Elon is the bakery owner swearing in the street about Yelp critics canceling him

By now Elon Musk should be used to high-risk maneuvers. If it's not SpaceX landing reusable rockets or docking manned capsules in orbit, it's Teslas hitting the road under AI control. Yet this week he tried one particular gambit we're not sure how he'll recover from: telling his Twitter advertisers to go f**k themselves during …

[An_Old_Dog]

Advertising Money

Musk screaming about advertisers taking their money elsewhere could possibly kill X-Twitter implies he thinks we should care. We don't. He should hobnob with former editors of deceased newspapers and try his spiel.

(No icon. Imagine finger rubbing thumb, representing the world's smallest violin playing, "Poor Elon.")

[b0llchit]

Re: Advertising Money

Please, that would still be an insult to the violin. Even when it is a very, very, exceedingly very small one.

[Khaptain]

Re: Advertising Money

"Musk screaming about advertisers taking their money elsewhere could possibly kill X-Twitter implies he thinks we should care"

Someone posting to a thread stating that they don't care about a subject often leads me to the conclusion that that actually do.

[doublelayer]

Re: Advertising Money

That's a pretty simplistic way to interpret the decision to comment. They can easily care about something while not caring about a different part. For example, they could care about the chaos being caused while not caring about the success of Twitter in the long term. That is basically my position; if Twitter fails or doesn't fail, I still won't use it so either is fine with me. However, I am getting some entertainment from watching the chaos from a distance, so I do care enough to keep looking at it.

Maybe comparing this to a different subject will make my point clearer. We've had articles discussing the switching of corporate-supported open source projects to proprietary projects, and I tend to comment on them because the license issue is important to me. Sometimes, that's because I use the projects in question. However, even when I don't and wasn't planning to, I still care about the general licensing thing even if the specific codebase in question isn't important to me. I don't think those views are inconsistent.

[Groo The Wanderer]

Re: Advertising Money

I don't care one whit if X-Twitter survives, but I find Elon's behaviour highly amusing, if baffling, and worthy of comment.

I'm still convinced it is long past time for Elon to take a break at Betty Ford for a few months. The man has clearly snapped.

[1920x1080p]

Re: Advertising Money

"I don't care one whit if X-Twitter survives ..."

Yes you do.

[Graham Cobb]

Re: Advertising Money

Well, I don't. I do not care at all. I have reached my sixties and I have never read (let alone written) a tweet or had an account.

However, I know that Twitter was a major social media network. I am interested to see how this plays out as I am very interested to see how the Internet evolves and how society changes over time. That's why I read science fiction: I care no more about Twitter than I care about The Mule or Paul Atreides.

[Fr. Ted Crilly]

Re: Advertising Money

If he was more like Delos D Harriman i'd care but he isn't...

[Blank Reg]

Re: Advertising Money

It is amusing but not baffling, he is a moron doing what morons do

[WanderingHaggis]

Re: Advertising Money

Do I care if twitter survives -- yes in same way I care about a sewer pipe discharging in the street. I don't want its poisonous content and conspiracy junk polluting the neighbourhood.

[mpi]

Re: Advertising Money

Being amused by the drama about something, is not the same as being interested in the something.

[StrangerHereMyself]

Re: Advertising Money

When you're the richest man on the planet and surrounded only by ass-kissers and yay-sayers you tend to lose touch with reality. Not to mention he smokes pot all the time, which isn't doing miracles for his strategic thinking either.

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: Advertising Money

Haha Elon is not the worlds richest man.

MBS spends more money on crap in a few months than Elons entire wealth. How many football teams, golf tournaments, world cups, f1, cities over 200 kms has Elon got ?

[Groo The Wanderer]

Re: Advertising Money

And becoming poorer by the day, thanks to his perpetually open mouth...

[Grogan]

Re: Advertising Money

Musk is an asshole on his own merits. That's probably the only thing he's ever really built from the ground up :-)

[msknight]

Love the "God bless America" playing :-)

[msknight]

He has a robust advertising system...

...the advertising system just doesn't have a very robust owner :-D

[quartzz]

maybe that forgotten about cage fight will happen after all

[msknight]

Yes... Musk v a mirror. It's happening right now :-)

[Grunchy]

The forgotten cage match…?

I’m still waiting for the cave rescue submarine!

Musk promised he would deliver even though the kids were long since rescued!

You might laugh at my “faint hope,” but he did finally get around to delivering his abysmal cyber truck, after all.

(I’ve noticed that people seem to have extremely short memories about stuff like this. Does anybody remember, there used to be a company called “Pontiac?” Do people remember when they released their latest godawful truck, “Aztek?” Yeah.. that one.)

[gecho]

Feedly

This old fart still likes RSS feeds. I can scan through a bunch of headlines and queue up tabs for the stories I'm interested in.

[Hawkeye Pierce]

Re: Feedly

Came here to say the same thing - in response to the brief discussion about direct traffic. RSS for the win! But sadly it appears to be less and less visible (or indeed being remove) on more and more sites.

But if you have a site which publishes articles (whether a news site, or a blog,or a newsletter) and it doesn't offer an RSS feed, I'm unlikely to revisit.

[Graham Cobb]

Re: Feedly

Yep. Time to take the opportunity to remind El Reg that some of us literally rely on RSS: I only ever visit the site based on the RSS ticker at the bottom of my screen (4 feeds: BBC News, El Reg, Sailing, Motor Racing).

[elsergiovolador]

No Twitter

What would have happened if Twitter disappeared tomorrow?

Before Twitter mostly people at one's village knew they are daft.

Twitter made it known to the whole world.

So I guess once Twitter is gone, we will temporarily lose the ability to track people with let's say peculiar views and an urge to express them to broadest audience possible.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Re: No Twitter

There is the place where a Florida resident frequents... Truth Social

[werdsmith]

Re: No Twitter

As much as I would like to see the demise of the main internet sewer low life channels Faecebook and Twitter, I just know that something else probably even worse would spring up in their place.

[Tron]

Re: No Twitter

Twitter/X is a default signpost for just about every service, business and government department on the planet. So, yes, lots of people would miss it and it would be inconvenient if it vanished. It is particularly useful when anywhere gets hacked or suffers a ransomware attack. The social media posts that people complain about on here, most people never see. On social media, you see what you look for. If you don't want to see it, don't look for it. My elderly mother spends her lunch hour surfing through animal videos on FB and has never seen anything abusive (apparently called a 'Harm') on there. As in real life, if you go looking for trouble, you will find it. If you go looking for suicide advice, you will find it. If you go looking for drug dealers, you will find them. Offline and online.

