One interesting thing is that unlike Paul Graham, who thought it was possible to launch a Twitter competitor in a month, Elon understands it’s not that easy to compete with or build a new Twitter. It’s not a particularly expensive company for its outsized influence in the world. Having said that, boy is Elon the wrong person to own a platform that should respect free speech and be neutral (understanding Twitter hasn’t had a perfect record on either front).
Stuff like Reddit or Twitter should be public services or at least non-profits.
Edit: Why is this downvoted? How does it make any sense to have them as public, for profit, companies, when we all know what happens when their growth stops? How sleazy they all become? Heck, they're sleazy as-is. Who here likes where Reddit is headed, for example?
What does this mean or rather what does this look like? When I see these I never understand if it’s for or against governmental free speech. As I understand it , services under governmental control are under even more free speech restrictions than privateer services since they have a duty to crack down on whatever values a government is beholden to (anti-porn, anti-illegal activity, anti-Anonymization). What is the end goal here?
Ok, non profit then. Have some neutral org not chasing profits improve what it has instead of shoving dark design patterns and closing APIs in order to sell more ads.
What is “neutral”? As I see it your target 3 different things here.
To be honest interpolation is something that will be ripe for abuse by actors like 4Chan just because they can. I’m not seeing a way to ensure the banning of users while allowing interoperability that isn’t solved already by email.
If the solution to this is to not allow the banning of users, then how does one combat things such as child porn, revenge porn, etc.
I'm not for decentralized solutions since I don't think their UX can scale. Theoretically maybe they can, but in my eyes it's a P=NP hard problem right now.
I'm also not for absolute free speech, so yes, users should be banable in case of abuse.
The main thing I'm against is the fact we're taking for granted various methods of online communication (Twitter like broadcast, Reddit-like centralized forums, plus I'd actually put WhatsApp like instant messengers here). And they should just be dumb pipes.
They shouldn't try to add a ton of smart features they sell to <<other companies>>. Because their incentives are out of alignment with their direct user needs. They will serve whoever pays them instead of whoever uses them.
The classic enterprise software dilemma which in that case creates functionally horrible software. For online software it creates morally horrible software, instead.
interoperable protocols are arguably more important.
ActivityPub is a W3C specification at the Recommendation stage, which basically means it's ready for production.
This would allow groups like, oh, house.gov to run their own platform and assign every congress person their own interoperable user account (AOC@HOUSE.GOV for example) and it works pretty much the same way email works.
The problem is, companies know these and they subtly sabotage these standardization efforts.
Look at the web. Desktop UI toolkits have had solid components since the start. From the late 80s and early 90s. The web is maybe getting them universally in 2024.
I mean, it's great that we have standards, but can you really afford to wait 30-40 years? I'll be frank with you, if you're a professional in our field, 30-40 years is your entire career. Many people in IT actually retire even earlier or move up to management and basically out of regular IT, after 5-10-15 years.
And people can only care so much. Heck, many Open Source hackers move on after 5-10 years. Only a handful last 30 years.
Faster moving standards are a sort of utopia, it seems.
> Elon the wrong person to own a platform that should respect free speech and be neutral (understanding Twitter hasn’t had a perfect record on either front).
Off the top of my head and solely? Mackenzie Scott (Bezos)? There are quite a few folks who could create structures for shared (vs. sole) ownership of Twitter as a public good.
What does Mackenzie Scott know about anything other than running Amazon? She’s a busybody who involves herself in stuff that’s none of her business. E.g. knee-jerk donating to anti-Asian front organizations like AAJC just because #stopaapihate was trending and they had “Asian” in the name: http://nwasianweekly.com/2020/08/mackenzie-scott-billionaire...
Musk is an infinitely better influence on something like Twitter.
Mackenzie Scott will leave running the platform to the people familiar with it. That's exactly why she's the best person to own Twitter and turn it into a public good vs. Elon, who also knows absolutely nothing about running Twitter, but will no doubt intervene.
Twitter is already a public company left to its own devices. But free speech wise, what Twitter needs is intervention. Scott is plainly in the same bubble as the existing Twitter employees and can’t provide that intervention.
Free speech is the guarantee the government won't censor you. Just because Twitter shares are tradable on public markets doesn't mean they're a public utility.
Musk made his comments in context of social networks. In a digitizing world where all conversation is centered into a handful of platforms, those platforms become the free speech carrier, no matter who owns them.
Yes, you're technically correct, but it's irrelevant from a pragmatic point of view. A legal definition of free speech is worthless if said free speech cannot be expressed in the places where most speech happens.
This is a thing many people believe, but it's not an axiom. The balancing of interests an "intervention" to resolve this would require come at their own cost of free association, and the lines you'd have to draw to make new restrictions on e.g. moderation workable are treacherous.
You can argue that major platforms like Twitter are essential to free speech, maybe even persuasively. What you can't do is make your case as if it were a self-evident fact. It is not.
Hey. I am sure you know a lot more about this than I do, but just to let you know, your comment comes off as sort of petty and ill-motivated.
I've never heard of AAJC. You linked a news article that proves her donation but doesn't make the organization seem sinister. I search AAJC and I get a bunch of results that do nothing to tell me anything sinister. I check Wikipedia and there are a handful of political stances, some of which are expected from political NGOs. I can't find any indication that anyone views this organization as anti-Asian. Based on what I've found, I assume what you mean is that this organization seems to support affirmative action in college admissions, a position that sets them apart from many other Asian groups, and which you could argue hurts Asian participation in colleges relative to a race-neutral admissions standard. Again, I had to do research to figure out that was what you were thinking of, I couldn't read your mind.
I'm not saying you're wrong in your belief, or that you can't make the argument you're making, I'm saying short-circuiting the entire argument and just declaring it so is both intellectually facile and unlikely to inform anyone about anything. I've seen the same argument before when people on the right baldly assert that the SPLC is a "hate group" -- when what they means is some nuanced take on a particular political stance SPLC takes being disagreeable to conservatives.
But then that's not the only leap you make. It's not just taken as obvious that AAJC is an anti-Asian organization, and everyone knows that, and no one could think differently: it's also taken as an obvious conclusion that anyone who donates to them in spite of this must be an idiot dilettante who doesn't even understand what they're giving money to. I don't think that's a reasonable conclusion to draw. I think a much more reasonable conclusion to draw would be that Mackenzie Scott supports affirmative action in college admissions, doesn't mind supporting an organization that supports affirmative action in college admissions, and knows exactly what she's supporting.
Again, not trying to change your mind about the organization or about Scott, trying to encourage you to express yourself in a more useful way so that readers actually know what it is you're trying to say.
> Hey. I am sure you know a lot more about this than I do, but just to let you know, your comment comes off as sort of petty and ill-motivated.
That's fair--I was trying to avoid a lengthy rant.
> But then that's not the only leap you make. It's not just taken as obvious that AAJC is an anti-Asian organization, and everyone knows that, and no one could think differently: it's also taken as an obvious conclusion that anyone who donates to them in spite of this must be an idiot dilettante who doesn't even understand what they're giving money to.
I'll get to AAJC in a moment, but I want to address this first. My conclusion that MacKenzie Scott is a dilettante is based on timing. She donated a bunch of bunch of money to random racial justice organizations just a couple of months after George Floyd was killed, and again shortly after the "AAPI Hate" news cycle after the Atlanta shootings. But she has no track record of involvement with Asian communities or Asian issues in the past. There is no reason to believe she has any understanding of the issues facing Asian Americans, what they want, or who really represents their interests. She just up and decided to donate to a bunch of organizations purporting to represent minorities. That's the opposite of Bill Gates-style "informed philanthropy."
Ordinarily, uninformed donations merely risk being wasteful. In the context of identity-based organizations, however, they can be severely prejudicial to minorities. Asians, Hispanics, etc., all have specific interests. There are myriad internal debates within those groups about everything from policing to welfare. But wealthy white donors like MacKenzie Scott can effectively be kingmakers--their donations can completely drown out grass-roots support. And they create an incentive structure where the most successful organizations end up being the ones that make themselves attractive to donors like Scott, not the ones that are most effective at advocating for Asians or Hispanics.
> Based on what I've found, I assume what you mean is that this organization seems to support affirmative action in college admissions, a position that sets them apart from many other Asian groups, and which you could argue hurts Asian participation in colleges relative to a race-neutral admissions standard.
It's undeniable that affirmative action and movements to end meritocratic admissions hurts Asians. If Ivy League student bodies perfectly reflected the country's composition, you'd eliminate about 60-70% of the Asians. In Silicon Valley it would be over 80%. As shown by the voting on Prop 16, Asian voters oppose such measures even in California. In Virginia, the end of meritocratic admissions at TJHSST resulted in Glenn Youngkin getting half the Asian vote--a remarkable result given that almost all Asians in the state live in heavily Biden-voting liberal Northern Virginia.
It doesn't matter whether you think it's the right thing to do on the whole. If you're an organization purporting to represent Asian interests, it's unconscionable to support policies that reduce Asian representation and are contrary to what Asians themselves want. But AAJC goes further than that. They sought to overturn a federal district court judgment in Virginia that found that changes to the admissions process of a public magnet high school were "racially motivated": https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/virginia/va... (p. 16). In that case, one of the Board members behind the policy indicated in a text message that the policy changes seemed to have an “anti Asian” motivation.
Can you imagine the NAACP ever throwing its weight behind policies intended to reduce Black representation, where there was evidence of "anti Bl...
This is all very interesting, and I'm familiar with and have internalized Yglesias (and Shor's) take on the donor-industrial complex. But I'm still going to point out the obvious gap here, which is that you're holding Scott to a standard you're not holding Musk.
It would be one thing if your point was that billionaires should keep their grubby hands off of Twitter, but that's not what I see you to be saying here. You seem to just object to Scott being involved.
Very well said. There is a similar dynamic going on in almost every Asian activist group or non-profit in San Francisco. They reflect the interests of their funders. Some are the clueless wealthy like Scott but it gets much, much worse.
Many are funded by government entities under political control. They end up supporting whatever agenda the powerful politicians are pushing or else they risk losing that funding. Almost invariably this is not the same as Asian interests.
Currently the top issues in the SF Asian community are crime and education (and inflation and small business hassles to a lesser degree). This what everyone talks about. Yet the local Asian orgs have been counterproductive on all of these fronts and are actively support the politicians widely blamed for exacerbating these problems.
Really disheartening to see almost every SF Asian leader co-opted by the rich or powerful. Similar dynamic in other racial and affinity groups. Anyone with influence eventually sells out the people they have influence over. These orgs just institutionalize that transaction.
You don't need a "right person", just not a "wrong person". The vast majority of people are less sociopathic and less revengeful than Elon Musk. He's very high on a number of negative personality traits.
Everybody knows that building a competitor is not the hard part.
Elon could build and own 100% a competitor to Twitter for much less than the 3 billion he spent to get 9% of twitter.
The problem is getting the competitor to have traction.
For that you need to have the idea for a differentiator that will hook people, and unlike engineering talent you can't buy this!
Truth Social launched with a real differentiating message compared to Twitter that appeals to a lot of people, had massive media coverage and is fronted by one of the most prolific and famous Twitter users in history. Yet by all accounts it has effectively zero traction.
> For that you need to have the idea for a differentiator that will hook people, and unlike engineering talent you can't buy this!
I have an entire bookshelf of books about how to do this, but I’ve never been asked about it during a coding interview. I think it's less of "you can't buy it" and more of that no one values it.
That's hard to answer because there are so many different types of books. E.g. I like this one a lot, it's basically a summary of the most important academic papers about what makes online communities successful:
But I also like Seth Godin's books a lot, e.g. All Marketers Are Liars, Free Prize Inside, and Purple Cow.
A lot of my reading on web stuff has been vaguely in those categories though, in terms of either academic research, academic theory, digital ethnography stuff, psychology and sociology, marketing theory/praxis, plus whatever I've read on design and UX.
I would say the single book that founders in the tech industry would benefit from reading the most is probably Punished By Rewards by Alfie Kohn. I feel like every other startup puts themselves out of business by fucking up on the super basic things that book discusses. I end up having to explain it to people all the time.
> Everybody knows that building a competitor is not the hard part.
Everybody knows this? Truth Social needs to be told. The app can barely launch, and got a head start forking Mastadon as far as we know. They have hundreds of millions (a few billion?) in capitalization.
Everyone knows people who haven’t actually tried tend to underestimate the difficulty in other’s work.
To be clear, nowhere did I say the engineering is the hardest part.
Stating his aspirations and actually following through is something else entirely. If we went by what he aspires, we’d be on our second human mission to Mars with fully autonomous vehicles.
Elon has the emotional stability of my 13 year old cousin, and changes his mind as often.
That's quite a cynical take, and plainly incorrect.
He is still actively pursuing those goals, they are just very difficult projects. Objectively he has done more for promoting space travel than most any other individual today.
He has his flaws sure, but people generally admire his willingness to pursue bold aspirations with extreme tenacity.
Having goals that can not be reached in time doesn't mean his goals are fake or that he doesn't mean to achieve them.
There is zero sign that his support for free speech is a spontaneous idea that he will lose interest about in a few month. And there is also no way to achieve it but certainly there is plenty room to improve with Twitter.
He tweeted about it after he'd bought the stock but before that knowledge was public, which I think is further proof that Musk is somewhat disingenuous.
