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Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?

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Spottieottiedopaliscious
Spottieottiedopaliscious

Hotez is far from bulletproof.       

MissingInAction
MissingInAction
Spottieottiedopaliscious
Spottieottiedopaliscious

Absolutely.    Would you like other guys pointing out Hotez deficiencies?   It was actually more about Hotez but whatever? Why stick around? All the constructive back and forth

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Chewbacca

Chewbacca 7780

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1 hour ago, Nivek said:

He isn't that bright or that shrewd.  He was in a position to take risks that paid off for him and had enough of a cushion to fall back onto.   None of his ideas are really that original or wonderful.  SpaceX is a private take on NASA (whose budgets have been in decline*)  Funded in part by the government, it took the old Saturn V rocket design updated it, and sent stuff into space for his own company and some for NASA.  Again, nothing that any scrub on here couldn't have come up with had we the clout and cash to pull off.  

*NASA peaked in the 60s with a budget of 4.4% of US budget, it is nearly 0.48% now.    

Making stupid tweets isn't quite so hysterical when it can have real implications.   He tried to dip his toes into international conflict and came out looking like a petulant child.  That is not fucking funny.   

I can't stand Musk, but this is a terrible take.  I haven't seen NASA land a reusable rocket booster on a floating ocean barge.  He can be both a visionary (which I think he is) and a huge asshole who should shut the fuck up (which I also believe).

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Samson's Wig

Samson's Wig 3192

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40 minutes ago, 52-80 said:

Hard disagree on the value of twitter, and the trite notion of social media bad.  The value is inherent in its activity.  It has a massive active community particularly where its use-case does not overlap with the other platforms.  If the Twitter were to be nuked from planet, another would take its place.  But as its stands today, the handwringing over Musk's taking over it it, demonstrates the value people ascribe to its importance.  (if not, why do they care so much?)

Fast news is bad news.  What's the alternative?  AFP?  Reuters?  Lest we reinvoke the Ukraine thing again -- please god let this be the last time in this thread -- 80% of the content of the Surly Ukraine thread was built on Twitter updates. 

You may not derive any personal value from Twitter and it could be 1000% true, and people everywhere have been boasting about deleting their FB profiles for 10 years, but in aggregate its the tools employed by pretty much the entire world to organize their social lives, share information, orchestrate events, etc. 

This is the notion that Twitter fan boys have their heads so far up their collective asses about.  It is absolutely not the a tool employed by pretty much the entire world.  Not even remotely close.  Not even a 4th of Americans have a Twitter account, and among those who do maybe 10% of them are active.   This shit is nothing more than the modern equivalent of Saturday morning cartoons for kids in the 80's.  You're convinced you're being entertained but you're just being manipulated.   I understand it's the drug of choice for lots of folks with short attention spans and a penchant for arguing with others in an absolutely consequence free environment, but that doesn't make it substantive.  

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Brisketexan

Brisketexan 105156

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1 minute ago, Samson's Wig said:

This is the notion that Twitter fan boys have their heads so far up their collective asses about.  It is absolutely not the a tool employed by pretty much the entire world.  Not even remotely close.  Not even a 4th of Americans have a Twitter account, and among those who do maybe 10% of them are active.   This shit is nothing more than the modern equivalent of Saturday morning cartoons for kids in the 80's.  You're convinced you're being entertained but you're just being manipulated.   I understand it's the drug of choice for lots of folks with short attention spans and a penchant for arguing with others in an absolutely consequence free environment, but that doesn't make it substantive.  

Actually, this is a fantastic post.  Collectively, almost ALL of us suffer from 1) fooling ourselves by participating in echo chambers and 2) deluding ourselves into believing the echo chamber reflects great reality.

I'm always reminded of one of the first clear examples of that: After the 2000 POTUS election, when folks in Manhattan were quoted as saying "how could W have won?  I don't know ANYONE who voted for him?"  Fast-forward to 2020, rural America: "No way Biden won!  I don't know a single person who voted for him!"  The same issue comes up with Beto fans -- my wife says all the time "I really think he could win, look at all the signs in our hood and almost everyone I know supports him."  Yeah, you've curated your friends and your social media feed -- and then the algos in that feed do it even more, manipulating the fuck out of you -- to consume self-validating info.

Twitter doesn't reflect how "everyone" thinks.  It reflects how certain engaged constituencies thinks, in about this order: chicks with Onlyfans accounts, political extremists, scammers and grifters (of both the political and porn variety), and then an aggregation of funny accounts, news aggregators, etc.

Thinking that Twitter reflects how the world thinks is just as dumb as thinking that Surly or Texags reflect how the world thinks.  Twitter is much bigger than both, but in the grand scheme, it's still a very small percentage of actual humanity.  Sure, it has an impact.  So does Surly.  So does Texags.