Technology is great. People can be lousy. The problems with social media are all human, not technological. Getting rid of the tech because of some of the users is incredibly stupid. People who don't use social media and post on here as if it makes them superior are just arrogant snobs. Governments are working hard to take user to user and one to many technologies that they cannot control away from citizens. Don't help them, unless you want to live a more Chinese/Iranian life. We need distributed social media and we need it soon, before governments reduce the net to a state surveillance system x Viewdata mash up.

[veti]

Re: No Twitter

The problems with social media are all human, not technological.

You could say the same of nerve gas, or domestic abuse. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do something about them.

[Chet Mannly]

Re: No Twitter

"You could say the same of nerve gas, or domestic abuse"

Complete false equivalence - there are no positive uses for nerve gas or domestic abuse, eliminating them would make the world a better place.

Not so with technology. While people like to focus on the negatives (as that's what gets eyeballs) there are all manner of positive things enabled by social networks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: No Twitter

Yeah, but have you watched the videos your mother is watching? She may have the view that kicking dogs is fine and she watches tons of dog kicking videos...I wouldn't take anyones word for it if they said they never saw harmful content on social media...what people think is harmful and what is actually harmful are two different things.

[JulieM]

Re: No Twitter

Especially given the possibility of showing material only to people already suspected of potentially being sympathetic to a cause, in the hope that they will naïvely assume everyone else visiting the same site is also seeing it (just like adverts on radio, TV, newspapers and walls) and falsely conclude it can't be that bad because no-one else is complaining about it.

[Killfalcon]

Re: No Twitter

Losing an easy-to-access tool that can be used for product recalls, service outages and tornado warnings alike is a definite downside to Twitter's failure. It's useful infrastructure for most of the planet, and it'd be a shame if that part of Twitter isn't replaced in some form.

[An_Old_Dog]

Re: No Twitter

What sort of person relies on a fallible, Internet-connected service to learn about nearby (e.g., immediately-threatening) weather events or service outages?!

When the lights at my apartment go out, I just walk outside and look at the windows of the other apartments. If they're dark, too, I think, "Hmm... (external) power failure." Then I'll look up and down the street at the traffic lights and other buildings, and based on that, think, "It's just our building," or, "I guess it's the whole area," and go back inside. I don't bother calling the power company, because I know many other people will already have done so -- no need for me to clog up the phone lines with a redundant report. If it's not the whole area, and not the whole building, I'll look at my electric meter as I walk back inside. If the electric meter does indicate at-this-time power usage, I'll check my breaker box next.

For tornados, hurricanes, and floods, there are my cellphone alerts, broadcast-over-the-airwaves radio and television news (I don't have cable TV). Earthquakes tend not to be predicted conveniently-in-advance.

If you're talking about computer-service outages, I just go to https://downdetector.com -- no accounts, sign-ups, or sign-ins required.

[Keith Langmead]

Re: No Twitter

"Twitter/X is a default signpost for just about every service, business and government department on the planet."

But for how long. I'd argue part of the reason it reached that point was the fact that you COULD login and interact with people/companies/departments etc if you wanted to, but if you just wanted to see the latest updates from someone you could do so without having to login at all.

As such it was a handy univeral destination that you could depend on anyone being able to access. We've long used it at work for service status updates, since it's not reliant on our infrastructure and anyone can access them there, but now that you're forced to login to see anything the utility of the service drops off.

Even though I have a twitter login, I'm not logged in on all the devices and browsers I use. On many occasions I've followed a link to see more information on something that look vaguely interesting, gotten to Twitter where it insists I first login, and decided "Nah, can't be bothered" and just gone elsewhere instead.

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: No Twitter

No its not.

I have never seen a single business in Australia ever mention their twitter handle in a public place.

[Inventor of the Marmite Laser]

Re: No Twitter

What would have happened if Twitter disappeared tomorrow?

Well an awful lot of companies would have to come up with a meaningful alternative route to contacting their customer indifference support people, for starters.

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: No Twitter

Nobody needs twitter or its replacement.

Morons announcing crap too other morons isnt vital.

[sabroni]

Re: Morons announcing crap too other morons isnt vital.

Thanks for that announcement.

[Necrohamster]

Re: No Twitter

CoowHorseFrog: "Morons announcing crap too other morons isnt vital."

And yet here you are...

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: No Twitter

I never claimed my words were vital in any form.

[renniks]

Re: No Twitter

I had the idea for an antisocial media site called Hatebook - no 'friends' just 'enemies'

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: No Twitter

That and ThickTock, where to register you have to log your Kruger-Dunning score.

[HuBo]

What took so long?

I'm with Thomas on this one, and there's that notion that "the customer is always right" that seems to have slipped off the map in this saga. It just makes sense that an advertiser should want to maintain an image of quality, wholesomeness, seriousness, playfulness, or what have you for its products, and that having its ads paired with uncorrelated, or negatively correlated content, would be perceived as potentially damaging for a brand's image (or just wasted money). Like advertising for fine dining in a public urinal.

[abend0c4]

Like advertising ... in a public urinal

Which, for some reason, takes me back to the days of the old telephone box.

Lots of advertising there - at least in big cities - but very little of it actually paid for. And very little incentive to spend any time in the stinking gloom staring at them unless you had a particular need. Which is, of course, the other side of the coin: if you exercise some control over the audience, you can choose the advertisers; otherwise you are at the mercy of advertisers shaping the audience. Which might be awkward when you want to sell them financial services. Or expensive cars. Or pretty much anything that requires a name, address or credit card.

[Evil Scot]

Re: Like advertising ... in a public urinal

I think some of my twitter followers used to advertise in telephone boxes.

[werdsmith]

Re: What took so long?

"the customer is always right"

This is an old empty marketing buzz line from the earlier 20th century. It is not real, never was. No retailer or business ever really took it seriously, so we should not either.

[Grunchy]

Re: "the customer is always right"

Although it is absolutely true that the customer is always right, it’s also true that they aren’t the only potential customer in the whole wide world.

Correctly understood, the two facts tend to render any disagreement moot.

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: What took so long?

That would also explain American consumer law compared to EU or AU.

[b0llchit]

Maybe intentional

How do you run a company into the ground you do not want?

You make it impossible for your company to survive by being a complete dick to your customers^(*) and assure to alienate them. It takes a while, but with the right amount of intent,... you'll get there sooner than later.

^(*) _{No, the tweeting fools are not customers but they are the product. The advertisers are the customers.}

[Flocke Kroes]

Re: Maybe intentional

No way.