Do you have any examples of Twitter arresting or imprisoning people for speech, or acquiescing to government censorship? Perhaps you are instead to moderating their private platform and enforcing community guidelines? I understand the latter can be annoying, but it is a mistake to conflate the two, as free speech is something very special and important and in the US is in fact codified into the Bill of Rights.
TL;DR free speech is between you and the government, not between you and someone else or some other company.
That's up for debate. Modern communication is so monopolized by twitter/FB that the argument of "they are a private company" no longer holds.
We can bemoan Russian interference in the elections all we want. But the power Twitter/FB hold is far more impactful on domestic and international democracy than any russian agent every could be.
Imagine a scenario where Twitter and Facebook lose their ability to unconditionally moderate the content of their platforms. Presumably they would need to check with government censors first? Again, I understand how annoying moderation can be! I just don't understand the alternative and I do not see how this alternative is not a huge violation of the First Amendment — this would precisely be the government telling private companies what they can and cannot publish.
Well, one alternative would be that they have to decouple their front-end and back-end and provide open APIs to their backend (posts/tweets, friends lists, etc.).
Facebook/Twitter can moderate/censor whatever they want on their own front-ends, but they can't remove anything from the backend.
People/companies can build alternative front-end apps that access the fb/twitter graphs and censor in a different way - so that users have an alternative.
No, it's not. If you want corporations to be beholden to the first amendment then pass laws saying that private companies can no longer moderate their platforms, full stop.
(the term gets thrown around a lot, and has been devalued into meaninglessness by the Russian government, but it does have a legal meaning in Germany and France)
Yes, their "denazification of Ukraine" propaganda, expanding from the presence of some far-right militia activity in some places to justifying the mass murder of civilians.
That and its excessive use on social media renders "Nazi" mostly useless as a descriptor, outside of those groups that explicitly and deliberately reference Nazi symbology and ideology.
> expanding from the presence of some far-right militia activity in some places
Note: smaller than that of the same ideological but different geopolitical alignment that Russia has been sponsoring for years (Azov exists, but it's smaller than Sparta) in the same conflict.
I didn't mean the russian propaganda. I meant the western media that had branded anyone with the most milquetoast traditional views as nazis for the past 7 years. The fucking canadian truckers were branded as fascists, for fuck's sake. did NSDAP protest against COVID-19 vaccine mandates too?
>some far-right militia activity in some places
FYI, those guy with wolfsangel and black sun insignias and swastika tattoos are not a militia but a legitimate unit of Ukraine's national guard
Free speech in terms of the first amendment is about government censorship, but in todays society with only a handful of giant media and tech companies controlling the vast majority of information flow, then free speech takes on a the second meaning about corporate or private censorship. It may not be illegal, but that doesn't mean its ok. And for the record, I do no support completely unmoderated media - that would be a nightmare. Free speech in both forms are, and will always be, very tricky things to deal with.
Should it? Should free speech be extended beyond the bounds of government and if so doesn’t that contradict its original meaning by making the government restrict who should and shouldn’t provide uncensored free speech?
> What about slander and libel laws or laws about claims made in advertisements?
Yep — here we're getting into Prior Restraint. It's both against the law to restrain free speech such as lies, but as you rightly point out, this speech can have other legal consequences.
Free speech never began with governments. The 1st is a prohibition on government interfering with the freedom of speech. That's the problem with this whole debate, most people have everything backwards. Free speech is a concept, an ideal that underpins the entire concept of a healthy, free, fair and open society.
> then free speech takes on a the second meaning about corporate or private censorship
Then the government should pass laws stating that these private corporations are no longer able to moderate their own platforms as they see fit. There is no "second meaning" without concrete legal precedent.
In effect, large corporations are like secondary governments in how their actions, policies, and decisions affect our lives. That's what the second meaning is about - its not a legal concept, but rather how things work and feel in practice.
My position is that the moderation and content policies ("community guidelines") that private companies and individuals have is also a form of expression. For example, this explains the legality of op/ed pages of newspapers publishing the viewpoints which they choose to, and omitting others. You could sue Fox News or Twitter for censoring or omitting your viewpoint, but this case would not and, in my opinion, should not, be successful.
But how much, if at all, should a public company, without a single owner actually have. And if so, who should decide what the stances are? I mean the very people that now suddenly defend "private" property rights are generally the same who argue against personhood for corporations outright and in total.
They claim to be a platform, not publishers, so they shouldn't be able to invoke publisher rights and be the judge of what can or cannot be published. Let the government do this mediation. Twitter should let people ask a judge to issue content take downs based on the law and just comply with it.
"Twitter is _not allowed_ to remove porn, spam, doxxing, or death threats without a court order (of what jurisdiction?)" would immediately collapse into goatse chaos.
It's shocking how many otherwise smart people are naïve about this. Even those who have been around the Internet long enough to know full well what happens with any text box (or worse, image upload) offered.
When major corporations stop receiving billions of dollars of my taxes and special legislation and other carve outs and also don't openly court being agents of political parties then i can start treating the difference seriously.
That whole "pedo guy" episode really showed us that Elon is just a another narcissistic bully who only really cares about anything up to the point that its about him.
"Pedo guy" is not defamation, just an insult barked back at someone who told him to stick a submarine where the sun doesn't shine.
Not the classiest response, but nothing to cry about.
Considering we're talking about someone who's footing the bill to make significant innovation in multiple sectors, I still view him favourably. I disagree with him politically on a few topics and agree on others.
I hope it's not going to be like DuckDuckGo, which started like a service against Google biased / curated results and ended up manually hiding what they deemed russian propaganda during the latest war, effectively doing what Google was doing.
He insulted that man because he cast a shadow on his own useless and clueless "efforts" to help. But Musk wasn't helping, just doing cheap PR; the insulted man was actually helping.
That's despicable. He's an evil narcissist and a dangerous person.
"He's an evil narcissist and a dangerous person. "
This absolutist and judgmental attitude is what makes social networks hell. I wonder what your worst moment was and whether it happened offline or online, and how would you like to be judged for it by others.
It was not just a "moment"; he could have said that he misspoke and that he was sorry. But he persisted, and put up a nonsensical defense where he said "pedo" was a kind of nice nickname in his home country in his youth (which nobody corroborated).
He showed that what he wants is eradicate opponents and will stop at nothing. That's probably what has brought him where he is. But we don't have to respect it.
There's a big difference between saying "This was a low moment for Elon and an example of immature and rude behavior nobody should be proud of" and "Elon is an evil narcissist who will stop at nothing to eradicate opponents."
Elon was mean on Twitter. It's not like he paid people in the Thai government to frame the guy or something - which would seem much more "stop at nothing" to me.
I think it's basically the same moral fault, though maybe a slight difference of degree, to accuse a person of being a pedophile on bad evidence as it is to accuse someone of being an evil narcissist out to eradicate on bad evidence.
Musk has 80.9 million followers on Twitter. I have none. He's the richest person in the world. I am not. He publicly accused someone of being a pedophile, who was doing an actually good and useful job, not on "bad" evidence, but in the absence of any evidence of any kind, just out of the meanness of his heart, and then he doubled down on it, while also pretending "pedo" doesn't mean "pedo" (adding cowardice to malevolence). And this was neither his first time or his last. He also didn't help in any manner, his proposed "solution" did not work and only added noise to a difficult situation.
Also the insult matters. "Pedophile" is currently, in the English speaking world, the worst label imaginable. This was not just any insult, the kind one says when they're annoyed at someone in traffic for example. This was intended to kill. It was extremely mean. I maintain it revealed his true character.
It's true that Elon is more famous than you are and that makes his actions, and faults, more consequential - but I don't think it changes anything regarding moral faults. If 90 million people came and read your hackernews comment would your moral fault in accusing Elon of being an evil narcissist be made worse? It would be more consequential, but if 90 million readers read it or 90, your actions, and your moral culpability for those actions would remain unchanged.
Regarding "evidence" Elon's reasoning, if I recall correctly, was that an adult man moving to Thailand was inherently suspicious for pedophilia. Thailand has some reputation for sex tourism, especially of the underage variety. This is, as I said, bad evidence. Likewise, your belief that Elon is an evil narcissist who will stop at nothing to eradicate opponents is based on bad evidence - the mean/bad tweets.
Finally, I don't think that you reveal your character. I don't judge people based on short comments - at least not comments such as these. Just like I don't think Elon's tweets were especially revealing or damaging to his character I don't think your comments are that meaningful for your character.
He wasn't just mean on Twitter, he also paid a private detective and emailed journalists making specific claims about the guy. And after emailing journalists that they should expose the pedophile he then claimed in court to not actually have meant that the guy is a pedophile... sure. "I lost my cool and said something stupid on Twitter" would've been one thing.
That guy was an asshole and they were both assholes to each other. I would say the other guy started the conflict. And both don't come out looking very good.
And the other guy was a guy that pushed himself into the media light and made headlines and also not deserving any.
Hes very much pro free speech why would he be the wrong person? He doesn't have to become the CEO anything if he has enough influence trough his shares he can push twitter to be more open about how it make stuff trending and prevents other stuff from trending etc.
There is no doubt hes not happy with the current way Twitter restricts speech which is heavily biased and so he wants to change that.
DeSo / Bitclout is a company that had rebuild Twitter on top of a blockchain and its just not that good. The whole Twitter UI paradigm is so 15 years ago.
Never gonna happen. Mostly because there's no freedom respecting, free-as-in-libre stock exchange that RMS would be okay with using. Not to mention I'm sure he doesn't like the idea of being a twitter shareholder.
The interesting question is whether said value is based on one of his insights/visions that most others seem to lack, or whether he is outright deluding himself because of his Twitter addiction.
Of course he sees value in Twitter. He may not like it, but he would be a moron to not see the value in it. Heck, half the reason he has so many fanboys is probably because of his twitter antics.
I can see the idealism behind this question, but imagine just how hard this could backfire in practice. People discovering to what extent algorithmic ranking manipulates them, and feeds the outrage machine.
And that's what glues eyeballs and generates revenue, so changing the algorithm would work against revenue.
We shouldn't be transparent because there would be insane SEO if we were. Social media needs to be a black box or the only thing you'd see if propaganda and ads.
this is a pretty dumb idea. Suppose it happens, that'll simply give power to the programmer community to shove their algorithm, whatever they come up with, down everyone's throat. The key issue isn't that the algorithm is close source but it's a single algorithm.
People should be able to customize the algorithm (aka make their own algorithm). As long as that is possible and the options are clear, no one cares if it's open source or not.
They could open source older versions. It would still allow people to see close to what the algorithm is without seeing what is currently in production.
This is already allowed on twitter, along with lots of other "cancelled opinions" (despite any stated rules to the contrary - they do not take action against such posts). One of the freedoms you have in many parts of the internet is being able to express regressive opinions like that without being banned or having your posts deleted.
> The science of basic human biology is now a “regressive opinion.” Stunning.
Your lack of medical knowledge is just as stunning.
Not only does intersex exist (yes, humans can indeed have both primary sexual organs, though it's rare), there's also a plethora of conditions that blur the line, from De la Chapelle-Syndrom to Swyer-Syndrom. There's chromosomal-, gonadal-, hormonal-, and anatomical variations that are part of "basic human biology" yet result in individuals that cannot easily be classified by vagina=woman and penis=man.
Despite the messiness of biology it is, has always been, and always will be a reasonable statement to say that "boys have a penis and girls have a vagina". That really shouldn't need saying. Of course, the meaning of the statement depends on the meaning you assign to "boy", "girl", as well as "penis" and "vagina". But in the semantic/communication environment in which we operate, the statement is reasonable because most people define those words such that the statement evaluates to usually-true. And usually-true is what we work with in biology and language; it's not computer science, it's messy, so approximate language is appropriate.
I've seen this argument a few times, but I don't think it holds up
The majority of trans people have/had functioning genitalia. Gender identity isn't restricted to the set of people outside the crudely simple vagina=woman penis=man classification
There's a spectrum of opinion which is easier to consider with hair color identity as opposed to gender identity
If there's blonds & brunettes, the existence of redheads doesn't mean blond vs brunette is moot. & don't even get started on dirty blonds. But if a blond dies their hair brunette, are they blond or brunette? Their roots still say blond. But they put much care into dying frequently enough that the roots aren't visible. So society accepts them as brunette. Meanwhile the more pro-identity group will argue that not only is the blond brunette, but has _always been_ brunette[1]
The latter argument is much harder to defend, & from what I can tell arguments tend to do one of two things:
1. both parties focus on arguing against the weakest arguments of their opposition, leading to two parties talking past each other
2. both parties shift the argument to the most debatable point either way, which can often shift the dividing line of for/against to be at some extreme as opposed to in the generally accepted gray area between the extreme & the counter
Full disclosure: I'm fine using people's preferred pronouns even if I believe in biological gender (ie I don't believe pronouns need to be tied to biological gender, because while I generally need pronouns for everyone I may refer to, I generally don't care about their genitals). That said, I mostly find gender roles a hassle; being a man who has enjoyed wearing a dress & putting on nail polish doesn't mean I identify as a woman
[1] out of politeness one may not want to make a point of randomly pointing out that a brunette haired person was actually born blond, even if they don't believe they were always brunette
You might wanna look up the The Babylon Bee (Satire) twitter incident.
"Allowed" doesn't mean anything on Twitter. People get punished for thing that do not break the rules including obvious satire.
Elon is completely right Twitter has lost common sense when in comes to enforcing their own rules.
