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

MaybeACoordinator

By MaybeACoordinator
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Spottieottiedopaliscious
Spottieottiedopaliscious

Hotez is far from bulletproof.       

MissingInAction
MissingInAction
Spottieottiedopaliscious
Spottieottiedopaliscious

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

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 90677

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So spend $44 billion on a social media platform so that you can then spend additional money and buy a failed bank and use that to turn your $44 billion social media platform into a digital bank, because you are trying to recreate your luck with digital banking and PayPal.  All the while draining your holdings in the auto company that has so far funded your experiment, but which is going through some issues right now with its stock price over the past month (past year, who is counting amirite?).  But Peter Thiel won't be there to take over when you go off on your next honeymoon.

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Chopper

Chopper 17450

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My first job after undergrad was with SVB so it's been amusing to see them in the news this week, for doing things that crooked bankers do. They created a new position for me, a fast track to upper management. Little did I know that what the Bank's Pres and a couple VPs were angling for was frequent guest invitations to Pebble Beach CC, to which the family business owned a membership. When they were told in no uncertain terms that wasn't going to happen, I was summarily dismissed. Bastards. A couple of the people who worked there at the time are now retired but on the BOD.

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Wally Fairway

Wally Fairway 5678

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1 hour ago, HenryJames said:

 

If only Elon had invented the sliding side door; wife wanted a minivan when they came out with drivers side slider. We've had one since 1996, the kids call it the Mom truck; I'm too lazy but I should take a short video of the power slider opening/closing parked next to an Elon X model and note the price difference

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atomheartbevo

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Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, Neonmoon said:

Elon is promoting the “just a tour” J6 trope on 4chan Twitter. This timeline 

Yep, he was always leaning into conspiracy theory bullshit/Qanon mental illness, but looks like he’s decided to fully embrace it.   And I’m still getting email notifications for his posts even though I follow many other people that I interact with and should get their notices instead of his (and people he likes).  He should just buy 4chan since that’s his wheelhouse. 
 

Next up: He will start responding to “the moon landing was a hoax and staged by Stanley Kubrick” idiots with “interesting” and soon after he will start talking about how he’s going to land the “first” people on the moon.  

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Captain Ron

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11 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Yep, he was always leaning into conspiracy theory bullshit/Qanon mental illness, but looks like he’s decided to fully embrace it.   And I’m still getting email notifications for his posts even though I follow many other people that I interact with and should get their notices instead of his (and people he likes).  He should just buy 4chan since that’s his wheelhouse. 
 

Next up: He will start responding to “the moon landing was a hoax and staged by Stanley Kubrick” idiots with “interesting” and soon after he will start talking about how he’s going to land the “first” people on the moon.  

I was listening to Pivot (Swisher/Galloway), they had a great point on yesterday's show. At this point Musk is going full on evil dude. He was full on mocking a disabled guy. I mean this is stuff that you didn't see/hear people doing really, at least not openly. And Musk wasn't just doing it - he was doubling/tripling down on it. I mean conspiracy is one thing, but this was whole different level.

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Captainant

Captainant 28600

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5 minutes ago, Captain Ron said:

I mean this is stuff that you didn't see/hear people doing really, at least not openly. And Musk wasn't just doing it - he was doubling/tripling down on it. I mean conspiracy is one thing, but this was whole different level.

Animated GIF

I mean, it's apparently a presidential thing to do... He got elected after doing this lol

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Chopper

Chopper 17450

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, Captain Ron said:

Btw - if you want to hear that podcast, here is the Spotify link for it. already cued up for you too.

I was surprised they didn't cover Haraldur's status in the company as a Director and that he was on a "do not fire" list because of it. A couple threads posted above discussed it and though there's not been official confirmation of what the financial ramifications are to twitter, the fact that Haraldur casually accepted being fired and asked Mosk to please "make sure he's paid what he's owed" are pretty hilarious.

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atomheartbevo

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Says the man whose fanboys will drop tens of thousands of dollars on a shitty-looking 1980s-inspired "Cybertruck" that isn't even out yet, and who buy stock in his company because they love him.