Musk's perceived wealth is number of Tesla shares multiplied by share price. That number is partly fiction: selling some Tesla shares drops the value of his remaining holding. To spend that money Musk must instead borrow it from some banks offering shares as collateral. His credit was so good he could get banks to lend Twitter version 2 the money needed to buy Twitter version 1. The banks agreed to this because they believed they could sell the debt to greater fools.

This all fell to pieces the day he trashed-talked Twitter V1 - after committing to buy for $44B. Somehow he worked out that he was massively over paying. The way out would have been to talk up the value of Twitter so V1 share holders would be reluctant to sell. This is actually something he is good at. Tesla is proof he can talk up share price well beyond company performance.

Instead he trashed Twitter V1's share price with considerable skill and enthusiasm. This made Twitter's previous share holders determined to sell - at the high price he had committed to. It also made Twitter V2's debt unsellable. No rich people were foolish enough to buy Twitter debt when he took control of the company. That became more impossible when he stopped his Twitter paying bills. It has become even more impossible now he is talking about Twitter going bankrupt.

Twitter borrowed more money than it needed to buy Twitter. The excess has been paying the interest but there is very little left. Musk is not going to bail out Twitter so the banks will be left with a bad debt.

Musk's credit rating is now shit. Any vendors not currently requiring payment in advance will do so after Twitter's bankruptcy. Loss of that credit rating actually hurts Musk hence the massively inept performance intended to blackmail advertisers into returning.

[Lurko]

Re: Maybe intentional

"Musk's credit rating is now shit. "

I wish it were so. But fame is an aphrodisiac for the onanists who manage other people's money. I reckon even when Twitter craps out, if Musk then announced a venture to collect and process dog mess into a sausage substitute for human consumption, he'd have venture capitalists, lenders and investors fighting each other for the opportunity to place their money with him.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Maybe intentional

Possibly, but it remains to be seen.

I suspect you're at least half correct: elom would indeed have investors and such willing to loan / invest etc. again, but it likely wouldn't be the top line lenders, and it wouldn't be favorable rates, and it might not even be for very large amounts.

That is, there are always bottom-feeders and vultures looking for an opportunity to scrape or scavenge some leavings.

True or not, it reminds somewhat of the reports that ex-president 45 has been having difficulty assembling good legal teams, after publicly burning them with erratic and manic behavior, throwing them under the bus to divert attention, allegedly failing (refusing?) to pay them, and so on. No more help from "only the best people", supposedly.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Maybe intentional

"Musk's credit rating is now shit. Any vendors not currently requiring payment in advance will do so after Twitter's bankruptcy. Loss of that credit rating actually hurts Musk hence the massively inept performance intended to blackmail advertisers into returning."

The rest of Elon's empire will also suffer. Banks burned by "The Twitter Affair" could put the squeeze on SpaceX, Tesla, TBC and Neuralink by accelerating loans and reigning in lines of credit. They could stop extending credit all together to Tesla unless the board parts ways with their part-time CEO in any capacity. That would be very overt and there are many more subtle tactics they can adopt so to not damage Tesla et al but pressure Elon from those companies. People will argue that Tesla has plenty of money now and doesn't need the banks, but that just illustrates what those people don't know about large business operations.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Maybe intentional

Musk's perceived wealth is number of Tesla shares multiplied by share price. That number is partly fiction: selling some Tesla shares drops the value of his remaining holding. To spend that money Musk must instead borrow it from some banks offering shares as collateral. His credit was so good he could get banks to lend Twitter version 2 the money needed to buy Twitter version 1. The banks agreed to this because they believed they could sell the debt to greater fools.

I think the bigger challenge is Tesla's PE is around 77x vs most other car makers 6-7x. So Tesla is massively overvalued, competition is increasing, and product launches may be failures, eg the Cyberduck. If Tesla's revalued, along comes the margin call and all the fun that goes along with that. Remember one of the previous richest men in the world, Bernie Ebbers?

Personally I think Twitter/X is safer, given it's an app, and Musk is a software guy at heart. Plus he's been doing the capitalist thing and ruthlessly cutting the fat. It may not stop an investor, or activist investor try to force bankruptcy by triggering debt covenants, and a forced sale to a 'friendlier' owner though.

[Blank Reg]

Re: Maybe intentional

Except by most accounts (except his own) he's crap at software.

[renniks]

Re: Maybe intentional

The only thing Musk is good at is talking sh!te

[MachDiamond]

Re: Maybe intentional

"The only thing Musk is good at is talking sh!te"

I don't know about that. If he applied himself, he could be good at testing experimental parachutes.

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: Maybe intentional

Isnt that the highlight of the US economy ?

Google - talking bullshit about products and services, aka advertising

Facebook - see google

Hollywood - selling the bullshit american dream

Twitter - see G or FB

Tesla - do they sell because of quality or perceived bullshit ?

[MachDiamond]

Re: Maybe intentional

"Plus he's been doing the capitalist thing and ruthlessly cutting the fat."

By all accounts, he didn't take any time to make a distinction between the core staff and the fat. He just started in with the scythe and had to go back in with some triage when it came to light that some of those people had contracts he couldn't just terminate at will without some serious compensation.

If he would have immediately started moving operations to other areas with lower costs, I would have applauded that. Why does an internet based company need offices in the most expensive of large city downtowns? Since Elon stopped paying rents, this option isn't an option. Any new landlord would want rents for at least a year in advance although for US$1mn, he could purchase a decent office block in a small city. He'd also only need to pay half the salary to employees for an equivalent standard of living.

[aerogems]

Re: Maybe intentional

That would assume two things.

1) That he actually thought this through, and there's ample evidence to show he's not exactly a deep thinker, and very little to the contrary

2) That his status as a "successful businessman" isn't basically tied to the myth that he alone is responsible for the success of Tesla and SpaceX, and having a business fail completely and spectacularly wouldn't do serious damage to that myth

Now admittedly there's a chance that #1 sort of negates #2, but if there's probably anything that gets Twitler to stop and think about things, it's anything that affects his net worth. Twitter is just an example of what happens when Twitler is free to act on his crazy impulses and doesn't have a team of minders to keep him from tanking the company after he takes one of his "energy supplements" (i.e. a cocaine bump) and is absolutely convinced that some absolutely idiotic idea is the greatest thing ever.

[Snowy]

Re: Maybe intentional

Nice company you have there, would make a great tax right off with the right management.

[Flocke Kroes]

Re: tax write off

A tax write off means instead of paying a proportion of profits from one company to the government you use another company to flush it down the toilet. There way well be an argument for the two options being effectively the same. A greedier solution is to make a profit with both companies but have your accountants find a legal way to pay bugger all tax from both. At a certain scale it is cheaper to buy a law exempting you from taxes than pay the taxes you cannot otherwise avoid.