Not commenting on the particular issue that the GP used to illustrate their point about free speech but because Elon has definitely raised concerns about censorship on twitter before their comment is relevant. A sizeable stake in the company should presumably give him some influence in determining twitter's policies.
(Also, I think your comment breaks several of the 'In comments' guidelines)
You're right my comment does technically, but in my defence it wasn't responding to a good faith discussion about free speech, it was responding to a bad faith transphobic talking point. But yeah I could've made that point more politely.
It's not transphobic to point out material biological reality.
This accusation gets thrown around far too easily these days; it's really losing its power. A few years ago, if someone was accused of saying something transphobic, I'd think, wow they really must have said something horrible like a slur or an abusive remark.
Nowadays, I just assume that they mentioned a previously uncontroversial fact relating to biological sex.
I don't agree with you. For me , no longer feeling free to state the simple biological definitions that I assign to the words "man" and "woman" is absolutely the first thing I think of when someone mentions freedom of speech. On Twitter and off.
Unless you're personally trans or transphobic, what is it about those words that make them the most important thing to you when it comes to freedom of speech?
They're not remotely what comes into my head for that subject, and I can think of many things where freedom of speech is far more important to me than which words are used in which ways to define sex/gender/etc.
Is it possible that you too have allowed minority interest groups to convince you that trans people are the next big threat, just as gay people were decades ago, and that's why it's the first thing you think of? (Not a rhetorical question, I don't know anything about you and hopefully you're completely not transphobic! But many transphobic people don't consider that word to describe them yet do fall for and repeat explicitly transphobic agendas...)
You keep framing this issue as if it only affects trans people.
The biological definition of man and woman is a category that's pretty relevant to everyone. And pulling the rug out from under a biological concept, and then saying "Oh how strange that you all are thinking about this, it must only be because you are a transphobe, or a pervert" is an extremely disingenuous argument at best.
I asked a genuine question of why it matters so much to you (and explained that it was a genuine question because I dont feel it matters to me) and you haven't answered, instead you've just accused me of not caring about your view.
Please enlighten me if there's a non-transphobic reason to care what pronounces my next door neighbour uses.
And nobody is talking about pulling the rug from biological concepts - they're remaining the same regardless of what language we all use. "Male-born" and "penis-having" for example are (and I've no idea if these are the best / commonly accepted terms, this isn't an area I know much about) and I'm sure plenty of other related terms can still describe exact situations if you're wanting to think about someone's genitals while using their pronouns.
But unless you're a doctor about to operate on me or somebody I want to have sex with, I probably don't care if you know what genitals I have or don't have nor do I understand why you'd think it important to know.
It's not about genitals per se! Genitals are mentioned as a proxy for the concept of biological sex. I think you know that, but are pretending not to. So, by all means engage in debate with us about whether it's reasonable to use the words "man" and "women" to refer to the biological sex concepts; but please don't pretend the argument is about genitals: it's the concept of biologically-defined sex that's been attacked, not the concept of genitally-defined sex.
I'm not saying all this talk about genitals is a great idea; it's perhaps a bit inflammatory and juvenile. But that's not the point here.
Dear fellow HN users: please do not flag things simply because they are representing a stance that you disagree with; we should use down-voting for that if we have the karma. This post does not violate our guidelines:
--------------------------------------
There are many good reasons why one might want to refer to a person's biological sex in conversation.
For example:
"Why is that man being allowed to compete in a women's sporting event?"
"Why is that man flashing his penis in the women-only area of the nude spa?"
"Why is that man calling himself a lesbian and haranguing actual lesbians for not being sexually interested in him?"
> what is it about those words that make them the most important thing to you when it comes to freedom of speech?
As ramblerman says, it's because it's a fundamental biological concept that's central to my existence as a member of Homo sapiens. It's absolutely unacceptable to me that I or anyone might not feel comfortable stating that we (surprise!) adhere to the traditional definitions of the words "man" and "woman". I don't really understand why you think something so fundamental doesn't matter.
You repeatedly attempt to put words into people's mouths.
GP never said those words were "the most important thing to (them)". If anything, they seem more concerned that if they "state the simple biological definitions" will bring up people exactly like you, accusing them of the transphobia and potentially getting them banned (on a platform like Twitter).
You are not well-intentioned at all in this discussion: there was no reason to go on the banter to the extent you did.
I'd understand it if you said that we are at a time where we are challenging those definitions as they used to stand, as long as you recognize that "definitions", by definition, are prescriptive and need to be agreed between people to make them widely accepted. So I can define whatever terms I want the way I like them, it does not make them so unless I can get enough people to start using them that way, or ideally included in one of the well-known dictionaries of a language.
When I said "freedom of speech" I'm not referring to legal rights. I'm referring to whether or not the nature of our society is such that holders of divergent views are not subject to shaming or ostracization by any substantial subgroup, as long as their views are politely and respectfully expressed.
That’s seems dumb to me. Now I question under this “freedom of speech” should I be allowed to make that first sentence ? For all intents and purposes I am “shaming” your view. Flagging would be arguably ostracizing.
Would the inability to do this mean my own freedom of speech to shame your views would be infringed? It seems like an unsustainable paradox to me that falls apart in various use cases that cannot function in society as we know. At least not if we seek to ban/prosecute things such as child pornography, revenge porn, libel, etc.
I've been thinking about this. To be honest, you're not the first person to tell me that my usage of "freedom of speech" is incoherent. I think, when I say "freedom of speech", what I really mean is perhaps more what you'd call "open mindedness". Specifically: I do not shun or disrespect the progressives with whom I work. I don't try to police the language that they use. I feel unwelcome on company chat channels because everybody is expressing progressive viewpoints, so it hardly seems like it's going to go well to say "Hi, nice to meet you. I'm a liberal but I'm, um, not actually on board with all this woke stuff". But I don't even hold that against them most of the time, I just try to forget that the people I'm working with might also be expressing intolerant woke views on the #general chat channel.
So what I'm looking for is for them to extend the same respect that I extend to them, to people like me who don't share their views. And they don't: they are so certain that theirs is the only correct viewpoint.
You’re not going to get in trouble on Twitter for stating a general fact. However, you will sometimes get in trouble if you’re using thinly veiled talking points that are intended to deny the claimed identity of millions of people. It’s mean spirited and hurts others. Hopefully this helps you understand why it’s a contentious thing to post.
Sounds like laying the groundwork for stock manipulation. There is a subtle threat there, that he might dump those shares if people vote that Twitter is not a free speech place.
He can buy enough to influence Twitter management. If he can accrue roughly 20%, I imagine he can easily influence their 30-something CEO. At the same time, Twitter will become another meme stock for the r/wsb crowd. Elon will exit at a healthy profit. TWTR has been an underperforming stock for such a long time, it’s ripe for something like this to completely remake the company.
That’s very fair. Most people, regardless of age, would listen to Elon Musk especially in SV. I actually like Parag so it wasn’t meant as a knock on him.
If his plans are to turn twitter into an untouchable free speech zone, then twitter's in a world of pain.
We've seen from the past 4 or so years with QAnon, anti-vaxers, flat-earthers etc, that free speech to the wrong listener can be weaponised. If you make twitter censor-proof, all you'll get is a bigger trash fire.
I was sad when I got kicked off Twitter, but it possibly ended up being the best thing for me. Damn twitter is a toxic place... and if Elon turns it into censor-proof cesspool, I give the platform 5 years tops before it becomes yet another social platform that nobody uses anymore.
Those "opinions" are heavily inflated by bots and other fake accounts. I've observed this behaviour around 2012 on Youtube comments, where the usual tinfoil nutjobs kept running several accounts at once and artificially upvoted their fantasies and downvoted any criticism. It happened on multiple videos on very specific topics from respectable sources. Usually moon landing, 9/11 and so on. It's pretty much the same now on Twitter. It's just the scale that's different, and apparently also the professionalism behind it.
That's the problem, yes. I fully agree with your point. Just wanted to add some observations. Every community needs some form of "censor", or as we called it back in the day: "moderator". Just to keep things civil.
The only way to stop bots, or at least lessen their impact, would be to make verification via ID (passport, drivers license, etc) mandatory. But that opens up a whole other can of worms.
Another thing i noticed is, that many people don't seem to know what "free speech" actually is. Maybe it's different in the US. I can only speak for the German version of it. It's to protect you from prosecution by the government. It is not a free ticket to attack others and it doesn't protect from criticism.
I'd be perfectly happy to put up with the rampant bot problem forever if it meant the censorship problem went away forever. And don't pretend censorship is actually even an effective solution: remember that today we have a bot problem and a censorship problem.
What’s wrong with being anti-vax? Should we kick off the anti-GMO people as well? And QAnon is like the left wing boogie man. Anyone complaining about it sounds like a left wing Alex Jones. It’s silly.
QAnon is "real", or at least real enough that it keeps coming up in indictments of Jan 6 people. Whereas Alex Jones libels the parents of murdered children.
It's factually incorrect and unhealthy. Plenty of science out there on the subject. Bans can cause backlash - it's better to just leave Twitter yourself so as not to be exposed to that particular "reality" which is not at all similar to the one that exists in meat space. Or, at least, to admit that you may be incapable of deciphering truth from fact with that much misinformation around and so many others happy to believe it without applying rigorous examination, vetting sources, etc.
Also, believe it or not but there actually are people who believe the Qanon nonsense. It's been widely reported on.
A very material number of people believe in that stuff.
More broadly - misinformation is very real.
It's 'silly' to believe that somehow the truth rises to the top. People believe the story that makes them 'feel' a certain way, and will deny the reality in their faces.
I'm on RT and watching Russian commenters indicate that all the 'dead bodies in Bucha' (near Kyiv) were Ukrainians killed by Ukrainians as a 'false flag'. Others say it they are not real. Other say actors. Others say it doesn't exist.
In 2022 you can just make up your own reality and spread it on Twitter, and that's dangerous.
Could not agree more. What conspiracies theories have taught us, and yes, I realize this is still an unpopular opinion, is that free speech is overrated.
Free speech, like everything else, needs regulations to work. This is hard, and maybe impossible to do well, but the alternative (no regulations) leads to chaos. Not just chaos of discussion: chaos of society.
I think you have the wrong interpretation. Harmful narratives forming is not the failure here, that is an old "problem" with free speech. [0]
The problem Twitter emphasizes is that free speech and anonymity do not work at scale. Pre-internet, speech always had a degree of accountability because you know who's saying what. Now, you don't know if you're engaging with with an ad team, a bot-net, a trained cohort in another country, or just your dumb neighbor's political views.
The reasonable netizen has to assume the majority of what you see online is manipulated and fake. We can't fairly say the worst parts of twitter are purely a failure of free speech.
That being said, its an age old battle which system is better: one that is free, open, optional, and sometimes gets it wrong or one that is closed, managed, unavoidable, and can't be reviewed when it does get it wrong.
I think people should stop saying today's context is "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" and instead compare today's environment to "Everyone in the theater shouting fire every second throughout the whole movie while everyone smokes a cigarette"
the point is, there's a difference between "shouting fire in a theater" vs. "russian agents disguised as patrons shouting fire in a theater with the express purpose of causing chaos and harm"
Real "free speech" is hard and prohibitively expensive to maintain.
But if we can accept that there's not "right" without "wrong" or a coin's "tail" without a "head", we can sympathize with those we deem unworthy of "free speech".
I don't think there's much that Musk can do to increase Twitter's revenue, but at least the market seems to believe that he can hype this one beyond reasonable valuations, too.
If you don’t care about directly making money, you can treat the platform as a way to promote or reject whatever messaging you want to millions of users.
If it’s a public company, it’d be subject to the will of the shareholders and have other corporate responsibilities. If it’s private, it can do whatever he wants it.
A private corporation is bad because its owner can use it to promote their own personal views. OTOH, a publicly traded corporation is also bad because because, motivated solely by growth, it will eventually need to engage in anti-societal behavior (dangerous algorithms, dark patterns, lobbying, fines as cost-of-doing-business, union-busting, etc). [Is this late-stage capitalism?](butterfly_meme.jpg) Where do we even go from here?
> OTOH, a publicly traded corporation is also bad because because, motivated solely by growth,
There is nothing that says a public company must only be motivated by growth. Tesla's mission statement doesn't say anything of the sort and has done things that don't fulfill the idea of growth or profit at all costs.
Now you might argue that institutional investors don't care about that since there's an indirection between actual shareholders, but that's a related but different issue.
Haha. The outraged complaints by those who've been repeating that line for years claiming "Twitter is a private company, they can ban who they like" would be epic.
Also I bet they would call to regulate or even nationalize social media platforms as soon as companies like Twitter switch to a more balanced moderation approach and don't aid in amplifying certain politics.
I don’t think he cares about revenue. I think he is trying to build a majority share and then take the company private. It is the very fact that twitter is a public company to begin with, that is pushing it to extremes. Social media companies should be banned from the stock market.
"It's a private company" has been the excuse for the abusive censorship. Are you saying if someone has right wing leanings on free speech that politicians will now change their tune and threaten it?
Not at all (under the assumption that a possible Twitter under Elon Musk would continue to adhere to local laws).
But trying to shut down a platform which is considered (by some) "critical infrastructure" might find you in a position where regulations restrict what you can do.
It's not a certainty but a possibility that this might happen (regardless of who is in power at the time.) Many politicians of different leanings use Twitter for communication.
