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

[Chopper 16666]

4 hours ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

So?  If I want to read a bunch of Brits bitching and moaning on the internet, I’ll check out Reddit.

This is the Musk thread and some things just happened in the UK involving Musk, which drove off the more educated, compassionate and empathetic from his site. Huge numbers of posters with lots of followers. Nobody told you to go follow them on bluesky. However, your obliviousness is clear and your anger about it is noted. 

[Nivek 16688]

Were they surprised?  This was never in doubt.

[Chopper 16666]

24 minutes ago, Nivek said:

Were they surprised?  This was never in doubt.

No idea. As we've seen people even in the US are only slowly leaving the platform with many afraid to leave because of their followers. However Musk's race riots appeared to be the last straw for many twitter users across the pond. 

[atomheartbevo 89044]

1 hour ago, Chopper said:

No idea. As we've seen people even in the US are only slowly leaving the platform with many afraid to leave because of their followers. However Musk's race riots appeared to be the last straw for many twitter users across the pond. 

I’m seeing a shitload of people doing intro posts on Threads, like everyday quite a few decent folks in my areas of interest are popping up from Twitter.

And because there’s currently no advertising, the bottlers/spammers aren’t wasting their time on it, so our feeds are pretty dadgummed good.

[TwiceHorn 30851]

On 8/19/2024 at 4:09 PM, MissingInAction said:

Wesley Crusher is PISSED!

[Francisco 2.0 32215]

https://www.torquenews.com/11826/my-first-cybertruck-was-dead-arrival-now-tesla-pushing-me-take-delivery-2nd-cybertruck/amp

 

Quote

Johnathon J Smith is trying to spend over $100,000 to purchase a brand-new Tesla Cybertruck. Still, Johnathon shares that despite multiple tries, Tesla appears unable to provide him a defect-free Cybertruck.

After much frustration, Johnathon headed to the Tesla Cybertruck group on Facebook for advice regarding his second defect-ridden Cybertruck.

Johnathon writes, “Anyone would reject this truck. Tesla Service Center is trying to push it on me.” Below, Jonathan shared 18 pictures of the Cybertruck Tesla was pushing him to take delivery of.

 

 

Quote

Ironically, not only did the Cybertruck that Tesla was trying to hand over to Johnathon have several defects, but Tesla service technicians had marked out the defects with chalk.

The Tesla service center employees did not even bother to wipe out the chalk marks outlining the defects before asking Jonhatan to take the truck.

As you can see from the several pictures Johnathon provided, Tesla has marked these defects with chalk. The first defect Tesla outlined is over the side of the bed; here, Tesla has put two brackets marked with chalk, outlining dents, scuffs, and scratches.

 

Quote

A second area of defects is outlined with chalk using three brackets over the tailgate. Here, you can see similar issues with dents and scratches. Tesla has also outlined a third area with deeper scratches by the windows.

In addition to the issues Tesla outlined, Johnathon also discovered several of his own, including a misaligned tonneau cover with exposed metal where the tonneau cover meets the Cybertruck sail and a small blemish on the tonneau cover material.

In addition, there are multiple areas of scratches and the usual trim misalignments. Finally, the vehicle was dirty and needed a wash.

Continuing the subpar customer service, Johnathon says Tesla only offered him a $250 one-time use store credit discount to take delivery of the defective Cybertruck.

 

Spoiler

This would be frustrating for anyone, but Johnathon says this is the second defective Cybertruck Tesla has assigned him. Johnathon writes, “This is the second Cybertruck with defects. The first one was dead on arrival. I didn't even get to see it.”

Johnathon’s theory is that after his original Cybertruck experienced major electrical issues, the EV maker assigned him a different Cybertruck that other buyers rejected because of defects.

Given all the issues, people naturally wanted Johnathon to speak to a manager to solve the problem. However, Johnathan says he has already spoken to a Tesla district manager, and “he’s the one who arranged it!”

Adding insult to injury, Johnathon says, since this is technically the second Cybertruck he did not take delivery of, he can’t reject this Cybertruck and get a replacement. Johnathon writes, “This is the take it or leave it option.”

Overwhelmingly, people were advising Johnathon to reject this Cybertruck and get a new one in a few years after Tesla has sorted out some of the early production issues; however, Johnathon says in preparation for his Cybertruck, he has already sold his Jeep and now doesn’t have a truck to pull his trailer for his job.

Johnathon writes, “I would wait, but I sold my work truck, and this was supposed to be the replacement. I'm going on two weeks of downtime with $0 made and a second failed Cybertruck delivery.”

Finally, Johnathon identifies the Tesla service center in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, as where he is facing all these problems.

Overall, the comments below Johnathon’s post show that many people, including several Tesla and Cybertruck owners, are unhappy with the level of customer care they have received from Tesla lately.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. Share your ideas by clicking the red “Add new comment” button below. Also, visit our site, torquenews.com/Tesla, regularly for the latest updates.