[Killfalcon]

Re: tax write off

In theory, the money pumped into a company that's making a loss is an investment that'll eventually provide returns to you. For a business, this can be a more efficient use of money than paying taxes (which does have returns, but they're much harder to put on your annual report to shareholders).

[renniks]

Re: Maybe intentional

"How do you run a company into the ground you do not want?"

Make Elon Musk the CEO

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: Maybe intentional

The more of a public focus or celebrity any leader becomes the worse it is for everyone.

Concentrating decisions on the few never ends well... from dictators like Putin, the Gulf states, to megacorps like Musk or Bezos.

[pdh]

We just can't take our eyes off of him, can we?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would I? The entertainment's priceless, and if I look away for a moment I might miss another world class act of idiocy.

[MachDiamond]

"Why would I? The entertainment's priceless, and if I look away for a moment I might miss another world class act of idiocy."

One of the distinguishing traits of humans is our ability (in some) to learn from other's mistakes. The problem with watching Elon is he does such stupid things that I'm not learning not to do things that I would never do in the first place.

[nintendoeats]

I find a degree of reassurance in the fact that it is still possible for rich people to hurt themselves.

[aerogems]

It's like a slow motion train wreck. You know it's going to be awful, but you just can't look away.

[MachDiamond]

"You know it's going to be awful, but you just can't look away."

The suspense is killing me, I hope it lasts.

[SundogUK]

He's still a billionaire and you're not.

[Blank Reg]

He's a potential billionaire. Until he sells his assets their value is undetermined. And selling his assets would greatly diminish their value, that is why he has come up with several excuses for selling assets over the years. The real reason being he wanted to cash in while the price was insanely and unreasonably high. Had he kept the proceeds he would be a real billionaire many times over, but instead he decided to flush it down the toilet

[fg_swe]

No, Actual

If Musk did an intelligent liquidation of his assets, he would be easily worth $50 billion.

[Sam 15]

Yep. He's a Schrödinger's billionaire.

Until you collapse the wavefunction we have no idea what he is really worth - and "collapse" might be the operative term here.

[Alan Bourke]

Nothing more tragic

than Musk stans.

[Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells]

And the campaign against free speech by journalists (!) continues.

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

I cannot tell--is this a parody account or the genuine article? Anyone have a solid clue?

[John Miles]

Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells on Wiki, though I would normally expect the stereo-typical "Disgusted" to be writing to complain about Musk's profanities

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

Thanks, John! I will assume it's a parody account providing healthy servings of poeslaw.

[Anonymous Coward]

Throatwarbler Mangrove: “Is this a parody account or the genuine article?”

> I cannot tell--is this a parody account or the genuine article? Anyone have a solid clue?

YES!

[Jamie Jones]

I originally thought the name was meant to be ironic, but then I started to think that he/she really lives up to it, but yeah, it's getting so ridiculous now, it must be a parody account.

[mpi]

Whos free speech was campaigned against precisely?

And since we're talking about freedom: As a customer, I have the freedom to take my business elsewhere when I no longer agree with how the supply company run their business.

[nintendoeats]

Re: Whos free speech was campaigned against precisely?

This is the bit people often forget about.

"Well, Googapplesoftizoneta are allowed to operate their business however they like"

"Right, and a consequence is that I won't use their services because I DON'T like it."

[Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells]

Re: Whos free speech was campaigned against precisely?

Before Musk, Twitter "deamplified" right wing voices, shut down perfectly respected scientists and in one case, blocked mainstream journalists from posting a link to their article because the article was harmful to Twitter's political aims.

This stopped being a conspiracy theory and started being fact when Musk allowed a group of journalists free access to internal company emails, etc. We know know that all this happened. It is fact.

The number of people piling on attacking my post is concerning. Not because I'm bothered about unpleasant replies, but because so many people are willing to ignore bad behaviour as long as it is committed by their side.

Free speech is vital to a functioning democracy. Just because you dislike the person doing the speaking, disagree with their opinions or even if you think you can prove them to be factually wrong, that doesn't justify the public square being limited to only people who push certain viewpoints.

[mpi]

Re: Whos free speech was campaigned against precisely?

> Before Musk, Twitter "deamplified" right wing voices, shut down perfectly respected scientists

Source? Proof?

> This stopped being a conspiracy theory

No, it did not.

> Free speech is vital to a functioning democracy.

Free speech means one thing, only one thing, and EXACTLY one thing: That the government cannot arrest people for what they say.

So I ask again: Whos free speech was campaigned against precisely?

Free speech does NOT mean that an advertising customer who no longer agrees with how I run my advertising platform, has to continue being my customer.

Free speech does NOT mean that anyone has to give me a platform for what I want to say.

Free speech does NOT mean anyone has to listen to me, agree with me, respect what I say, or even notice that I said anything.

Free speech does NOT mean that what I say cannot be challenged or face criticism.

[Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells]

Re: Whos free speech was campaigned against precisely?

You've linked to the antisemitic MediaMatters to prove something negative about Twitter.

Media Matters are getting sued for using fraud to defame Twitter. They lied. Sorry to break it to you.

[mpi]

Re: Whos free speech was campaigned against precisely?

> You've linked to the antisemitic MediaMatters

Proof for anti-semitism? Also still waiting for the proofs I asked for in my above post.

> Media Matters are getting sued

Getting sued and being convicted are 2 very different things.

[Mooseman]

Re: Whos free speech was campaigned against precisely?

"Media Matters are getting sued for using fraud to defame Twitter. They lied"

Er, Mediamatters don't seem terribly concerned about this -

"Far from the free speech advocate he claims to be, Musk is a bully who threatens meritless lawsuits in an attempt to silence reporting that he even confirmed is accurate. Musk admitted the ads at issue ran alongside the pro-Nazi content we identified. If he does sue us, we will win." (One of the companies who withdrew advertising from X, IBM, did so after the MM reports was published. You would imagine that they would have checked rather than simply believe a report, surely?

You're accusing MM of antisemitism? Hmm, now let me think - oh yes “Jewish communties have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” said X/twitter user @breakingbaht. Sounds a bit, er, antisemitic doesnt it? How did your hero respond? “You have said the actual truth.”

You might want to take a few minutes to browse the kind of user accounts and content that twitter/x is not only allowing to crawl back out from under their rocks but actively promoting.

[Khaptain]

Re: Whos free speech was campaigned against precisely?