A public company needs (endless) growth, it's the only reason to own stock.
Growth in social media means attracting more users and/or increasing engagement of existing users. Civil and reasonable discourse is bad for engagement numbers, outrage and extremism do much better.
> Can you explain how being public pushes Twitter to extremes ?
Public companies and their leadership face much more pressure to show profit and growth every 3 months. This pushes them toward short-term thinking and easy ways to juice their numbers. For social media the easiest way to do this is the promote and encourage content that incites outrage, since this drives engagement, which in turn drives ad $$$
yes, but being a public company prevents it from doing anything that deliberately lowers revenues. As a private company they'd be less beholden to advertisers.
Source? While it was apparently over $20B at the peak of its value, according to https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/DWAC it seems to currently be bellow $2.5B
That’s just the float of the SPAC, the merger didn’t go through yet. The prospectus says that after the merger there will be 193.4 million shares outstanding so multiply 193m with the stock price to get a pro forma market cap of $11+B
Which goes to show that none of these social media companies are built on inimitable technology dominance, there is no technology moat, only a network moat.
Since we already have a media oligarchy we can't get rid of, maybe it'll help to inject some new blood into it. I don't think Musk has the right answers, but maybe we can hope he won't be copying from Murdoch's homework. Remains to be seen, I suppose.
Smart move for a billionaire that wants to influence public opinion. The usual route is to buy a magazine or newspaper but in our new world, being a highly influential stock owner of a social media company is the way forward.
(I'd suspect Musk of wanting to run for office, except I don't think he'd accept a lesser office than President which he's ineligible for. Maybe a state governor like Arnie?)
You might recall a certain movement asking for Obama's birth certificate to prove that he was born in the US, back when he ran for president.
It's not completely clear that you need to be born in the US - several presidents and presidential candidates weren't - but it's pretty clear that foreigners who become naturalized US citizens later in life are not eligible to run for president.
Yes - I don’t believe there is a requirement to be born inside US territory (Ted Cruz was born in Canada and clearly desperately wants to be president!) - just to be a US citizen at birth.
He was born in the British colony of Virginia. There's no point in history where you could describe that as "foreign" to the US, in the same way you wouldn't say Stalin was "foreign born" from the USSR.
Because those types of people want power, and even when you're the richest guy in the world, there are things you can't do unless you're head of a country.
What power do politicians have? I guess you can nudge bureaucratic legislation to favor one group of developers over another and get favorable investment deals, but that just gets you more money.
Or maybe you can elect a district attorney and go after an enemy of yours, but even that's not an easy win. And you can always buy influence for this sort of thing without going through the trouble and cost of running
You certainly can't wave a magic wand and garner favor and respect from people. People hate politicians in the US.
I don't know, I just don't see the "power". It's just an appeal to narcissism as people in the media would be obsessing over you and dissecting every word you say. But that's definitely not power.
The fewer politicians there are, the more power they have. In the US, levers of power are widely distributed compared to a typical autocratic country. If you want to avoid autocratic rule, split up the power into many hands. The end result may look like a top heavy lumbering bureaucracy, but if it's difficult to wrest control of someone's lever of power from them then you have a better defense against autocratic takeover.
It almost like it was intentional on the part of the founders of the US
Sadly we did not heed their wisdom and we have over the course of time consolidated power in the the hands of fewer people by putting more things into the hands of the federal government, allowed congress to shift their responsibility to the executive, and failing to increase the size of congress.
Trump vaporized Soleimani; you can't do that when you're just the host of a TV show.
Obama to this day loves to brag about how he sent SEAL Team 6 to deal with enemies of the US; you can't do that either when you're just a successful author.
Hollande (former French president) also bragged to journalists, many times, about assassinating ISIS leaders.
These are "normal" leaders elected in democracies; it's much worse of course with more authoritarian regimes.
Real power is the power to kill other human beings and not suffer any consequence for it. We don't usually talk about that when discussing politics, but this is what aspiring leaders really crave.
>Real power is the power to kill other human beings and not suffer any consequence for it. We don't usually talk about that when discussing politics, but this is what aspiring leaders really crave.
Well put. It makes sense in that context that Musk's fans think he has no interest in politics and his detractors think he must.
As insane as Musk's fanbase can be, I still find his detractors' view of the world less realistic. There's a metric to assess that opinion by. As a fan, I predict he won't run for political office on Earth.
It's not like President Musk would have the authority to murder anyone. His murder powers would largely be limited to the Middle East and loosely defined enemies of the United States.
Musk has never shown a desire to murder random people and he has never shown particular hatred for those in the Middle East. Why would he want the power to murder people who are basically unrelated to him?
> Trump vaporized Soleimani; you can't do that when you're just the host of a TV show.
True, but Musk has a fleet of absurdly huge rockets at his command. If he really wanted to, he could de-orbit something large on top of Tehran.
Given the rate at which he is progressing toward his stated goals, he’s not that far from being able to do that and get away with it - by moving to Mars.
Yeah, this post is mostly tongue-in-cheek, but there is some truth to it. SpaceX is a company with assets that could easily be weaponized far in excess of many country’s militaries. I’m now imagining a future where a crazed trillionaire executes a first strike against some country with kinetic energy weapons, flees to a different planet, and all the governments of the world are scrambling trying to figure out if they can retrieve him.
> I’m now imagining a future where a crazed trillionaire executes a first strike against some country with kinetic energy weapons, flees to a different planet, and all the governments of the world are scrambling trying to figure out if they can retrieve him.
I get what you're saying, and I would agree that the power of _most_ politicians is minimal compared to the absolute richest people in the world (so not just mere single-digit billionaires, unless their wealth is built on owning a platform, like Oprah).
However, read the book Charlie Wilson's War. Wilson had no money to speak of, but the book reveals the incredible power that he wielded, largely by sidling up to selective groups (like the Israeli lobby) and getting key committee appointments. And Wilson wasn't even a U.S. Senator! (Generally speaking Representatives have far less power than Senators)
I mean, it would be trivial for a president with a lot of stock in EV companies to reduce domestic oil drilling/pipelines, start a "police action" in the Middle East that combined with super harsh sanctions on Iran, Russia and Venezuela sends oil soaring.
Why would he run for president, when he could quite possibly own a planet if he keeps moving forward with his Mars goals.
If he establishes a base on mars, it is essentially his. Earth based countries are forbidden (in treaty at least) from claiming ownership of celestial bodies. What's to stop him declaring himself emperor of Mars. The person that controls the flow of supplies to an isolated world is pretty much all powerful.
> Why would he run for president, when he could quite possibly own a planet if he keeps moving forward with his Mars goals.
Countries have armies. Armies enforce international (and eventually planetary) rights. Countries also make laws. Laws that Musk must follow or risk consequences.
> If he establishes a base on mars, it is essentially his. Earth based countries are forbidden (in treaty at least) from claiming ownership of celestial bodies. What's to stop him declaring himself emperor of Mars.
He’d be a paper emperor. No method or means of enforcing his claimed dominion.
> The person that controls the flow of supplies to an isolated world is pretty much all powerful.
Countries control the right to launch those supplies. Musk is a few steps below that in the chain of power.
You realise he needs permission from the government to even develop rockets, much less launch them into space and all the other crap. Unless there's an autonomous community on Mars that can defend from the US Space force, no private entity will be emperor of anything unless they are controlling things on Earth.
He does not even have to move an openly hostile country, better if he doesn't, Any country in south america or africa would bend over backwards to get his companies. Imagine the economic boom those countries would experience via trade with a space faring nation.
He already has permission to launch his rockets. Or he can just move the company to another country. Once the colony is established and has reached a certain size its probably inevitable. At that point what is the US going to do? Nuke the colonies to prevent independence? Figure out a way to load 100's of marines onto rockets and send them to mars? Starve the colonies? I very much doubt any of those things happen. As soon as a colony is established I think the path to independence begins.
Why would being largest shareholder of a company not give you any special privileges in a company? Also, it guarantees him at least one seat on the board, and probably enough clout to help dictate the future direction of the company.
If your largest shareholder says the current methodology used for content manipulation and account banning is bad for business, then there will be systemic changes as a result.
I'm waiting for some Musk tweet, the requisite outrage from an impassioned subset of the populace, a quick-witted Musk response, followed by the new title:
Worth noting that the date of buying these shares is March 14th, and the date he started rather unsubtly tweeting about Twitter's approach to free speech is March 25th. So to be clear, anyone who thought that Musk's actions are the result of the twitter poll he ran has clearly been misled.
> The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.
Is pretty disingenuous when it turns out that he's launched the poll a week after he already decided to buy 10% of the stock. Do you seriously think Musk spent several billion dollars on twitter stock and then decided to check what people think?
I just don't think it's very likely that Elon Musk spend billions buying a stake in twitter before he knew what he wanted to do with the company, especially since his view on free speech is already well known and goes far beyond even vocal free speech advocates.
In what way is his view on free speech far beyond vocal free speech advocates? I think it’s pretty uncontroversial that Twitter is the de-facto public square on the internet, and so it is bad that they clearly have a political leaning when it comes to content moderation. I know they’re a private company. But it’s just naïve at this point to think Twitter is the same as any old private company.
Well on the "far beyond free speech advocates", the position that the SEC can't prevent market manipulation due to the first amendment is a position that basically no one sensible takes. Or that he's happy using "Free Speech" to slander people.
On the subject of Twitter being a public square, I think that's a pretty absurd assertion, it's one of a plethora of social media sites - Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Whatsapp, Reddit, Tiktok, Telegram, Snapchat. And it's not even particularly large compared to that competition. It's not even like Twitter has grown to become some behemoth, it's share price is about flat over the last decade. This isn't some behemoth that needs regulating.
His Twitter poll about selling 10% of Tesla was equally disingenuous.
He had pre-arranged those sales in mid-September according to regulatory filings. He also didn’t mention in the tweets that he has millions of stock options that must be exercised.
It makes me sad to see that his fan base turned into a cult for the most part. I used to admire him until the veil fell off, I still admire the technologies him and the smart people at Tesla and SpaceX have created, but my admiration doesn't extend to him anymore.
Man but the bad 10% is so rough. The Thai diver situation wasn't some off the cuff rant, that was someone wealthy and influential in concerted effort to utterly destroy someone who had done some good in the world. Intellectual genius but moral void can still apparently be admirable?
I wouldn't call it a moral void. Heroes are better and worse than ordinary people, it's unfortunate that we've been raised on simplistic stories where if someone is worth being on a side with they can't have any significant flaws.
I fully recognize that people exist in shades of gray.
However, I also believe that there are actions that people can and do take that put them beyond what contrition could repair-- and Musk hasn't publicly apologized for this, even.
Just like him I've got to a position where I can live very comfortably, but I would never ever give up my comfortable life and all my money for creating/buying startups that will most likely fail (of course I'm still investing).
I have all admiration for him that can't be taken away by any kind of fan base.
Sorry I was not clear, it was not the fan base that turned me away from him. It was the way he treated his workers during the start of the pandemic, forcing them to work. Along with other workplace controversies.
That's just my opinion, but I don't admire someone that prioritizes profit over human life.
I believe OP is referring to Musk re-opening production against Alameda County's standing work-stop rules at the time.
This isn't necessarily the same as forcing people to work, but I have no idea if Tesla employees willing to return vs. those deciding to follow county rules saw any advantages or disadvantages at work as a result. Certainly forcing people to defy government rules to keep their jobs would be highly problematic to me as well, for example.
You’re right, but actually the workers know what they are getting into in return for their options packages, it’s clear on Glassdoor. When I was looking for jobs in 2016, my slogan for myself was invest in Tesla, work at Google, not the other way around.
The only problem is that the stock price was growing more than the revenue, so I’m not sure how fast it can keep up growing, and what the current employees are expecting.
Is this a common belief? That he is taking "risks" others don't have the courage to? This is a new one to me and interesting cultural development for sure.
Edit: Just kind of seems in contradiction to the previous stories of him where it focused on his intelligence/de facto technocratic authority to save the world. It wasn't so much his courage, but his moral rectitude combined with capital resources -- "he is going to save the world! Take us to mars!"
His two main companies have apparently taken risks that established companies in those areas were not willing to do.
Could Boeing built a self-landing reusable rocket? Almost certainly. Would they have been willing to, considering it almost certainly involves failing in explosive ways multiple times? That may be a risk they aren't willing to take.
> Could Boeing built a self-landing reusable rocket? Almost certainly.
McDonnell Douglas is part of Boeing and (before they were part of Boeing) did the DC-X prototype.
One failure ended the program, but it was transfered from McDonnell to NASA at that point I think and funding was shifted towards the reusable VentureStar. But it did demonstrate reuse and went through a partial failure of a hydrogen explosion and recovery:
I would say it’s common. Both SpaceX and Tesla almost ran out of money with Musk maximally invested. Both moments were widely reported 5-10 years ago when they happened.
Even if you say that someone like him simply enjoys work, it seems clear that he's often working an uncomfortable amount, in order to achieve his two stated objectives, which at least in his perspective are altruistic (and are objectively not the best ways for him to get richer.)
I'm not sure you can argue that the richest man in the world got rich by accident while pursuing purely altruistic goals. He clearly knows what he's doing.
