing safety controls for users or moderation for misleading, divisive or dangerous content, because controls would interfere with their ability to make money.

Private Eye published more examples this week. It took Meta six years to introduce default protections for young Instagram user accounts, instead of “opt-in” settings, and in Australia, Meta users are getting all their data scraped to train AI, with no opt out. In the UK you can “object” but a company that was doing the right thing would ask all users to opt in to AI scraping, not just do whatever they can get away with according to the laws of the country they are working in.

and there was also Cambridge analytica.

Wah, wah, wah.

Musk hits back after being shunned from UK summit

Libertarians are libertarian because it suits them, no matter how much they try to dress it up in princples.

It amazes me how miserable most of these super-successfullucky people seem to be.

Drugs Mule?

Gambling dens. They probably shipped an awful lot of drugs too.

Libertarians are libertarian because it suits them

Aside from very few of them really are.

They are “libertarians” in the sense they want the freedom for them to do what they want as well as for us to do what they want.  So be more accurate as “Libertarians are libertarian when it suits them”

Zuckerberg approach to personal privacy is a good example. He considers his own privacy worth enough to buy up large areas of land round his house, some bits under dubious conditions, to ensure he has sufficient privacy.

Yes. They don’t really care about actual libertarianism as a concept, they just personally want to be able to do whatever they want and it’s a conveniently noble sounding word to throw about.