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

[NoName 17,148]

37 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Business school professors are going to print this tweet out and frame it, and start writing a new chapter or five for their textbooks (or entirely new textbooks)

 

How fast can you torch your 44 billion dollar investment, public perception of you as a business genius and promote nazis...it hasn't even been 12 months!

Imagine the valuation write downs after this next financial quarter. He's lucky the House of Saud literally doesn't give a fuck about money.

[NoName 17,148]

1 minute ago, Neonmoon said:

Coke: We’re going to change our name to Fizz because we’re really smart 

Not even fizz. That would actually be relevant. Like if twitter changed their name to "Post" that would be dumb but at least you could defend it.

It would be like if they changed it to "M" because someone sold them the rights to it 25 years ago and someone else told them the letter M looked cool.

[cactusflinthead 27,627]

Fidelity, an asset manager that held a stake in Twitter worth about $20m after Musk acquired the business for $44bn, said in a corporate filing that its stake was now worth just under $6.6m. That would value the overall company, now officially called X Holdings Corp after Musk’s early venture X.com, at just $14.75bn.

 

 

[atomheartbevo 90,641]

5 minutes ago, cactusflinthead said:

And, it just continues to sink. Twitter is approaching crush depth.

[Brian Fantana 6,862]

8 hours ago, Nivek said:

He really has no ideas. Zuckerman did the stupid name change, and so Elon had to follow.

Because the name is the problem….

Even Zuck was smart enough not to change the name of the actual platform.

Edited July 23, 2023 by Brian Fantana

[Celery Man 21,095]

[atomheartbevo 90,641]

16 minutes ago, Celery Man said:

He's plowing ahead with creating X.com, which is, as he's said, going to be like WeChat, which offers:

Quote

 text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast (one-to-many) messaging, video conferencing, video games, mobile payment, sharing of photographs and videos and location sharing.

But also he wants banking with the mobile payment, Bitcoin (assuming it's folded into the banking/mobile payment), shopping, handling things like insurance (car/home/etc.), and so on.

For the Surly financial gurus: Who is going to invest in or lend him the money to make all of this happen?  Because he's going to have to hire a fuck-ton of people who do web development and support (shame he fired thousands of the very people he'd need when he took over twitter), he's going to have to hire vendors/contractors, work with various companies on the back-end, etc.

He can sell it as he has the user base, but at the rate things are going, the user base that's going to be left is not the user base that existed a year ago.  I don't think his incel fanbois can keep him afloat.

Edited July 23, 2023 by atomheartbevo

[atomheartbevo 90,641]

X.com is already redirecting to twitter.com, so I'm assuming they are messing with the DNS records, etc.

This change would explain why so many broken things haven't been getting fixed  over the past month or two - the remaining devs he has have been focused on making sure that when he switches to X.com, everything is properly forwarding/resolving.

But you know they are going to miss a bunch of stuff.

[NoName 17,148]

39 minutes ago, cactusflinthead said:

Fidelity, an asset manager that held a stake in Twitter worth about $20m after Musk acquired the business for $44bn, said in a corporate filing that its stake was now worth just under $6.6m. That would value the overall company, now officially called X Holdings Corp after Musk’s early venture X.com, at just $14.75bn.

 

 

[NoName 17,148]

17 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

For the Surly financial gurus: Who is going to invest in or lend him the money to make all of this happen?  Because he's going to have to hire a fuck-ton of people who do web development and support (shame he fired thousands of the very people he'd need when he took over twitter), he's going to have to hire vendors/contractors, work with various companies on the back-end, etc.

He can sell it as he has the user base, but at the rate things are going, the user base that's going to be left is not the user base that existed a year ago.  I don't think his incel fanbois can keep him afloat.

+

Unlike the car and space industries he hasn't fucked over a ton of people, not paid severance, cut benefits, required return to work and is generally an ass.

Which is gonna hurt him when it comes to hiring a lot of people.

[Pods 7,637]

1 hour ago, NoName said:

How fast can you torch your 44 billion dollar investment, public perception of you as a business genius and promote nazis...it hasn't even been 12 months!

Imagine the valuation write downs after this next financial quarter. He's lucky the House of Saud literally doesn't give a fuck about money.

The House of Saud doesn't care about the money, but they financed it so they could turn Twitter into controlled opposition. Their plan was to be able to control the messaging and read the DMs of dissidents and criticizers of Saudi policies. Possibly find some good stuff to use as blackmail. 