I say this while having an appreciation for the existence of Tesla and SpaceX, but let's not pretend he supresses unionisation at his factories because he cares too much.
not by accident, but getting rich clearly wasn't his goal when he dumped all his money into the start ups. why aren't we glad the richest man in the world got there by using his resources for futuristic ideas instead of something like oil and gas
I actually am glad of that - I think Elon is one of the less-bad billionaires. His views are stupid and most of his ideas are too, and billionaires shouldn't exist at all, but I am glad that he made his money building companies that are doing important things. Well, SpaceX and Tesla are - the Boring Company and Neuralink seem like boondoggles, to say nothing of Hyperloop.
SpaceX is interesting, but are they really doing anything important? Maybe if starlink goes global, but until then it doesn't seem to change anything in my or many peoples lives by not existing.
They are working on interesting problems though, far more interesting to me than most companies (including Tesla)
> SpaceX is interesting, but are they really doing anything important?
I'd say it's the most important company on the planet seeing as it's the only one that's truly carving a path for us to one day become a spacefaring civilization and doing so at a seemingly 10x faster pace than competitors
Spacefaring? Hopefully you mean Marsfaring (at best, if you can find a good reason to set up a colony there)
The average stellar density around our sun is about 0.004 per cubic light year, so definitely don't get your hopes up on some Star Trek scenario for the next few hundred years at least.
What is SpaceX's value again? P.S. Musk himself admits that SpaceX wouldn't be a thing if it hadn't been saved by a phone call from NASA. You know, the government, the same entity that Musk worshipers seem to dismiss as the lesser party when it comes to ingenuity and forward-progression.
I don't see that at all. We're never going to spacefare on chemical rockets, unless you mean maybe going as far as the asteroid belt.
Reusable rockets are about satellites and maybe the space station. But until we see something use the cheap launches to improve life on earth, it's meaningless.
That said, I'd invest in SpaceX for the Starlink potential if it was public.
SpaceX has drastically lowered cost/mass to put something in orbit with Falcon 9. If they are successful with Starship they will do so again. Already lowering cost to orbit is increasing access to space for companies, universities, and governments. This is huge. Their success has lead to a number of new companies trying to innovate in a similar way and even. altering how governments plan to run future space programs.
Lower cost to transportation is key for pretty much any economic growth. People and companies have significantly more plans than just a couple probes every few years. Exploration, mining, tourism, scientific research, manufacturing are a couple things that come to mind. There are probably many more ideas than what i can think of and that’s the point. Make it cheaper for people with ideas to make them a reality. When only the largest of governments can afford to put something into space then we won’t see much innovation/economic growth.
You should check your facts. Elon doesn’t own any houses, he lives in rentals. Also in 2008 when he didn’t even have money for that after putting all his PayPal money into the startups, he was living at his friends’ places.
But the main point is the side comment: I’m having fun coding whenever I want to, but I strictly do non-payed hobby projects, as I don’t want to get into commitments ever again.
You mean the state with one of the lowest effective property tax rates in the country? Your property tax is pegged to 1% of the purchase price, and essentially never goes up ever again.
One of the only (if not the only) state where that happens.
The main reason not to own in CA is the insane purchase price, not the taxes.
Loads of wealthy people live in houses that they themselves don't directly own. Instead they'll form a real estate LLC that owns property, pays contractors to maintain the houses, and the people will then pay rent to their own LLC to live there to cover the maintenance costs and whatever mortgage/debt the LLC has.
The link you sent doesn’t confirm the comment that he owns lots of houses. Of course he won’t live in a bad place, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t stick to facts.
He could waste a lot of money on failed startups and never have any appreciable impact on his day to day life and standard of living other than his own satisfaction of seeing $BigMoneyNumber.
Can't he both be a smart person and encouraging his fanbase to more cultish?
If one looked at life and fame as an engineer, having a rabid and large fanbase allows for new opportunities (financial and otherwise). So it'd be suboptimal not to encourage that.
Or as Matt Levine pontificated, if you're the kind of guy who can spike a cryptocurrency by writing something nice on Twitter, and you manage a public company, there's an argument that it's your fiduciary responsibility to do so in a buy-tweet-sell manner.
Matt Levine was, clearly, being snarky. Especially considering that such activity would be illegal.
As for "suboptimal", if you're trying to maximize financial or other gains regardless of societal impact or human suffering, maybe what you describe is correct, but it also requires the person to be a bit of a sociopathic asshole to choose that path.
It may take a long time for the ship to turn, but it has turned. John McAfee was indicted by the CFTC for doing this sort of pump & dump. I think anyone as high profile as a CEO would find themselves in the same boat.
Separately from that is the way Musk keeps Tesla in the public eye through various stunts etc., which is a little different than a pump & dump. How much of that is his personality, and how much of it is deliberate strategy? I don't know. I'd speculate that some of it started as personality, and when he saw the results he leaned into it hard and it became strategy. On that aspect of things, you have a point in that a CEO who can do that should probably take advantage of it, and I wouldn't necessarily attach sociopathic tendencies to that behavior as a requirement for acting that way: it doesn't seem to hurt anyone. At least I think it doesn't? Who suffers if TSLA is overvalued? And that would require a good way of determining if it actually is overvalued, something I don't think is straightforward. I guess short sellers suffer, but they could simply have been wrong about TSLA being over valued, and that's on them.
I don't think all CEOs should give it a try though. First because, well, most just don't have whatever quality is necessary to make it work. Second because if everyone tried it, it would just become so much noise, and probably drown out the efforts of those like Musk who can actually pull it off. In Levine-esque speculation, I wonder if Musk would have a legal case against those CEO's if they made his own antics worthless? Some type of tortious interference maybe?
Wasn't McAfee personally trading though? I'm not as up on his more recent insanity.
+1 agreed on the rest. It's an interesting thought problem. Capital was less formal during the late 19th century monopoly era in the US, but it makes me wonder if there were schemes where Morgan or Rockefeller publicly circulated market moves.
The guy knows how to hire smart people and keep them around, that in an of itself is rare these days and worth admiration.
I can't think of many living CEOs as effective as him in this regard.
I wouldn't say my admiration extends outside of areas he is an expert in though, usually when he starts talking about anything else he talks out of his ass.
Executives != smart people, some of them are but revolving door of executives speaks more to how hard it is to find good executives and just how cutthroat of an environment Tesla is performance wise.
I know for a fact the good engineers are sticking around because I know a bunch of them personally. I wouldn't say all of them are staying because of Elon alone but it generally factors into the calculation (along with massively appreciated stock options ofcourse...)
People stayed even with the stock was getting crapped on by Wall Street, he was clearly able to convince everyone that the company would succeed and opinions of the companies future would turn around.
Going to Tesla a few years ago was a hard choice, they paid below market (substantially) but offered pretty generous stock grants.
The stock hadn't really appreciated in-line with the companies growth because of the enormous risk of the Model 3 project. This represented massive risk overhang that until cleared didn't allow the stock to really take off.
2020 (over?) corrected for that however so now the employees that have put in the years are sitting on massive unrealized gains.
He's a good salesman in getting people to invest money or (in this case) time. But the discussion was talking about retention. And that's just because people are about to clear huge paydays.
This is what happens when you gradually drive away the reasonable people from any group - what's left is a combination of natural cultists and formerly reasonable-ish people who got railroaded into a cult without realizing it.
If I wrote off every genius who is also unstable or acts like an ass I would have to delete a lot of my music collection.
If you are idolizing someone, it's because the veil hasn't fallen off yet. Everyone is crazy. The question for me is: does the good outweigh the bad?
I'd say it does for Elon. Reusable rockets and helping push EVs over the adoption hump are far more important than trolling like a thirteen year old boy on Twitter or playing Dukes of Hazard with the SEC.
I don't think Elon was strategically necessary to get EVs over the adoption hump, in that the market was primed for _someone_ to do it. And retrspectively it's been a huge distraction from the change we really need, which is the improvement of public transportation in our largest cities.
But I can't comment on the reusable rockets thing, I suppose time will only tell.
Nah, it just doesn't work that way. Things don't happen until someone does them. Doesn't matter how easy the pitch is. Someone has to hit the ball.
In my experience most companies and governments are risk-averse and nobody wants to do anything until the mythical "someone else" does it. In the absence of a market equilibrium "defector" (game theory) it usually takes a government mandate or subsidy, and even that often fails if it results in "malicious compliance" like GM's EV1 debacle. (The EV1 was clearly sabotaged. It was intended to fail and when drivers actually liked it it was pulled, with GM even more or less confiscating and crushing them.)
The truth is that a significant proportion of the classical auto industry hated EVs. Some still do. The car industry is long wedded to the ICE and the good old fashioned "vroom vroom" as being essential to what makes a car a car, and everyone from unions to equipment makers to oil companies and petrostates had no interest in disruption.
There are still holdouts like Toyota that are just now being dragged into EVs and Koch Industries is still bankrolling anti-EV disinformation.
The reusable rockets thing was much worse than EVs. The space industry used to be smaller and was dominated by stolid mega-corporations with backgrounds in defense contracting that had absolutely zero incentive to change anything. The conventional wisdom in engineering was that current space launch tech was as good as it could get to the point that you had people authoring paper studies claiming that reusability actually wouldn't deliver much of a win (stop laughing!).
It took an utter lunatic to be willing to lose hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to disrupt space. As SpaceX worked on reusability they did so against a chorus of classical aerospace people and even NASA people claiming they would either fail or build a system that would be more expensive than disposable rockets.
I heard people continuing to make this claim even after F9 cores had been flown multiple times. They seemed to shut up when the video of those two Falcon Heavy cores landing in unison came out.
I think the Shuttle experience convinced everyone that reusability wasn't economically feasible. The whole industry had a bad case of learned helplessness combined with an addiction to cost plus contracts.
Edit: speaking of EVs:
I have this hypothesis that Elon's sort of kind of flirting with the alt-right and Trumpism was a ploy to ingratiate himself to Trump during the Trump era to possibly stop any attempt by Trump to kill either Tesla or SpaceX on behalf of his oil company and old school defense contractor allies. Elon may have decided that sucking up to Trump was the price of avoiding a backlash until Trump was out of office.
I have also wondered if his Texas move and appeals to "red America" aren't a marketing ploy to sell that demographic on EVs, since obviously the latte sipping liberal crowd are already on board with the EV revolution. Tesla is capped at blue state early adopters if they can't cross over into the mainstream and that means selling the non-techno-nerd and non-progressive part of car culture.
No clue, just speculation. Elon is first and foremost a marketer.
I would estimate that Musk accelerated the transition to electric cars by 1-5 years. I believe he claims the same thing you do, that moving to electric is inevitable, and that his strategy has just been to nudge it along a little bit faster.
For a single person, this is still a significant contribution (if we presume that Tesla would not have survivied without him), which just happened to also make him wealthy.
The poll is open to everyone on Twitter. Not just his fans. I bet many of his fans voted not to sell his Tesla stock. While people hate him are more likely to vote yes.
> people who hate him don't visit his Twitter or are you saying they would abstain from the poll on principle?
I would hope they wouldn't hate visit his twitter. But I didn't think it was a principle thing. I would imagine trust in a poll correlates with trust in the person putting on the poll. People who hated American Idol didn't hate call in options, even though they could have.
> It's usually some pedantic thing like a Twitter poll.
I think that's more because everyone here has a view of Elon that's mostly immutable. The minutia leads to interesting discussions (sometimes)
Interesting that he filed his >5% report on Schedule 13G rather than Schedule 13D, and has checked the box for the exemption in Rule 13d-1(c)[1]. This exemption requires that he "has not acquired the securities with any purpose, or with the effect, of changing or influencing the control of the issuer, or in connection with or as a participant in any transaction having that purpose or effect."
If he's indeed seeking to participate actively in changing things at Twitter, he may have opened yet another front in his antagonization of the SEC.
Background: the SEC requires purchasers of >5% of a U.S. public company to provide certain information about themselves and their intentions in making the purchase. Generally, you file Schedule 13D if you're seeking to conduct a takeover bid. The shorter Schedule 13G is supposed to be used only for "passive" investors.
Here, perhaps Musk would say he's not seeking a change in the "control" of the company (voting share ownership), just a change in governance practices not involving a change in control.
Update: some press coverage raising the same questions. The silly part about this is the filing deficiencies seem either inept or willful. Mr. Musk can certainly afford good securities lawyers to make the proper filings. A 13D is not that much more burdensome than a 13G, and some activists use the filing (which gets a lot of free attention) to make statements that to support their objective, whatever that may be.
I enjoy my job, I also get paid to do it. If being a twitter troll is both a past time and road to riches for Elon I think it’s just win-win for somebody who seems to need attention and wealth.
There's only a limited amount of time one has. The private jet is to save time (convenience). In one of his interviews he talks about how he is always solving problems and his brain is running a million miles a minute. His brain is wired differently than most people. He has so many ideas running through his head. He doesn't have time to work on them all.
He doesn't have many expensive tastes. He doesn't live a life of luxury, he's not covered from head to toe in brand name clothes. He doesn't own a private island. He could care less about that stuff. Yes he has a huge ego but rightfully so. Look at all that he has accomplished against incredible odds (Tesla and SpaceX almost failing).
I do think he is genuinely trying to expand the realm of human consciousness and save the planet and create a backup plan for humans (colonizing Mars). Overall I think he is a net positive for mankind.
If anyone really thinks he is doing all this just to get rich needs to do some more research on him.
> He doesn't live a life of luxury, he's not covered from head to toe in brand name clothes. He doesn't own a private island. He could care less about that stuff.