What the Twitter Files proved more than anything else was the interaction/interference between the Govt and/or 3 letter agencies and Twitter. Due to the bias of the Govt etc this meant that they had control over certain narratives, especially anything concerning anything positive towards Trump, negative towards Biden or against the narrative for Covid.

This as of itself should have scared you, regardless of your political stance.

[Mooseman]

Re: Whos free speech was campaigned against precisely?

"What the Twitter Files proved more than anything else"

was that the right wing hysteria was as usual completely made up

[Stuart Castle]

I'll admit, it is a radical approach for a business. Telling your customers to f**k off.

And make now mistake, the advertisers *are* the customers. The people who actually use the site are the product the advertisers buy.

[Lurko]

"And make now mistake,"

Indeed, sir, indeed.

AC because I can't type either, nor do I proof read my own posts before pressing "submit".

[Lurko]

"Lurko"

"AC because I can't type either, nor do I proof read my own posts before pressing "submit"."

See what I mean? Genuinely, I was intending to post AC, mucked it up, and realised within the edit window but thought it only fair to let people have a further laugh on me.

[Jamie Jones]

The edit window has always been buggered - I've reported it twice, but nothing is done.

Basically, you can't edit a post to switch from anon to non-anon or vice-verca. It appears to work, but the change is not made.

On a similar vein, if you edit a post, and the edit contains invalid html, it doesn't warn you, it just drops the edit, which is also not very nice. I also included this bug in the original ignored reports.

[yetanotheraoc]

edit

"you can't edit a post to switch from anon to non-anon or vice-verca"

If you posted under your name, you can withdraw it and repost it anonymously. If you originally posted anonymously, you can reply saying it was you.

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel your pain. As an anon I could go on and on about anon to non anon.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe he did proof read it and he's just a brummie.

[Mooseman]

"Maybe he did proof read it and he's just a brummie."

Bostin!

[Anonymous Coward]

A study found that business increased for establishments labelled as racist on Yelp!

[MachDiamond]

"A study found that business increased for establishments labelled as racist on Yelp!"

It might be a good indicator that their competitors are scared by how much better they are so they are resorting to petty attacks to bring them down. I don't trust the feedback on Yelp anyway so it matters not as far as I'm concerned. Amazon feedback is useless too since it's apparently easy to game (not that I buy anything through Amazon). eBay seems to be a bit better with how they've implemented their feedback, but it's not perfect and people can buy 'used' eBay accounts that have a certain level of positive feedback preloaded.

[Khaptain]

"A study found that business increased for establishments labelled as racist on Yelp!"

Another study found that 99.99999% of people are not racist but that didn't interest the media or those desperate for likes.

[CowHorseFrog]

That is not true at all. A large number of americans are racist, for example they cry black lives matter but when was the last time you heard them cry black african lives matter or kids making nikes matter ?

They dont care about non americans, thats a basic fact.

[GNU SedGawk]

Facts, not a Zionist strong point - Rachel Corrie.

Rachel Corrie, may she be of blessed Memory. Is an American Hero, raised by Americans, who set out to make the world a better place.

Rachel Corrie

Born Rachel Aliene Corrie

April 10, 1979

Olympia, Washington, United States

Died March 16, 2003 (aged 23)

Rafah, Gaza Strip, Palestinian Territories

Cause of death Crushed by an Israeli armored bulldozer

Nationality American

Alma mater Evergreen State College

Occupations

Activistdiarist

Years active 1997–2003

Movement International Solidarity Movement

Rachel Aliene Corrie (April 10, 1979 – March 16, 2003) was an American activist and diarist.[1][2] She was a member of the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement (ISM)[3] and was active throughout the Palestinian territories. In 2003, Corrie was in Rafah, a city in the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli military was demolishing Palestinian houses at the height of the Second Intifada. In an attempt to stop the demolitions as they were being carried out, she stood in front of an armored bulldozer and was subsequently crushed to death by it under contested circumstances.[4][2][5][6]

She had gone to Gaza as part of her college's senior-year independent-study proposal to connect Olympia and Rafah with each other as sister cities.[7] While there, she had joined other ISM activists in efforts to prevent Israel's demolition of Palestinian property.[2][8][9] Israeli authorities stated that the demolitions were being carried out in order to eliminate weapons-smuggling tunnels for Palestinian militants,[2] but this claim was contested by a number of international human rights organizations,[who?] which argued that Israel was responding to terrorist attacks by subjecting the Palestinian people to collective punishment.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Corrie

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: Facts, not a Zionist strong point - Rachel Corrie.

No she is dead, not a hero.There is nothing heroic about being stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

Balneum tempus

I’m not sure Elon could run a bath.

[Flocke Kroes]

Re: Balneum tempus

The same doubt applied to Florida Man would have resulted in a video proving you wrong plus supporters linking to the video to demonstrate his exceptional abilities.

[fg_swe]

Re: Balneum tempus

He is running operations that are easily 10000x more complex. Real Rocket Science, for example. Doing things nobody else did before him, like reusing launchers.

[Casca]

Re: Balneum tempus

No, HE is not running them...

The musk herd is really something.

[Mooseman]

Re: Balneum tempus

"He is running operations that are easily 10000x more complex. Real Rocket Science"

By that logic the head of Ford is personally building cars. Or the head of IBM is designing and building computers. You do know that Musk has actual scientists and engineers who do the work, dont you?

[MachDiamond]

Re: Balneum tempus

"Doing things nobody else did before him, like reusing launchers."

Even I was was reusing rockets before Elon!

It's not a new concept and wasn't in use due to financial considerations rather than technical. A rocket meant to land again for reuse needs have about 45% more capability than one that will be discarded. That includes landing gear mass and added fuel. Before SpaceX was reusing cores on a regular basis, people with satellites to launch would contract for a launcher that matched their needs plus a little margin.

[Anonymous Coward]

if your still on xitter

get off now, do not associate with people who ignore this instruction

your giving money to companies who not only ignore the orders of the ADL but actively defy it

[Jamie Jones]

Re: if your still on xitter

Not a good argument.

The ADL are not a government, or a police force.

That aside, they aren't even a valid group. To them, "anti-defamation" means, and only means, ANY criticism of anything to do with Zionist policy, They are the source of the Rachel Riley school of thought that criticising the current Israeli government policy makes you anti-Semitic.

I used to support them until I realised - and at that point, I miraculously went from being a friendly person who had lived in Israel with an Israeli Jew to being piled on from all corners as an anti-Semite.

Mind you, my girlfriend at the time was also critical of her government's treatment of Palestine, so I guess she's anti-Semitic too.

[Millwright]

Re: if your still on xitter

I believe the favoured label for your ex is "Self-hating Jew". Being a goy with similar views I of course get "anti-semite".

