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

[atomheartbevo 90057]

5 hours ago, Laxtonto said:

TikTok is getting lit up in their hearing today and at this point, I would be betting on it getting banned at some point here soon...

Twitter owning still Vine now has more and more potential and funny enough would most likely make twitter instantly profitable and well beyond the revenue projections from that of Twitter 1.0. 

A smart man would be pivoting his company to take advantage of this, and he'd be in the press talking about how Twitter is an American-based company, and he'd have his engineers focused on bringing Vine back and making twitter profitable.

But nope, he fired a bunch of the people who could bring Vine back properly, and he's focusing his time on twitter fights or getting virtual high fives from his anonymous incel twitter bros.

[Brisketexan 105586]

11 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

A smart man would be pivoting his company to take advantage of this, and he'd be in the press talking about how Twitter is an American-based company, and he'd have his engineers focused on bringing Vine back and making twitter profitable.

But nope, he fired a bunch of the people who could bring Vine back properly, and he's focusing his time on twitter fights or getting virtual high fives from his anonymous incel twitter bros.

If you want to find the right and smart thing to do, with respect to, well, it seems just about ANYTHING.....the easiest thing to do is look at what direction Elon is running, and go the exact opposite direction.

[HenryJames 66284]

 

[Brisketexan 105586]

34 minutes ago, HenryJames said:

 

Seriously.  I presume that most of us had that experience of knowing an utterly awkward doofus who wasn't really in your friend group, but he was maybe friend-group adjacent.  You'd look up at some get-together or party over the weekend, and he'd be there, acting like one of the guys.  You didn't want to be a total dick and tell him to fuck off, but every conversation involving him was just awkward and cringey.  He'd try to crack a joke or say something funny, and just....crickets.  Awkward crickets.

Elon is that guy.  And the "friend group" that he makes cringe is "all of socially functional humanity."

[Captain Ron 12962]

Except he has a bunch of incels that are telling him he is funny and laugh at everything he says because they all want a ride in his cool car. 

[washparkhorn 9939]

[Goredho 17512]

Not sure the right place to put this, but given the links and parallels between Elon and Jack Dorsey, I’ll put it here.