Elon is extremely vain so he doesn't put on anything by accidents.
>If anyone really thinks he is doing all this just to get rich needs to do some more research on him.
It's incredibly obvious he's doing this to be rich. He has incredibly expensive taste that goes far beyond than things like fancy yachts or private islands. He cares about money because it affords him soft power, influence, public adoration and the ability to buy things like you know... *10% of Twitter*.
He is both very well accomplished and a textbook narcissist who ties his sense of self-identity with the world's perception of him. That's why he gets incredibly defensive against naysayers and he is always pushing to "one-up" others.
So yeah, he absolutely cares about being rich because to him it's a validation of his own ego and also allows him to continue to purchase influence and power and attention.
If he's doing it all for money and to live a life of luxury then why does he live in a 50k house in Texas? Yes he had a McLaren F1, so what? That was a long time ago when he was young. He drives a model S these days.
If he's doing it all for money then why start the companies he did? All of them are helping to solve a problem for mankind. He didn't become a drug dealer, sell things that are addicting, etc. He doesn't run a tobacco company.
There's a scale for it, we've quantified the lack of satire!
---
The celebrity-persona parasocial identification scale (CPI) is designed to measure how media consumers develop identification with celebrities or popular fictional characters. Identification is defined as a persuasion process that occurs when an individual adopts the behavior or attitudes of another individual or group based on a self-defining relationship (Kelman, 1961, p. 63). Identification is a psychological orientation through which individuals define themselves based on their group membership and derive "strength and a sense of identity" from the affiliation (Kelman, 1961). Identification is often confused or entangled with parasocial interaction. Although both parasocial interaction and identification are both forms of audience involvement, they are distinct processes (Brown, Basil, & Bocarnea, 2003b, Brown & Fraser, 2006). Parasocial interaction often predicts identification because people commonly seek to adopt the values, beliefs, and behaviors of celebrities and media persona whom they admire. However, there are examples of celebrities that fans have strong parasocial interaction with, and yet the fans do not want to be like that person (Matviuk, 2006). This brief chapter discusses various aspects of the CPI online survey and its use in these contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)
This is incorrect and he has denied it on a number of occassions. He does live in a relatively small cheap house (likely around $50k when he bought it), but it's in Boca Chica Village near Brownsville, and it's not a prefab.
Putin himself isn't on Twitter. The Kremlin has an account that's managed by a team. That's not comparable to Trump's Twitter account who had his personal account and @POTUS.
Putin's position is unaccountable to voters, he isn't losing the Kremlin's twitter account through an election, for all intents and purposes it is his personal twitter account, worse actually because it comes with the machinery of government behind it.
??? Trump came within inches of putting enough pressure on politicians to throw the election for him. Were he to have more support, which is entirely elicited via platforms like Twitter, than the 30% of Americans who believe the election was rigged and 'Trump Won' - would be 55% and we'd have a constitutional crisis, it would be very, very bad.
It's oddly naive to fail to understand how this works because it seems pretty obvious.
Why does anyone think that the US, Japan, UK etc. could not fall into the same trap other nations are in?
Russians right now believe Ukraine is a giant country of Nazis, and that the hundreds of dead bodies showing up after their Army withdraws are people killed by Ukrainians as a false flag, or they're actors, or fake, or 'it doesn't exist'. If the lie is big enough, and you keep telling it, it can be real.
Reality matters as much as anything else.
We probably need a constitutional amendment on that frankly.
Exactly. Propaganda works. Not just social media but traditional media. Thirty years of nonsense anti-EU stories got the UK out of the EU. Arguably we already fell into that trap. Hungary have re-elected Orban.
> We probably need a constitutional amendment on that frankly.
Unfortunately you really cannot legislate for this, except in very specific cases like constitutional amendments against Holocaust denial. And even then there's plenty of ways to power that let it be changed or neutralized.
France, Ireland, the Netherlands voted against ratifying the treaty of Lisbon, which gave considerable sovereign to the EU. Sarkozy adopted it anyhow. EU leaders decided to forgo any form of referendum in the rest of Europe, because they knew they would lose.
It was one of the most blatant anti-democratic acts in all of history.
That's just the tip of the iceberg.
Paradoxically, the amount of Pro-EU propaganda and complete lack of both understanding and questioning of the institution is staggering.
It should be noted that at this very moment of crisis, the EU actually isn't providing leadership, rather individual EU nations are forging their own momentum: Baltic states + Poland are closing their borders, dumping Russian Oil, Macron is 'talking' to Putin (not Von Der Leyen), and from a military perspective the EU has no relevance it seems.
So no - that's the opposite of a good example and why we'd have to be careful about legislation.
CNN, Fox, MSNBC, are all full of propaganda and misrepresentation - the issue has fundamentally to do with material reality.
We can actually probably legislate against misinformation, that might be possible but probably not 'propaganda'.
For example: making unproven claims about medical technology - already there's health reasons for that, imagine how that would apply to vaccine misinformation? It might require skeptics to be very deliberate about their skepticism, which for example is fine, it's what we want. But they can't run around arbitrarily saying 'it causes cancer' etc..
For elections, if you want to make claims of 'stolen' you might have to provide evidence.
Perhaps if we treated drugs and election standing like individuals, who can be subject to slander and 'sue' their antagonists, there might be something there.
> I will leave Twitter forever[1] and it will be a pity.
Who cares and just leave.
Twitter is beyond repair and it will still just keep running to the ground regardless. Where it is currently going (unless Musk does something) it will never change and it will only get worse.
Also, who cares about Trump these days. He has his own platform anyway and even if he does get unbanned (which is highly unlikely) just block him and move on.
The Taliban, Khomeini, Putin and many other war criminals have Twitter accounts screeching on the platform and I don't see you complaining about leaving. (yet)
Better make that search for an alternative soon then.
You are going to leave a platform if a certain person is allowed the right to speak there? Have you tried Weibo or VKontakte? Those seem like the sort of sites you'd enjoy then.
There's a very dry official twitter called KremlinRussia_E, which posts his diary, pretty much. This is ~equiv to WhiteHouse, which Twitter obviously didn't nuke. They banned Trump's _personal_ account.
That account still spews misinformation, encourages continued invasions of Ukraine, and condones violence responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians. These are in direct violation of Twitter ToS but they only enforce that when its politically convenient.
For better or for worse (personally I think it's for worse, but I am not King of Twitter), Twitter has (formally) adopted a policy of extremely high tolerance to the twitter accounts of public bodies and government officials. Note that Trump lasted until there were legitimate questions over whether he was using it to encourage the violent occupation of a government building, rather than being evicted years ago like anyone normal would have for the sort of things he said on a daily basis.
Appreciating how funny it is that a buying a platform for emitting 140 char messages was the way to get short narrative.
It's a huge channel with a very poor and constrained platform under it, which I suspect is the opportunity. However, the only way to unlock it is with leadership who still want to grow for real, instead of keeping it leashed as a zero-sum political tool. If I were to speculate on what makes this a Musk super-play, Twitter seemed on the path to collapsing under the weight of all the fucks its managers and keepers have had to give, thus destroying the value of a historically unique channel. The best way to use that huge channel for real good and value is to open it up to users to build on and get out of the way. It's something he's almost uniquely capable of driving.
Agrawal: "Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation,” [1]
Musk: "Sorry to be a free speech absolutist" [2]
Investopedia: "Large shareholder blocs can therefore vote to fire a member of the board and replace them with somebody else for perceived mismanagement, ineffectual governance, or malfeasance." [3] The Board hires the CEO.
754 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 305 ms ] threadEdit: Why is this downvoted? How does it make any sense to have them as public, for profit, companies, when we all know what happens when their growth stops? How sleazy they all become? Heck, they're sleazy as-is. Who here likes where Reddit is headed, for example?
To be honest interpolation is something that will be ripe for abuse by actors like 4Chan just because they can. I’m not seeing a way to ensure the banning of users while allowing interoperability that isn’t solved already by email.
If the solution to this is to not allow the banning of users, then how does one combat things such as child porn, revenge porn, etc.
I'm also not for absolute free speech, so yes, users should be banable in case of abuse.
The main thing I'm against is the fact we're taking for granted various methods of online communication (Twitter like broadcast, Reddit-like centralized forums, plus I'd actually put WhatsApp like instant messengers here). And they should just be dumb pipes.
They shouldn't try to add a ton of smart features they sell to <<other companies>>. Because their incentives are out of alignment with their direct user needs. They will serve whoever pays them instead of whoever uses them.
The classic enterprise software dilemma which in that case creates functionally horrible software. For online software it creates morally horrible software, instead.
ActivityPub is a W3C specification at the Recommendation stage, which basically means it's ready for production.
This would allow groups like, oh, house.gov to run their own platform and assign every congress person their own interoperable user account (AOC@HOUSE.GOV for example) and it works pretty much the same way email works.
The problem is, companies know these and they subtly sabotage these standardization efforts.
Look at the web. Desktop UI toolkits have had solid components since the start. From the late 80s and early 90s. The web is maybe getting them universally in 2024.
I mean, it's great that we have standards, but can you really afford to wait 30-40 years? I'll be frank with you, if you're a professional in our field, 30-40 years is your entire career. Many people in IT actually retire even earlier or move up to management and basically out of regular IT, after 5-10-15 years.
And people can only care so much. Heck, many Open Source hackers move on after 5-10 years. Only a handful last 30 years.
Faster moving standards are a sort of utopia, it seems.
Does a "right person" exist?
Musk is an infinitely better influence on something like Twitter.
Mackenzie Scott will leave running the platform to the people familiar with it. That's exactly why she's the best person to own Twitter and turn it into a public good vs. Elon, who also knows absolutely nothing about running Twitter, but will no doubt intervene.
Musk made his comments in context of social networks. In a digitizing world where all conversation is centered into a handful of platforms, those platforms become the free speech carrier, no matter who owns them.
Yes, you're technically correct, but it's irrelevant from a pragmatic point of view. A legal definition of free speech is worthless if said free speech cannot be expressed in the places where most speech happens.
You can argue that major platforms like Twitter are essential to free speech, maybe even persuasively. What you can't do is make your case as if it were a self-evident fact. It is not.
I've never heard of AAJC. You linked a news article that proves her donation but doesn't make the organization seem sinister. I search AAJC and I get a bunch of results that do nothing to tell me anything sinister. I check Wikipedia and there are a handful of political stances, some of which are expected from political NGOs. I can't find any indication that anyone views this organization as anti-Asian. Based on what I've found, I assume what you mean is that this organization seems to support affirmative action in college admissions, a position that sets them apart from many other Asian groups, and which you could argue hurts Asian participation in colleges relative to a race-neutral admissions standard. Again, I had to do research to figure out that was what you were thinking of, I couldn't read your mind.
I'm not saying you're wrong in your belief, or that you can't make the argument you're making, I'm saying short-circuiting the entire argument and just declaring it so is both intellectually facile and unlikely to inform anyone about anything. I've seen the same argument before when people on the right baldly assert that the SPLC is a "hate group" -- when what they means is some nuanced take on a particular political stance SPLC takes being disagreeable to conservatives.
But then that's not the only leap you make. It's not just taken as obvious that AAJC is an anti-Asian organization, and everyone knows that, and no one could think differently: it's also taken as an obvious conclusion that anyone who donates to them in spite of this must be an idiot dilettante who doesn't even understand what they're giving money to. I don't think that's a reasonable conclusion to draw. I think a much more reasonable conclusion to draw would be that Mackenzie Scott supports affirmative action in college admissions, doesn't mind supporting an organization that supports affirmative action in college admissions, and knows exactly what she's supporting.
Again, not trying to change your mind about the organization or about Scott, trying to encourage you to express yourself in a more useful way so that readers actually know what it is you're trying to say.
That's fair--I was trying to avoid a lengthy rant.
> But then that's not the only leap you make. It's not just taken as obvious that AAJC is an anti-Asian organization, and everyone knows that, and no one could think differently: it's also taken as an obvious conclusion that anyone who donates to them in spite of this must be an idiot dilettante who doesn't even understand what they're giving money to.
I'll get to AAJC in a moment, but I want to address this first. My conclusion that MacKenzie Scott is a dilettante is based on timing. She donated a bunch of bunch of money to random racial justice organizations just a couple of months after George Floyd was killed, and again shortly after the "AAPI Hate" news cycle after the Atlanta shootings. But she has no track record of involvement with Asian communities or Asian issues in the past. There is no reason to believe she has any understanding of the issues facing Asian Americans, what they want, or who really represents their interests. She just up and decided to donate to a bunch of organizations purporting to represent minorities. That's the opposite of Bill Gates-style "informed philanthropy."
Ordinarily, uninformed donations merely risk being wasteful. In the context of identity-based organizations, however, they can be severely prejudicial to minorities. Asians, Hispanics, etc., all have specific interests. There are myriad internal debates within those groups about everything from policing to welfare. But wealthy white donors like MacKenzie Scott can effectively be kingmakers--their donations can completely drown out grass-roots support. And they create an incentive structure where the most successful organizations end up being the ones that make themselves attractive to donors like Scott, not the ones that are most effective at advocating for Asians or Hispanics.
> Based on what I've found, I assume what you mean is that this organization seems to support affirmative action in college admissions, a position that sets them apart from many other Asian groups, and which you could argue hurts Asian participation in colleges relative to a race-neutral admissions standard.
