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

[SizzleChest 8283]

1 minute ago, Brisketexan said:

He reply can’t help himself.

This was autocorrect, but it's even more accurate than "really".

[Captainant 27654]

2 hours ago, Celery Man said:

just on the topic of good ops nerds to follow

foone is great if you want a 70 tweet thread where he takes apart a tiger electronics handheld game from the late 80s so he can extract its font

Man the tech debt skeletons in the closet of a bare metal company with no consistency in architecture.... YIKES! Kind of crazy they made it to that scale without a major refactor to smooth out all those ineffiencies (AND LOWER YOUR TECH COST!!!), but at least DevOps books will have a new "worst case scenario" to talk about lol

[Captainant 27654]

34 minutes ago, immamac said:

I'm aware, but the whole Twitter infrastructure is gonna fall over thing is stupid as fuck. It's not. 

Man you would be shocked at how poorly fortune-500 companies run their wholistic tech stack. It's usually the smaller (read: newer with less legacy) companies that are ran better, because there was never that old tech debt in the first place. 

 

Twitter started out in ~2008 as an SMS service. I wouldn't be shocked if some of that actual code and infra were still in there as a dependency today

[UpperWestside 6162]

3 hours ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

I got one of those when I was three or four for Christmas. That was an awesome toy.

[Mrs Whiggins 13050]

6 minutes ago, UpperWestside said:

I got one of those when I was three or four for Christmas. That was an awesome toy.

They still are for many developmental reasons, but I don't want to expound in the Elon thread.

[Degenerate Gardner 4085]

On 11/4/2022 at 8:08 AM, atomheartbevo said:

I really wish somebody would educate him on what free speech actually means. 

Free speech means whatever he says it does. You can’t get any freer than that!

[immamac 42839]

23 minutes ago, Captainant said:

Man you would be shocked at how poorly fortune-500 companies run their wholistic tech stack. It's usually the smaller (read: newer with less legacy) companies that are ran better, because there was never that old tech debt in the first place. 

 

Twitter started out in ~2008 as an SMS service. I wouldn't be shocked if some of that actual code and infra were still in there as a dependency today

I would not be surprised because I'm well aware and have helped unfuck some of those architectures personally. Twitter is not that. They have fucking people working on the Linux kernel and wrote their own fucking database and object storage cluster.

This is Twitter not some stupid ass parler app or truth social. They were doing SRE shit before SRE shit was a thing anywhere but Google and the bigs. 

This is like saying if Google had layoffs or aws had layoffs entire AZs or big portions of their service would just go down. It's stupid and nowhere close to any kind of reality. 

[Celery Man 20934]

I absolutely defer to your depth and breadth of expertise here and get that the bullshit duct tape stuff I’ve seen in my datacenters is not Twitter, but this is a reduction of 50% of their workforce. Surely they wouldn’t cut down the team responsible for keeping the service up to that point, but it does look like there’s a lot of insanely stupid shit happening. If half the team responsible for keeping an aws region going vanished I would expect outages.

[immamac 42839]

1 minute ago, Celery Man said:

I absolutely defer to your depth and breadth of expertise here and get that the bullshit duct tape stuff I’ve seen in my datacenters is not Twitter, but this is a reduction of 50% of their workforce. Surely they wouldn’t cut down the team responsible for keeping the service up to that point, but it does look like there’s a lot of insanely stupid shit happening. If half the team responsible for keeping an aws region going vanished I would expect outages.

Will stuff that isn't supposed to happen happen? Yes. That wasn't the argument. The argument is that Twitter is going to go down and be unrecoverable. It's so obscenely stupid. I do bet they have some service degradation and possibly some major events that could have been prevented or remedied much quicker with the people that no longer work there, but Twitter isn't going down. 

[Homercles 10205]

1 hour ago, UpperWestside said:

I got one of those when I was three or four for Christmas. That was an awesome toy.

Somehow every kid extant today knows that’s a phone even though they’ve never seen a ‘real’ phone like that in their life.  

[Eastwood 4394]

1 hour ago, Storm the Field said:

Still grinding away at that important CEO work: Sending emoji replies to stuff you'd see on "Dumbass Shit I Saw on Facebook" posted by crypto meme accounts. 

Le epic Morpheus and Michael Scott crossover meme bro! 

Small tangent, but this has been my "favorite" logical fallacy that I have been combating with my family over the last, oh, 6 years or so. Any source that I provide to them that counters their beliefs is immediately discredited as untrustworthy. We'll know that Twitter is truly dead and buried when my parents and grandparents all have accounts, suddenly, and start sending me links to news articles from it because they know I don't have Facebook. Elon keeps fucking around and I won't have a Twitter, either.