 

 

Spoiler for photos:

 

Spoiler

 

 

[Chopper 16666]

It's absolutely incredible that someone would sell the sole vehicle they depend on to earn a living and plan to replace it with a brand new, first model year vehicle. I wouldn't do that with any vehicle in its first model year. 

Compound that major life fuckup with somehow ignoring the many huge, multiple red flags that accompanied the Cybertruck's development.

Then for someone to go ahead with their plan despite everything that's happened since the CT roll out.

It's stupefying. No sympathy for the dipshit fanboys. 

 

 

[Captain Ron 12722]

43 minutes ago, Chopper said:

It's absolutely incredible that someone would sell the sole vehicle they depend on to earn a living and plan to replace it with a brand new, first model year vehicle. I wouldn't do that with any vehicle in its first model year. 

Compound that major life fuckup with somehow ignoring the many huge, multiple red flags that accompanied the Cybertruck's development.

Then for someone to go ahead with their plan despite everything that's happened since the CT roll out.

It's stupefying. No sympathy for the dipshit fanboys. 

 

 

Fools and money yo !!

[Chopper 16666]

Awww elmo lost custody 

[Captain Ron 12722]

Elmo will find anything to get mad about

 

Granted, it was used to make a great point

 

 

[atomheartbevo 89044]

Thankfully the people who designed the CyberTruck didn’t design their spacecraft

 

[Captain Ron 12722]

 

 

 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-22/bmw-pulls-ahead-of-tesla-in-european-ev-sales-for-first-time?embedded-checkout=true

 

Edited August 22 by Captain Ron

[Captain Ron 12722]

[High Plains Drifter 10937]

On 8/20/2024 at 5:06 PM, Chopper said:

hahaha

"Thanks chiefly to the legacy Twitter LBO debt, Barclays senior M&A team were informed last year their annual compensation would shrink by 40% over the previous year. The cut was so severe that almost a quarter of the bank’s 200-plus managing directors quit once they had collected it."

 

If that was the team responsible for the twitter loan, they should have all been fired. 

 

 

[Francisco 2.0 32215]

 

Quote

Relevant section of the article:

And before any Tesla loyalists complain that we aren't giving the Cybertruck its due, know that the one we rented broke on the second day, effectively parking itself with just a few hundred miles on its odometer. A DNF results in a mission-fulfillment score of zero.

 

Edited August 23 by Francisco 2.0

[Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand 13485]

[InkaUtexas 24933]

I guess twitter is all about free market/speech.

Weapons dealers in Yemen are openly using the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, to sell Kalashnikovs, pistols, grenades and grenade-launchers.

The traders operate in the capital Sana’a and other areas under control of the Houthis, a rebel group backed by Iran and proscribed as terrorists by the US and Australian governments.

"It is inconceivable that they [the weapons dealers] are not operating on the Houthis’ behalf," said the former British Ambassador to Yemen, Edmund Fitton-Brown, who now works for the Counter Extremism Project.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c86l4pl6072o

[atomheartbevo 89044]

Elmo is letting people do whatever with Grok, unlike most of the majors that have some restrictions on actual people’s likenesses.

 

[PenelopeWitherspoon 18508]

I left Twitter today. Fuck Elmo.

[InkaUtexas 24933]

17 minutes ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

I left Twitter today. Fuck Elmo.

I did awhile back, and sometimes I miss the old version. Ya know the one where real shit was posted. Nothing has really replaced it

[Captainant 26927]

1 hour ago, atomheartbevo said:

Elmo is letting people do whatever with Grok, unlike most of the majors that have some restrictions on actual people’s likenesses.

 

He is gonna get laws named after him at this point lol. Speed running being an absolute antisocial choade

[C-Man 26739]

12 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Elmo is letting people do whatever with Grok, unlike most of the majors that have some restrictions on actual people’s likenesses.

 

[Francisco 2.0 32215]

That Elon.  What a boss.  I see why so many want to work at Twitter.

 

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/23/24226830/elon-musk-email-x-twitter-stock-grants

 

Quote

Elon Musk sent an email to X staff overnight about their much-anticipated stock grants — but there’s a catch.

In an email to staff viewed by The Verge, the company is planning to award stock options based on the anticipated impact of employees. That means staff have to submit a one-page summary telling leadership their contributions to the company in order to get their stock.

 

Quote

These long-awaited stock grants add to the tensions between X leadership and staff after the promotions process was recently delayed without explanation, we previously reported. Given how the company formerly called Twitter has continued to struggle under Elon Musk’s ownership, employees have been bracing for more layoffs.

 

Quote

What’s more, a source at X told The Verge that the company still owes staff their annual equity refresher, which was supposed to be doled out in April. Musk previously assured employees that they could regularly cash out stock, similar to SpaceX staff, according to two employees. However, he has not yet followed through on this promise.