It's undeniable that affirmative action and movements to end meritocratic admissions hurts Asians. If Ivy League student bodies perfectly reflected the country's composition, you'd eliminate about 60-70% of the Asians. In Silicon Valley it would be over 80%. As shown by the voting on Prop 16, Asian voters oppose such measures even in California. In Virginia, the end of meritocratic admissions at TJHSST resulted in Glenn Youngkin getting half the Asian vote--a remarkable result given that almost all Asians in the state live in heavily Biden-voting liberal Northern Virginia.
It doesn't matter whether you think it's the right thing to do on the whole. If you're an organization purporting to represent Asian interests, it's unconscionable to support policies that reduce Asian representation and are contrary to what Asians themselves want. But AAJC goes further than that. They sought to overturn a federal district court judgment in Virginia that found that changes to the admissions process of a public magnet high school were "racially motivated": https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/virginia/va... (p. 16). In that case, one of the Board members behind the policy indicated in a text message that the policy changes seemed to have an “anti Asian” motivation.
Can you imagine the NAACP ever throwing its weight behind policies intended to reduce Black representation, where there was evidence of "anti Bl...
It would be one thing if your point was that billionaires should keep their grubby hands off of Twitter, but that's not what I see you to be saying here. You seem to just object to Scott being involved.
Many are funded by government entities under political control. They end up supporting whatever agenda the powerful politicians are pushing or else they risk losing that funding. Almost invariably this is not the same as Asian interests.
Currently the top issues in the SF Asian community are crime and education (and inflation and small business hassles to a lesser degree). This what everyone talks about. Yet the local Asian orgs have been counterproductive on all of these fronts and are actively support the politicians widely blamed for exacerbating these problems.
Really disheartening to see almost every SF Asian leader co-opted by the rich or powerful. Similar dynamic in other racial and affinity groups. Anyone with influence eventually sells out the people they have influence over. These orgs just institutionalize that transaction.
What’s anti-Asian about AAJC? The only thing I found is that management treated its unionized employees like shit.
Elon could build and own 100% a competitor to Twitter for much less than the 3 billion he spent to get 9% of twitter.
The problem is getting the competitor to have traction. For that you need to have the idea for a differentiator that will hook people, and unlike engineering talent you can't buy this!
The mere fact that the platform belongs to him can help a lot
I have an entire bookshelf of books about how to do this, but I’ve never been asked about it during a coding interview. I think it's less of "you can't buy it" and more of that no one values it.
https://www.amazon.com/Building-Successful-Online-Communitie...
But I also like Seth Godin's books a lot, e.g. All Marketers Are Liars, Free Prize Inside, and Purple Cow.
A lot of my reading on web stuff has been vaguely in those categories though, in terms of either academic research, academic theory, digital ethnography stuff, psychology and sociology, marketing theory/praxis, plus whatever I've read on design and UX.
I would say the single book that founders in the tech industry would benefit from reading the most is probably Punished By Rewards by Alfie Kohn. I feel like every other startup puts themselves out of business by fucking up on the super basic things that book discusses. I end up having to explain it to people all the time.
Everybody knows this? Truth Social needs to be told. The app can barely launch, and got a head start forking Mastadon as far as we know. They have hundreds of millions (a few billion?) in capitalization.
Everyone knows people who haven’t actually tried tend to underestimate the difficulty in other’s work.
To be clear, nowhere did I say the engineering is the hardest part.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1507259709224632344
Elon has the emotional stability of my 13 year old cousin, and changes his mind as often.
He is still actively pursuing those goals, they are just very difficult projects. Objectively he has done more for promoting space travel than most any other individual today.
He has his flaws sure, but people generally admire his willingness to pursue bold aspirations with extreme tenacity.
- Elon wants to take Tesla private and has the capitalization
- Elon wants to rescue Thai children stuck in a cave
- Elon will sell Tesla stock to end world hunger
- Elon wants to fight Putin in a 1-on-1 to end the war in Ukraine
- Elon thinks 98% of the US will be covered in Supercharging stations by 2015
- Elon wants to send 2 people into space by 2018
...
Elon has a long history of underestimating how difficult things are and gives up quietly or is proven immediately to be wrong.
Edit:
Forgot about this site https://www.elonmusk.today/ which does a better job than my memory of documenting some of Elon's outrageous tweets.
Add:
- Elon wants to fund the repairs of any house in Flint that's water contaminated.
- Elon wants to use bricks from the Boring Company to create low cost housing.
- Elon is starting a candy company that will be amazing.
- Elon wants to use SpaceX rockets to power aircrafts for quicker trips from New York to London in 29 minutes.
- Elon received government approval (verbally) to build a tunnel for the hyperloop from New York City to Washington DC.
...
They wouldn't give him a plan...which I bet he figured would happen.
The long-term conversation ended with him asking questions about rampant child abuse under the watch of the UN.
Get your facts straight.
BTW he did give them the money: https://fortune.com/2022/02/15/elon-musk-5-7-billion-donatio...
There is zero sign that his support for free speech is a spontaneous idea that he will lose interest about in a few month. And there is also no way to achieve it but certainly there is plenty room to improve with Twitter.
He tweeted about it after he'd bought the stock but before that knowledge was public, which I think is further proof that Musk is somewhat disingenuous.
After buying but before announcing seems like a good time to see what your fans think.
Musk behavior is such a rorschach test.
Given twitter has not respected free speech, and Elon has no track record (AFAIK) of thwarting free speech, what makes him so wrong?
TL;DR free speech is between you and the government, not between you and someone else or some other company.
That's up for debate. Modern communication is so monopolized by twitter/FB that the argument of "they are a private company" no longer holds.
We can bemoan Russian interference in the elections all we want. But the power Twitter/FB hold is far more impactful on domestic and international democracy than any russian agent every could be.
Yes, everyone knows that.
It's a bit different though when you have massive social media platforms that have monopolies over public discourse.
Well, one alternative would be that they have to decouple their front-end and back-end and provide open APIs to their backend (posts/tweets, friends lists, etc.).
Facebook/Twitter can moderate/censor whatever they want on their own front-ends, but they can't remove anything from the backend.
People/companies can build alternative front-end apps that access the fb/twitter graphs and censor in a different way - so that users have an alternative.
(Note that FOSTA/SESTA already imposes a proactive legal obligation to censor within the US, and overrides s230)
No, it's not. If you want corporations to be beholden to the first amendment then pass laws saying that private companies can no longer moderate their platforms, full stop.
(the term gets thrown around a lot, and has been devalued into meaninglessness by the Russian government, but it does have a legal meaning in Germany and France)
really now?
That and its excessive use on social media renders "Nazi" mostly useless as a descriptor, outside of those groups that explicitly and deliberately reference Nazi symbology and ideology.
Note: smaller than that of the same ideological but different geopolitical alignment that Russia has been sponsoring for years (Azov exists, but it's smaller than Sparta) in the same conflict.
>some far-right militia activity in some places
FYI, those guy with wolfsangel and black sun insignias and swastika tattoos are not a militia but a legitimate unit of Ukraine's national guard
https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/sonnen...
https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/wolfsa...
this is a clear violation of the First Amendment, which makes it legal to publish lies.
Yep — here we're getting into Prior Restraint. It's both against the law to restrain free speech such as lies, but as you rightly point out, this speech can have other legal consequences.
Then the government should pass laws stating that these private corporations are no longer able to moderate their own platforms as they see fit. There is no "second meaning" without concrete legal precedent.
Tell them to call it freedom of expression if you're so inclined, and keep supporting their fight for it.
Anything less is detracting from their point, seemingly intentionally.
"Pedo guy" is not defamation, just an insult barked back at someone who told him to stick a submarine where the sun doesn't shine.
Not the classiest response, but nothing to cry about.
Considering we're talking about someone who's footing the bill to make significant innovation in multiple sectors, I still view him favourably. I disagree with him politically on a few topics and agree on others.
I hope it's not going to be like DuckDuckGo, which started like a service against Google biased / curated results and ended up manually hiding what they deemed russian propaganda during the latest war, effectively doing what Google was doing.
That's despicable. He's an evil narcissist and a dangerous person.
This absolutist and judgmental attitude is what makes social networks hell. I wonder what your worst moment was and whether it happened offline or online, and how would you like to be judged for it by others.
Too many people cosplay the Old Testament God.
It was not just a "moment"; he could have said that he misspoke and that he was sorry. But he persisted, and put up a nonsensical defense where he said "pedo" was a kind of nice nickname in his home country in his youth (which nobody corroborated).
He showed that what he wants is eradicate opponents and will stop at nothing. That's probably what has brought him where he is. But we don't have to respect it.
Elon was mean on Twitter. It's not like he paid people in the Thai government to frame the guy or something - which would seem much more "stop at nothing" to me.
I think it's basically the same moral fault, though maybe a slight difference of degree, to accuse a person of being a pedophile on bad evidence as it is to accuse someone of being an evil narcissist out to eradicate on bad evidence.
Also the insult matters. "Pedophile" is currently, in the English speaking world, the worst label imaginable. This was not just any insult, the kind one says when they're annoyed at someone in traffic for example. This was intended to kill. It was extremely mean. I maintain it revealed his true character.
But you're free to think I reveal mine.
Regarding "evidence" Elon's reasoning, if I recall correctly, was that an adult man moving to Thailand was inherently suspicious for pedophilia. Thailand has some reputation for sex tourism, especially of the underage variety. This is, as I said, bad evidence. Likewise, your belief that Elon is an evil narcissist who will stop at nothing to eradicate opponents is based on bad evidence - the mean/bad tweets.
Finally, I don't think that you reveal your character. I don't judge people based on short comments - at least not comments such as these. Just like I don't think Elon's tweets were especially revealing or damaging to his character I don't think your comments are that meaningful for your character.
And the other guy was a guy that pushed himself into the media light and made headlines and also not deserving any.
Musk is also in a leadership position where his opinion is highly valued by many thousands, and he decided to abuse that authority and power.
There is no doubt hes not happy with the current way Twitter restricts speech which is heavily biased and so he wants to change that.
Nope, he has a history of silencing or trying to silence opinions that he doesn't like.
Please?
The interesting question is whether said value is based on one of his insights/visions that most others seem to lack, or whether he is outright deluding himself because of his Twitter addiction.
It's more likely to do with his issue around Twitter & free speech.
At the scale of attention he’s operating at, value is all made up anyway.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1507259709224632344
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1507041396242407424
I can see the idealism behind this question, but imagine just how hard this could backfire in practice. People discovering to what extent algorithmic ranking manipulates them, and feeds the outrage machine.
And that's what glues eyeballs and generates revenue, so changing the algorithm would work against revenue.
I'm saying it's interesting for Elon, as a major shareholder, to argue in favor of this.
People should be able to customize the algorithm (aka make their own algorithm). As long as that is possible and the options are clear, no one cares if it's open source or not.
ill quote will ferrell
"No one knows what it means, but it’s provocative… it’s gets the people going!"
Your lack of medical knowledge is just as stunning.
Not only does intersex exist (yes, humans can indeed have both primary sexual organs, though it's rare), there's also a plethora of conditions that blur the line, from De la Chapelle-Syndrom to Swyer-Syndrom. There's chromosomal-, gonadal-, hormonal-, and anatomical variations that are part of "basic human biology" yet result in individuals that cannot easily be classified by vagina=woman and penis=man.
Shocking, I know.
The majority of trans people have/had functioning genitalia. Gender identity isn't restricted to the set of people outside the crudely simple vagina=woman penis=man classification
There's a spectrum of opinion which is easier to consider with hair color identity as opposed to gender identity
If there's blonds & brunettes, the existence of redheads doesn't mean blond vs brunette is moot. & don't even get started on dirty blonds. But if a blond dies their hair brunette, are they blond or brunette? Their roots still say blond. But they put much care into dying frequently enough that the roots aren't visible. So society accepts them as brunette. Meanwhile the more pro-identity group will argue that not only is the blond brunette, but has _always been_ brunette[1]
The latter argument is much harder to defend, & from what I can tell arguments tend to do one of two things:
1. both parties focus on arguing against the weakest arguments of their opposition, leading to two parties talking past each other
2. both parties shift the argument to the most debatable point either way, which can often shift the dividing line of for/against to be at some extreme as opposed to in the generally accepted gray area between the extreme & the counter
Full disclosure: I'm fine using people's preferred pronouns even if I believe in biological gender (ie I don't believe pronouns need to be tied to biological gender, because while I generally need pronouns for everyone I may refer to, I generally don't care about their genitals). That said, I mostly find gender roles a hassle; being a man who has enjoyed wearing a dress & putting on nail polish doesn't mean I identify as a woman
[1] out of politeness one may not want to make a point of randomly pointing out that a brunette haired person was actually born blond, even if they don't believe they were always brunette
Elon is completely right Twitter has lost common sense when in comes to enforcing their own rules.
And if stupid decisions get made, welp, more engagement, so more ad revenue.
The entire system that twitter is embedded into is a cancer, and twitter is just one more tumour.
(Also, I think your comment breaks several of the 'In comments' guidelines)
This accusation gets thrown around far too easily these days; it's really losing its power. A few years ago, if someone was accused of saying something transphobic, I'd think, wow they really must have said something horrible like a slur or an abusive remark.
Nowadays, I just assume that they mentioned a previously uncontroversial fact relating to biological sex.