Spoiler

• Block Inc., formerly known as Square Inc., is a $44 billion market cap company that claims to have developed a “frictionless” and “magical” financial technology with a mission to empower the “unbanked” and the “underbanked”.
• Our 2-year investigation has concluded that Block has systematically taken advantage of the demographics it claims to be helping. The “magic” behind Block’s business has not been disruptive innovation, but rather the company’s willingness to facilitate fraud against consumers and the government, avoid regulation, dress up predatory loans and fees as revolutionary technology, and mislead investors with inflated metrics.
• Our research involved dozens of interviews with former employees, partners, and industry experts, extensive review of regulatory and litigation records, and FOIA and public records requests.
• Most analysts are excited about the post-pandemic surge of Block’s Cash App platform, with expectations that its 51 million monthly transacting active users and low customer acquisition costs will drive high margin growth and serve as a future platform to offer new products.
• Our research indicates, however, that Block has wildly overstated its genuine user counts and has understated its customer acquisition costs. Former employees estimated that 40%-75% of accounts they reviewed were fake, involved in fraud, or were additional accounts tied to a single individual.
• Core to the issue is that Block has embraced one traditionally very “underbanked” segment of the population: criminals. The company’s “Wild West” approach to compliance made it easy for bad actors to mass-create accounts for identity fraud and other scams, then extract stolen funds quickly.
• Even when users were caught engaging in fraud or other prohibited activity, Block blacklisted the account without banning the user. A former customer service rep shared screenshots showing how blacklisted accounts were regularly associated with dozens or hundreds of other active accounts suspected of fraud. This phenomenon of allowing blacklisted users was so common that rappers bragged about it in hip hop songs.
• Block obfuscates how many individuals are on the Cash App platform by reporting misleading “transacting active” metrics filled with fake and duplicate accounts. Block can and should clarify to investors an estimate on how many unique people actually use Cash App.
• CEO Jack Dorsey has publicly touted how Cash App is mentioned in hundreds of hip hop songs as evidence of its mainstream appeal. A review of those songs show that the artists are not generally rapping about Cash App’s smooth user interface—many describe using it to scam, traffic drugs or even pay for murder. [See our compilation video on this here]
• “I paid them hitters through Cash App”— Block paid to promote a video for a song called “Cash App” which described paying contract killers through the app. The song’s artist was later arrested for attempted murder.
• Cash App was also cited “by far” as the top app used in reported U.S. sex trafficking, according to a leading non-profit organization. Multiple Department of Justice complaints outline how Cash App has been used to facilitate sex trafficking, including sex trafficking of minors.
• There is even a gang named after Cash App: In 2021, Baltimore authorities charged members of the “Cash App” gang with distribution of fentanyl in a West Baltimore neighborhood, according to news reports and criminal records.
• Beyond facilitating payments for criminal activity, the platform has been overrun with scam accounts and fake users, according to numerous interviews with former employees.
• Examples of obvious distortions abound: “Jack Dorsey” has multiple fake accounts, including some that appear aimed at scamming Cash App users.  “Elon Musk” and “Donald Trump” have dozens.
• To test this, we turned our accounts into “Donald Trump” and “Elon Musk” and were easily able to send and receive money. We ordered a Cash Card under our obviously fake Donald Trump account, checking to see if Cash App’s compliance would take issue—the card promptly arrived in the mail.
• Former employees described how Cash App suppressed internal concerns and ignored user pleas for help as criminal activity and fraud ran rampant on its platform. This appeared to be an effort to grow Cash App’s user base by strategically disregarding Anti Money Laundering (AML) rules.
• The COVID-19 pandemic and nationwide lockdowns posed an existential threat to Block’s key driver of gross profit at the time, merchant services.
• In this environment, amid Cash App’s anti-compliance free-for-all, the app facilitated a massive wave of government COVID-relief payments. CEO Jack Dorsey Tweeted that users could get government payments through Cash App “immediately” with “no bank account needed” due to its frictionless technology.
• Within weeks of Cash App accounts receiving their first government payments, states were seeking to claw back suspected fraudulent payments—Washington State wanted more than $200 million back from payment processors while Arizona sought to recover $500 million, former employees told us.
• Once again, the signs were hard to miss. Rapper “Nuke Bizzle”, made a popular music video about committing COVID fraud. Several weeks later, he was arrested and eventually convicted for committing COVID fraud. The only payment provider mentioned in the indictment was Cash App, which was used to facilitate the fraudulent payments.
• We filed public records requests to learn more about Block’s role in facilitating pandemic relief fraud and received answers from several states.
• Massachusetts sought to claw back over 69,000 unemployment payments from Cash App accounts just four months into the pandemic. Suspect transactions at Cash App’s partner bank were disproportionate, exceeding major banks like JP Morgan and Wells Fargo, despite the latter banks having 4x-5x as many deposit accounts.
• In Ohio, Cash App’s partner bank had 8x the suspect pandemic-related unemployment payments as the bank that processed the most unemployment claims in the state, even though the latter bank processed 2x the claims as Cash App’s, according to data we obtained via a public records request.
• The data shows that compared to its Ohio competitor, Cash App’s partner bank had nearly 10x the number of applicants who applied for benefits through a bank account used by another claimant – a clear red flag of fraud.
• Block had obvious compliance lapses that made fraud easy, such as permitting single accounts to receive unemployment payments on behalf of multiple individuals from various states and ineffective address verification.
• In an apparent effort to preserve its growth engine, Cash App ignored internal employee concerns, along with warnings from the Secret Service, the U.S. Department of Labor OIG, FinCEN, and State Regulators which all specifically flagged the issue of multiple COVID relief payments going to the same account as an obvious sign of fraud.
• Block reported a pandemic surge in user counts and revenue, ignoring the contribution of widespread fraudulent accounts and payments. The new business provided a sharp one-time increase to Block’s stock, which rose 639% in 18 months during the pandemic.
• As Block’s stock soared on the back of its facilitation of fraud, co-founders Jack Dorsey and James McKelvey collectively sold over $1 billion of stock during the pandemic. Other executives, including CFO Amrita Ahuja and the lead manager for Cash App Brian Grassadonia, also dumped millions of dollars in stock.
• With its influx of pandemic Cash App users, our research shows Block has quietly fueled its profitability by avoiding a key banking regulation meant to protect merchants. “Interchange fees” are fees charged to merchants for accepting use of various payment cards.
• Congress passed a law that legally caps “interchange fees” charged by large banks that have over $10 billion in assets. Despite having $31 billion in assets, Block avoids these regulations by routing payments through a small bank and gouging merchants with elevated fees.
• Block includes only a single vague reference in its filings acknowledging it earns revenue from “interchange fees”. It has never revealed the full economics of this category, yet roughly one-third of Cash App’s revenue came from this opaque source, according to a 2022 Credit Suisse research report.
• Competitor PayPal has disclosed it is under investigation by both the SEC and the CFPB over its similar use of a small bank to avoid “interchange fee” caps. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request we filed with the SEC indicates that Block may be part of a similar investigation.
• Block’s $29 billion deal to acquire ‘buy now pay later’ (BNPL) service Afterpay closed in January 2022. Afterpay has been celebrated by Block as a major financial innovation, allowing users to buy things like a pair of shoes or a t-shirt and pay over time, only incurring massive fees if subsequent payments are late.
• Afterpay was designed in a way that avoided responsible lending rules in its native Australia, extending a form of credit to users without income verification or credit checks. The service doesn’t technically charge “interest”, but late fees can reach APR equivalents as high as 289%.
• The acquisition is flopping. In 2022, the year Afterpay was acquired, it lost $357 million, accelerating from 2021 losses of $184 million.
• Fitch Ratings reported that Afterpay delinquencies through March 2022 had more than doubled to 4.1%, from 1.7% in June 2021 (just prior to the announced acquisition). Total processing volume declined -4.8% from the previous year.
• Block regularly hypes other mundane or predatory sources of revenue as technological breakthroughs. Roughly 31% of Cash App’s revenue comes from “instant deposit” which Block says it pioneered and works as if by “magic”. Every other major competitor we checked provides a similar service at comparable or better rates.
• On a purely fundamental basis, even before factoring in the findings of our investigation, we see downside of between 65% to 75% in Block shares. Block reported a 1% year over year revenue decline and a GAAP loss of $540.7 million in 2022. Analysts have future expectations of GAAP unprofitability and the company has warned it may not be profitable.
• Despite this, Block is valued like a profitable growth company at (i) an EV/EBITDA multiple of 60x; (ii) a forward 2023 “adjusted” earnings multiple of 41x; and (iii) a price to tangible book ratio of 13.1x, all wildly out of line with fintech peers.
• Despite its current rich multiples, Block is also facing threats from key competitors like Zelle, Venmo/Paypal and fast-growing payment solutions from smartphone powerhouses like Apple and Google. Apple has grown Apple Pay activations from 20% in 2017 to over 70% in 2022 and now leads in digital wallet market share.
• In sum, we think Block has misled investors on key metrics, and embraced predatory offerings and compliance worst-practices in order to fuel growth and profit from facilitation of fraud against consumers and the government.
• We also believe Jack Dorsey has built an empire—and amassed a $5 billion personal fortune—professing to care deeply about the demographics he is taking advantage of. With Dorsey and top executives already having sold over $1 billion in equity on Block’s meteoric pandemic run higher, they have ensured they will be fine, regardless of the outcome for everyone else.