[Jamie Jones]

Re: if your still on xitter

Ahhh. "self-hating Jew". It's good how they've even made the insult make it appear like she's in the wrong!

That would explain why the Haredi throw stones at people like her, to teach her to love herself more.

Anyway by the same logic, I guess I (and many others here) am a "self-hating white Brit"!

[xyz123]

Elon Can't win. If he bends to the will of advertisers he's "an establishment shill" and if he doesn't he's "unfairly killing X".

BUT (and its a big but) Theregister.co.uk has advertisers and takes instructions on stories to run from them all the time.

If you check Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Register#:~:text=Situation%20Publishing%20Ltd%20is%20the,Birtles%20is%20the%20managing%20director.

You'll see the register ran stories pushed under the instructions of climate deniers and big oil and other polluting corporations.

[doublelayer]

I take it you're deriving that statement from this rather different one from the Wikipedia article:

"In 2010 The Guardian accused The Register of misunderstanding climate science and misrepresenting a paper from the journal Nature in a manner that deliberately minimized the climate impact of human emissions."

Not quite the same as what you said, is it? I've now read the Guardian article in question. I think they've got it right; the article from El Reg from thirteen years ago was misinterpreting a paper quite badly. That doesn't follow that they were told to do so by anyone in particular. It may be the author's biases or even simple laziness, and the author concerned doesn't work here anymore. It also doesn't mean that they've been taking instructions from advertisers "all the time", since you haven't proven that they did so even once.

I'm also not really sure what this has to do with Musk's actions, since he's not taking any instructions from advertisers, even as they stop paying him. He's attempting to give them instructions along the lines of "you don't understand, you have to keep paying me, I have a right to your money".

[Flocke Kroes]

Re: the will of advertisers

The will of advertisers is dictated by the will of the majority of their customers so I quite agree that Musk cannot win this one.

Musk killing X is not unfair. He bought it, he can run it as badly as he chooses until it dies from bad debt. The thing I find entertaining is his destruction of X is not deliberate. He genuinely believes he is doing something constructive at X and the failure is caused by a small but powerful conspiracy working against him.

The failure comes from him directing hatred at minorities and the majority as individuals deciding to push back because: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out..."

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: the will of advertisers

WHy does Musk have to increase Twitter's value for it to be a success?

Maybe he wants to kill X, maybe thats his measure of success.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: the will of advertisers

OK, if his intention is to slowly kill off X I must grudgingly admit that he's doing a sterling job of it.

[Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells]

Re: the will of advertisers

Maybe he measures success in terms of stopping the American left from controlling public discourse.

Maybe he thinks there's profit in Twitter being what Twitter was originally supposed to be rather than a partisan political tool used to push left-wing propaganda and silence everybody else.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: the will of advertisers

You know full well that the brainwashed masses in America are MAGA, believing all sorts of lies spewed by Fox, Newsmax, and AON.

The so called "left wing" press isn't impartial - they can show quite some bias at times - however, the right wing media out and out lies, and a quarter of Americans believe it.

Do you think the election was stolen? Do you think Biden is responsible for gas prices? Do you think that Biden is really an actor and JFK will be coming back soon?

[MachDiamond]

Re: the will of advertisers

"WHy does Musk have to increase Twitter's value for it to be a success?"

A successful business earns a profit. A successful hobby can lose money all year long, but the tax people eventually start to ask questions if the enterprise is claimed to be a business.

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: the will of advertisers

Thats YOUR definition of success, its not th eonly definition.

For PUTIN the man, Ukraine is a success, because he doesnt give a flying fuck how many Russians get killed, as long as he stays in power.

[Mike 137]

Re: the will of advertisers

"He genuinely believes he is doing something constructive at X and the failure is caused by a small but powerful conspiracy working against him"

Symptomatic of paranoid megalomania?

[trindflo]

telling his Twitter advertisers to go f**k themselves

Elon's a really busy guy. He can't get to everyone himself.

[Pete Sdev]

It's a conspiracy!

Here's a conspiracy theory for all the metalic haberdashery fans:

Twitter was actually not bad at letting the oi poli access information quickly. It played a not insignificant role in the Arab Spring revolts for example.

That made The Powers That Be™ nervous so they sent in their man Musk (son of a South African diamond mine owner), who's obviously a lizard, to deliberately sabotage it and run it into the ground. All going according to plan.

/ mode type="tounge-in-cheek"

[Boris the Cockroach]

Re: It's a conspiracy!

Now thats a plan so cunning its worthy of Baldrick

[willyslick]

Re: It's a conspiracy!

Is there not serious middle east money financing Elon's purchase of Xitter?

The argument that there should not be a repeat of the Arab Spring which was to some degree enabled by Xitter seems not too farfetched in this context.

What's a few billions in losses to Musk when he has the financial support of these autoritarians behind him???

[MachDiamond]

Re: It's a conspiracy!

"What's a few billions in losses to Musk when he has the financial support of these autoritarians behind him???"

Elon says he expects to spend a couple of billion in 2024 on Starship. If he can't raise that with other people's money, he'll need to (finally) put in some more of his own. He's taken US taxpayer money to build a lunar lander and if that's not accomplished, even late as it will be at this point, the US Government may take steps which could mean the end of SpaceX as an EM enterprise. A few million can be forgiven, but not $3bn. Elon needs to have some big cash reserves to back up his mouth.

[Eugene Crosser]

I have little sympathy of Musk's way to dealing with his latest purchase. But regardless, saying that "freedom of speech means that government cannot tell people what they can and cannot say" is a misdirection. The principle was conceived in the times when nobody except government could enforce censorship. This principle works when the venue for the public discourse is a town square, funded by local taxes.

In this day and age though, when we collectively handed the "venue for the public discourse" to businesses, that are financed by advertises, it means that advertisers decide what can and what cannot be publicly said. Yes, it's not a limitation of the freedom of speech in the narrow legal sense: it's not the government that does the limiting. But the result is still the same: there is somebody who decides what it "OK" to say in public, and what is "not OK".

As long as the "venue for the public discourse" is a business, there cannot be true freedom of speech on that platform. (Even if it is funded by member subscription, it will be prone to the "dictatorship of the majority".)

(For the record, I've never had a twitter, or facebook, for that matter, account.)

[yetanotheraoc]

true freedom of speech

`... there is somebody who decides what (is) "OK" to say in public, and what is "not OK".`

When I was young, that was my grandmother. She is long gone, but the lesson remains. There are some things it is not OK to say in public.

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: true freedom of speech

Like free healthcare ?

[Hawkeye Pierce]

I have to disagree with most of what you've said.