Also, he would be shocked at what went on at college campuses in the 1960s and early 1970s if he thinks this is bad.

 

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Pig Bellmont

Pig Bellmont 8888

Posted
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2 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Says the man whose fanboys will drop tens of thousands of dollars on a shitty-looking 1980s-inspired "Cybertruck" that isn't even out yet, and who buy stock in his company because they love him.

Also, he would be shocked at what went on at college campuses in the 1960s and early 1970s if he thinks this is bad.

 

So it’s Soviet indoctrination to oppose apologizing to a staunchly partisan anti-lgbt hack who happens to have a lifetime appointment to the Fifth Circuit? God forbid law school students act on their own moral beliefs within a school they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend. 
 

Typical bullshit to couch free speech of alternative viewpoints as communism 

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32612

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https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/inside-elon-musks-cost-cutting-drive-at-twitter/

 

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From a secretive “war room” at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters last month, Elon Musk’s trusted lieutenants pored over a list of employees, showing how much they cost the social media company.

The billionaire owner’s “transition team,” headed by Steve Davis, who leads the Musk-owned Boring Company, then began to phone staffers. Some were asked to justify their role; others to recommend which colleagues to retain.

Those deliberations informed Musk’s latest layoffs at Twitter, as part of his efforts to bring the lossmaking company to financial health while also battling an advertiser exodus and unwieldy debt servicing bill.

 

Quote

The February cuts removed more than 200 staff but were still broader and deeper than many employees had anticipated, because they came after Musk had already laid off half of the company’s 7,500 workforce following his acquisition of Twitter in October. The move wiped out large swaths of its business development and product teams, leaving Twitter leaner—and more unstable.

This account of the billionaire’s ongoing efforts to wrestle Twitter’s finances under control with his inner circle is based on interviews with current and former Twitter staffers, people aware of Musk’s thinking, and his public statements on Twitter and to investors.

Musk, Twitter, and most members of the transition team did not respond to a request for comment.

 

Quote

Formed in November, the transition team has often refused to immediately pay many of Twitter’s vendors, landlords, and partners in the hope of keeping down costs, in some cases irking clients and leading to frosty stand-offs.

This push comes as Twitter is expected to roll out new equity compensation packages for employees in late March, said two people familiar with the situation. For tax purposes, Twitter is in the process of calculating a new valuation to price the common equity in the business, which determines the value of staff stock options, the people said. One of them said the valuation would probably be far lower than the $44 billion acquisition price.

At an investor conference hosted by Morgan Stanley last week, Musk said he had cut non-debt expenditures to $1.5 billion, from the $4.5 billion that he claimed it would have otherwise incurred in 2023, adding that Twitter could reach positive cash flow by the second quarter.

 

Spoiler

But a scattergun approach to securing efficiencies has left some current and former employees perplexed. Some fear the company is being exposed to costly legal and regulatory challenges later down the line. Meanwhile, the platform has suffered a rise in technical issues and bugs.

“Elon would always say ‘Let them sue’, it was a constant refrain,” said one former senior staffer who was let go in the latest cuts. “It’s all very short-term thinking.”

Musk’s decision to bring a rotating cast of leaders from his wider business empire to his so-called Twitter 2.0 comes down to a deep distrust toward its previous leadership and paranoia that disgruntled staffers might try to sabotage the business, according to people familiar with his thinking.

There is now growing expectation among Twitter rank-and-file employees, as well as some bankers, that Musk will eventually select a new chief executive and leadership team from among this circle of advisers—although multiple Twitter insiders complained of their lack of experience in social media or consumer apps.

Davis, an aerospace expert and longtime ally of Musk, has taken on a role similar to a chief operating officer, insiders say. A former SpaceX employee, he decided how to allocate the job cuts along with James Musk, the Twitter owner’s cousin who is now overseeing the social media platform’s engineering work, and Jared Birchall, who runs Musk’s family office.

Among the more than 200 staffers culled were founders of start-ups that Twitter had bought before Musk’s takeover, and to whom the company will now owe substantial compensation packages.