The most recent stock refresh for X employees was in October 2023, valuing the company at $19 billion — significantly less than the $44 billion Musk paid for it. During this refresh, employees received RSUs at a share price of $45, I previously reported.

 

Edited August 23 by Francisco 2.0

[4th&Five 41243]

 

[Captain Ron 12722]

 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/world-bank-advertising-elon-musk-x-racism-pro-nazi-accounts/

 

[DigglerontheHoof 20595]

Guess he'll sue World Bank, now. 

[4th&Five 41243]

 

[TexPx 2307]

Woke Bank!

[Sawbonz 26892]

11 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

That means staff have to submit a one-page summary telling leadership their contributions to the company in order to get their stock

[956 Worldwide 34016]

 

[atomheartbevo 89044]

In case the above gets deleted

Elon Musk has complied after all and provided a list of X Holding Corp shareholders who helped the billionaire buy Twitter. And who do you think turned out to be the investors of the X platform? That's right, Petr Aven and Vadim Moshkovich. Now it is absolutely obvious where Musk got such love for Russia and where the roots of “filters” due to anti-Russian publications grow from. Let me remind you who Aven and Moshkovich are.

Petr Aven is a Russian billionaire, founder of Alfa Group, which is one of the main wallets for Putin. This man is controlled by the Kremlin as much as possible, for example, in 2018 he traveled to Washington with his colleague Fridman to lobby on behalf of the Russian government to lift international sanctions on Russia. Aven is one of Putin's oldest friends. In general, without Peter's interference, Putin would be in jail rather than becoming president. After all, Aven covered for Vladimir Putin in 1992, when he organized the illegal trade in export licenses. Aven promptly approved him as an authorized representative of the Ministry of Foreign Economic Affairs with the right of foreign economic activity, thus saving the future dictator from prison. Aven also attended a meeting with Putin on February 24, 2022 to mark the start of the invasion of Ukraine. He did not express any protest, started the special military operation and silently supported Putin. By the way, he along with Friedman is trying to get sanctions lifted, just yesterday he received another rejection in this matter.

Twitter is represented in the purchase by 8VC Opportunities Fund II, L.P., a company in which his son Denis works.

Vadim Moshkovich is a sub-sanctioned Russian agrarian billionaire who was a member of the “Federation Council of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation”. In other words, he was officially part of Putin's closest circle. Moshkovich owns Russia's largest agricultural holding Rusagro. Naturally, he also attended the meeting with Putin on February 24, 2022 and, like Aven, did not express any protest against Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Twitter is represented in the purchase by 8VC Opportunities Fund II, L.P., a company in which his son Jack (Eugene) works.

Also an interesting personality is Al-Waleed bin Talal Al Saud, who both personally and through his Kingdom Holding Company is represented in the list of investors as many as three times. This man continues his investment business in Russia and does not publicly support Hamas in the war against Israel. He regularly works with Rosneft, Lukoil and Gazprom on investments in Russia.

Knowing all of this, how can there even be a discussion about Elon Musk's bias? Everyone was thinking how is it possible that Twitter (X)'s stock is plummeting, advertisers are breaking contracts, and no one is doing anything about it. I mean, that's a direct loss to investors. But what everyone overlooked was the fact that investors didn't care about profits, they needed a platform to promote their narratives, such as: supporting Putin and Russia; lobbying to freeze the war in Ukraine; taking the Ukrainian agenda out of the top news; the righteousness of Hamas, etc.

It is now obvious that all the changes to Twitter that are ruining this beautiful platform are a consequence of Elon Musk's collaboration with people like Moshkovich and Aven.

[Parliament 14017]

Elon Musk seems like he sucks.

[mchookem 15568]

23 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

That Elon.  What a boss.  I see why so many want to work at Twitter.

 

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/23/24226830/elon-musk-email-x-twitter-stock-grants

 

 

 

 

 

12 hours ago, Sawbonz said:

 

[Chopper 16666]

some good news, they came up with a nice, new bumper sticker for @Guadaloopy

[HenryJames 65563]

That’s The Odyssey.

[InkaUtexas 24933]

2 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

In case the above gets deleted

 

Elon Musk has complied after all and provided a list of X Holding Corp shareholders who helped the billionaire buy Twitter. And who do you think turned out to be the investors of the X platform? That's right, Petr Aven and Vadim Moshkovich. Now it is absolutely obvious where Musk got such love for Russia and where the roots of “filters” due to anti-Russian publications grow from. Let me remind you who Aven and Moshkovich are.

