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

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 89659

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15 minutes ago, Chopper said:

peaking of things breaking, twitter links no longer imbed apparently.

And recommendations are broken to hell.  Or maybe by design.

I still get emails for recommended tweets, and there will be Longhorns stuff, Ukraine stuff, and then for no reason what-so-fucking-ever, fucking catturd, putruck, etc.,

I don't follow those last two, don't interact with them, don't look at them on the computers that I do my actual social media stuff on, etc. but there they are and I've even blocked them.

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Captain Ron

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Jesus. How can you be so Ill prepared? That’s embarrassing.

His problem is letting Musk trap him with the whole “you tell me what that is” question. He basically lights his own fuse with the “slightly sexist” thing and gets flustered and then he gets blown up 10 seconds later.

It’s not a hard answer. Openly racist and homophobic speech. The welcoming back of hate groups, of drug cartels, of dictators around the world.

Examples- anything those groups post. The fact that people have literally counted the use of things like the N word and the like increasing a significant amount.

He’s British, so that was like Wondoloski’s miss in the World Cup. 
 

 

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Slacks

Slacks 6819

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On 4/11/2023 at 12:06 AM, atomheartbevo said:

Technically he did none of that - other people he hired did, and there was already satellite internet long before he came along and bought the company that became Starlink, and arguably Toyota got the ball rolling with mainstream interest in EVs with the Prius (even though it was a Hybrid, it got people thinking EV can work for them).

But in his mind he did all of that.

As a business leader...

https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/10/tech/elon-musk-twitter-antics-turnaround/index.html

Elonspeak: Let people decide for themselves = give a platform to people committing war crimes.

And none of that touched on the fact that he's cracking down on what the Indian and Chinese governments are telling him to crack down on.

 

On 4/11/2023 at 1:15 AM, Brian Fantana said:

You're fucking delusional. Elon Musk is not an engineer, he did not figure out any of that. He does not run SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell runs SpaceX. If you said any of that to an actual aerospace engineer, they would laugh in your face. Satellite internet network technology, including LEO satellite constellations, has existed since the 90s. Even Tesla he simply bought out and marketed. He gets credit for pushing electric cars into the mainstream a little earlier than they would have, but even with that, Tesla is a poorly run operation that lacks the ability to innovate or improve their product in any measurable way and is quickly being usurped by legacy automakers and new competitors with better products.

He is not smart, in any way, and in fact is demonstrating daily how incredibly dumb he is to the entire world with his antics post-Twitter acquisition.

 

On 4/11/2023 at 6:39 AM, Captainant said:

Point of order: Elmo didn't design any of that. He had an idea and threw it at his highly paid and crack engineering team to solve it. Specifically, Gwynne Shotwell is the actual steady hand on the wheel at SpaceX that's doing the work. 

He's a savvy business man with few scruples and is more than happy to claim full credit for the work that other people did and he paid for

 

On 4/11/2023 at 8:04 AM, GopherRock said:

 

 

 

On 4/11/2023 at 8:41 AM, Captain Ron said:

Rockets - A. He didn't figure it out. He hired an engineering team and demanded they figured it out. B. The work had already been done by McDonald Douglas in the 90s and those engineers (not Musk himself) just continued the process to bring it to the state we see it today.

 

 

Satellite Internet - huh? Hughsnet and Viasat have both been in the game much longer than Starlink. And satelite communication has been done for decades before that. He just created his own service. And don't get me wrong - it's better than other offerings, but just read the Starlink thread and you know it also has issues.

 

EVs - No question he probably accelerated EVs timetable up 20 or so years. That is amazing. But at the same time let's not forget that while he INVESTED in Tesla, he WAS NOT (despite his claims) a founder and because they haven't really moved the needle in recent years and are quickly getting caught/passed by mainstream companies in the modern game. 

Dammit, people... Don't let your hate get in the way. I'm not a fan, but geez...  Henry Ford didn't build the first car or the first production line...

The guy is clearly smart about something besides being born rich, even if he says dumb shit and will ruin Twitter.

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Parliament

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32 minutes ago, Slacks said:

 

 

 

 

Dammit, people... Don't let your hate get in the way. I'm not a fan, but geez...  Henry Ford didn't build the first car or the first production line...

The guy is clearly smart about something besides being born rich, even if he says dumb shit and will ruin Twitter.

Thomas Edison stole some ideas from Tesla, and that's just the way it is.  He took some existing tech, "acquired" new tech from others. and created a whole new thing.

Mr. Musk is a deeply-flawed man, who seems to have gone nuts.  But a rational person can recognize that, while at the same time criticizing him for what he's doing with Twitter.

Also.  That BBC reporter is an idiot.  Do some prep work, man.