These included Esther Crawford, Twitter’s former director of product management who had initially been tasked with leading Musk’s vision of allowing payments through the platform, Martijn de Kuijper, former senior product manager, and Icelandic entrepreneur Haraldur Thorleifsson.

Otherwise, Davis has been focused on efforts to reduce the company’s day-to-day costs, according to several people familiar with the situation. They added that he was looking into data licensing agreements and policies at the company. Davis led the recent decision to charge third parties for access to Twitter’s developer tools, one person said.

Davis has demonstrated his commitment to the social media company by sleeping on site at its headquarters with his wife and newborn child in the wake of the acquisition, according to one person familiar with the situation, in a move first reported by The Information. “He is like a majority house whip,” the former senior staffer said. “His job is to push and push.”

Elsewhere, Musk is drawing on experience from his own equity investors in the deal.

Pablo Mendoza, a managing director at Dubai-based Vy Capital, which provided $700 million to the $44 billion takeover, has been working along with Silicon Valley entrepreneur Suril Kantaria, who founded health insurance tech platform Savvy, to assess what to do with existing vendors, according to five people familiar with the situation.

These range from landlords, software-as-a-service companies such as Salesforce, Adobe, and Slack, insurance providers, security details, limo services, and even fertility providers, two people said.

In some cases, the pair have focused on renegotiating existing contracts that were mandatory, or in other cases, they have simply terminated deals.

When telling vendors that the company does not plan on paying them, Mendoza has often resorted to pleading with them that his job is on the line, another person said. Nevertheless, he has enjoyed relative success, negotiating down some bills by between 50 and 90 percent in some cases, the person added. Mendoza declined to comment.

Kantaria, meanwhile, also worked with James Musk to close one of Twitter’s three data centers. That move was hailed as a major win by Musk at the Morgan Stanley investor conference, but critics argue it could contribute to technical instability on the platform.

Another person in Musk’s inner circle is Omead Afshar, a longtime Tesla executive who once led the company’s Gigafactory in Austin, Texas. He joined late last year but was quick to earn the nickname “the Elon whisperer” among staffers because of his ability to read the mood of the mercurial billionaire.

At Twitter, Afshar is now helping solve “the biggest, stickiest issues at the company,” including cutting infrastructure costs, people said. Recently he has been involved in tense negotiations over large cloud spending contracts with Amazon and Google, two people said. Musk said at the investor conference that cloud spending was now down 40 percent.

Nevertheless, the intense cuts—and refusal to immediately pay multiple bills—have raised the specter that Twitter will be hit with belated costs, legal challenges, or regulatory scrutiny. Already, Twitter faces a lawsuit from its San Francisco landlord for not paying rent, as well as potential class-action lawsuits for allegedly failing to follow and pay out the full severance packages during mass lay-offs.

“It’s smoke and mirrors,” one former senior staffer said. “[Musk] is doing all this deferring of eventual costs—so he can do the victory lap.”

 

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Brisketexan

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23 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/inside-elon-musks-cost-cutting-drive-at-twitter/

 

 

 

 

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But a scattergun approach to securing efficiencies has left some current and former employees perplexed. Some fear the company is being exposed to costly legal and regulatory challenges later down the line. Meanwhile, the platform has suffered a rise in technical issues and bugs.

“Elon would always say ‘Let them sue’, it was a constant refrain,” said one former senior staffer who was let go in the latest cuts. “It’s all very short-term thinking.”

Musk’s decision to bring a rotating cast of leaders from his wider business empire to his so-called Twitter 2.0 comes down to a deep distrust toward its previous leadership and paranoia that disgruntled staffers might try to sabotage the business, according to people familiar with his thinking.

There is now growing expectation among Twitter rank-and-file employees, as well as some bankers, that Musk will eventually select a new chief executive and leadership team from among this circle of advisers—although multiple Twitter insiders complained of their lack of experience in social media or consumer apps.

Davis, an aerospace expert and longtime ally of Musk, has taken on a role similar to a chief operating officer, insiders say. A former SpaceX employee, he decided how to allocate the job cuts along with James Musk, the Twitter owner’s cousin who is now overseeing the social media platform’s engineering work, and Jared Birchall, who runs Musk’s family office.