Twitter becoming a Nazi infested shithole changes that. None of the people they wanted to control and spy on will be using Twitter much longer, if they still are. 

They could lose 10 times the money and not bat an eye, but I am positive they are super pissed at losing the access and control. Maybe they'll invite Elon to meet with them in a Turkish Embassy. 

[Bozo_Casanova 26,846]

 

[cactusflinthead 27,627]

 

[NoName 17,148]

1 minute ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

 

Except that they...

Are destroying their company brand and value.

Limited messaging to people who pay.

Have an extremely subpar video player. Worst of any large social network.

Their audio platform is hacked together from periscope and is terrible based on users, creators and engineers who worked on it.

They don't pay creators. Their ad platform is laughably bad. The support for paid users and paying advertisers is bad.

Huge bot and spam issues.

Elon has been extremely vocal about the danger of AI and now he's in favor of using it. 👀

So they have cratered their company's value, they can't convert users to their paid service at all, they are still under an order from the FCC regarding protecting user data and their leader is shit posting all day and night. Oh yeah, and they don't have the engineering talent to do any of the things they listed.

Linda is about to get thrown off the glass cliff before the end of the year.

...Of course, Elon could float it himself but he very clearly won't because he hasn't at any opportunity in any company.

[Francisco 2.0 32,586]

 

 

 

[atomheartbevo 90,641]

 

[NoName 17,148]

13 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

 

 

 

This one was funnier to me 

[The Dog 44,856]

 

[Francisco 2.0 32,586]

 

 

 

[Francisco 2.0 32,586]

 

 

 

[cactusflinthead 27,627]

 

Edited July 24, 2023 by cactusflinthead

[cactusflinthead 27,627]

Wrong thread

Edited July 24, 2023 by cactusflinthead

[NoName 17,148]

Just a fundamental misunderstanding of his $44b company, who the clients are, how it makes money, what it is, what it does well, what it doesn't do well...and now what it's going to be and why.

Good thread on the bird

 

 

 

 

Omg the guy has had 25 years and still hasn't come up a something better logo wise?

 

 

Edited July 24, 2023 by NoName

[atomheartbevo 90,641]

I wonder if he truly realizes that twitter is barely a top-15 social media platform.  And that if people in the West wanted everything combined, Facebook would have done it already.

[Francisco 2.0 32,586]

 

 

 

Edited July 24, 2023 by Francisco 2.0

[Armybrat 41,397]

[Francisco 2.0 32,586]

 

 

And because Twitter allows a book now, here's everything Isaacson wrote:

Quote

The infatuation of

@elonmusk

with the name http://X.com goes way back. Here are some excerpts from my upcoming book, https://amazon.com/Elon-Musk-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1982181281

"When his cousin Peter Rive visited in early 1999, he found Musk poring over books about the banking system. “I’m trying to think about what to start next,” he explained. His experience at Scotiabank had convinced him that the industry was ripe for disruption. So in March 1999, he founded http://X.com. His concept for http://X.com was grand. It would be a one-stop everything-store for all financial needs: banking, digital purchases, checking, credit cards, investments, and loans. Transactions would be handled instantly, with no waiting for payments to clear.

His insight was that money is simply an entry into a database, and he wanted to devise a way that all transactions were securely recorded in real time. “If you fix all the reasons why a consumer would take money out of the system,” he says, “then it will be the place where all the money is, and that would make it a multitrillion-dollar company.”

Musk was able to entice the influential head of Sequoia Capital, Michael Moritz, to make a major investment in http://X.com. Moritz then facilitated a deal with Barclay’s Bank and a community bank in Colorado to become partners, so that http://X.com could offer mutual funds, have a bank charter, and be FDIC-insured. One of Musk’s management tactics, then as later, was to set an insane deadline and drive colleagues to meet it.

He did that in the fall of 1999 by announcing, in what one engineer called “a dick move,” that http://X.com would launch to the public on Thanksgiving weekend. In the weeks leading up to that, Musk prowled the office each day, including Thanksgiving, in a nervous and nervous-making frenzy, and slept under his desk most nights. One of the engineers who went home at 2 a.m. Thanksgiving morning got a call from Musk at 11 a.m. asking him to come back in because another engineer had worked all night and was “not running on full thrusters anymore.”

Such behavior produced drama and resentments, but also success. When the product went live that weekend, all the employees marched to a nearby ATM, where Musk inserted an http://X.com debit card. Cash whirred out and the team celebrated. One driver of growth was a feature that they originally thought was no big deal: the ability to send money by email. That became wildly popular, especially on the auction site eBay, where users were looking for an easy way to pay strangers for purchases.