Petr Aven is a Russian billionaire, founder of Alfa Group, which is one of the main wallets for Putin. This man is controlled by the Kremlin as much as possible, for example, in 2018 he traveled to Washington with his colleague Fridman to lobby on behalf of the Russian government to lift international sanctions on Russia. Aven is one of Putin's oldest friends. In general, without Peter's interference, Putin would be in jail rather than becoming president. After all, Aven covered for Vladimir Putin in 1992, when he organized the illegal trade in export licenses. Aven promptly approved him as an authorized representative of the Ministry of Foreign Economic Affairs with the right of foreign economic activity, thus saving the future dictator from prison. Aven also attended a meeting with Putin on February 24, 2022 to mark the start of the invasion of Ukraine. He did not express any protest, started the special military operation and silently supported Putin. By the way, he along with Friedman is trying to get sanctions lifted, just yesterday he received another rejection in this matter.

Twitter is represented in the purchase by 8VC Opportunities Fund II, L.P., a company in which his son Denis works.

Vadim Moshkovich is a sub-sanctioned Russian agrarian billionaire who was a member of the “Federation Council of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation”. In other words, he was officially part of Putin's closest circle. Moshkovich owns Russia's largest agricultural holding Rusagro. Naturally, he also attended the meeting with Putin on February 24, 2022 and, like Aven, did not express any protest against Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Twitter is represented in the purchase by 8VC Opportunities Fund II, L.P., a company in which his son Jack (Eugene) works.

Also an interesting personality is Al-Waleed bin Talal Al Saud, who both personally and through his Kingdom Holding Company is represented in the list of investors as many as three times. This man continues his investment business in Russia and does not publicly support Hamas in the war against Israel. He regularly works with Rosneft, Lukoil and Gazprom on investments in Russia.

Knowing all of this, how can there even be a discussion about Elon Musk's bias? Everyone was thinking how is it possible that Twitter (X)'s stock is plummeting, advertisers are breaking contracts, and no one is doing anything about it. I mean, that's a direct loss to investors. But what everyone overlooked was the fact that investors didn't care about profits, they needed a platform to promote their narratives, such as: supporting Putin and Russia; lobbying to freeze the war in Ukraine; taking the Ukrainian agenda out of the top news; the righteousness of Hamas, etc.

It is now obvious that all the changes to Twitter that are ruining this beautiful platform are a consequence of Elon Musk's collaboration with people like Moshkovich and Aven.

If under sanctions, and investing in Twitter, then should not Twitter (and Musk) be under sanctions?

1 hour ago, Chopper said:

some good news, they came up with a nice, new bumper sticker for @Guadaloopy

Needed to hold it together? I mean, what did he hit already to fuck  up the corner? Or does it come like that. Ya know, like people who paint their 4x4's to look muddy.

[AnTiM 1634]

I am happily awaiting the day when Musk is the only employee of his company and all the bills come due.

[Chopper 16666]

Courtesy of nyt here's Chapter 1 of a new book by Ryan Mac and Kate Conger

How Elon Musk Got Tangled Up in Blue

Twitter Blue, a revamped subscription service that let users buy verified badges, was the first big test for the platform’s new owner. It didn’t go well.

Ryan Mac and Kate Conger are the co-authors of “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter,” from which this article is adapted.   

Spoiler

Aug. 24, 2024

By Nov. 9, 2022, anxiety was high among the Twitter employees gathered at the company’s San Francisco headquarters. They had spent part of that morning trying to gently explain to their new boss, Elon Musk, that the service they had just launched was dangerous.

Twitter Blue, a subscription service that now allowed users to buy one of the platform's coveted verified badges, had been live for only a few hours when Mr. Musk — who had bought the company two weeks earlier and would later rename it X — stepped out of the glass-walled conference room with views of San Francisco City Hall to speak with an assistant. With Mr. Musk out of earshot, the welcoming, deferential mood in the room immediately changed. The employees knew that users relied on the verified check marks to ensure that information on the platform — including bus times or hurricane evacuation orders or a pop star’s musings — was indeed real.

“All these other people around the world rely on a label of some kind, a badge of some kind, to tell them this is the real account to listen to,” said Esther Crawford, a director of product management, according to three people in attendance. “And they will be hijacked.”

Christian Dowell, a company lawyer, chimed in, suggesting that accounts that bought the badges could start a harassment campaign, using the credibility of verification to, for instance, direct SWAT teams to people’s homes. “Somebody could die, actually,” he said.

When Mr. Musk re-entered the room, the chatter died. No one had expected him to be with them for so long on launch day, but he picked through the snacks — at one point eating half a doughnut in a single bite. He encouraged employees who raised concerns to be “adventurous.”

“We’re going to be shooting from the hip in real time,” Mr. Musk said, fashioning his hands into a pair of finger guns.

