Submitted 11 months ago by misk@sopuli.xyz to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67599937
I honestly think that he doesn’t have to face consequences like normal people because he has enough money to make problems go away. He can be an awful person in interviews, and mean his words too, then even bankrupt his company, and you know what? He will continue being excessively rich.
His money could be used to fix so many issues en masse. It’s disgusting that he chooses not to do so every day.
His money could be used to fix so many issues en masse. It’s disgusting that he chooses not to do so every day.
One of my biggest gripes is that anyone can have this much money to begin with. We should never have to rely on the ultra-wealthy to fix our problems by making it their pet project, and no one should be able to squirrel away that much money to begin with. All the money that could fix those issues en masse instead pads some sociopath’s portfolio.
Personally, I’m okay with a small set of folks being rich as long as they pay their taxes. I’m this case, a hell of a lot of taxes. Let the legal system enforce that they give back to society in a meaningful way. Close the stupid loopholes. I want to see a meaningful improvement in society from their contributions. Everyone else is worse off unless they contribute.
He has wealth, he has to dip into selling stock to have “money.”
I don’t disagree otherwise, but when your wealth is in the companies you own, you pretty much have to sell the whole shebang in one go (what Musk reportedly tried to do with Apple, offering to sell them Tesla as a whole) or selling it piecemeal, by selling off portions of stock (which he does fairly regularly for cash infusions).
His wealth will surely insulate him for quite a long time. However, it is not a permanent insulator, and he has made a series of, let’s say, questionable decisions. It’s very likely that it will either take decades for it to really hurt him, or that it just may make him far less wealthy, but still wealthy enough to be annoying.
We’re also at a precipice, because the kinds of things that he is saying were the kinds of things that used to get you shitcanned from the business community as a whole. Nobody would do business with a virulent anti-semite. It’s one of the reasons Musk bought Twitter, really, because they are busy normalizing positions like anti-semitism.
The normalizing of his hate will actually get him farther, longer, than his wealth.
If the guy has his money “tired up in assets,” and this is your way of training that he shouldn’t pay taxes, then I have a bridge to sell you.
His money could be used to fix so many issues en masse. It’s disgusting that he chooses not to do so every day.
Pretty sure he posted on twitter a couple years ago about how if someone credible provided a plan to solve world hunger for 6 billion dollars, he would sell Tesla stock and just do it, to which the UN responded with a detailed plan. However, Musk pretty much ignored them, no acknowledgment (as far as I know) and no money donated.
Using the money to fix issues in the world and making it a better place is not a part of his politics.
Life without is better. I left over a year ago. No drama, no loss, no issues.
“I don’t have any theories that make sense,” Paskalis says. “There is a revenue model in his head that eludes me.”
You don’t need a complex business model for this to make sense. The man has had “fuck you money” his entire life. Things are finally not going his way and he only has one way to respond… by saying “fuck you” to the people he doesn’t like.
Pretty much. I understand the impulse to think he has to have some secret plan, some rational explanation for his behavior. I used to think the same thing, that there was some way he would actually make money from destroying the company, but no. No, he’s just an impetuous, impulsive idiot who tricked himself into having to buy the company at meme stock prices, and is going to burn the whole thing to the ground purely because he is, in fact, a dumbass.
That impulse is similar to the impulse I see in conservatives when they claim Trump has to have a plan. “he’s eluded prison time his whole life!” “He managed to become president!” Etc. Like. They insist there’s a method to the madness. That method is that he shouts down anyone who tells him he’s wrong and sells everyone else bravado. That’s it.
Yeah. Most people, especially in the establishment press, don’t know or pretend to not know that this is the first time he’s actually shaping how a company is run rather than pay someone else and then take credit for their work like he’s always done.
Everything went well when he pretended to be Tony Stark inventing and designing every part of his companies while others did it all much better than he ever could.
Now that he’s publicly making actually meaningful (as in they have a big impact, not as in them making sense) decisions, he’s showing the world that he’s just an extremely impulsive malignant narcissist 52 year old manchild who desperately craves to be seen as cool and edgy by young people.
I liked Twitter. I know it’s a cesspit, but as a software engineer it was always the top company I wanted to work at. It didn’t work out (for several funny reasons), but for that selfish reason I’ll never forgive Musk.