Almost all discussion about "freedom of speech" ends up back with the American Constitution - or else you're talking purely philosophically with no definitive written word to make it anything other than a philosphical or moral debate.

As such it most certainly does relate to the government - then as to now - as it's the government that has the ability to severly restrict your personal freedoms. So no, an advertiser can not dictate what I can say in public and a government mustn't be allowed to - there is a significant different there.

You seem to conflating that difference with the ability of an advertiser to put financial pressure on a business - which is a completely different issue. An advertiser is not stating what is or isn't OK. They're saying that their money may get withdrawn and that the business may suffer, but that business is still free to do what they want. And your comment about businesses "funded by member subscription" is also far off the mark. Unless said business has a consitution requiring votes from the membership, said business is perfectly entitled to do what they want and as to whether "the majority" then walk away, that doesn't prevent that business from continuing as they please and who knows, maybe the minority is still sufficient to remain in business.

[MachDiamond]

"So no, an advertiser can not dictate what I can say in public "

Yes and no. They can't dictate what you say in public in the classic form of going outside, standing on something and having your say. What they can do is refuse to fund venues where you might be heard by more than a handful of people. The classic gatekeepers have been newspapers, magazines, radio programmers and TV stations. They've all had to moderate their content even in nominally free countries to keep advertisers happy. That hasn't changed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Free speech 101

Nazis are always wrong.

[SundogUK]

Re: Free speech 101

Who gets to decide who is a Nazi?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Free speech 101

Re: “Who gets to decide who is a Nazi?”

I think there’s a simple test for that these days.

Ask your local Gruppenfuhrer for details.

[SundogUK]

Re: Free speech 101

You disagree with me = you're a Nazi?

[fg_swe]

Tshekists

HITLER learned mass murder from commies ULJANOV. TROTZKY and TSHERSHINSKY. They had already murdered 20 million people before 1933.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Tshekists

And that is relevant how?

No, seriously, just curious.

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: Tshekists

HITLER copied his ideas from Mr Ford... go read what Mr Ford wrote.

[Mooseman]

Re: Tshekists

"HITLER copied his ideas from Mr Ford... "

No he didn't. Ford was a rabid antisemite but in no way did Hitler copy from him. The nazis seized on the American-led idea of eugenics and took it to whole new depths, but antiseitism was alive and kicking in Europs long before Ford was conceived.

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: Tshekists

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford

Steven Watts wrote that Hitler "revered" Ford, proclaiming that "I shall do my best to put his theories into practice in Germany", and modeling the Volkswagen Beetle, the people's car, on the Model T.

[Mooseman]

Re: Free speech 101

"Nazis are always wrong."

Isn't it interesting that 3 people downvoted that basic idea? So apparently 3 people DON'T think being a nazi is wrong.....

[SundogUK]

Re: Free speech 101

Again, Who gets to decide who is a Nazi?

[CowHorseFrog]

Isnt it gret how american media makes heroes out of arseholes and continues to create cults of so many unworthy personalities.

[Andrew Barr]

Why isn't Elon's other companies filling in the gaps that are left by the leaving advertisers if it is so amazing? /Sarcasm

[MachDiamond]

"Why isn't Elon's other companies filling in the gaps that are left by the leaving advertisers if it is so amazing? /Sarcasm"

I think that some of that has been happening. If Tesla is going to do any advertising, the first place you'd expect to see those ads is Xitter. SpaceX could buy adspace, but since there's no need for SX to advertise, it's a bit more suspicious. The same for The Boring Company (Elon's, not the older Boring Company in Las Vegas.) Neuralink could advertise, but they're still in the R&D phase without a product. It's a way for Elon to move money to Xitter in a way that has a veneer of plausible deniability when the lawsuits are filed.

[LordZot]

It's about the blackmail

Did nobody notice or listen to the original comment that he made during the interview? It's about companies that were trying to blackmail him by threatening to take away their advertising business. So he told them to go jump, and rightly so.

[krakead]

Re: It's about the blackmail

But it's not blackmail - not even close. It's business exercising their freedom not to associate with a company whose behaviour they do not agree with. It's not hard to understand once you remove your head from Elon's rectum and take a look around.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: It's about the blackmail

No, it is blackmail by the activists at Media Matters. Bend to our will or we will engineer data to make your advertisers leave you.

But I use an ad blocker so this doesn't affect me.

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: It's about the blackmail

Its the battle of arseholes, both sides are a waste of space.

[naive]

The witch hunt of the leftist mob

I bet Soros and his Stalinist comrades are grinding their teeth in anger due to the existence of a large public platform that they can't censor.

They grasp every opportunity to discredit the X platform, even El reg seems to have joined the mob with moaning lefties.

There is still something like a free capitalistic market.

The X platform is the only sizable and uncensored platform for public discourse in existence at the moment. The probability that people will continue visiting it, since their content won't be removed by water drinking hipster beards, is quite high. Advertisers can choose to ignore the huge user base, in the end they will budge since not advertising on a big platform is a missed opportunity.

Mr. Musk is one of the few members of the elite carrying the torch of freedom in the West.

[John H Woods]

Re: The witch hunt of the leftist mob

Is this a Poe?

[Androgynous Cupboard]

Re: The witch hunt of the leftist mob

Username checks out

[krakead]

Re: The witch hunt of the leftist mob

But if Twitter can't stand on its own two feet without being propped up by advertisers then surely that's just the capitalist market, which you clearly love dearly, speaking? Musk is, among his many failings, a first-class hypocrite.

[MachDiamond]

Re: The witch hunt of the leftist mob

"But if Twitter can't stand on its own two feet without being propped up by advertisers then surely that's just the capitalist market"

Wait! What?

Propped up?

Advertisers are the customer in the same way that advertisers are the customers for magazines, newspapers, TV channels, etc. Elon is talking about the trove of user submitted content they can sell to train AI, but I'm a bit skeptical about that. Somebody like FaceBook that doesn't have an arbitrary size limit on posts has much better material for AI systems to chew on.

[fg_swe]

Re: The witch hunt of the leftist mob

There are quite a few more censorship-resistant platforms such as

+ Telegram (ironically build+run by Russians "in Dubai")

+ Rumble

+ IRC

+ qwant search engine

+ YaCy distributed search engine

+ Conservapedia

+ private webserver

+ bittorrent scalable file sharing

+ crowdpowered video services such as PeerTube

The idea that average people are now locked into the FAANG golden cages is actually very wrong. Let's venture out !

[MachDiamond]

Re: The witch hunt of the leftist mob

"I bet Soros and his Stalinist comrades are grinding their teeth in anger due to the existence of a large public platform that they can't censor."