Previously, Blue had been a small part of the company’s business, which relied on advertising for 90 percent of its revenue. Blue allowed a few thousand die-hard users to pay for premium features, like the ability to edit their tweets and customize the Twitter app on their phones, but it never gained much traction. To Mr. Musk, a Twitter obsessive who had purchased the company for $44 billion, the service represented an untapped financial opportunity.
ImageElon Musk, wearing a shearling jacket, sits in front of a blue wall with his hands pressed together in front of his mouth.
Soon after buying Twitter in October 2022, Elon Musk told his new employees, “We’re going to be shooting from the hip in real time.”Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

Mr. Musk’s attempt to rescue a company he saw as a sinking ship was premised on the idea that he could persuade people — millions of them — to pay for Twitter Blue. That scheme, however, was doomed from the start by the haphazard planning and capriciousness of Twitter’s owner, whose nearly two-year stewardship of the company has cratered its finances and sullied his reputation as a generational entrepreneur.

During his time at the helm, Mr. Musk has cycled through periods of supreme confidence and self-doubt, making abrupt decisions only to reverse himself. The tumult of his takeover was exemplified in his handling of Blue, which he shut down the day after its unveiling, amid a torrent of criticism, but made available once again a month later. Since then, the site’s check marks have become a hodgepodge of paid, free and fake identifiers signifying little more than confusion.

The book from which this excerpt is drawn is based on more than 100 interviews with people who worked at Twitter or for Mr. Musk. It also relies on internal company documents, contemporaneous notes, recordings and court records. Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for interviews for this book or this excerpt.

Mr. Musk’s plan for Blue centered on selling Twitter’s verification check marks as part of the subscription. The badge, which featured a check mark outlined in blue, was a status symbol on Twitter. In the past, the company gave them out at its own discretion, distinguishing high-profile accounts from impostors. Justin Bieber and Barack Obama had check marks, as did more than 420,000 other users.

Mr. Musk came to hate what he saw as Twitter’s two-tiered class system of the verified and unverified, and to him, selling off the check marks was the ultimate democratization of the site. Soon after completing his acquisition, he assigned Ms. Crawford to assemble a team and gave her a deadline of Nov. 7, 2022, for Blue’s relaunch. She had 10 days to deliver or risk being fired, three people with knowledge of the conversations said.

Many of the employees on the Blue team came to view the project as pointless at best and, at worst, something that could undermine trust. If everyone could be verified, then no one would truly be verified.

As one Blue worker later wrote in a journal: “It was such an obvious train wreck, that the main job of everyone on the team was to make sure it was the safest train wreck possible.”
The Check Mark

Before the introduction of verified check marks in 2009, impersonation on Twitter was pervasive. While the company’s founders knew it was a problem, cracking down on accounts masquerading as those belonging to famous people was always a secondary concern as the company struggled to keep the site online as it constantly crashed from growth.
 

In 2009, Tony La Russa, the World Series-winning manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, became fed up with a parody account that made jokes about unsavory team incidents — including the death of one of his players — and sued Twitter. In response, Twitter took down the impostor and rolled out a solution: verified accounts.

The company began slapping the blue seal on the accounts of notable people and organizations, becoming the first social network to verify its users — one of its most lasting impacts on internet culture. Other services began verifying prominent users, including Google+ in 2011, Facebook in 2012 and Instagram in 2014.

While many people saw the check mark as a designation of fame, it became an important part of Twitter’s utility. It marked the real accounts for brands like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, making the platform much more attractive to advertisers. And it signified authenticity for governments and emergency services, which provided information about train delays, elections and tornado warnings.

Among those impersonated on early Twitter was @ElonMusk. Mr. Musk, who had been pushed to try Twitter by his first wife, Justine Musk, initially dismissed the microblogging service and her constant use. When the impostor vacated the @ElonMusk handle and Mr. Musk took over the username in 2010, the entrepreneur rarely posted. “Not sure I can handle just doing 140 char missives,” he tweeted in late 2011, frustrated by the character limits on tweets.

But Mr. Musk’s Twitter habit grew as he realized the site’s power. It gave him a way of keeping everyone updated on the progress of his companies, Tesla and SpaceX, and pushing back against media outlets, which he had come to distrust. On the platform, he owned his own narrative.

By early 2022, he was secretly acquiring Twitter stock, blazing past a limit set by the Securities and Exchange Commission to prevent investors from quietly accumulating major stakes in public companies. That April, Mr. Musk made an offer to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share, eager to own his favorite megaphone. He waffled over the decision that summer and tried to call the deal off, but Twitter’s board sued him to force it through. By Oct. 26, Mr. Musk had accepted the terms and marched into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters with a vision for Blue.
‘Power to the People!’

For Ms. Crawford — who had arrived at Twitter in 2020 after it acquired Squad, her video chat start-up — Blue represented an opportunity. In private meetings, she told those working with her on the project that there was limited possibility for success, three people who were part of those discussions said. But she saw it as a chance to impress Mr. Musk and gain influence.

“This is our chance to show the best of what Twitter has to offer,” Ms. Crawford told her team. If they could accomplish this task now, she suggested, they would be able to negotiate for what they wanted later, including raises, new positions and new products.