I'm going to sit back and watch Elon try to do what he thinks is super-easy: manipulating a forum of human engagement in a way that everyone thinks balances civility and fairness.  I wish him much luck, he's going to need it.  If he pulls it off, I'll be the first person here praising him for doing what most everyone thinks is impossible.  For those of you fanbois.....what do you think the odds are of him pulling that off?

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52-80

52-80 19163

Posted
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1 minute ago, Samson's Wig said:

This is the notion that Twitter fan boys have their heads so far up their collective asses about.  It is absolutely not the a tool employed by pretty much the entire world.  Not even remotely close.  Not even a 4th of Americans have a Twitter account, and among those who do maybe 10% of them are active.   This shit is nothing more than the modern equivalent of Saturday morning cartoons for kids in the 80's.  You're convinced you're being entertained but you're just being manipulated.   I understand it's the drug of choice for lots of folks with short attention spans and a penchant for arguing with others in an absolutely consequence free environment, but that doesn't make it substantive.  

I picked your calling out the value of both Twitter and social media in general.  The last sentence is about the Twitter AND FB ("the tools" "in aggregate"). 

Park your opinions about the ethics and morals of the platforms.  We're debating over their value -- their level of demand/use from consumer perspective, and audience size from commercial perspective.

-A top 4/5 site in one of the wealthiest country in the world.

PJ_2022.09.20_social-media-news_0-02b.pn

-the juiciest financial demographics from that list of competition

image.thumb.png.ba883524f43bcc2d17d8c530a572738b.png

 

 

It's a drug choice for people being easily manipulated into a spiral of political news, consisting of a wealthier demographic than the other manipulative playthings......

....and therefore it is overvalued?

 

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Cornpop

Cornpop 230

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3 hours ago, sheeeit said:

@Brisketexan @InkaUtexas

 

I am having a really hard time understanding your positions here.  You keep telling everyone that Musk is cozying up (affinity) with Putin/Russia and cares nothing about the people.  Yet, he is essentially spending hundreds of millions personally to provide Ukraine with internet access via Starlink that every person with any knowledge of the situation has aid is absolutely vital to Ukraine's success.  It has resulted in saving thousands of Ukrainian lives and led to the killing of thousands of Russian soldiers and caused Putin to lose massive amounts of money/power/influence etc in the world.  The whole invasion could possibly topple Putin.

Listen to what you posted and liked "Both of them think it's good and right for the rich and powerful to simply take what they want and they think there should be no legal or even social checks on people like them doing whatever they want. "  No one single person (and really many countries) has done more to oppose Putin/Russia in this invasion than Musk.  

It's all because he said he's not a fan of a certain team. It's not that hard to understand.

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Humble Beast

Humble Beast 258

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Posted

I had forgotten about this. Look for Twitter to head this way. Maybe with some shitcoin payment mechanism. 
 

https://twitter.com/songpinganq/status/1582432464797958144?s=46&t=dslBToIWchcB6eqB5KIEJg
 

And people that hate him now will suddenly hate financial surveillance. People that love him will suddenly say “what do you have to hide!”  Flat circle. Blah blah 

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32395

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https://theintercept.com/2022/10/28/elon-musk-twitter/

 

Quote

ELON MUSK (and his consortium of much smaller investors) now owns Twitter. We need to take seriously the possibility that this will end up being one of the funniest things that’s ever happened.

That’s because as of this moment, it looks like Musk dug a big hole in the forest, carefully filled it with punji sticks and crocodiles, and then jumped in.

This was made immediately clear by Musk’s “Dear Twitter Advertisers” tweet as the deal closed:

 

Quote

The statement starts off, promisingly, with a blatant lie: “The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important for the future of civilization to have a common digital town square.” Musk apparently believes that no one will remember that until three weeks ago, he was desperately trying not to buy Twitter. The only reason he did is because he was about to lose Twitter’s lawsuit to force him to buy it. This may be the greatest “you can’t fire me because I quit” moment in history.

The significance of the rest of his statement is more subtle. To understand it, you have to start with the basics.

 

 

Spoiler

Twitter currently makes 90 percent of its revenue from advertising. (The rest is largely from data licensing.) This means that you, the Twitter user, are not Twitter’s customers. You are its product. Its customers are corporate advertisers and, as every businessperson knows, the customer is always right. Grocery stores care about the people shopping for Cheetos, not about the feelings of the Cheetos themselves.

Twitter’s content moderation has sometimes been heavy-handed — especially when it froze my account because David Duke got mad at me. But this is not because Twitter is run by a woke mob. It’s because Twitter needs to keep advertisers happy — and their top priority is a certain kind of environment for their ads.