https://hindenburgresearch.com/block/

Edited March 24, 2023 by Goredho

[Rimbo 26439]

Wolf's been on fire lately

1 hour ago, Captain Ron said:

Except he has a bunch of incels that are telling him he is funny and laugh at everything he says because they all want a ride in his cool car. 

his cars suck now tho

[DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt 12301]

3 hours ago, HenryJames said:

 

This dude is a glitchy cyborg

[atomheartbevo 90057]

He's farting around, saying stupid shit when a major competitor just gave him a massive opening to take market share, as they are being grilled by Congress.

Meanwhile, YouTube is making sure that everybody knows their TikTok competitor is chugging right along just fine, and it's easy to import/use.

And then there is bullshit like this

Yeah, except I see a whole lot more hate speech bullshit in email notifications and in my feeds since Elon took over, and it's not shit that I've clicked on or followed or liked.

[mchookem 16527]

6 hours ago, HenryJames said:

 

 

[bolverk 29823]

6 hours ago, HenryJames said:

 

 

5 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

Seriously.  I presume that most of us had that experience of knowing an utterly awkward doofus who wasn't really in your friend group, but he was maybe friend-group adjacent.  You'd look up at some get-together or party over the weekend, and he'd be there, acting like one of the guys.  You didn't want to be a total dick and tell him to fuck off, but every conversation involving him was just awkward and cringey.  He'd try to crack a joke or say something funny, and just....crickets.  Awkward crickets.

Elon is that guy.  And the "friend group" that he makes cringe is "all of socially functional humanity."

 

4 hours ago, Captain Ron said:

Except he has a bunch of incels that are telling him he is funny and laugh at everything he says because they all want a ride in his cool car. 

[Captain Ron 12962]

11 hours ago, Goredho said:

Not sure the right place to put this, but given the links and parallels between Elon and Jack Dorsey, I’ll put it here.