I don't think they would have to play a particularly long game to allow Xitter to implode and scoop up the bits at auction for pennies.

[Mooseman]

Re: The witch hunt of the leftist mob

"one of the few members of the elite carrying the torch of freedom in the West"

Are you actually serious? I assume from your drivel about Soros and "stalinists" that you consider racist and far right hate speech to be "freedom"? How about antisemitic lies? Because that's what Musky is pushing on X.

[GNU SedGawk]

Re: The witch hunt of the leftist mob

The issue you have is your lies are being debunked in realtime as the users of Xitter are witness to "A textbook case of Genocide" in the experts opinion outlined at some length here, https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2023/11/a-textbook-case-of-genocide/.

The wanton destruction of civilian infrastructure, the statements of genocidal intent, the deprivation of food, fuel, water, medical supplies to a besieged occupied population, all have been documented.

Forming part of the

As scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies and genocide studies, we are

compelled to sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli

forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. We do not do so lightly, recognising the weight of this

crime, but the gravity of the current situation demands it.

https://twailr.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Gaza-public-statement-and-signatories.pdf

[Casca]

Re: The witch hunt of the leftist mob

Ah yes, and hamas did nothing wrong...

[GNU SedGawk]

Re: The witch hunt of the leftist mob

That's not true - It's widely acknowledged not least by them, that they kidnapped, and held hostage non-combatants. That is a 100% war crime. Capturing uniformed combatants, I don't think is a war crime provided their treatment accords with the Geneva conventions.

However Apartheid and Genocide are crimes against Humanity. All people have a obligation to prevent Genocide and dismantle Apartheid, including the Palestinian people.

Israel, and the states that have failed to call a ceasefire, use Article 51 of the UN Charter to claim legitimacy for Israel’s blanket attack on the civilian population in Gaza. Israel in the past has attempted to use "self-defence" to justify a number of its actions, including the building of the wall in the West Bank.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ), in its advisory opinion on the legal consequences of the construction of a wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory in 2004, confirmed that Article 51 "recognises the existence of an inherent right of self-defence in the case of armed attack by one state against another state".

However, Israel accepts that it is occupying Palestinian land and denies the legitimacy of Palestinian statehood, therefore Gaza and the West Bank are not a "foreign state" for the purposes of Article 51. The ICJ therefore concluded, in that same judgment, that Article 51 had no applicability to Israel since Palestine is occupied.

Israel withdrew its illegal settlers from Gaza in 2005, but maintained full control of the borders, including the supply of fuel and electricity, cutting these off at will.

Amnesty International described the situation as a "15-year ongoing… collective punishment". Despite arguments by Israel that its occupation of Gaza ended in 2005, it has remained de facto occupier and therefore the applicability of the ICJ opinion is still upheld.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-palestine-war-claim-self-defence-zero-legal-legitimacy

[Casca]

Re: The witch hunt of the leftist mob

Wow, that was a lot of weird bullshit.

[Simon Rockman]

Nice piece.

[StrangerHereMyself]

Losing $45 billion

I believe he's going to lose the entire $45 billion he spent on Twitter with his antics.

It will be interesting how this will affect both SpaceX and Tesla since investors might not be too happy about a dude at the wheel that blew away this kind of money on a whim. I don't think he'll end up sleeping on the street (he has too much money for that and probably has a couple millions stashed away somewhere), but it could mean he'll have to settle for "early retirement."

[fg_swe]

Re: Losing $45 billion

Electric cars on large scale, reusable rockets and mega satellite constellations are worth more than a smartphone discussion app. But yeah, destroying a billion dollar brand does not go down easily with the financiers.

More importantly, if the smartphone app is just to bring serious flak to the oligarchy, there will be blowback through all of the mainstream media they control. Which is about 100%.

[Stuart Castle]

I like Twitter, but think Elon Musk is being an idiot. He can think what he wants about his major customers, but the fact is, if they do f**k off, he doesn't have a business. And yes, his customers *are* the advertisers. The schmucks (like me) who post on there are the produce.

He is increasingly reminding me of the owners of this restaurant.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MC8i0gt5m-Y

[fg_swe]

Playing Inside Minefield

Mr Musk clearly shows some Cojones for marching into this minefield. Somebody should tell him, that this should be done with caution and skill, though. Free Speech is very important and critical to the proper function of ANY democratic republic*, governed by rule of law. As opposed to the rule of (oligarchy or other) mobs.

The Covid Corruption (making dangerous quick+dirty injections mandatory) clearly demonstrated this. Nutterish government policies related to the the Gender Thing would be another example. Iraq war for nothing, etc.

I still consider Mr Musk a highly skilled man, given his achievements in cars and reusable rocket launchers, mega-satellite constellations,...

He now found out that PROPER censorship is the critical skill. It is somewhere between "you cannot criticize wokeism" and "let's call for mass murder".

*or constitutional monarchy with elected government

[MachDiamond]

Re: Playing Inside Minefield

"He now found out that PROPER censorship is the critical skill."

Proper content moderation is the better description. Opposing views can be very valuable, but not ad-hominem attacks, overt racism and objectionable language.

[Mooseman]

Re: Playing Inside Minefield

"Free Speech is very important and critical to the proper function of ANY democratic republic"

Oh, you mean freedom to say whatever you like, no matter the consequences for others? That's not free speech, neither is it protected under law in any democracy I can think of. What Musk and his fanbois fail to grasp is that free speech also means accepting the consequences of that speech, which is why there were so many unpleasant (usually always right wing) users blocked from Twitter - they broke clearly signposted rules. Now Musk has given them all carte blanche to return and continue spewing hatred and lies, which I assume you support and agree with, given your drivel about vaccines...

[Casca]

Re: Playing Inside Minefield

Antivaccer you? Surely not...

[CitizenJohnJohn]

"this boycott could kill the social network"

And nothing of value was lost.

[Winkypop]

Musk’s Twitter

Useful at one thing.

Exposing the concentration of RWNJs and Conspiracy Sheep that gather there to the world.

But be careful if you venture in, there be dragons!

[b1k3rdude]

To use a commonly used London phrase, muskox really needs to f**k off and do one.

[arachnoid2]

Poor Rocket man

Spewing his version of truth on Twitter as if hes a wise man handing out candy to an adoring crowd.

[renniks]

'On-the-spectrum' boy is gonna on-the-spectrum

[Alan Brown]

Advertising integrity

Almost all of the ads I see are of the "Martin Lewis wants to sell you crypto" variety

If I was a big-name advertiser I'd be staying far far away from being associated with such things