[After a merger, with a company cofounded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, the company became known as PayPal.] "Musk insisted that the company’s name should be http://X.com, with PayPal as merely one of its subsidiary brands. He even tried to rebrand the payment system X-PayPal. There was a lot of pushback, especially from Levchin. PayPal had become a trusted brand name, like a good pal who is helping you get paid. Focus groups showed that the name http://X.com, on the contrary, conjured up visions of a seedy site you would not talk about in polite company. But Musk was unwavering, and remains so to this day. “If you want to just be a niche payment system, PayPal is better,” he said. “But if you want to take over the world’s financial system, then X is the better name.”

Levchin and Musk soon clashed on an issue that sounded technical but was also theological: whether to use Microsoft Windows or Unix as the main operating system. Musk admired Bill Gates, loved Windows NT, and thought Microsoft would be a more reliable partner. Levchin and his team were appalled, feeling that Windows NT was insecure, buggy, and uncool. They preferred using various flavors of Unix-like operating systems, including Solaris and the open-source Linux. One night well after midnight, Levchin was working alone in a conference room when Musk walked in primed to continue the argument. “Eventually you will see it my way,” Musk said. “I know how this movie ends.” “No, you’re wrong,” Levchin replied in his flat monotone. “It just isn’t going to work in Microsoft.” “You know what,” said Musk. “I will arm-wrestle you for it.”

Levchin thought, correctly, that this was the stupidest imaginable way to settle a software-coding disagreement. Plus, Musk was almost twice his size. But he was loopy from working late hours and agreed to arm-wrestle. He put all his weight into it and promptly lost. “Just to be clear,” Levchin told him, “I’m not going to use your physical weight as any sort of a technical decision input.” Musk laughed and said, “Yeah, I get it.” But he prevailed.

[Musk told me, even before he took control of Twitter, that he planned to rebrand it http://X.com and to try to make it a platform that would fulfill his original vision from 1999. A passage from later in the book:] In the days leading up to his takeover of Twitter at the end of October 2022, Musk’s moods fluctuated wildly. “I am very excited about finally implementing http://X.com as it should have been done, using Twitter as an accelerant!” he texted me out of the blue at 3:30 one morning. “And, hopefully, helping democracy and civil discourse while doing so.”

He said that he would turn it into the combination of financial platform and social network he had envisioned twenty-four years earlier for http://X.com, and he added that he planned to rebrand it with that name, which he loved. A few days later, he was more somber. “I will need to live at Twitter HQ. This is a super tough situation. Really bumming me out Sleep is difficult.” Here is Musk with Peter Thiel and the http://X.com card in 1999, and celebrating with Pappy van Winkle,

@pappyvanwinkle

, the world's best Bourbon, on the day he bought Twitter:

 

 

[dcbc 14,644]

What's enjoyable is that this is the part where his dream of a do-all called X falls apart for seemingly obvious reasons.

Edited July 24, 2023 by dcbc

[ultimaton 2,985]

2 hours ago, The Dog said:

 

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54 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Musk’s moods fluctuated wildly. “I am very excited about finally implementing http://X.com as it should have been done, using Twitter as an accelerant!” he texted me out of the blue at 3:30 one morning. “And, hopefully, helping democracy and civil discourse while doing so.”

Musk doesn't understand either of these things.

Especially civil discourse, unless he thinks civil discourse means dumbshits jumping into a conversation about landing on the moon and who start rambling about how no human has ever been on the moon because it was all a fucking Kubrick movie.  Or a bunch of genealogists/historians discussing genealogy research around the Holocaust and some incel Holocaust deniers jumping in and trying to claim the Holocaust wasn't real and the records lost and Jewish people that were killed were the result of allied bombing.

Which brings me to this:  If you think about all of the Musk fanboys who rushed to spend their mom's hard-earned $8 a month on the blue symbols, and the conspiracy nuts, and the bots and the foreign agents, etc., etc.,  - that's not a good pool of people to draw from when trying to build a do-it-all app that involves banking, financial transactions, shopping, email, social media, etc. because those people don't have the assets to plug into X.com.

The rest of twitter users already have Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo, Zello, etc., setup on their phones, not to mention their banks' financial apps.  They aren't going to trade stocks through x.com, nor are they going to start buying Bitcoin through it (the Bitcoin ship has left the harbor as far as X.com is concerned).