IMO, Musk needs help. If he were a normal person, someone would have pushed him to leave work and find help. As the owner of three companies, responsible for tens of thousands of employees, no chance is he getting that help. He’s constantly baited and prodded by his fan boys, people like Rogan and Chappelle who can deal with that kind of fame, and the press that get content from his antics.
As for Twitter, I don’t see it dying, until it fails to have a use for Musk. My initial belief was that his “everything app” would use Twitter’s account system to get all of its users, and then he’d sell Twitter and continue with the users - but that app isn’t ever happening. It’s just something he’s desperate to ditch, but his vanity and poor mental health won’t let him do it. For that reason, it’ll just be a zombie app.
I dont think an “everything app” will ever work.
You can make one thing that does one thing very well and better than the competition, and you will get users. Or you can do one thing that will try to do 10 things half assed, and it will fail to impress users. This happens because you have to divert your resources (time, money, people) for development, maintenance, new ideas, design etc. across all your “everythings”. The more everythings you have, the less resources each one gets, however the costs for maintenance, bugfixes, updates etc. stay the same.
This happened to Yahoo in the early 2000s, where it tried to be Search, News portal, Email, Web directory, Weather, games and whathaveyou, however it failed because none of it’s parts was better than the competition.
The better approach for an app would be to do it’s own thing it is supposed to do, but support other apps that can enhance your product by allowing it to interact with data from other apps, and also give his data back out to other apps: use mailto:links/email instead of inventing your own messaging protocoll, support exporting to standard calendar files instead of implementing your own calendar that is oblivious to the schedule on the users phone. Support exporting datasets into common formats the user knows from his everyday tasks (excel, csv) so he can run his own data analysis on it, instead of baking some half-assed “analytics” module that only has 10% of the features the user needs.
Of course it works. See WeChat in China.
But I doubt it’ll be X that will make it work in the rest of the world.
I think it can definitely “work”, in that there will be a small number of people that use it. It won’t dominate any market, but it will exist, and it might even make some money. It’s ultimately a power play, by having an app in every market (video, social, maps, etc) he becomes more entrenched in tech.
It’s not an uncommon model, especially in smaller businesses that do a lot of things with a tiny bit of profit everywhere. With that being said, it requires competent leadership and an aligned team - and with Musk’s visible problems that won’t happen.
I think the idea (I don’t say plan, because I think it’s more of a seat-of-the-pants situation) was to first destroy Twitter as a platform for any kind of left wing activism.
Next, make it profitable as a subscription based right wing social media app.
The shit last week was just a rich, fragile narcissist lashing out at his perceived enemies.
The sooner the better.
I long for the headline “self driving Tesla runs over musk”.
Self driving teslas only run over kids and POC
Point of contacts?
Replace self driving with sentient and runs over with repeatedly crushes
Lots of folks are killed by their own baby. The fellow behind the Segway died while “touring his estate” on his. Bump over a root and into the drink and drowned.
The fact it hasn’t imploded a long time ago is proof that digital platforms need to be regulated to enforce interoperability.
Since this shitshow started, I have not heard from anyone that wanted to be on Twitter. In anything resembling a free market, these customers (both advertisers and users) could freely go to a competitor.
But due to the way platforms work, no one can compete, once a dominant platform emerges. A platform has a monopoly on all the things people built on top of the platform (content, software etc.). This monopoly kills the free market. Enforced interoperability would reduce this platform effect and help out competitors.
The EU is starting to tackle that, with the Digital Markets Act, but very few companies are targeted so far, even though the whole industry is plagued by quasi-monopolistic platforms that are universally agreed upon to be trash.
That’s a seriously interesting idea. For context, I’m a middle-aged, Southern, American white guy. “FREE speech! CAPITALISM!”
“That how dad did it, that’s how I do it, and it’s worked out pretty well so far.” ~Tony Stark.
High time to start looking at ideas like yours. If Europe and California have to impose these things? So fucking be it.
Might make me uncomfortable, might not understand it completely, too bad for me. I will vote for the world I want my children to live in. They’re 8 and 10, I’m 52. Done my time, coasting out. Y’all’s turn.
And if you want to hold forth on the notion of “enforced interoperability”, I’m listening.
That’s called regulation, and is supposed to happen.
We have a problem of regulatory capture, plus these platforms acting like both publisher and platform with no courts taking them to task for it (applying the regulation).
Sure, yeah. The way I imagine this would work out best for humanity, is if companies are forced to open up platforms they provide, when they have e.g. more than 40% market saturation with that.