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Captain Ron

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Posted
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38 minutes ago, Slacks said:

Dammit, people... Don't let your hate get in the way. I'm not a fan, but geez...  Henry Ford didn't build the first car or the first production line...

The guy is clearly smart about something besides being born rich, even if he says dumb shit and will ruin Twitter.

 

 

The guy is smart, I won't deny that and he's advanced some great things.

This isn't about hating on the guy. It is about correcting people that very falsely accredit him with things he didn't do.

If people want to call Henry Ford a great man - go for it. If they want to call him the inventor of the automobile - fuck that noise.

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Captain Ron

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BTW - this morning's ON with Kara Swisher she had the Substack creators on for an interview. It was really good stuff. I think one thing this lays out really well is the difference between Ad based vs Subscription based. They also touch on the Elon vs The World ... I mean Substack thing going on. 

 

 

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wildcat09

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10 minutes ago, Captain Ron said:

 

 

The guy is smart, I won't deny that and he's advanced some great things.

This isn't about hating on the guy. It is about correcting people that very falsely accredit him with things he didn't do.

If people want to call Henry Ford a great man - go for it. If they want to call him the inventor of the automobile - fuck that noise.

Point of order, Henry Ford was actually a piece of shit.

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Foosters

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Just now, Post Oak said:

How many new usernames is this for you now?

So, what are your hobbies?

Well, I'm very active in an online message board community.

Oh, that's cool. Have you made friends through this message board?

Oh no. They absolutely fucking hate me and say mean things to me every time I post. In fact, they've asked me to leave 5 times, but what can I say, I'm a sucker for looking like a clown.

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 89659

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4 hours ago, Parliament said:

The Henry Ford comparison is a good one.  Dude started out mostly OK but then went bonkers. 

Well....they both bought platforms that allowed bullshit, racism, and batshit conspiracy theories to be spread far and wide....

Quote

In 1918, Henry Ford purchased his hometown newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. A year and a half later, he began publishing a series of articles that claimed a vast Jewish conspiracy was infecting America. The series ran in the following 91 issues. Ford bound the articles into four volumes titled "The International Jew," and distributed half a million copies to his vast network of dealerships and subscribers. The rhetoric was not unusual for its content, as much as its scope. As one of the most famous men in America, Henry Ford legitimized ideas that otherwise may have been given little authority.

 

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Bookman

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On 4/12/2023 at 2:56 PM, HamsterHookah said:

On why he bought Twitter: Musk admitted that he went ahead with the $44 billion acquisition because he believed he would lose his legal case to try and back out of it.

Wait, I thought that Elon Musk had all the leverage and Twitter couldn't afford a long trial. Or something like that.

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Brisketexan

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23 minutes ago, Bookman said:

Wait, I thought that Elon Musk had all the leverage and Twitter couldn't afford a long trial. Or something like that.

That is what the fanbois told me.  Musk had the upper hand, and really showed Twitter.  It was a masterstroke of strategeric geenyus, or something like that.  That was the narrative at the time.  Because Elon only does superbraingenius things.

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atomheartbevo

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1 hour ago, Bookman said:

Wait, I thought that Elon Musk had all the leverage and Twitter couldn't afford a long trial. Or something like that.

He's changed his story multiple times now, and I don't know whether it's just him creating a narrative for some perceived audience, or if that's what he's convinced himself to do (he has regrets but doesn't want anybody to know, so he changes the story to try and make himself feel/look better).  We are talking about a 50 year-old guy who is so juvenile, he covered up the "W" in the twitter sign on a building, and then painted over it, all so he could laugh about "titter" and a guy who is inspiring confidence in advertisers/businesses by changing his name to "Harry Bolz".

I don't know what's going on in his head, but we know he still doesn't understand what the product and customers are at twitter, and even now he's desperately trying to get content creators and pseudo-evolve twitter from what it was (and what it was good at) to some substack/medium clone.

 

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Chopper

Chopper 17235

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If you were going to come up with a list of the dumbest ideas for twitter, something that's guaranteed to help blue-starred, unverified scammers rip people off, where would 'buy stocks on twitter' be on the list?

So...of course. From Matt Levine's Money Stuff column today:


 

Quote

 

Buy stocks on Twitter

At the height of meme stock mania in early 2021, the WallStreetBets forum on Reddit was adding a million users a day as people flocked to Reddit to discuss their plans to trade GameStop Corp. and other meme stocks. Imagine if Reddit put a button next to each GameStop post saying “buy GME,” and if you clicked the button you could buy shares directly through Reddit? (I guess maybe add another button like “YOLO GME options” so you could buy the call options too?) That just seems like it would be good business, and good customer service, each in a loose approximate way. Probably some compliance issues with that button. Probably some customers would be sad if they bought GameStop for $400 with one click after reading an enthusiastic but inaccurate Reddit post. Probably some lawsuits. Still the basic business idea — “the place where people go to enthusiastically discuss stocks should also let them buy those stocks directly” — has an appeal.