Speaking of, I kept seeing people mention Mastodon and I thought maybe I missed an album release because I love Mastodon, the band. But it looks like a platform called Mastodon is picking up a little traction as a Twitter alternative.

[Prepuce of Doom 21065]

4 hours ago, Celery Man said:

just on the topic of good ops nerds to follow

foone is great if you want a 70 tweet thread where he takes apart a tiger electronics handheld game from the late 80s so he can extract its font

I don't understand 80-90+% of the shit that foone posts, and yet they're nevertheless one of my favorite accounts to follow on Twitter. 

[Braff Zacklin 13558]

2 hours ago, elfenix said:

Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen.”

 Always gotta rep for a Catch 22 reference.

[Bozo_Casanova 26444]

2 hours ago, Brian Fantana said:

You might have accidentally liked some anti-trans post or something. I think she has a setup for automatically blocking anyone that likes stuff like that. She aggressively curates her timeline.

Internet, man

[atomheartbevo 89649]

2 hours ago, immamac said:

I'm aware, but the whole Twitter infrastructure is gonna fall over thing is stupid as fuck. It's not. 

If Elon actually follows through on what he said and starts cutting infrastructure in order to save the $3 million per day that he is chasing (and it’ll get worse as he drives more advertisers away), then it may not fall over, but it will shit the bed during big events.  Toss in that he’s trying to bring Vine back as well, so he’s trying to save a billion dollars a year in infrastructure costs while spinning up a video platform.

He just does not have the mindset to run a social media platform, both from a technical perspective, and from a marketing perspective.  He’s the kind of guy who will ask the techies “so what is the bare minimum you need to keep things running on an average day?” and “why are we paying for extra infrastructure that we don’t know if we will need?”

And his public threats to go nuclear on advertisers who paused their spending on Twitter means he’s liable to have to find more than a billion dollars per year in infrastructure cuts that he’s targeting when even more advertisers bail.

 

[Schulz2.0 28951]

 

[Neonmoon 38129]

 

[Rimbo 25920]

3 hours ago, Loch Ness Monster said:

Elon's a bit sensitive at times so wondering how he's gonna deal with being the lightning rod that is being a social media CEO.

Especially now that people are paying $8 for the blue check, changing their names and photos to Elon Musk's, and making embarrassing scatological tweets. En masse.

[Captainant 27654]

1 minute ago, Rimbo said:

Especially now that people are paying $8 for the blue check, changing their names and photos to Elon Musk's, and making embarrassing scatological tweets. En masse.

Wow Elon really committing whole-hog to the shaggybevo "tear it all down" strategy 

[Rimbo 25920]

Example:

Screenshot in case of deletion/suspension:

[atomheartbevo 89649]

55 minutes ago, Neonmoon said:

If you don’t pay the $8 your tweets will be suppressed by an algorithm. Not making this shit up he said it to a room of investors yesterday & claimed this would solve hate speech. “You’ll have to scroll really far to see unverified users”

A) Plenty of people would pay $8 a month to spread their hate speech around, especially if they get a blue check

B) Telling existing users, companies, organizations, etc. whose tweets can easily be seen for free right now, that they'll now have to pay $96 a year to have their tweets easily seen, even though they are the product and generating the content that attracts the customers (advertisers) is a bold move Cotton.

He really doesn't fucking get it, that the users are the product and the advertisers the customers.

[Chopper 17230]

here

here's the rest of the page in case you don't feel like clicking through

 

Edited November 5, 2022 by Chopper

[Celery Man 20934]

I like the idea that they are half assed targeting their ads for non blue check people.

[atomheartbevo 89649]

6 minutes ago, Celery Man said:

I like the idea that they are half assed targeting their ads for non blue check people.

I like that he thinks that spammers won’t pay the eight bucks a month and then use those accounts for bots. He’s literally giving them legitimacy. 

[Pancho 44757]

 

[Francisco 2.0 32389]

6 hours ago, Chopper said:

here

 

 

$7.99 a month if you sign up now?

That implies that it definitely will be going up in the near future, so better lock in at $7.99/month today!

 

 

 

[Post Oak 20210]

15 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

 

$7.99 a month if you sign up now?

That implies that it definitely will be going up in the near future, so better lock in at $7.99/month today!

 

 

 

Of course it's going up.  It was always going to go up.

**Not implying that you didn't know that.

[atomheartbevo 89649]

18 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

$7.99 a month if you sign up now?