  Hide contents

• Block Inc., formerly known as Square Inc., is a $44 billion market cap company that claims to have developed a “frictionless” and “magical” financial technology with a mission to empower the “unbanked” and the “underbanked”.
• Our 2-year investigation has concluded that Block has systematically taken advantage of the demographics it claims to be helping. The “magic” behind Block’s business has not been disruptive innovation, but rather the company’s willingness to facilitate fraud against consumers and the government, avoid regulation, dress up predatory loans and fees as revolutionary technology, and mislead investors with inflated metrics.
• Our research involved dozens of interviews with former employees, partners, and industry experts, extensive review of regulatory and litigation records, and FOIA and public records requests.
• Most analysts are excited about the post-pandemic surge of Block’s Cash App platform, with expectations that its 51 million monthly transacting active users and low customer acquisition costs will drive high margin growth and serve as a future platform to offer new products.
• Our research indicates, however, that Block has wildly overstated its genuine user counts and has understated its customer acquisition costs. Former employees estimated that 40%-75% of accounts they reviewed were fake, involved in fraud, or were additional accounts tied to a single individual.
• Core to the issue is that Block has embraced one traditionally very “underbanked” segment of the population: criminals. The company’s “Wild West” approach to compliance made it easy for bad actors to mass-create accounts for identity fraud and other scams, then extract stolen funds quickly.
• Even when users were caught engaging in fraud or other prohibited activity, Block blacklisted the account without banning the user. A former customer service rep shared screenshots showing how blacklisted accounts were regularly associated with dozens or hundreds of other active accounts suspected of fraud. This phenomenon of allowing blacklisted users was so common that rappers bragged about it in hip hop songs.
• Block obfuscates how many individuals are on the Cash App platform by reporting misleading “transacting active” metrics filled with fake and duplicate accounts. Block can and should clarify to investors an estimate on how many unique people actually use Cash App.
• CEO Jack Dorsey has publicly touted how Cash App is mentioned in hundreds of hip hop songs as evidence of its mainstream appeal. A review of those songs show that the artists are not generally rapping about Cash App’s smooth user interface—many describe using it to scam, traffic drugs or even pay for murder. [See our compilation video on this here]
• “I paid them hitters through Cash App”— Block paid to promote a video for a song called “Cash App” which described paying contract killers through the app. The song’s artist was later arrested for attempted murder.
• Cash App was also cited “by far” as the top app used in reported U.S. sex trafficking, according to a leading non-profit organization. Multiple Department of Justice complaints outline how Cash App has been used to facilitate sex trafficking, including sex trafficking of minors.
• There is even a gang named after Cash App: In 2021, Baltimore authorities charged members of the “Cash App” gang with distribution of fentanyl in a West Baltimore neighborhood, according to news reports and criminal records.
• Beyond facilitating payments for criminal activity, the platform has been overrun with scam accounts and fake users, according to numerous interviews with former employees.
• Examples of obvious distortions abound: “Jack Dorsey” has multiple fake accounts, including some that appear aimed at scamming Cash App users.  “Elon Musk” and “Donald Trump” have dozens.
• To test this, we turned our accounts into “Donald Trump” and “Elon Musk” and were easily able to send and receive money. We ordered a Cash Card under our obviously fake Donald Trump account, checking to see if Cash App’s compliance would take issue—the card promptly arrived in the mail.
• Former employees described how Cash App suppressed internal concerns and ignored user pleas for help as criminal activity and fraud ran rampant on its platform. This appeared to be an effort to grow Cash App’s user base by strategically disregarding Anti Money Laundering (AML) rules.
• The COVID-19 pandemic and nationwide lockdowns posed an existential threat to Block’s key driver of gross profit at the time, merchant services.
• In this environment, amid Cash App’s anti-compliance free-for-all, the app facilitated a massive wave of government COVID-relief payments. CEO Jack Dorsey Tweeted that users could get government payments through Cash App “immediately” with “no bank account needed” due to its frictionless technology.
• Within weeks of Cash App accounts receiving their first government payments, states were seeking to claw back suspected fraudulent payments—Washington State wanted more than $200 million back from payment processors while Arizona sought to recover $500 million, former employees told us.
• Once again, the signs were hard to miss. Rapper “Nuke Bizzle”, made a popular music video about committing COVID fraud. Several weeks later, he was arrested and eventually convicted for committing COVID fraud. The only payment provider mentioned in the indictment was Cash App, which was used to facilitate the fraudulent payments.
• We filed public records requests to learn more about Block’s role in facilitating pandemic relief fraud and received answers from several states.
• Massachusetts sought to claw back over 69,000 unemployment payments from Cash App accounts just four months into the pandemic. Suspect transactions at Cash App’s partner bank were disproportionate, exceeding major banks like JP Morgan and Wells Fargo, despite the latter banks having 4x-5x as many deposit accounts.
• In Ohio, Cash App’s partner bank had 8x the suspect pandemic-related unemployment payments as the bank that processed the most unemployment claims in the state, even though the latter bank processed 2x the claims as Cash App’s, according to data we obtained via a public records request.
• The data shows that compared to its Ohio competitor, Cash App’s partner bank had nearly 10x the number of applicants who applied for benefits through a bank account used by another claimant – a clear red flag of fraud.
• Block had obvious compliance lapses that made fraud easy, such as permitting single accounts to receive unemployment payments on behalf of multiple individuals from various states and ineffective address verification.
• In an apparent effort to preserve its growth engine, Cash App ignored internal employee concerns, along with warnings from the Secret Service, the U.S. Department of Labor OIG, FinCEN, and State Regulators which all specifically flagged the issue of multiple COVID relief payments going to the same account as an obvious sign of fraud.
• Block reported a pandemic surge in user counts and revenue, ignoring the contribution of widespread fraudulent accounts and payments. The new business provided a sharp one-time increase to Block’s stock, which rose 639% in 18 months during the pandemic.
• As Block’s stock soared on the back of its facilitation of fraud, co-founders Jack Dorsey and James McKelvey collectively sold over $1 billion of stock during the pandemic. Other executives, including CFO Amrita Ahuja and the lead manager for Cash App Brian Grassadonia, also dumped millions of dollars in stock.
• With its influx of pandemic Cash App users, our research shows Block has quietly fueled its profitability by avoiding a key banking regulation meant to protect merchants. “Interchange fees” are fees charged to merchants for accepting use of various payment cards.
• Congress passed a law that legally caps “interchange fees” charged by large banks that have over $10 billion in assets. Despite having $31 billion in assets, Block avoids these regulations by routing payments through a small bank and gouging merchants with elevated fees.
• Block includes only a single vague reference in its filings acknowledging it earns revenue from “interchange fees”. It has never revealed the full economics of this category, yet roughly one-third of Cash App’s revenue came from this opaque source, according to a 2022 Credit Suisse research report.
• Competitor PayPal has disclosed it is under investigation by both the SEC and the CFPB over its similar use of a small bank to avoid “interchange fee” caps. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request we filed with the SEC indicates that Block may be part of a similar investigation.
• Block’s $29 billion deal to acquire ‘buy now pay later’ (BNPL) service Afterpay closed in January 2022. Afterpay has been celebrated by Block as a major financial innovation, allowing users to buy things like a pair of shoes or a t-shirt and pay over time, only incurring massive fees if subsequent payments are late.
• Afterpay was designed in a way that avoided responsible lending rules in its native Australia, extending a form of credit to users without income verification or credit checks. The service doesn’t technically charge “interest”, but late fees can reach APR equivalents as high as 289%.
• The acquisition is flopping. In 2022, the year Afterpay was acquired, it lost $357 million, accelerating from 2021 losses of $184 million.
• Fitch Ratings reported that Afterpay delinquencies through March 2022 had more than doubled to 4.1%, from 1.7% in June 2021 (just prior to the announced acquisition). Total processing volume declined -4.8% from the previous year.
• Block regularly hypes other mundane or predatory sources of revenue as technological breakthroughs. Roughly 31% of Cash App’s revenue comes from “instant deposit” which Block says it pioneered and works as if by “magic”. Every other major competitor we checked provides a similar service at comparable or better rates.
• On a purely fundamental basis, even before factoring in the findings of our investigation, we see downside of between 65% to 75% in Block shares. Block reported a 1% year over year revenue decline and a GAAP loss of $540.7 million in 2022. Analysts have future expectations of GAAP unprofitability and the company has warned it may not be profitable.
• Despite this, Block is valued like a profitable growth company at (i) an EV/EBITDA multiple of 60x; (ii) a forward 2023 “adjusted” earnings multiple of 41x; and (iii) a price to tangible book ratio of 13.1x, all wildly out of line with fintech peers.
• Despite its current rich multiples, Block is also facing threats from key competitors like Zelle, Venmo/Paypal and fast-growing payment solutions from smartphone powerhouses like Apple and Google. Apple has grown Apple Pay activations from 20% in 2017 to over 70% in 2022 and now leads in digital wallet market share.
• In sum, we think Block has misled investors on key metrics, and embraced predatory offerings and compliance worst-practices in order to fuel growth and profit from facilitation of fraud against consumers and the government.
• We also believe Jack Dorsey has built an empire—and amassed a $5 billion personal fortune—professing to care deeply about the demographics he is taking advantage of. With Dorsey and top executives already having sold over $1 billion in equity on Block’s meteoric pandemic run higher, they have ensured they will be fine, regardless of the outcome for everyone else.