Still, the absurdity of being asked to launch a product built to Mr. Musk’s specifications in less than two weeks, amid widespread layoffs, was not lost on her. In one meeting, she presented her team with customized mugs that wouldn’t have been out of place at a tech-themed Bed Bath & Beyond. “Chance made us co-workers, crazy psycho [expletive] made us Tweeps,” read the mugs’ inscription.

Ms. Crawford and her team tried to develop safeguards. On Oct. 31, they presented options to Mr. Musk and his retinue of investors and friends. In one version of the system, there would be two badges: People who were already verified would keep their blue badges, while those who paid for the subscription program would get a different badge, this one in white.

To illustrate the differences, they created mock-ups of two tweets. One, from the legacy verified @JoeBiden account, advised people to vote. The other, from the Blue-subscribed @JoeB1den account, which replaced the “i” with a “1,” tweeted that it was “starting nuclear war with Russia.” Besides the slight change in spelling, the two accounts could be distinguished by their colored badges.

The attempt to make clearer distinctions between legacy and paid verified users, however, was not embraced by Mr. Musk’s friends. It “feels like a second-class citizen,” David Sacks, a venture capitalist who was assisting with the takeover, wrote in an email seen by The New York Times, adding that it would “disincentivize purchase.” Eventually, Mr. Musk vetoed the move.
 

Mr. Musk’s fixation on Blue extended beyond the design, and he engaged in lengthy deliberations about how much it should cost. Mr. Sacks insisted that they should raise the price to $20 a month, from its current $4.99. Anything less felt cheap to him, and he wanted to present Blue as a luxury good.

“Chanel could make a fortune selling a $99 bag, but it would be a one-time move,” he wrote. “A ‘promotional offer’ may not be the position we want. A luxury brand can always move down-market, but it’s very hard to move up-market once the brand is shot.”

Jason Calacanis, a friend of Mr. Musk’s, disagreed. “It should be $99 a year,” he insisted. During one meeting, he launched into a spiel about how Twitter users were more likely to open their wallets for a $100-per-year subscription if it seemed slightly cheaper at the $99 price, as though he had just watched a YouTube video explaining the basics of consumer psychology.

Mr. Musk also turned to the author Walter Isaacson for advice. Mr. Isaacson, who had written books on Steve Jobs and Benjamin Franklin, was shadowing him for an authorized biography. “Walter, what do you think?” Mr. Musk asked.

“This should be accessible to everyone,” Mr. Isaacson said, no longer just the fly on the wall. “You need a really low price point, because this is something that everyone is going to sign up for.”

To employees, the discussions were baffling. There was Mr. Musk, a man who had built multibillion-dollar companies, soliciting advice from a small inner circle of advisers who had little experience building social networks. Sure, they used Twitter, but these rich men were not representative of the hundreds of millions of people who logged in every day.

Mr. Musk had largely come to peace with a price of $100 a year for Blue. But during one meeting to discuss pricing, his top assistant, Jehn Balajadia, felt compelled to speak up.

“There’s a lot of people who can’t even buy gas right now,” she said, according to two people in attendance. It was hard to see how any of those people would pony up $100 on the spot for a social media status symbol.

Mr. Musk paused to think. “You know, like, what do people pay for Starbucks?” he asked. “Like $8?”

Before anyone could raise objections, he whipped out his phone to set his word in stone.

“Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” he tweeted on Nov. 1. “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”
‘We Need to Protect the Mission’

Ms. Crawford grew closer to Mr. Musk, texting with him regularly, and members of his inner circle started opening up to her. Ms. Balajadia sat Ms. Crawford down to coach her on managing Mr. Musk. Ms. Balajadia was one of the few women Mr. Musk trusted, and while her title was “operations coordinator” for the Boring Company, his tunneling start-up, she was treated as a glorified assistant. She monitored his calendar, shadowed him at events and set up his laptop for him when Mr. Musk needed to do work that couldn’t be done on his iPhone.

“I can tell you’re going to be around for a while, so let me tell you something,” Ms. Balajadia said to Ms. Crawford. “Elon is special in this world. It is our job to protect him and make sure what he wants to have happen, happens. We need to protect the mission.”

Ms. Crawford came up with her own tactics for dealing with Mr. Musk. She quickly learned that she could challenge him in one-on-one settings. Individually, Mr. Musk could be charming, willing to engage in discussion and listen to the expertise of his counterpart. Put him in a larger group setting with people outside his inner circle or those he didn’t trust, however, and Mr. Musk’s ego ran wild. He could never be seen as inferior or uninformed.

In a meeting days after the acquisition, Mr. Musk was tuning out a discussion about product ideas and scrolling Twitter. After reading a tweet about the F.B.I. and Hillary Clinton — a constant fixation for the right-wing accounts that he began to interact with more frequently — he announced to the room that he had drafted a tweet about Ms. Clinton, hoping to elicit laughs.