Anyway!

    Twitter will let its users access stocks, cryptocurrencies and other financial assets through a partnership with eToro, a social trading company.

    Starting Thursday, a new feature will be rolled out on the Twitter app. It will allow users to view market charts on an expanded range of financial instruments and buy and sell stocks and other assets from eToro, the company told CNBC exclusively.

    Currently, it’s already possible to view real-time trading data from TradingView on index funds like the S&P 500 and shares of some companies such as Tesla. That can be done using Twitter’s “cashtags” feature — you search for a ticker symbol and insert dollar sign in front of it, after which the app will show you price information from TradingView using an API (application programming interface).

    With the eToro partnership, Twitter cashtags will be expanded to cover far more instruments and asset classes, an eToro spokesperson told CNBC.

    You’ll also be able to click a button that says “view on eToro,” which takes you through to eToro’s site, and then buy and sell assets on its platform. EToro uses TradingView as its market data partner.

This is apparently part of Elon Musk’s plan to turn Twitter into a “super app” that offers payments and banking. The entity formerly known as Twitter Inc. now seems to be named X Corp., reviving the name of Musk’s early online bank that eventually became part of PayPal. People like to discuss stocks on Twitter, and Musk wants Twitter/X to get into financial services, and so, sure, connect the stock discussion more closely to a stock brokerage.

This seems fairly tame. But wouldn’t it be great if you could read a tweet touting a stock and Twitter would serve you a button saying “buy 100 shares of this stock” and you’d click and Jane Street would sell you the stock and Twitter would get a fee for making it happen? [1]  Or if Elon Musk tweeted “Use Signal,” there’d be a button saying “Buy Signal,” and you could buy the stock of Signal Advance Inc., a company that has nothing to do with what Musk was tweeting about but which does have the word “Signal” in its name. Or if Musk tweeted “X,” as he did the other day, there’d be a button saying “Buy X,” and you could click it and buy shares of United States Steel Corp., whose ticker is X. Would people click those buttons? I mean, yes, right? Why shouldn’t Twitter monetize the Elon Markets Hypothesis? How much would Jane Street pay for those orders? Those orders seem fun. [2]

I said above that there are some compliance issues with that button, but that is the real beauty of this idea:

    Elon Musk generally seems a bit aggressive on compliance matters, and in particular he does not care at all about securities law compliance. “I want to be clear. I do not respect the SEC. I do not respect them,” he once said, on television, and that’s one of the nicer things he has said about the US Securities and Exchange Commission. If Elon Musk tells Twitter’s engineers “put a button on the site that lets people buy stock in companies that I tweet about, or in companies that have names that are similar to words that I tweet,” and a lawyer pipes up to say “the SEC might have some concerns about that,” he will scream expletives and tell them to make the button bigger. This is not how the leaders of most retail stock brokerages think about their relationship with the SEC, and it gives Musk certain, uh, competitive advantages.
    The SEC has been burned before and seems to be afraid to enforce securities laws against Musk?

I think a lot of people could offer a more seamless and convenient retail stock trading experience if they did not care about, and were not subject to, securities regulation. [3]  Why not Twitter?

Also, everything I said above, but 10 times more so, for trading crypto on Twitter. As is true for a lot of people on Twitter, including Elon Musk, a great deal of my feed consists of typo-filled spam trying to convince me to send my money to some sort of crypto scam. Imagine if I could do that directly in the app! So convenient!

 

 

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Chopper

Chopper 17235

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18 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

He's changed his story multiple times now, and I don't know whether it's just him creating a narrative for some perceived audience, or if that's what he's convinced himself to do (he has regrets but doesn't want anybody to know, so he changes the story to try and make himself feel/look better).  We are talking about a 50 year-old guy who is so juvenile, he covered up the "W" in the twitter sign on a building, and then painted over it, all so he could laugh about "titter" and a guy who is inspiring confidence in advertisers/businesses by changing his name to "Harry Bolz".

I don't know what's going on in his head, but we know he still doesn't understand what the product and customers are at twitter, and even now he's desperately trying to get content creators and pseudo-evolve twitter from what it was (and what it was good at) to some substack/medium clone.

 

If you have a fetish for glitchy social media sites where incels and fascists run rampant, twitter seems like a perfect place to publish. Too late for Taibbi (shed a tear) but I'm sure there's some 4channers dying to take advantage of this.

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Chopper

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I guess the BBC decided against fucking around in the article to follow-up the interview

 

image.thumb.png.255aa57a0563ecd0da375a55c285ae58.png

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65067707

Quote

 

By Grigor Atanesian
Global Disinformation Team

Hundreds of Russian and Chinese state propaganda accounts are thriving on Twitter after Elon Musk wiped out the team that fought these networks, the BBC has found.