https://hindenburgresearch.com/block/

I will just say this - if you know anyone that has a lot of stock in Block/Square borrow it now and short the shit out of them.

Hindenburg Research is a group known for shorting stocks. If they have released a dossier on a company, they have done their research and are doing the same.

For the sake of space:

Spoiler

This is the TL;DR one a 15 minute news piece on Hindenburg going after a firm in India that they claim is cooking their books

However, if you want a more in-depth look, this was the first I heard for them, the latest season of Bad Bets, when they took down Nikola, an electric truck company. Hindenburg. They jump in the story on season 4 and you get :

But this season was amazing and is a fascinating and fun ride (no pun intended). I recommend the whole series, it's great (here is the start point):

 

 

[atomheartbevo 90057]

You know the company behind ChatGPT?  Elon was an investor, but gave up on them unless they would let him run the place.  He promised a billion, gave them $100 million and then when he left, stopped investing, so they had to turn to Microsoft, which eventually led to their massive success without Musk.

https://www.semafor.com/article/03/24/2023/the-secret-history-of-elon-musk-sam-altman-and-openai

Quote

After three years, Elon Musk was ready to give up on the artificial intelligence research firm he helped found, OpenAI.

The nonprofit had launched in 2015 to great fanfare with backing from billionaire tech luminaries like Musk and Reid Hoffman, who had as a group pledged $1 billion. It had lured some of the top minds in the field to leave big tech companies and academia.

Quote

But in early 2018, Musk told Sam Altman, another OpenAI founder, that he believed the venture had fallen fatally behind Google, people familiar with the matter said.

And Musk proposed a possible solution: He would take control of OpenAI and run it himself.

Quote

Altman and OpenAI’s other founders rejected Musk’s proposal. Musk, in turn, walked away from the company — and reneged on a massive planned donation. The fallout from that conflict, culminating in the announcement of Musk’s departure on Feb 20, 2018, would shape the industry that’s changing the world, and the company at the heart of it.

The conflict would also create a public rift between the two most important players in technology today, Musk and Altman. Semafor spoke to eight people familiar with the inside story, and is revealing the details here for the first time.

Quote

Greg Brockman, an OpenAI co-founder who was chief technology officer at that time, also opposed Musk’s takeover as did others at OpenAI. A power struggle ensued, according to people familiar with the matter.

Altman, who also ran the powerful startup accelerator YCombinator, stepped in. According to tax documents, he added president to his title in 2018, in addition to being a director.

Quote

An OpenAI announcement said Musk would continue to fund the organization, but Musk did not, according to people familiar with the matter. He had promised to donate roughly $1 billion over a period of years (he had already contributed $100 million), but his payments stopped after his departure, people familiar with the matter said. That left the nonprofit with no ability to pay the astronomical fees associated with training AI models on supercomputers.

Quote

When ChatGPT launched in November, OpenAI instantly became the hottest new tech startup, forcing Google to scramble to play catchup. Musk was furious, according to people familiar with the matter.

In December, a month after the launch of ChatGPT, Musk pulled OpenAI’s access to the Twitter “fire hose” of data — a contract that was signed before Musk acquired Twitter.

Quote

On Feb. 17, he tweeted “OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft.”

On March 15, he tweeted, “I’m still confused as to how a non-profit to which I donated ~$100M somehow became a $30B market cap for-profit. If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it?”

Quote

OpenAI declined to comment. Musk didn't respond to a request for comment but on Friday, he tweeted "I'm sure it will be fine" and a meme of Elmo with the words: "Me realizing AI, the most powerful tool that mankind has ever created, is now in the hands of a ruthless corporate monopoly."

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/on-with-kara-swisher/id1643307527

Quote

Ironically, Musk’s antics seem to be a part of the reason why OpenAI sought these other partnerships with big tech firms. On a Thursday episode of the On With Kara Swisher podcast, Altman finally responded to Musk’s Twitter comments, saying “Most of that is not true, and I think Elon knows that.”

He also called Musk a “jerk” but added that “he does really care, and is feeling stressed about what the future’s going to look like for humanity.” He also said that Musk “really does care about the future with AGI” referring to a so-called “artificial general intelligence.” AGI is still just a theory, though Altman and others at OpenAI are obsessed with the idea.

Quote

Musk is known for his domineering ways, such as reportedly firing employees who criticize him or give him bad news. Not being happy that OpenAI has become the new hotness, Musk has reportedly been in talks with an ex-DeepMind AI researcher about creating his own alternative to ChatGPT, one that will combat the so-called “woke AI” of his once-partners and now rivals.