Among the more than 200 staffers culled were founders of start-ups that Twitter had bought before Musk’s takeover, and to whom the company will now owe substantial compensation packages.

These included Esther Crawford, Twitter’s former director of product management who had initially been tasked with leading Musk’s vision of allowing payments through the platform, Martijn de Kuijper, former senior product manager, and Icelandic entrepreneur Haraldur Thorleifsson.

Otherwise, Davis has been focused on efforts to reduce the company’s day-to-day costs, according to several people familiar with the situation. They added that he was looking into data licensing agreements and policies at the company. Davis led the recent decision to charge third parties for access to Twitter’s developer tools, one person said.

Davis has demonstrated his commitment to the social media company by sleeping on site at its headquarters with his wife and newborn child in the wake of the acquisition, according to one person familiar with the situation, in a move first reported by The Information. “He is like a majority house whip,” the former senior staffer said. “His job is to push and push.”

Elsewhere, Musk is drawing on experience from his own equity investors in the deal.

Pablo Mendoza, a managing director at Dubai-based Vy Capital, which provided $700 million to the $44 billion takeover, has been working along with Silicon Valley entrepreneur Suril Kantaria, who founded health insurance tech platform Savvy, to assess what to do with existing vendors, according to five people familiar with the situation.

These range from landlords, software-as-a-service companies such as Salesforce, Adobe, and Slack, insurance providers, security details, limo services, and even fertility providers, two people said.

In some cases, the pair have focused on renegotiating existing contracts that were mandatory, or in other cases, they have simply terminated deals.

When telling vendors that the company does not plan on paying them, Mendoza has often resorted to pleading with them that his job is on the line, another person said. Nevertheless, he has enjoyed relative success, negotiating down some bills by between 50 and 90 percent in some cases, the person added. Mendoza declined to comment.

Kantaria, meanwhile, also worked with James Musk to close one of Twitter’s three data centers. That move was hailed as a major win by Musk at the Morgan Stanley investor conference, but critics argue it could contribute to technical instability on the platform.

Another person in Musk’s inner circle is Omead Afshar, a longtime Tesla executive who once led the company’s Gigafactory in Austin, Texas. He joined late last year but was quick to earn the nickname “the Elon whisperer” among staffers because of his ability to read the mood of the mercurial billionaire.

At Twitter, Afshar is now helping solve “the biggest, stickiest issues at the company,” including cutting infrastructure costs, people said. Recently he has been involved in tense negotiations over large cloud spending contracts with Amazon and Google, two people said. Musk said at the investor conference that cloud spending was now down 40 percent.

Nevertheless, the intense cuts—and refusal to immediately pay multiple bills—have raised the specter that Twitter will be hit with belated costs, legal challenges, or regulatory scrutiny. Already, Twitter faces a lawsuit from its San Francisco landlord for not paying rent, as well as potential class-action lawsuits for allegedly failing to follow and pay out the full severance packages during mass lay-offs.

“It’s smoke and mirrors,” one former senior staffer said. “[Musk] is doing all this deferring of eventual costs—so he can do the victory lap.”

 

Seems to me that the list of debts that Twitter is not paying -- a list that is public, per multiple lawsuits filed -- creates a pretty good argument that Twitter is insolvent.  And if it is insolvent, creditors have multiple options, including forcing it into bankruptcy.  If I represented someone who Twitter owed money to, I sure as fuck wouldn't just file a breach of contract suit and negotiate, hoping for the best.  I'd align myself with multiple other creditors to create a more unified strategy -- one that might see us ending up owning Twitter and then selling it off to pay off the obligations owed to us.

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NoName

NoName 17184

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Posted

Elon really is trying to FAFO with the EU

 

Elon Musk's Twitter Blue is breaking European rules about unfair business practices by failing to show its full cost to consumers right away, EU agency says

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Elon Musk's Twitter Blue subscription is breaking European Union rules about unfair business practices, a consumer watchdog in the bloc told Insider.

Specifically, the advertised subscription prices don't factor in taxes, which violates consumer-protection laws in the 27-country union, a spokesperson for the watchdog said.