That implies that it definitely will be going up in the near future, so better lock in at $7.99/month today!

2 minutes ago, Post Oak said:

Of course it's going up.  It was always going to go up.

**Not implying that you didn't know that.

If people will pay $8, they’ll pay $10.

Plus he started out at $20.  

[atomheartbevo 89649]

 

 

https://twitter.com/Tpvjohn

 

 

[Francisco 2.0 32389]

5 minutes ago, Post Oak said:

Of course it's going up.  It was always going to go up.

**Not implying that you didn't know that.

 

Oh, I know that.  But the language in the build notes is pretty explicit.  Whoever wrote that (I concur; Elon did it or dictated it) should have left out the word *now*.  Or added in introductory price.

But we all know they are just winging it right now, and they truly believe they are going to get millions to say to themselves "by God, now that's a fucking bargain!  Let me tap that buy now".

 

 

 

 

 

[Brian Fantana 6685]

5 hours ago, Pancho said:

 

*As contractors, most likely. Common practice at big tech/gaming companies.

[Celery Man 20934]

ok but still the inanity of claiming that if you pay for a blue check they are going to flip the bit that targets ads for you better. as if having high quality ad targeting is a benefit for the end user rather than the advertiser

[Francisco 2.0 32389]

Clear, concise Twitter thread from 2 days ago that explains the advertiser thing, and why Musk keeps saying there's activist movement pressuring advertisers from giving Elon their money:

 

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1588696157794242560.html

 

 

 

1/ There is some pretty substantial context about Twitter's 2023 revenue and advertisers that I think partly help explains why Musk is really losing it...

And it involves upfront ad sales. Let me explain... 

2/ Back Twitter (like a lot of digital companies) participates in an event called new fronts. At this event, they sell large chunks of ads for the following year.

Typically, Twitter sells like ~600-900M in ads at new fronts. That's guaranteed revenue for following year. 

3/ This year, they didn't sell much of anything.

A coalition called Stop The Deal spent time educating and using media buyers and big advertisers at the event to ask Twitter some basic questions about potential Musk takeover before giving him a guaranteed income for 2023. 

4/ Media buyers did ask those questions. Twitter had zero answers or assurances, the presentation imploded and ended shockingly early. Twitter from what I understand basically sold almost nothing and locked in extremely little 2023 revenue. 

5/ This means that instead of heading into 2023 with 15-20% of 2023 already secured as they typically would have, Twitter heads into next year with almost none of that. All because of Musk's red pilled edgelord approach. 

6/ @elonmusk has had months to address these concerns or even learn about them. But instead, he's insisted on antagonizing the very businesses and people that sustain Twitter.

Back in May, the groups and companies weren't calling for a boycott, they were asking basic questions. 

7/ My point here is: It's actually worse than that I think a lot of people even appreciate all because Musk's conduct and commitments to roll back brand safety and community safeguards essentially obliterated Twitter's new front sales event that woulda secured 2023 revenue. 

 

 

[DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt 12301]

He’s going to spend all of his time focused on Twitter. 
 

What happens to Tesla and SpaceX?

And are his investors so impotent that they just have to sit back and allow a CEO to spend 1/3rd (maybe) of his time leading the company they have invested in?

Edited November 6, 2022 by DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt

[chainsaw 9865]

21 hours ago, immamac said:

I would not be surprised because I'm well aware and have helped unfuck some of those architectures personally. Twitter is not that. They have fucking people working on the Linux kernel and wrote their own fucking database and object storage cluster.

This is Twitter not some stupid ass parler app or truth social. They were doing SRE shit before SRE shit was a thing anywhere but Google and the bigs. 

This is like saying if Google had layoffs or aws had layoffs entire AZs or big portions of their service would just go down. It's stupid and nowhere close to any kind of reality. 

dude they are gonna get Myanmar Muslim'd

[Nice Guy Eddie 13510]

When Elon posted that there is an effort to stop advertisers from spending money on Twitter, the author Hank Green replied back that he (Elon) had just recently posted an unsubstantiated rumor from a gossip site. Presumably the Paul Pelosi story. Elon replied back asking why his post should be the reason that Twitter fails. This is the argument or reply of a child.

Old Elon was at his best when he took good ideas for Tesla on Twitter and incorporated them into the car. He could be doing the same with Twitter. Instead he wants to jump into the political and cultural fray and simultaneously attract everyone to Twitter. Hard to understand why he doesn’t recognize that is impossible.

Elon could make Twitter better but only if he stays out of the opinion business. As Michael Jordan once said, democrats and republicans buy shoes.