Everybody needs to encourage Musk to dump money into a new AI company.

[Chopper 17355]

On 3/24/2023 at 7:09 PM, atomheartbevo said:

Musk didn't respond to a request for comment but on Friday, he tweeted "I'm sure it will be fine"

Weird. That's exactly what she said.

[Captain Ron 12962]

 

[Francisco 2.0 32435]

 

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/elon-musk-offers-twitter-staff-stock-grants-of-20-billion-report-3894558

 

Quote

Twitter's Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said that the employees will receive stock-based awards at a valuation of close to $20 billion, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. This is less than half of the $44 billion spent by Mr Musk to acquire the social media platform in October last year. 

Mr Musk expressed optimism about the social-media company's future in a statement to employees. "I see a clear, but difficult, path to a >$250B valuation," he stated, implying that shares awarded now would be worth ten times more.

 

 

Quote

In the email reviewed by the outlet, Mr Musk added that Twitter is witnessing changes so rapidly to ensure that the company "can be thought of as an inverse startup." According to the email, he said that significant changes were required in part to prevent Twitter from going bankrupt. 

According to a separate email sent to the employees on Friday, the company informed its staff that it is providing additional equity grants to employees, which will begin to vest after six months. It further said that the company intends to offer a liquidity event in around a year during which time employees will be able to cash out some of their equity. However, it is to be noted that no information was available regarding the number of employees who will get equity awards.

 

Quote

Since Mr Musk's contentious acquisition of the microblogging site last year, employees have had a lot of questions, including ones about compensation. According to former employees, Twitter frequently provided stock grants as part of employee pay that vested over time, the outlet noted.

The new grants, which are separate from and in addition to any legacy Twitter equity that was converted to cash at the time of the acquisition in October 2022, will vest over a four-year period, as per the email.

According to regulatory filings, Twitter had spent roughly $630 million on stock-based compensation in 2021, the last full year it publicly declared financial results before going private. 

 

[SydneyCarton 48314]

Oh wait, now he wants a 250 billion valuation when he took the company private for its development and the good of mankind? What a fucking shock. 

[Brisketexan 105586]

Oh wait, now he wants a 250 billion valuation when he took the company private for its development and the good of mankind? What a fucking shock. 

“No, see, what you don’t understand that with even more money, infinite money even, Elon will truly be able to be the savior of all humanity and our One True King [of boot-slurping]!”

[Hefeweizen 5357]

250 billion ameros.  Maybe?

 

[Neonmoon 38130]

I see a clear, but difficult, path to a blowjob from Natalie Portman 

[Firemans4Horn 18304]

22 minutes ago, Neonmoon said:

I see a clear, but difficult, path to a blowjob from Natalie Portman 

[Sawbonz 27783]

On 3/23/2023 at 4:23 PM, Brisketexan said:

If you want to find the right and smart thing to do, with respect to, well, it seems just about ANYTHING.....the easiest thing to do is look at what direction Elon is running, and go the exact opposite direction.

 

3 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

In the email reviewed by the outlet, Mr Musk added that Twitter is witnessing changes so rapidly to ensure that the company "can be thought of as an inverse startup.

Wouldn’t the inverse of a startup be a shutdown?

[Captain Ron 12962]

5 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

In the email reviewed by the outlet, Mr Musk added that Twitter is witnessing changes so rapidly to ensure that the company "can be thought of as an inverse startup.

Wait, isn’t the site still fundamentally THE SAME microblogging site he bought in October?

If you’re still working there now, you didn’t get out when you had a chance and get some severance. Now you’re just hoping on sunshine pumping. 

[atomheartbevo 90057]

3 hours ago, SydneyCarton said:

Oh wait, now he wants a 250 billion valuation when he took the company private for its development and the good of mankind? What a fucking shock. 

17 minutes ago, Captain Ron said:

Wait, isn’t the site still fundamentally THE SAME microblogging site he bought in October?

If you’re still working there now, you didn’t get out when you had a chance and get some severance. Now you’re just hoping on sunshine pumping. 

I love the whole $250 billion number. 

Not $50 billion, which if he managed to get it up to that level of valuation, would actually be very impressive just by itself, given the changes he's made and the advertising problems that have come up.  $250 billion.

Somebody needs to explain that twitter users are the product, not the customers.

Edited March 26, 2023 by atomheartbevo

[Captain Ron 12962]

10 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

I love the whole $250 billion number. 

Not $50 billion, which if he managed to get it up to that level of valuation, would actually be very impressive just by itself, given the changes he's made and the advertising problems that have come up.  $250 billion.

Somebody needs to explain that twitter users are the product, not the customers.

This number is pure fever dream insanity. 

Metabook is worth $530 Billion right now. Twitter isn’t a 1/10 the company Facefriend is. And he wants a valuation that’s 1/2 theirs? WTF?

Someone needs to explain basic economics to this fool. 

[Francisco 2.0 32435]

Gee, what a damn shame.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/26/technology/twitter-source-code-leak.html

 

Quote

Parts of Twitter’s source code, the underlying computer code on which the social network runs, were leaked online, according to a legal filing, a rare and major exposure of intellectual property as the company struggles to reduce technical issues and reverse its business fortunes under Elon Musk.

 

Quote

Twitter moved on Friday to have the leaked code taken down by sending a copyright infringement notice to GitHub, an online collaboration platform for software developers where the code was posted, according to the filing. GitHub complied and took down the code that day. It was unclear how long the leaked code had been online, but it appeared to have been public for at least several months.