Most small platforms will want to strive for interoperability with the dominant platforms anyways, so this threshold is just to keep the burden of regulation low.
In practice, this might mean that Twitter would be forced to allow federation with Mastodon.
Or that Microsoft is forced to open-source the code for the Windows API.
Or that Reddit is blocked from closing up their third-party API.
Ultimately, I don’t think, it even needs to be as concrete. I feel like even a law stating that if you’re providing a platform, you need to take special care to keep competition alive (along with some detailing what this entails), and then leaving it up to a judge to decide, would work.
The GDPR is implemented like that and while most larger companies are IMHO in violation of the GDPR, I also feel like most larger companies actually did go from atrocious privacy handling to merely bad privacy handling, which is an incredible success.
That’s effectively all I’m hoping for, too. That dominant platforms can’t just stagnate for multiple decades anymore. That they do have to put in at least a small bit more effort to stay in that dominant position.
We’re scheduled to find out.
Morally or financially?
Both, right?
This was a hit job and news outlets are trying to pretend it’s an accident.
Pretty sure it’s an inevitability at this point and Musk knows it, which is precisely why he’s fueling the flames of the whole ad situation. Since the whole controversy are both about the Jews (as in antisemitism) and advertisers, they can be blamed for the death of the platform instead of business decisions by Musk.
There’s also the possibility that some right-wing billionaires who really love to spread their propaganda using twitter are going to buy the company or bail it out or whatever, but that remains to be seen
Wasn’t Musk a right wing billionaire who loved spreading their propaganda
What is it about him, that makes him look like an asshole? It can’t just be his eyes being too close together, can it?
The honest answer is mostly because you are seeing bad photos of him, since Lemmy loves to hate on him and all articles hating on someone love to shoe bad photos. If you look up positive/neutral articles he looks much better.
You mean older photos? Publicity photos? This is the equivalent of “you have been fooled by the media into not liking Trump/musk/whoever!”. Anyone who watched the video of his ‘interview’ last week can see he’s looking much worse than he did a couple years ago, and fairly terrible overall.
For me, it just looks like he has a certain coldness in his eyes. It’s not a dead or vacant look, it’s just the way a smile, or any other facial expression for that matter, just doesn’t seem to make it to his eyes. There’s obviously life and intelligence there, but it’s not a friendly intelligence. I pulled up the most lizard-man pictures of Zuckerberg for comparison, and even at his most robotic, his eyes still look human. Like there’s some capacity for empathy in there somewhere. With Musk? His eyes just don’t quite read as human to me in an uncanny valley sort of way.
The eyes of a fucking aristocrat, care for nothing more than power. No ideals, no kin, no kith. Just a hunger for power for powers sake.
It doesn’t help that he’s got this vibe undulating off him, you know the one-- evil, narcissistic, oligarch dork, trying to look cool but failing miserably because it’s impossible to be cool when you’re anywhere remotely close to as big of a dickbag as he is.
Yes
Elon made deals w/ hedge funds to funnel him money as they shorted the stock (not to mention 100x leverage derivatives against TSLA). Because Twitter is collateralized against his wonder-child.
Since canceling his PR team, Elon’s entire MO has been to run it into the ground in a manner that seems plausible to the SEC so he doesn’t get out-right sued.
He just isn’t this stupid, whether you want him to be or not.
“Fuck you” to his advertisers seems like a fairly on-brand way to telegraph his true intentions. I really look forward to a point where we can forget about his relevance when all 3 companies bite the dust.
Since twitter is no longer publicly traded, he doesn’t have to make anything “seem plausible” to the SEC… So the premise of your theory needs some work.
Not true. He can’t buy it and shut it down the next day or he would 100% get sued for manipulation of the markets.
He could absolutely be this stupid. Drugs do crazy things to the brain.
Whether he intends it or not, it’s going to die when it turns into a far right outrage echo chamber. The only people willing to advertise will be outright scammers. There’s a reason why every right wing alternative platform fails. They also tend to fail to attract normies with moderate conservative beliefs. If they do get them, they leave after the userbase reveals itself to be a bunch of racist incels.
It’s been a far right echo chamber for about ten years now, so I don’t know that this holds up.
How do you short the stock of a private company?
TSLA is not a private company
I partly agree. He isn’t that stupid and things are not so simple that twitter would just go under.