This can take specific forms. Delta probably has it written into its contract that its ads won’t run near any tweets about plane crashes. But more generally, advertisers don’t want anything controversial that gets people out of the buying mood, or worse, mad at the brands themselves. Proctor & Gamble can’t allow its ads for Charmin, targeted at the Upscale Panera Mom micro-demographic, to appear below frothing diatribes about annihilating all Muslims.

Twitter is also, speaking just in financial terms, a crummy business. It’s only been profitable for two years of its existence, 2018 and 2019. In 2020 it lost over $1 billion, rebounding to lose a mere $222 million in 2021.

To make matters worse, Musk’s deal to buy Twitter involved taking out $12.5 billion in loans. This means that Twitter will have to come up with an additional $1 billion a year to service this debt.

Thus if Twitter simply continues on its current path, it will lose huge amounts of money indefinitely. But if advertisers get nervous about Musk’s management and flee the platform, it could see losses every year in the multiple billions of dollars.

It’s true that Musk has said, “I don’t care about the economics at all.” But even as the richest man on earth, he has to care about them. He has a current estimated net worth of $220 billion, but that’s not $220 billion in cash sitting in a bank vault — it’s mostly tied up in his stakes in Tesla and SpaceX.

Thus to cover big Twitter losses, he would have to sell off more of his stock every year. This would be painful in monetary terms but more so in terms of power: Eventually he would get into a situation in which he could lose control of the companies, Tesla in particular. Moreover, Tesla is publicly traded, and while it’s fallen 45 percent since its high a year ago, it remains way overvalued by normal metrics. Right now its price-earnings ratio is 70. The historical average for the S&P 500 is about 15. The price-earnings ratio for both Ford and GM right now is 6.

This is why Musk hit the ground running with a groveling attempt to propitiate advertisers. He absolutely must keep them happy. As he put it, “Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise.”

And that’s where the hilarity begins. Musk has engaged in endless paeans to the glory of free speech and the need to end Twitter’s invidious censorship. This clearly isn’t a subject he’s thought deeply about, since he said back in May that Twitter should delete “tweets that are wrong and bad.” Still, his vague pronouncements have given him a legion of right-wing acolytes who feel they’ve been ill-treated by Twitter.

But they are not Musk’s constituency now. Advertisers are. Even if Musk had some genuine commitment to free speech (which he absolutely does not), it would be essentially impossible for him not to continue significant content moderation.

That’s why, after a brief nod to his wish for Twitter to be a place “where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner,” he quickly pivoted to telling advertisers that “Twitter obviously cannot be a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences! In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all.”

This could have been the mission statement of pre-Musk Twitter. But now there’s one big difference: When the content moderation of Twitter remains largely the same, the sense of betrayal among Musk’s super-fans will explode with the force of a supernova. And they will scream at Musk about it nonstop — on Twitter.

Another mogul might have the fortitude to ignore this. But Musk does not, judging by past performance. You can also judge this by current performance: On his first full day on the job, Musk is personally “digging in” to the complaints of Catturd ™.

And while Musk has announced a new “content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints,” he will feel constantly compelled to either explain why he’s standing by his underlings’ moderation decisions, or reverse them. Then he will inevitably be drawn into personally making more and more content calls, perhaps giving the thumbs up or thumbs down to individual tweets.

It will be hell on earth for him. No matter what decisions he makes, he will infuriate large swaths of Twitter. The left will see its suspicions about him confirmed. The right will see him as a horrendous sellout, just another lying Big Tech swine. Joe Rogan will shake his head sadly about what happened to Elon. Eventually what used to give Musk the greatest pleasure, opening up Twitter on his phone, will be a source of excruciating pain.

And that’s just the beginning. Musk has important business interests around the world, and the potential riptides are endless. What happens when Kim Kardashian starts tweeting about how Taiwan is an independent country? Will the government of China quietly suggest to Musk that he do something about this, or will they make things hard for Tesla’s Shanghai plant and block the import of Teslas? What do other Tesla shareholders do if he defies China, and they find out his little bird app adventure is losing them money? What happens when a SpaceX rocket explodes, but Musk has been too busy adjudicating which Nazi furries are going to be suspended for a month?

This future is obviously not foreordained. Possibly Musk will do what no human has ever be able to do before and invent 1) content moderation that everyone likes at an enormous scale, and 2) a way to make huge amounts of money off Twitter. Maybe Tesla will become so profitable that he can use it to subsidize Twitter until 2090. But the most likely outcome is that he’s just asked the monkey’s paw to grant him his greatest wish. Now look as the paw crooks its gnarled finger, and Musk’s love for Twitter ends up obliterating the Twitter experience for one specific user: Elon Musk.

 

 

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Nivek

Nivek 16945

Posted
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2 hours ago, Chewbacca said:

I can't stand Musk, but this is a terrible take.  I haven't seen NASA land a reusable rocket booster on a floating ocean barge.  He can be both a visionary (which I think he is) and a huge asshole who should shut the fuck up (which I also believe).