Twitter also asked the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to order GitHub to identify the person who shared the code and any other individuals who downloaded it, according to the filing.

 

Quote

Twitter launched an investigation into the leak and executives handling the matter have surmised that whoever was responsible left the San Francisco-based company last year, two people briefed on the internal investigation said. Since Mr. Musk bought Twitter in October for $44 billion, about 75 percent of the company’s 7,500 employees have been laid off or resigned.

The executives were only recently made aware of the source code leak, the people briefed on the internal investigation said. One concern is that the code includes security vulnerabilities that could give hackers or other motivated parties the means to extract user data or take down the site, they said.

 

Spoiler

The exposed source code adds to the challenges facing Mr. Musk’s Twitter. Technology companies often view such code as a closely held secret and do not share it for fear that it could give competitors an unfair advantage or reveal security vulnerabilities. 

But even as tech companies strive to protect their code bases, they have become ripe targets for opportunists, hackers and others. Last year, a hacking group successfully stole source code from Microsoft and other major companies. And in 2020, Anthony Levandowski, a star engineer of self-driving cars, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing code from Google as he prepared to start a new job. (Mr. Levandowski was later pardoned by then-President Donald J. Trump.)

The public posting of Twitter’s code is “concerning,” said Brett Callow, a threat analyst at Emsisoft, a cybersecurity software company. “It does make it a little bit easier and speedier to probe for vulnerabilities.”

For Twitter, the leak also comes on top of mounting structural and financial challenges. Mr. Musk has been trying to turn around the social network over the past few months by slashing costs, trying out new features and welcoming back previously banned users. But outages of the service have increased, while advertisers — the main source of revenue for the company — have been skittish about running ads on the site.

The turmoil has caused financial damage. On Friday, Mr. Musk told employees in an email that Twitter was worth roughly $20 billion, down more than 50 percent from the what he paid for it. He said “radical changes” at the company, including mass layoffs and cost cutting, were necessary to avoid bankruptcy and streamline operations.

“Twitter is being reshaped rapidly,” Mr. Musk wrote in the email seen by The New York Times. He added that the company could be thought of as “an inverse start-up” and that he believed Twitter could someday be worth $250 billion.

Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment about Twitter’s leaked code. GitHub declined to comment on the decision to remove the code, but posted Twitter’s takedown request on its website.

The leak comes as Mr. Musk has promised to make some of Twitter’s code public. This month, the billionaire said that he would make the code that Twitter uses to recommend tweets publicly available by the end of March, so that it could be reviewed by anyone and scrutinized for possible flaws. The process could help Twitter’s code become more secure, as people identified and reported problems with it.

At the same time, Mr. Musk has worried about the possibility of leaks and theft by disgruntled former employees during his mass layoffs. In November, he locked Twitter’s offices and asked employees not to come in while cuts were being made. Over the last few months, Twitter has also prevented engineers from making changes to the site’s code ahead of layoffs for fear that someone would sabotage the platform on the way out the door.

“One of the best ways to mitigate insider risk is to keep your employees happy and that certainly hasn’t been the case at Twitter,” Mr. Callow said.

The person who leaked Twitter’s source code appeared to go by the name “FreeSpeechEnthusiast” on GitHub, according to Twitter’s legal filing. The user’s pseudonym appears to reference Mr. Musk, who has referred to himself as a “free speech absolutist.”

The GitHub profile for the anonymous user shows a single contribution to the platform in early January. The profile remains online.

 

 

Edited March 26, 2023 by Francisco 2.0

[NeverMarryAStripper 22030]

Maybe it was Musk who leaked it hoping someone could fix it for him

[Chopper 17355]

It was shitty code and due for a total rewrite anyway, per Mosk.

[atomheartbevo 90057]

6 hours ago, Captain Ron said:

Someone needs to explain basic economics to this fool. 

Maybe somebody could chip in and buy him this book

[atomheartbevo 90057]

Elon still does not fucking get it.  Shatner is a product, he produces content for free, for Musk's platform, which attracts customers (advertisers).  He has produced content worth far more to twitter than $84 a year and people like him bring others in.

[Francisco 2.0 32435]

38 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Elon still does not fucking get it.  Shatner is a product, he produces content for free, for Musk's platform, which attracts customers (advertisers).  He has produced content worth far more to twitter than $84 a year and people like him bring others in.

 

In his mind, he probably quantifies this by "I paid $44 billion, so I paid to get my blue check".  Never mind that he was handed a blue check by whatever rationale Twitter used years ago; he got his, now everyone else has to pay, because he did.

And you can bet your ass he loved getting that damn blue check for free years ago.  I don't imagine he (or an underling) sent an email to Jack asking to have it taken back, because it was handed out in an unfair manner.

 

 

 

[atomheartbevo 90057]

24 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

In his mind, he probably quantifies this by "I paid $44 billion, so I paid to get my blue check".  Never mind that he was handed a blue check by whatever rationale Twitter used years ago; he got his, now everyone else has to pay, because he did.

And you can bet your ass he loved getting that damn blue check for free years ago.  I don't imagine he (or an underling) sent an email to Jack asking to have it taken back, because it was handed out in an unfair manner.

That's exactly it.

And like I said, he still doesn't get how it works.  He should be handing out blue checks to celebs like Shatner and King because they are providing free content (and more twitter users/activity) that he makes money off of.

But nope, not in Elon's world.