“You can’t do that right now!” Ms. Crawford said, standing up. They had product matters to discuss, and she didn’t want a distraction. Then she burst out laughing. Her histrionic approach worked.

“Are you my tweet adviser now?” Mr. Musk asked, raising an eyebrow. He didn’t send the tweet.

Publicly, Ms. Crawford was seen as a cheerleader. Through the chaos of the takeover, she remained outwardly optimistic, giving others the impression that she had become Mr. Musk’s devotee.
 

One night, after working long hours with the Blue team, she and her colleagues decided to tweet a joke. She had brought an eye mask and a silver REI sleeping bag to the office for nap breaks, and a product designer, Evan Jones, had snapped a photo of her sleeping. Later, she asked him to retake the picture and post it. He climbed on some office furniture to get a better overhead angle of her in the sleeping bag, then tweeted the photo. Ms. Crawford then retweeted it with her own message: “When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork.”

The image rocketed around the internet. To Mr. Musk’s detractors, it symbolized the cringe-worthy hustle culture that dominated the tech world. To his supporters, the photo showed the impact that a once-in-a-lifetime innovator was having on a company that needed a revolution. In reality, it was a shrewd bit of self-promotion.

Ms. Crawford and Mr. Jones faced a maelstrom of criticism across Twitter, and the product designer wanted to delete his post. But she demanded that he keep the photo up. This was her time to shine.
An F.B.I. Inquiry

The hustle wasn’t completely fake. The Blue team stayed up late fielding requests from Mr. Musk and his transition team, and created a 24-hour rotation where projects could be passed to other employees around the globe.

Some people on the Blue team had taken to monitoring their elevated heart rates on their Apple Watches and sharing the metric with their colleagues to make light of their situations.

“I don’t want to push the team to die over this,” Ms. Crawford told Mr. Musk at one point, trying to warn about burnout.

“Well, push them to just before they die,” Mr. Musk responded, laughing.

As the new Blue came into focus, so did the fears about how it would be exploited for impersonation. What would happen if an account pretending to be a local fire department declared an emergency? Or an account posing as a politician spread a lie about an upcoming vote?
 

Stopping election interference was of paramount importance to Twitter employees. Brazil, one of Twitter’s largest markets outside the United States, held its presidential runoff election the weekend after Mr. Musk walked into Twitter. The incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, was unseated by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva but immediately said he would challenge the results. Twitter employees who worked on civic integrity gamed out situations in which Mr. Bolsonaro, whom Mr. Musk claimed to sometimes speak with, could spread disinformation using paid verified accounts.

The F.B.I. also raised concerns about the U.S. midterm elections, which were set for Nov. 8. About a week before Election Day, an agent from the agency’s Foreign Influence Task Force reached out to the company to better understand its plans for Blue.

Mr. Musk was briefed on the outreach during a Nov. 3 meeting and was told that the F.B.I. was interested in whether there would be changes to currently verified state or federal government election accounts, according to three people with knowledge of that conversation. The agency also asked whether fraudulent accounts posing as government officials would be able to become verified.

Mr. Musk’s response didn’t exactly breed confidence. He wanted to push ahead with the launch of Blue before the election, but wait to make some changes, including a plan to give tweets from Blue subscribers greater reach on the platform.

Mr. Musk also said he planned to give a separate “official badge” to all government entities “of significance” to indicate that they were authentic accounts. But he didn’t define what he meant by “of significance.” Employees knew it was impossible to filter through the thousands of verified accounts that could potentially deal in official U.S. elections and determine if they should receive “official” billing, just days before the vote. (Mr. Musk later killed the effort.)

“Why are we making such a risky change one day before elections, which has the potential of causing elections interference by malicious groups that could abuse the new rules to their advantage in the spread of misinformation?” one employee wrote on a companywide Slack channel.

The weekend before U.S. voters headed to the polls, Ms. Crawford made one last attempt in a private chat with her boss. “Do you want to be blamed for the outcome of this election?” she asked.

“Well, when is it?” Mr. Musk replied.

“It’s in two days,” Ms. Crawford said, stunned that he hadn’t clocked the date that she and her team had been warning him about since the start of the project.

Mr. Musk paused, processing. “Oh, I didn’t realize,” he said after a moment. “OK, yeah, it’s fine. We can wait. Why don’t we wait?”

The launch was moved to Nov. 9, the day after the election.
‘A Little Bit of Confusion’

On the morning of Nov. 9, Mr. Musk joined the Blue launch team in the conference room overlooking the city, according to three people who attended the meeting. The engineers and designers in the room straightened up.

“There are a whole bunch of people dying to show what a huge idiot I am,” Mr. Musk said. He decided to keep the launch quiet, worried that a press announcement would lead to an overload of Twitter’s systems.