He is not that smart either. He is a petulant child. Either the money he has, or from before, he is a narcissist and he thinks he knows better than anyone else. He doesn’t get dettered by having failures.
Eh… They would have lost money as he bought Twitter for more than it was worth and once he bought it the edge funds were forced to close their positions as Twitter wasn’t on the market anymore.
Unless you’re talking about shorting Tesla in which case sure, but that’s Elon’s piggy bank, so that wouldn’t make much sense.
100x derivatives on the date of TSLA’s forced sale will make Elon more money than TSLA will lose.
Does it even matter? Twitter is a cesspool! It only has 1500 employees. In the grand scheme of things there will be negligible economic backlash from this company going under.
Nobody really cares if Elon loses all that money and the 1500 employees will be able to find employment elsewhere.
It’s not the economic side of twitter that matters, but the informational aspects of the network which are now lost, that is the sad thing. It was used by many journalists and other important peer groups as a live news source for which there is currently no equivalent replacement.
I completely agree. Thanks to Elon it would be better to take this horse out to pasture at this point.
Was it ever profitable? I always thought twitter was always in the red and the only time it made money was when it sued Elon to buy it due to his arrogance and coz it minupilated the stock prices on twitter.
Twitter made some profit in 2018 and 2019: www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
They claim to be on track to make another profit year in 2024. Remains to be seen.
They claim to be on track to make another profit year in 2024.
And I’m the king of Thailand.
It almost certainly will.
Could?!
its the whole point. the guy is taking the business while providing legal cover for doing so. he'll default on what he can, let the saudis eat bunch of it and call it a FUCKING WIN.
why you people keep expecting muskrburger to be doing anything but destroying twitter is beyond me. his actions are obvious and have literally nothing to do with generating revenue.
It’s not a question of IF it will. It will. Both financially, and morally
I mean it was kinda destined to go bankrupt even under rge old owners. It only really ever produced a profit for like six months and was surviving of investor money
It was losing money but not a huge amount. They could have made reasonable cuts (compared to how Elron slashed 75% of staff) and been profitable, probably.
What’s MySpace worth these days?
At least 73 cents.
I wouldn’t buy that for a dollar
I think Murdoch will buy it just as it goes irrelevant for $580m and then it will go bankrupt
Prediction: Murdoch will be dead by then. He’s 92.
Prediction: Murdoch will be dead by then. He’s 92.
Or he’s been undead for years, and now has indefinite shelf life. That’s what I thought of Kissinger, anyway, at least until last week. But Murdoch? I give it 50/50 odds between aging human and already undead.
you can't kill satan, or god, it makes more sense its god messing with us.
I know this reference.
Go F Yourself meltdown is probably the final nail in the coffin. It does seem like space nazi knows it’s doomed. Anyone know what happens when bankruptcy happens? Does creditors take over the company? Does it get sold to a highest bidder for pennies on the dollar? I’m hoping someone can enlighten us.
Go F Yourself meltdown is probably the final nail in the coffin.
I'll believe it once they're actually bankrupt. So many things have been predicted as "killing" the company in the last year yet somehow they're still going and millions and millions of morons are still using it.
It doesn't matter how many people use the service, what matters is how many advertisers are left vs how much debt twitter has to service.
Those two numbers seem to be heavily on the side of the debt now.
The first kind of bankruptcy, Elon & his Saudi bros keep the company, and the banks lose like 50-90% of their loans.
The second kind of bankruptcy, the banks get all the servers and office chairs and sell them to either a new data-mining company or a recycler. This isn’t very likely, because most of the value of Xitter is all the people who keep visiting, regardless of whether Elon knows how to monetize them.
Yes, that’s what he wants and he’s looking for people to take the blame for it. Like advertisers
So obviously his fault, his attempts at blaming everyone else is super cringe
I just don’t care anymore. I hope far worse for Elon and every other rich asshole piñatas that exist.
🤞
That’s his goal. It always has been. He was forced to buy. His solution? The world’s biggest tax write off. Yet everyone is determined to keep him in the news like he actually cares about it.
I hope so.
His interview certainly lent some additional weight to the theories that he’s been trying to run the company into the ground the whole time.
Of course it can. And it probably will. But that’s what the plan was since the get.
its vast archive of conversations can be used to train chatbots.
Maybe Nazi chatbots?
Engywuck@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Hopefully yes.
SinningStromgald@lemmy.world 11 months ago
If there is a god/goddess it certainly will.