And I fully expect to move to some kind of "pay-to-use" model for all users within the next 18 months.

Yes, he will lose a lot of users, but in his mind if it's offset by enough people saying "fuck it" and sticking around, it'll be worth it, and it won't matter too much at that point about the advertisers (which he hates).

[Brisketexan 105586]

7 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

That's exactly it.

And like I said, he still doesn't get how it works.  He should be handing out blue checks to celebs like Shatner and King because they are providing free content (and more twitter users/activity) that he makes money off of.

But nope, not in Elon's world.

And I fully expect to move to some kind of "pay-to-use" model for all users within the next 18 months.

Yes, he will lose a lot of users, but in his mind if it's offset by enough people saying "fuck it" and sticking around, it'll be worth it, and it won't matter too much at that point about the advertisers (which he hates).

It's made something like $11 million?  For a business that requires literally BILLIONS to make it?

That's as fucking dumb as a law firm telling a client who will pay its $500 per hour rates that the client is fired if it also won't agree to pay the firm's new $20 per month "general office supplies surcharge."  The classic definition of penny wise and pound foolish.  

Elon.  Super brain genius.  Who apparently has not the first clue how the business he bought actually gets revenue.

[Slacks 6920]

On 2/16/2023 at 5:27 PM, Slacks said:

an entire financial model built on fiat currency that the banks can create via loans that become immediate deposits leading to more loans, repeating to infinity? scam.

all of our shit is a scam, but it works when everyone is bought in, so it becomes reality. pick your scam and go with it.

Slacks taking out half the banking industry on accident. Thanks, Obama Slacks.

[royiv 9471]

It's amazing how little he understands about the Twitter business model. Twitter has (had) thousands and thousands of celebrities, journalists, athletes, politicians, etc creating content for free. Now he wants those creators to pay him to give him the content that brings eyeballs to the platform. What a moron. 

[atomheartbevo 90057]

19 minutes ago, royiv said:

It's amazing how little he understands about the Twitter business model. Twitter has (had) thousands and thousands of celebrities, journalists, athletes, politicians, etc creating content for free. Now he wants those creators to pay him to give him the content that brings eyeballs to the platform. What a moron. 

But with the $8 blue checkmark, he can give spammers, bots, scammers, really shitty people, etc., the same weight as a celebrity or journalist or athlete or politician.  As those bots/scammers/etc. are cranking out far more content per hour than the previous folks with blue checks.

Of course, that content is driving advertisers away or keeping them away.

[HenryJames 66284]

[Neonmoon 38130]

1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

It's made something like $11 million?  For a business that requires literally BILLIONS to make it?

That's as fucking dumb as a law firm telling a client who will pay its $500 per hour rates that the client is fired if it also won't agree to pay the firm's new $20 per month "general office supplies surcharge."  The classic definition of penny wise and pound foolish.  

Elon.  Super brain genius.  Who apparently has not the first clue how the business he bought actually gets revenue.

We only have a year or so before this goes into bankruptcy. Just wait 

[atomheartbevo 90057]

11 minutes ago, HenryJames said:

Does he not realize how many bots/etc. are verified because companies discovered they could pay the $8 a month and get their bots into the mix?

6 minutes ago, Neonmoon said:

We only have a year or so before this goes into bankruptcy. Just wait 

It would be awesome if, after he gets driven out of an AI company that he bitches about a lot because they wouldn't let him be in charge, that AI bots completely wreck twitter.

I don't even have words for how hilarious that would be. It's more than poetry.

[mchookem 16527]

i mean i think he's demonstrated again and again that he really doesn't get anything. he's a business idiot lol. 

[cactusflinthead 27615]

 

[Captain Ron 12962]

[Sawbonz 27783]

He’s responding to a lot of critics with 

$7

 

did he really drop the price?

 

[Francisco 2.0 32435]

10 hours ago, HenryJames said:

 

I stole this from reader comments at The Verge:

Quote

Nothing says I support democratic values and free speech more than paying to vote.

 

[Francisco 2.0 32435]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Captain Ron 12962]

Since I’ve been on twitter for a while, my FOR YOU tab is actually a lot of people I follow, it’s well curated. The following feed isn’t as good.

 Getting rid of for you will end my reason for subscribing to twitter. I’ll just bookmark the accounts I want to read and directly read them. Subscribing and following aren’t needed anymore. 

[Bateshorn 9959]

It’s like when you first go on Spotify, before you’ve uploaded and curated lists, and you are just liking a few songs and getting used to the interface.  It gets a lot wrong before it learns what scratch’s your itch.

For example: I like certain country music, but in general, I’m not a big consumer.  But you click like on Dwight Yoakum’s cover of “I want you to Want me,” then the algorithm assumes you want to see a dozen big hat country channels, and not a clever covers channel.

 

[NoName 16622]

15 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Elon still does not fucking get it.  Shatner is a product, he produces content for free, for Musk's platform, which attracts customers (advertisers).  He has produced content worth far more to twitter than $84 a year and people like him bring others in.

everyone equally who pays, if you don't pay then fuck off. the verification would be great if they actually did any checking. instead it's basically if your CC payment goes through or not. if it does, you get a check. if not, you don't.

and no, he doesn't get it, period. it's dumb and he is shooting his foot off with people who bring eyes and therefore advertisers. but who knows, maybe that $11m will be a game changer for twitter and get them out of this billion / year debt service they owe.

[NoName 16622]

11 hours ago, mchookem said:

i mean i think he's demonstrated again and again that he really doesn't get anything. he's a business idiot lol.