Still, he expected people to sign up in droves. “It’s better to have a little bit of confusion reign for a soft launch so we don’t break the system,” he told employees. And he was worried about bad actors, predicting a wave of impostors and scammers that would be like a “zombie attack” in “World War Z,” the 2013 action horror flick starring Brad Pitt.

For more than six hours, Mr. Musk kept a watchful eye as users began to notice the service and spread the word. This was his game-changing Twitter service, one that he believed would wean the company off its dependence on advertising, and he was there to shepherd it through, like the liftoff of a SpaceX rocket. He warned the team against taking drastic actions like adding more labels or pausing the service.

“We should consider what is the magnitude of the thing that happens before we take action,” Mr. Musk said. “I want to pay close attention and react with agility, but not react with a fear of a thing that may or may not occur.”

A software engineer calling in to the meeting posed a question to Mr. Musk: “What would you consider a serious incident that would require us to put back such a label or some other differentiation between accounts?”

Mr. Musk intertwined his fingers and paused for a few seconds.

“If there’s like death or serious injury or something like that, um, you know, uh,” he said, fidgeting. “Something beyond annoyance or mild confusion — that would be enough.”
Turning It Off

By that evening, more than 78,000 users had signed up for Blue.

But many were impostors: One user pretended to be the video game company Nintendo and then shared an image of Mario, the lovable plumber, giving the middle finger. The fake verified accounts caused so much confusion that the stepmother of Kyrie Irving, the basketball superstar, called Twitter’s Partnerships Team to get the company to take down a tweet from an account spoofing an ESPN reporter that claimed the Brooklyn Nets had released him.
 

Then came the election meddling. Some results were still being tallied, including in the hotly contested Arizona governor’s race between Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state, and Kari Lake, a Trump-backed Republican who had offered to welcome Twitter if Mr. Musk moved the company to the state. With Ms. Lake half a percentage point behind in the vote count the day after the election, a fake account with a new verified badge purporting to be hers tweeted, “It is with heavy heart that I must concede to my opponent, @katiehobbs.”

On Nov. 10, major advertisers started to ring Twitter’s sales team, telling it that they would pull their ads unless the company did something about the fakes. In one call, executives from Nike threatened to never advertise on the platform again, two people with knowledge of the conversation said.

Those who saw Mr. Musk after these calls could sense his tension; he was clearly bothered by the threats from business leaders. By that afternoon, his jovial mood after launching Blue the previous day had disappeared. And over the coming weeks, Mr. Musk’s mood swings — one moment despondent, the next energized — would become routine.

The threats stirred Mr. Musk’s fear of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue in a snap. “Turn it off,” he told an engineer in the San Francisco office. “Turn it off!”

 

Edited August 24 by Chopper

[Chopper 16666]

I keep hearing people say twitter can't get any worse. The answer is, Yes it can.

 

[atomheartbevo 89044]

37 minutes ago, Chopper said:

I keep hearing people say twitter can't get any worse. The answer is, Yes it can.

 

 

Sounds like socialism.  Also, some of the big accounts that are fans of his are pissed and you can tell they are fuming about having to suck it up or abandon twitter.

[Captain Ron 12722]

4 hours ago, HenryJames said:

That’s The Odyssey.

1.25 speed? That’s pretty pathetic. 

[Hefeweizen 5226]

1 hour ago, Captain Ron said:

1.25 speed? That’s pretty pathetic. 

That’s my standard listening speed for YouTube lectures and Spotify Podcasts(1.2) .  lol at it being some special thing.

[BearMace 2180]

47 minutes ago, Hefeweizen said:

That’s my standard listening speed for YouTube lectures and Spotify Podcasts(1.2) .  lol at it being some special thing.

So it's not extremely hardcore?

[Goredho 17181]

21 hours ago, HenryJames said:

That’s The Odyssey.

For Elon, its the Oddsissy

[Pato del Muerto 52114]

22 hours ago, HenryJames said:

That’s The Odyssey.

D’oh

[C-Man 26739]

Giant Elon Musk bust spotted around Brownsville will be officially unveiled

The statue will be part of an "ElonDay" event meant to celebrate art, technology and culture.

https://www.chron.com/culture/article/elon-musk-bust-texas-19718808.php

[atomheartbevo 89044]

[Captainant 26927]

2 minutes ago, C-Man said:

Giant Elon Musk bust spotted around Brownsville will be officially unveiled

The statue will be part of an "ElonDay" event meant to celebrate art, technology and culture.

https://www.chron.com/culture/article/elon-musk-bust-texas-19718808.php

Did they get the guy who did the Ronaldo statue for elmo? Lol

 

[C-Man 26739]

Did they get the guy who did the Ronaldo statue for elmo? Lol

 

The French “artist” is quoted in the story saying it’s purposely been done this way to replicate a poorly drawn meme (or something like that. Probably because Elon’s meme game is strong.

[Sawbonz 26892]