Enough Musk Spam
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This was intentional, he and some wealthy donors wanted to tank the company to stop the spread of left wing populist movements like the Arab spring
Yeah sure, Elon totally intentionally obliterated his own image among progressives and liberals to prevent another Arab spring because he is a very stable 10D chess master who’s always a trillion steps ahead…
Nothing was intentional. He has no clue. He bought Twitter because he’s a pissy little man-baby on adderall who can’t keep his mouth shut.
And he’s ruining everything because he has no idea what he’s doing and he fired the persons who knew.
I definitely believe he got into the situation as an idiot. But he didn’t purchase twitter 100% by himself. I think his financial backers absolutely intended to destroy twitter. Or at least sabotage its ability to spread free speech.
I think you are absolutely right.
I've heard this a lot, but there is one flaw in it. It assumes Elon musk is actually smart. That guy is really fucking dumb.
Or he is a stooge being used by others who want to see Twitter fail
Oh no, it was intentional on the part of the SA and foreign backers. Elon is the scape goat. They bought it for the man-sized rich toddler and let nature take its course. Can you think of someone less reliable to put in charge of Twitter to cause it to crash and burn?
Kanye West and Donald Trump were both too busy.
But if twitter dies something takes it's place, be it threads or the fediverse. What a waste of 44 billion
The fediverse is very fragmented and threads isn't taking off
I don't think many fediverse users want to repeat the same mistakes of X/Twitter.
because of federation, fragmentation isn't a thing
I mean, the shareholders of all of his other companies let him stick around. Are the shareholders of Tesla in on some plan to watch him decimate the value of their investments? At best, they're being held hostage by the impact of him throwing a fit and liquidating his massive personal holdings.
I think the market is just trying to figure out how divorce him knowing how much damage he could do on his way out
The Muskovite purchasing Xitter ("X" being "sh" like in Chinese "xiao") took Xitter private. It's not "the market," it's "a handful of private investors." Not trying to play semantic games but Xitter's investors are not representative of an open market.
Why do we continue to give dictators and billionaires the benefit of the doubt all the time?
He might not be competent, but his high level investors are.
From what I can tell, he has some level of technical competence, more in engineering than in software, and basically not at all with people. I'm not sure if he has a neurodivergence in the area that prevents him from acquiring an understanding of people, or if he basically regards other humans as objects to be shifted around in bulk, and thus not worth considering, but his career demonstrates both him fucking up socially, and him being played by people who want something from him.
He does not have any level of technical competence.
He understands cars or rockets the way a kid who is really into models does: he can tell you dimensions, horsepower, or payload capacity. He can't apply any of that knowledge - they're just memorized stats to him. When you get him talking about what those stats mean, he makes stuff the fuck up based on the reaction of the room. He's getting sued for it right now... Again
He tries to make it sound like he's this flawed genius with a grand plan to save humanity, but he's just a billionaire who loves collecting futuristic looking toys to brag about
Don't be so sure. Now I still don't think he's some 4D chess player. But even stupid people with too many resources can form stupid conspiracies.
I really can't believe that Elon is willing to make himself the heal and devalue his "brand" for this wild conspiracy theory shit. He's just a narcissistic, autistic, wealthy, douchebag. It's the obvious and most reasonable explanation. He's so delusional he didn't realize how horrible his ideas are.
Its likely that Musk was a useful idiot in this situation. He backed himself into a corner w/ his dumb tweets and ended up being on the hook for the purchase of twitter. Then he either needed to pay a billion dollar fine or buy twitter. Thats when arab oil money volunteered to fund his blunder likely because it was a win-win for them. They either make money off of the success if twitter gets better, have huge influence over trends if twitter remained the default information platform, or deter future expensive rebellions if twitter was decimated.
Musk's idiocy gave dictators their opportunity to deal a deft blow to their largest enemy, information, and he probably just thinks that he's a genius who earned that investment.
His brand has reached cult status. He could snap newborn babies' necks like twigs in Times Square and someone would praise him for his basedness.
It's the whole reason he turned to the right, the lack of shame or standards. He was a darling if the centre/moderate left when he was the king of renewable energy, electric cars, space travel, etc. But then he realised those people won't just blindly clap everything you do during the incident with the cave diver. The right on the othe hand will cheer anything sfor someone with the right views, like what's happened with Laurance Fox last week.
Do you have, like, evidence of this, or is it just plausible sounding vibes?
I imagine Twitter being pretty left-leaning was one factor, but I think you also have to consider things like Elon simply being the world's biggest egotist and also very stupid, and most banks being able to see that this would be a terrible investment.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/was-elon-musks-strategy-twitter-rcna118490 bits and pieces paint a bigger picture
Fair enough, that's a really interesting (and horrifying) read.
I really do not like this idiot.
Damn, I've been keen to say this mindset is simply giving Elon too much credit, but this article drops some pretty strong bits and pieces indeed.
Definitely feels like Elon is still bumbling through this "plan", but the evidence is pretty damning.
Interested to hear more takes on this article. Thanks for sharing!
The best plans are the ones where you gain an advantage whether it succeeds or fails. For Musk's fascist backers, him buying Twitter was such a plan: if he successfully turns it into a right-wing disinformation platform they win, and if he destroys it utterly they also win.
Hanlon's Razor
None of us will know the full story for a long time, but it seems likely Elon was a useful idiot that his backers knew would be like letting a bull lose in a China shop. Not that Twitter was not problematic in a lot of ways, but its sort of decentralized communication did make things harder for despotic assholes for a bit
People act like twitter is somehow unique and irreplaceable. In reality with the rise of the fediverse breaking the network effect couldblet a genie out of the bottle they can't put back: decentralized communication that isn't beholden to corperate entities easily pressured by governments
I believe you're underestimating him. An idiot, he's not. It all kind of fits with Musk rolling over on Ukraine. He always has some weak excuse for all his actions. Because the US public believes lies, he gets away with it.
He gets away with it because he has money
It's a theory that doesn't make much sense to me. If he wanted to censor protests, blowing up twitter is counterproductive because now people will go elsewhere. Anyone can just make a website for $5/mo
Takes more than $5/mo to make a successful one, though.