Twitter Blue is one of Musk's flagship projects designed to make the social-media company profitable. It was rolled out to EU countries in February and March.

In EU countries that use the euro currency, Twitter Blue has an advertised monthly price of 8 euros, or about $8.50, for the web app — a little more than the $8 price in the US. The advertised annual price for most EU users is 84 euros, or about $88.50, versus $84 in the US.

However, the EU prices don't include value-added tax, a kind of sales tax which is different across Europe; for instance, it's 17% in Luxembourg and 25% in Sweden. While in the US sales tax is added to the advertised price at checkout, the EU requires companies to advertise the total price including the VAT.

That means Twitter users in Europe wouldn't know the subscription could actually cost an extra $20 a year until the Stripe checkout page automatically adds the tax after a second or two.

 

+
 

Quote

 

A spokesperson for the European Consumer Centre in Ireland — part of a network of offices that are designed to protect consumers and that are co-funded by the European Commission — said they reached out to legal staff in ECCs across the EU, and got responses from Belgium, Germany, Croatia, Ireland, and Malta, after being contacted by Insider.

"I can confirm that the pricing display and associated promotions are in breach of Articles 6 and 7 of the 'unfair business-to-consumer commercial practices' directive," they said.

 

+ the always given at the end of an article on any Musk company

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Twitter didn't respond to requests for comment from Insider.

 

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32612

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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/17/technology/twitters-music-elon-musk.html

 

Quote

Twitter explored the licensing of music rights from three major labels before negotiations stalled after Elon Musk’s takeover of the company, said eight people with knowledge of the discussions, who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Twitter is one of the last big social media platforms without music licensing deals in place, which allows the sites to host virtually all commercially available audio content without fear of takedowns or legal reprisal. Facebook, Instagram and TikTok have all made agreements for music rights.

 

Quote

Twitter had avoided signing deals for music rights, which require social media companies to compensate rights holders when users post or play content with song. The costs of the licenses can vary, but can be well over $100 million a year for established social-media platforms. Twitter has forgone the licensing deals because of the costs, five former employees said.

Twitter and Mr. Musk did not respond to an email request for comment.

 

Quote

Twitter began negotiations with the three major music conglomerates — Universal, Sony and Warner — in the fall of 2021, according to six people close to the talks. When Mr. Musk announced his intent to buy the company last April, some music industry leaders saw his involvement as an opportunity to finally get the deals done.

“Twitter uses a significant amount of music but unlike all other mainstream social media platforms has refused to license that music or compensate songwriters,” David Israelite, the chief executive of the National Music Publishers’ Association, a trade group, tweeted at Mr. Musk that month. “Please help.”

 

Spoiler

For the music companies, licensing agreements with Twitter would represent not only an additional source of revenue but would also resolve longstanding problems of copyright infringement on the platform.

After Mr. Musk bought Twitter in October for $44 billion, talks continued as he flirted with the idea of challenging TikTok and resurrecting Vine, a once-popular short video app that Twitter had bought in 2012 but shut down in 2016.

Mr. Musk’s team was intrigued by the idea of adding music to the platform, and his personal lawyer, Alex Spiro, who has also represented artists including Jay-Z and Megan Thee Stallion, held meetings to understand the status of the label negotiations and assess the costs, four people familiar with the internal discussions said.

Mr. Spiro, who oversaw Twitter’s legal portfolio during Mr. Musk’s acquisition, departed the company in December. He successfully defended Mr. Musk in a Tesla shareholder lawsuit this year.

The internal chaos at Twitter following Mr. Musk’s takeover disrupted the negotiations, six people said. The company eliminated some of the people responsible for the music rights talks in several rounds of layoffs, leaving the labels with few remaining Twitter contacts, said four people at the major music companies who were briefed on the discussions.

Mr. Musk’s team has also cut hundreds of millions of dollars in expenditures at Twitter — missing office rent payments, shortchanging software vendors and eliminating a data center — while requiring that every financial outlay be justified under new budgets. With those mandates, two people said, the company had little means to justify paying tens of millions of dollars to music rights holders

 

 

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