Technology is what changed.  They didn't invent the computer chip to pull this shit off, they just used off-the-shelf tech which was supported by US government programs (including GPS) to make this possible.   Yeah, it was impressive, but not amazing.  The F-1 engine was fucking amazing, especially considering how customized this stuff was back then.  No AutoCad, no 3D printing, no software-based modeling.   

NASA sent a bunch of guys to the moon, on a rocket, with much less computing power than my first flip phone.   That is damn impressive.   A rocket that can land and be useable, I have Estes rockets that can do that.  

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Nivek

Nivek 16945

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3 hours ago, Humble Beast said:

Yep and received a slap on the wrist. Funding secured. 
 

Again, surly keyboard warriors bring the lulz. If only you had the clout and cash he magically came up with, then you too could’ve built another Cape Canaveral. Just like the one he built while simultaneously running Tesla. Epically delusional. 
 

Look, I’ve lost money multiple times buying Tesla puts so I’m not some superfan. He’s definitely shady. Has committed securities fraud. He’s a shitcoin scammer. Uses government funding to support his businesses. He’s also a wildly talented businessman and leader that’s able to make big things happen. Denying that is as weird as excusing everything he does.  
 

He also will undoubtedly upset conservatives with moves at Twitter. Just sit back and enjoy the show. Or delete your Twitter, I guess. 

This is like someone thinking I was a genius poker player because I had won with risky betting on a few good hands and suddenly I had a massive number of chips to bully the rest of the table to submission.   I am not even mediocre but I sure as shit know how to make money with money.

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Pods

Pods 7586

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1 hour ago, Armybrat said:

Yeah. All that $$$$ and publicity makes an egomaniac like him think we give a shit what his opinions are.

All the weird mofos constantly stanning for him make him think we give a shit what his opinions are. All the professional trolls stanning for him make the rest of us think far more actual people care about him than really do.  

It's quite noticeable that the same professional liars are always pro-Russia, pro-Bitcoin and pro-Musk no matter what. 

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tbone_

tbone_ 14128

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Posted
Technology is what changed.  They didn't invent the computer chip to pull this shit off, they just used off-the-shelf tech which was supported by US government programs (including GPS) to make this possible.   Yeah, it was impressive, but not amazing.  The F-1 engine was fucking amazing, especially considering how customized this stuff was back then.  No AutoCad, no 3D printing, no software-based modeling.   
NASA sent a bunch of guys to the moon, on a rocket, with much less computing power than my first flip phone.   That is damn impressive.   A rocket that can land and be useable, I have Estes rockets that can do that.  

+1 for Estes rockets
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MeerkatBong

MeerkatBong 115

Posted
Posted (edited)

Whoa this thread really caught fire with the stupid the last few days.

I’ve been busy but I came to this thread to post that my mans Bret Taylor went toe to toe with Goliath and won. If Zuckerberg was smart he’d make BT the CEO and start the turn-around-comeback-szn narrative of Meta and take a step back.

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Neonmoon

Neonmoon 38129

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1 hour ago, SydneyCarton said:

Imagine how fucked up you have to be to proudly tell others you’re a new right christian nationalist. It’s like someone walking into a public space and gleefully shouting to a bunch of strangers that they love to fuck boys. 

America First. Christian Nationalist. Sounds Familiar

How Prohibition Fueled the Rise of the Ku Klux Klan - HISTORY

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SydneyCarton

SydneyCarton 48110

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Posted (edited)
16 minutes ago, DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt said:

Well he used to get on all 4s and have a train run on his ass at porn theaters.
 

So, yeah, pretty fucked up. 

I mean, I try not to kink shame. I find his personal views and the lies he told his wife a million times more disgusting than his hobbies. But yes, a man who vacillated from drugged up public cum dumpster to a new right christian nationalist is obviously a mentally ill, miserable individual trying to find happiness in all the worst places. Of course he loves Elon musk. 

Edited by SydneyCarton
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DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt

DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt 12301

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11 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

I mean, I try not to kink shame. I find his personal views and the lies he told his wife a million times more disgusting than his hobbies. But yes, a man who vacillated from drugged up public cum dumpster to a new right christian nationalist is obviously a mentally ill, miserable individual trying to find happiness in all the worst places. Of course he loves Elon musk. 

The defining characteristic of the “New Right” is self-hate.

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32395

Posted
Posted (edited)
26 minutes ago, Humble Beast said:

They were also large public shareholders of Twitter pre buyout. 

No shit.  But Elon's purchase paid them back their investment.  Instead, he gleefully took their money after the sale.

You sure as hell don't get the optics of things.

 

Edited by Francisco 2.0
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