Edited November 6, 2022 by Nice Guy Eddie

[atomheartbevo 89649]

39 minutes ago, DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt said:

He’s going to spend all of his time focused on Twitter. 

What happens to Tesla and SpaceX?

They will get better?

[Francisco 2.0 32389]

https://www.adweek.com/media/elon-musk-fails-to-answer-brands-questions-in-private-meetings/

 

Quote

In meetings with agency and brand leadership this week, Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, has been receptive to concerns about hate speech on the platform while also generally eluding pressing questions about the platform’s future, sources told Adweek.

“Honestly, he seemed a bit all over the place,” said a media buying executive at a large CPG brand, who attended a meeting earlier this week between the company and several brands. The source added that Musk did not answer several questions about his plans for advertising on the platform, including whether tobacco ads would be permissible. 

 

Quote

A second media buyer, who works at a large agency, said a second meeting with the company has been set up to answer more detailed questions that Musk wasn’t able to answer during a meeting earlier in the week.

“He was an active participant and actively listening to concerns of agency leadership about brand safety and what that means for the clients,” said the buyer. “We’re looking for a signal in a lot of noise,” the source said. 

 

Quote

Brands are trying to weigh private conversations with Musk, which have often lacked detail but been respectful, with his public presence on Twitter, where he has been critical of the advertising community. This morning, he tweeted that revenue at Twitter was down because of “activist groups” adding, “we did everything we could to appease advertisers.”

 

Spoiler

Despite this proclamation, estimates from data analytics firm Pathmatics show Twitter’s U.S. ad revenue has barely budged since Musk’s acquisition. During the first four days of this week, brands spent around $20.29 million on the platform compared to $20.3 million the first four days of last week.

Ebiquity, an ad-tech firm that monitors media spend, told Adweek that nine out of 17 brand advertisers they have contacted this week have instructed their agencies to suspend advertising on Twitter until further notice. Although the company didn’t share the specific brands, some of its clients include Sony, Nestle, Subway and Mazda. 

Some big names have indeed paused spend, including General Mills. But others are still waiting. Our media buyer source says none of their clients are off the platform. Reflecting this reality, CPMs on the platform have not fluctuated dramatically, Avi Ben Zvi, vp of paid social at performance marketing agency Tinuiti said. 

“Until something tangibly, concretely changes, there are a lot of advertisers that are waiting or operating business as usual,” the media buyer source said. 

Adweek contacted Twitter for comment Friday morning, but our emails to a spokesperson bounced back, which may be the result of widespread layoffs. An email to the company Friday afternoon was not returned.

A third media buyer source at a large brand said the channel had been a strong performer.

Even before Musk took over and hate speech rapidly increased on the platform, Twitter had struggled with preventing harmful and illegal content, some of it adjacent to ads. In late September, several brands found out they had been inadvertently advertising on accounts peddling child porn, per a report in Reuters. One of those brands, which spends more than $15 million on Twitter, subsequently paused spend on the platform, the third media buyer told Adweek.

The brand was considering returning to the platform recently and had scheduled a meeting this week with the company. But then Twitter abruptly canceled the meeting, souring relations. 

“They just realized all of this was happening and [had] nothing to say,” the source said. 

After this week, with hate speech increasing on the platform and Elon Musk tweeting (and then deleting) an inaccurate story about the attack of Paul Pelosi, the brand isn’t planning to return any time soon. 

“It’s a long road of fundamentally making us understand that [Musk] understands what we need from a brand safety standpoint,” the buyer said. “I have zero confidence in that right now.”

The media buying executive from the CPG company also stopped ad spend on Twitter due to a similar incident that also happened a month ago during which ads ran adjacent to predatory accounts. The company’s media spend on Twitter is more than $10 million annually. It’s now shifting budgets to CTV and TikTok.

The company had plans to advertise on Twitter for the upcoming Super Bowl, as it had done in past years, but that’s no longer the case, the source said. 

“Our brand is our most valuable asset, we would not and cannot have them be associated with content that would be hateful or vulgar,” the source said.

 

 

[Post Oak 20210]

56 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Clear, concise Twitter thread from 2 days ago that explains the advertiser thing, and why Musk keeps saying there's activist movement pressuring advertisers from giving Elon their money:

 

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1588696157794242560.html

 

 

 

1/ There is some pretty substantial context about Twitter's 2023 revenue and advertisers that I think partly help explains why Musk is really losing it...

And it involves upfront ad sales. Let me explain... 