Everything Elmo and his CEO are promising has already been done, done decently, and it's on our phones, and it's just as easy as opening an X.com app.

I doubt he realizes that X.com is competing with our iPhones and Android phones, because he's frozen in time in the late 1990s or early 2000s when Thiel and Co. ousted him as CEO, and at that time, the only smartphones were not something you were going to be doing all of these things with that you can do here in 2023 with a smartphone.

Edited July 24, 2023 by atomheartbevo

[Celery Man 21,095]

So he just decided to do this last night and announced it publicly and they can’t even just change the logo that quickly, right?

[atomheartbevo 90,641]

8 minutes ago, Celery Man said:

So he just decided to do this last night and announced it publicly and they can’t even just change the logo that quickly, right?

If Isaacson is to be believed, and I believe him, Musk has been wanting to change up Twitter since everything went down, but something kept nudging him away from fully committing.  He's talked more and more about the X.com stuff in recent weeks/months, and given how things seemed to be falling apart recently with certain functions, I wouldn't be surprised if he's had at least some of the staff working on it.

Can't believe I forgot about Brand X, but it's trending....

 

Edited July 24, 2023 by atomheartbevo

[Pato del Muerto 53,466]

2 hours ago, NoName said:

Just a fundamental misunderstanding of his $44b company,

You mean his $15b company 

[F250 29,199]

2 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Levchin and Musk soon clashed on an issue that sounded technical but was also theological: whether to use Microsoft Windows or Unix as the main operating system. Musk admired Bill Gates, loved Windows NT, and thought Microsoft would be a more reliable partner.

 

Jesus, this explains Musk in a nutshell. Nobody in the industry would side with Microsoft back in those days. Siding with Microsoft meant he was a rat face fuck that didn't really comprehend the technical culture of the tech industry.

 

 

 

[Celery Man 21,095]

Ah ok - I don’t know when it happened (if it was super late/early or during the evening yesterday) because the embeds are still showing the bird, but it looks like on the site the logo has been replaced.

[Parliament 14,593]

I always presumed Wechat was a do-all "popular" app in China because most competitors are banned?

[atomheartbevo 90,641]

 

 

Edited July 24, 2023 by atomheartbevo

[Francisco 2.0 32,586]

24 minutes ago, Parliament said:

I always presumed Wechat was a do-all "popular" app in China because most competitors are banned?

Well, that, plus the amount of regulatory stuff that a Chinese app had to go through vs what a app in this country (how the fuck are they gonna square up loans, stock trading and savings account with the FTC decree they currently can't adhere to?).  Also, not to mention getting banking approval in all the EU countries as well.

Also, as I've read, in many parts of China the cell access is poor, so rather than downloading several apps, you download one that can do it all.  Not such an issue for nearly all of the markets that Elon wants to play in.  

[atomheartbevo 90,641]

The transition is stunningly half-assed. Yes, I’d like to do my banking with, and buy a self-driving car from, such a man.

Seeing a lot of this.  Congrats to Musk for driving such people away

 

Edited July 24, 2023 by atomheartbevo

[NoName 17,148]

10 hours ago, Celery Man said:

So he just decided to do this last night and announced it publicly and they can’t even just change the logo that quickly, right?

It gets better.

 

[atomheartbevo 90,641]

[cactusflinthead 27,627]

[atomheartbevo 90,641]

This is going around and May sum it up perfectly:

“After Paypal and Grimes, twitter is going to be Elon Musk's third failed attempt to make things work with an X”

[The Dog 44,856]

[Goredho 17,651]

On 7/23/2023 at 7:45 AM, Neonmoon said:

 

The emperor has no clothes…

And he’s using a salmon as a flesh light.

[Fudge Nuggets 19,453]

[Goredho 17,651]

1 hour ago, NoName said:

It gets better.

 

I don't know which of the following is funnier:

1. That Twitter may not be able to trademark/copyright their new logo
2. That someone at Twitter was so apathetic about it all that they just typed an "X" and sent it off for approval as a logo
3. That their apathetic effort actually got approval from the billionaire genius

Its like the perfect prophetic convergence of "Office Space" and "Idiocracy".  I'm gonna have to go rewatch all of Mike Judge's work to find out what happens next.  Maybe Musk tries to colonize mars with propane-fueled rockets?

[Captain Ron 13,132]

 

[Captain Ron 13,132]

 

[aggie08 21,796]

Only thing more on brand would have been choosing a Comic Sans "X"