The unit worked to combat "information operations", coordinated campaigns by countries such as Russia, China, and Iran, made to influence public opinion and disrupt democracy.

But experts and former employees say the majority of these specialists resigned or were laid off, leaving the platform vulnerable to foreign manipulation. The BBC has spoken to several of them. They asked for anonymity, citing non-disclosure agreements and threats they received online.

"The whole human layer has been wiped out. All Twitter has left are automated detections systems," a former senior employee said.

In a BBC interview on Tuesday, Musk claimed there was "less misinformation [on Twitter] rather than more" under his tenure. He did not comment on active state troll farms on the platform nor the team that used to fight them.

We approached Twitter for comment but received no response other than a poo emoji - the standard auto-reply from the company to any press enquiry.
'Troll farms'

Organised groups of people posting coordinated messages are called 'troll farms.' The term was first used by Russian reporters who exposed one of roughly 300 paid employees run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner mercenary group.

Since then, troll farms influencing elections and public opinion have been uncovered in many countries, from Poland and Turkey to Brazil and Mexico. They have also been used as a propaganda tool in ethnic conflicts and wars.

In January, a cartoon promoting Russia's Wagner Group's actions in Mali went viral on Twitter

Now, a new group of Russian trolls is active on Twitter.

It supports Putin's war in Ukraine, ridicules Kyiv and the West, and attacks independent Russian-language publications, including the BBC Russian Service. Many of these trolls' accounts have been suspended, but dozens are still active.

Darren Linvill, associate professor at the Clemson University Media Forensics Hub in South Carolina, says the network appears to originate from Prigozhin's troll factory.

Mr Linvill and his colleagues have also discovered two similar Russian-language troll networks, but from an opposite camp. One tweets in support of Ukraine, and another promotes Russian opposition, including the jailed Putin critic Alexey Navalny.

While they have all the markings of troll accounts, including random numbers in the Twitter handles and coordinated behaviour, these networks appear to remain undetected by the platform.

The Clemson University team is also tracking pro-Chinese accounts targeting users in both Chinese and English about issues of importance to the Chinese government.

With only a skeleton crew remaining, Twitter does not have resources to swiftly detect, attribute and take down this foreign propaganda, according to former employees.

While the platform also established partnerships with research institutions that detected information operations, scholars say they have not heard anything from Twitter since November.


Punching above its weight

Experts have long warned about the dangers of foreign influence on social media.

In 2018, the FBI said that fake accounts impersonating real Americans had played a central role in the Russian effort to meddle in the 2016 election. That was when Twitter and Facebook started hiring "information operations" specialists.

Accounts meddling into the Brexit debate and US selections were in part managed from this office building in St Petersburg, Russia

"I still remember the rage I felt when I saw accounts with names like "Pamela Moore" and "Crystal Johnson" purporting to be real Americans from Wisconsin and New York, but with phone numbers tracing back to St Petersburg, Russia," recalls Yoel Roth, Twitter's former Trust and Safety head.

Twitter has a fraction of Facebook's reach and budget. But over the years, it built a small but capable team. While it could not match the resources of its rival social network, Twitter "nonetheless punched above its weight", says Lee Foster, an independent expert in information operations.

Twitter hired people with backgrounds in cybersecurity, journalism, government agencies and NGOs who spoke an array of languages including Russian, Farsi, Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish and Portuguese.

One former investigator says: "We needed people who would be able to understand: if Russia is likely to be the responsible actor behind this, what is its motivation to do this particular operation?"

He says he resigned because his team did not fit into 'Twitter 2.0' that Musk was building.

"Our role was to help make the use of Twitter as safe as possible. And it did not feel like that was likely to continue as a priority."
Countering propaganda worldwide

The team worked in close contact, but separately from the ones countering misinformation. That is because state-run campaigns can use both fake news and factual stories to promote their messages.

In 2016, Russian trolls targeted black voters in the US using real footage showing police violence. And in 2022, a coordinated network promoted negative - but sometimes accurate - news about the French contingent and United Nations missions in Africa's Sahel region.

Both networks were taken down by Twitter.

In 2016, Russian trolls posing as American activists played on the racial tensions in the US

As similar information operations were conducted on different platforms, Twitter employees met with their peers at Meta and other companies to exchange information.

But at such meetings, Twitter's investigators would be reminded of how small their operation was. "Their team would be ten times the size of ours," says an investigator.

Now even those resources are lacking.

Without the team dedicated to fight coordinated campaigns, Twitter "will slowly become more and more unsafe," says Linvill of Clemson University.

With additional reporting from Hannah Gelbart.

 

 

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