2/ Back Twitter (like a lot of digital companies) participates in an event called new fronts. At this event, they sell large chunks of ads for the following year.

Typically, Twitter sells like ~600-900M in ads at new fronts. That's guaranteed revenue for following year. 

3/ This year, they didn't sell much of anything.

A coalition called Stop The Deal spent time educating and using media buyers and big advertisers at the event to ask Twitter some basic questions about potential Musk takeover before giving him a guaranteed income for 2023. 

4/ Media buyers did ask those questions. Twitter had zero answers or assurances, the presentation imploded and ended shockingly early. Twitter from what I understand basically sold almost nothing and locked in extremely little 2023 revenue. 

5/ This means that instead of heading into 2023 with 15-20% of 2023 already secured as they typically would have, Twitter heads into next year with almost none of that. All because of Musk's red pilled edgelord approach. 

6/ @elonmusk has had months to address these concerns or even learn about them. But instead, he's insisted on antagonizing the very businesses and people that sustain Twitter.

Back in May, the groups and companies weren't calling for a boycott, they were asking basic questions. 

7/ My point here is: It's actually worse than that I think a lot of people even appreciate all because Musk's conduct and commitments to roll back brand safety and community safeguards essentially obliterated Twitter's new front sales event that woulda secured 2023 revenue. 

 

 

This is like if futureman bought twitter.

[atomheartbevo 89649]

4 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

Old Elon was at his best when he took good ideas for Tesla on Twitter and incorporated them into the car. He could be doing the same with Twitter. Instead he wants to jump into the political and cultural fray and simultaneously attract everyone to Twitter. Hard to understand why he doesn’t recognize that is impossible.

Elon could make Twitter better but only if he stays out of the opinion business. As Michael Jordan once said, democrats and republicans buy shoes.

He still needs to learn that Twitter users are the product, not the customer.  He thinks that the people he is interacting with on Twitter are the customers.

[Nice Guy Eddie 13510]

Most Americans agree that we should have the right to say pretty much whatever we want. And I don’t think there are many restrictions out there. Consequences yes, restrictions no.

But Ford or Kellogg’s doesn’t want their advertising associated with extreme free speech. Even being on the same site as racist or extremists isn’t an option for these corporations.  And as an user, i feel the same. There is a reason I don’t post on 8chan or texags. 

[Chopper 17230]

A short story

the posts she retweeted under elo's name stayed up for hours

and it looks like twitter may have just started cleaning it up.

 

Edited November 6, 2022 by Chopper

[Chopper 17230]

obligatory...when she was younger

[F250 28767]

4 hours ago, DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt said:

And are his investors so impotent that they just have to sit back and allow a CEO to spend 1/3rd (maybe) of his time leading the company they have invested in?

 

Some of those investors must be thinking.

[Francisco 2.0 32389]

 

 

[Humble Beast 258]

4 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

He still needs to learn that Twitter users are the product, not the customer.  He thinks that the people he is interacting with on Twitter are the customers.

Well, I guess if advertisers are leaving then the users are less the product than customers? Switching things up on the fly?

 

 

[atomheartbevo 89649]

4 hours ago, Post Oak said:

This is like if futureman bought twitter.

Or if Curt Schilling started a videogame company that was going to beat World of Warcraft, and took out some loans from Rhode Island.

[atomheartbevo 89649]

1 minute ago, Humble Beast said:

Well, I guess if advertisers are leaving then the users are less the product than customers? Switching things up on the fly?

That exactly what you do when you buy a $44 billion dotcom.

[Chopper 17230]

The "creator monetization" thing is the new twitter owner's idea of competing with youtube and (I guess) tiktok. Good luck with that. Will be even more difficult to  monetize when there's no advertising money, and zero creators see your platform as an attraction.

The long-form tweets idea was something twitter already working on implementing prior to the LBO. Now he's acting like it's his (idea).

Oh and that report where they're calling up some of the employees they just laid-off and offering new gigs...that's usually done in place of playing some brutal 'check all your email inboxes to find out if you've still got a job' game.

 

 

Edited November 6, 2022 by Chopper

[atomheartbevo 89649]

33 minutes ago, Chopper said:

The "creator monetization" thing is the new twitter owner's idea of competing with youtube and (I guess) tiktok. Good luck with that. Will be even more difficult to  monetize when there's no advertising money, and zero creators see your platform as an attraction.

And major YouTube and TikTok content creators are….moving to Patreon and the like (including their own drop-shipped merchandise) because they don’t like the cut they get of the advertising, so he’s not even keeping up with those creators, he’s literally a step or two behind them.