They're not remotely what comes into my head for that subject, and I can think of many things where freedom of speech is far more important to me than which words are used in which ways to define sex/gender/etc.
Is it possible that you too have allowed minority interest groups to convince you that trans people are the next big threat, just as gay people were decades ago, and that's why it's the first thing you think of? (Not a rhetorical question, I don't know anything about you and hopefully you're completely not transphobic! But many transphobic people don't consider that word to describe them yet do fall for and repeat explicitly transphobic agendas...)
The biological definition of man and woman is a category that's pretty relevant to everyone. And pulling the rug out from under a biological concept, and then saying "Oh how strange that you all are thinking about this, it must only be because you are a transphobe, or a pervert" is an extremely disingenuous argument at best.
Please enlighten me if there's a non-transphobic reason to care what pronounces my next door neighbour uses.
And nobody is talking about pulling the rug from biological concepts - they're remaining the same regardless of what language we all use. "Male-born" and "penis-having" for example are (and I've no idea if these are the best / commonly accepted terms, this isn't an area I know much about) and I'm sure plenty of other related terms can still describe exact situations if you're wanting to think about someone's genitals while using their pronouns.
But unless you're a doctor about to operate on me or somebody I want to have sex with, I probably don't care if you know what genitals I have or don't have nor do I understand why you'd think it important to know.
For example:
"Why is that man being allowed to compete in a women's sporting event?"
"Why is that man flashing his penis in the women-only area of the nude spa?"
"Why is that man calling himself a lesbian and haranguing actual lesbians for not being sexually interested in him?"
And so on.
I'm not saying all this talk about genitals is a great idea; it's perhaps a bit inflammatory and juvenile. But that's not the point here.
Dear fellow HN users: please do not flag things simply because they are representing a stance that you disagree with; we should use down-voting for that if we have the karma. This post does not violate our guidelines:
--------------------------------------
There are many good reasons why one might want to refer to a person's biological sex in conversation. For example:
"Why is that man being allowed to compete in a women's sporting event?"
"Why is that man flashing his penis in the women-only area of the nude spa?"
"Why is that man calling himself a lesbian and haranguing actual lesbians for not being sexually interested in him?"
And so on.
As ramblerman says, it's because it's a fundamental biological concept that's central to my existence as a member of Homo sapiens. It's absolutely unacceptable to me that I or anyone might not feel comfortable stating that we (surprise!) adhere to the traditional definitions of the words "man" and "woman". I don't really understand why you think something so fundamental doesn't matter.
GP never said those words were "the most important thing to (them)". If anything, they seem more concerned that if they "state the simple biological definitions" will bring up people exactly like you, accusing them of the transphobia and potentially getting them banned (on a platform like Twitter).
You are not well-intentioned at all in this discussion: there was no reason to go on the banter to the extent you did.
I'd understand it if you said that we are at a time where we are challenging those definitions as they used to stand, as long as you recognize that "definitions", by definition, are prescriptive and need to be agreed between people to make them widely accepted. So I can define whatever terms I want the way I like them, it does not make them so unless I can get enough people to start using them that way, or ideally included in one of the well-known dictionaries of a language.
Would the inability to do this mean my own freedom of speech to shame your views would be infringed? It seems like an unsustainable paradox to me that falls apart in various use cases that cannot function in society as we know. At least not if we seek to ban/prosecute things such as child pornography, revenge porn, libel, etc.
So what I'm looking for is for them to extend the same respect that I extend to them, to people like me who don't share their views. And they don't: they are so certain that theirs is the only correct viewpoint.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parag_Agrawal
You can think about Twitter what you want, but it's the only social network doing what it does and it's building a solid Ad-Business.
There couldn't have been a better time to buy.
I do think there's much further potential for monetization, but it's been a very shareholder hostile company historically
We've seen from the past 4 or so years with QAnon, anti-vaxers, flat-earthers etc, that free speech to the wrong listener can be weaponised. If you make twitter censor-proof, all you'll get is a bigger trash fire.
I was sad when I got kicked off Twitter, but it possibly ended up being the best thing for me. Damn twitter is a toxic place... and if Elon turns it into censor-proof cesspool, I give the platform 5 years tops before it becomes yet another social platform that nobody uses anymore.
The only way to stop bots, or at least lessen their impact, would be to make verification via ID (passport, drivers license, etc) mandatory. But that opens up a whole other can of worms.
Another thing i noticed is, that many people don't seem to know what "free speech" actually is. Maybe it's different in the US. I can only speak for the German version of it. It's to protect you from prosecution by the government. It is not a free ticket to attack others and it doesn't protect from criticism.
Also, believe it or not but there actually are people who believe the Qanon nonsense. It's been widely reported on.
A very material number of people believe in that stuff.
More broadly - misinformation is very real.
It's 'silly' to believe that somehow the truth rises to the top. People believe the story that makes them 'feel' a certain way, and will deny the reality in their faces.
I'm on RT and watching Russian commenters indicate that all the 'dead bodies in Bucha' (near Kyiv) were Ukrainians killed by Ukrainians as a 'false flag'. Others say it they are not real. Other say actors. Others say it doesn't exist.
In 2022 you can just make up your own reality and spread it on Twitter, and that's dangerous.
Free speech, like everything else, needs regulations to work. This is hard, and maybe impossible to do well, but the alternative (no regulations) leads to chaos. Not just chaos of discussion: chaos of society.
The problem Twitter emphasizes is that free speech and anonymity do not work at scale. Pre-internet, speech always had a degree of accountability because you know who's saying what. Now, you don't know if you're engaging with with an ad team, a bot-net, a trained cohort in another country, or just your dumb neighbor's political views.
The reasonable netizen has to assume the majority of what you see online is manipulated and fake. We can't fairly say the worst parts of twitter are purely a failure of free speech.
That being said, its an age old battle which system is better: one that is free, open, optional, and sometimes gets it wrong or one that is closed, managed, unavoidable, and can't be reviewed when it does get it wrong.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
knowing who caused you harm and why is necessary in stopping it from happening again.
in the real world, society depends on neighbors working together towards a common notion of the greater good.
if I live in a community that I depend on and I cause chaos, I will feel the consequences.
if I am a foreign agent, I am decoupled from those consequences, and may even benefit by virtue of undermining an enemy.
if the bad actors out weigh the good actors, then society cannot function.
and if you see your neighbors as being as bad as your enemies, then your enemies have truly won.
But if we can accept that there's not "right" without "wrong" or a coin's "tail" without a "head", we can sympathize with those we deem unworthy of "free speech".
I don't think there's much that Musk can do to increase Twitter's revenue, but at least the market seems to believe that he can hype this one beyond reasonable valuations, too.
If he does, there will be a significant share premium paid to current holders from the acquirer.
If you don’t care about directly making money, you can treat the platform as a way to promote or reject whatever messaging you want to millions of users.
If it’s a public company, it’d be subject to the will of the shareholders and have other corporate responsibilities. If it’s private, it can do whatever he wants it.
There is nothing that says a public company must only be motivated by growth. Tesla's mission statement doesn't say anything of the sort and has done things that don't fulfill the idea of growth or profit at all costs.
Now you might argue that institutional investors don't care about that since there's an indirection between actual shareholders, but that's a related but different issue.
Also I bet they would call to regulate or even nationalize social media platforms as soon as companies like Twitter switch to a more balanced moderation approach and don't aid in amplifying certain politics.
Musk has to take care to not overplay his hand.
But trying to shut down a platform which is considered (by some) "critical infrastructure" might find you in a position where regulations restrict what you can do.
It's not a certainty but a possibility that this might happen (regardless of who is in power at the time.) Many politicians of different leanings use Twitter for communication.
It would be called something else that would be easily to remember like Tikker or Woobly.
Growth in social media means attracting more users and/or increasing engagement of existing users. Civil and reasonable discourse is bad for engagement numbers, outrage and extremism do much better.
Public companies and their leadership face much more pressure to show profit and growth every 3 months. This pushes them toward short-term thinking and easy ways to juice their numbers. For social media the easiest way to do this is the promote and encourage content that incites outrage, since this drives engagement, which in turn drives ad $$$
I would argue that the drift toward extremism has much more to do with the advertising revenue business model.
Content that enrages, engages. More user engagement = more revenue.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/22/22740354/trump-truth-soc...
Source? While it was apparently over $20B at the peak of its value, according to https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/DWAC it seems to currently be bellow $2.5B
Don't reward Wall Street by taking it private at a fat premium for them.
Or a TV channel/network, let's not forget those!
I think you're on point.
He’s going to cut the head off by redoing the algorithm and establish an insane amount of power / influence by reducing everyone else’s.
Bezo's "philanthropic" Washington Post purchase just became honest.
Every popular power account and blue check mark is about to get blown up. It's no secret he kind of hates them.
(I'd suspect Musk of wanting to run for office, except I don't think he'd accept a lesser office than President which he's ineligible for. Maybe a state governor like Arnie?)
> He was born in South Africa so he could never become President of the United States.
Didn't know that was a requirement. TIL :D
It's not completely clear that you need to be born in the US - several presidents and presidential candidates weren't - but it's pretty clear that foreigners who become naturalized US citizens later in life are not eligible to run for president.
Or maybe you can elect a district attorney and go after an enemy of yours, but even that's not an easy win. And you can always buy influence for this sort of thing without going through the trouble and cost of running
You certainly can't wave a magic wand and garner favor and respect from people. People hate politicians in the US.
I don't know, I just don't see the "power". It's just an appeal to narcissism as people in the media would be obsessing over you and dissecting every word you say. But that's definitely not power.
Sadly we did not heed their wisdom and we have over the course of time consolidated power in the the hands of fewer people by putting more things into the hands of the federal government, allowed congress to shift their responsibility to the executive, and failing to increase the size of congress.
Obama to this day loves to brag about how he sent SEAL Team 6 to deal with enemies of the US; you can't do that either when you're just a successful author.
Hollande (former French president) also bragged to journalists, many times, about assassinating ISIS leaders.
These are "normal" leaders elected in democracies; it's much worse of course with more authoritarian regimes.
Real power is the power to kill other human beings and not suffer any consequence for it. We don't usually talk about that when discussing politics, but this is what aspiring leaders really crave.
Well put. It makes sense in that context that Musk's fans think he has no interest in politics and his detractors think he must.
As insane as Musk's fanbase can be, I still find his detractors' view of the world less realistic. There's a metric to assess that opinion by. As a fan, I predict he won't run for political office on Earth.
Musk has never shown a desire to murder random people and he has never shown particular hatred for those in the Middle East. Why would he want the power to murder people who are basically unrelated to him?
True, but Musk has a fleet of absurdly huge rockets at his command. If he really wanted to, he could de-orbit something large on top of Tehran.
Given the rate at which he is progressing toward his stated goals, he’s not that far from being able to do that and get away with it - by moving to Mars.
Yeah, this post is mostly tongue-in-cheek, but there is some truth to it. SpaceX is a company with assets that could easily be weaponized far in excess of many country’s militaries. I’m now imagining a future where a crazed trillionaire executes a first strike against some country with kinetic energy weapons, flees to a different planet, and all the governments of the world are scrambling trying to figure out if they can retrieve him.
This is an excellent plot!!
However, read the book Charlie Wilson's War. Wilson had no money to speak of, but the book reveals the incredible power that he wielded, largely by sidling up to selective groups (like the Israeli lobby) and getting key committee appointments. And Wilson wasn't even a U.S. Senator! (Generally speaking Representatives have far less power than Senators)
Countries have armies. Armies enforce international (and eventually planetary) rights. Countries also make laws. Laws that Musk must follow or risk consequences.
> If he establishes a base on mars, it is essentially his. Earth based countries are forbidden (in treaty at least) from claiming ownership of celestial bodies. What's to stop him declaring himself emperor of Mars.
He’d be a paper emperor. No method or means of enforcing his claimed dominion.
> The person that controls the flow of supplies to an isolated world is pretty much all powerful.
Countries control the right to launch those supplies. Musk is a few steps below that in the chain of power.
By the way this is totally off-topic, Musk may say a few stupid things and piss a few people off but he is no Putin or James Bond Super-Villain.
Does he though? If the US wants to boot him out you don't think he'd move everything to Russia or China?
Without SpaceX Can the US even launch anything beyond mini-sats into LEO?
Probably the other colonists.
Realistically, Mars isn’t going to be in a position to act independently for hundreds of years.
If your largest shareholder says the current methodology used for content manipulation and account banning is bad for business, then there will be systemic changes as a result.
"Elon Musk OWNS 9.2% of Twitter."
> The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.
Is pretty disingenuous when it turns out that he's launched the poll a week after he already decided to buy 10% of the stock. Do you seriously think Musk spent several billion dollars on twitter stock and then decided to check what people think?
I don't follow him that closely, how so?
On the subject of Twitter being a public square, I think that's a pretty absurd assertion, it's one of a plethora of social media sites - Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Whatsapp, Reddit, Tiktok, Telegram, Snapchat. And it's not even particularly large compared to that competition. It's not even like Twitter has grown to become some behemoth, it's share price is about flat over the last decade. This isn't some behemoth that needs regulating.
He had pre-arranged those sales in mid-September according to regulatory filings. He also didn’t mention in the tweets that he has millions of stock options that must be exercised.
Musk knows his fans are dumb as rock.
I’m still a fan because he seems about 90% right on his opinions and he’s doing amazing work.
However, I also believe that there are actions that people can and do take that put them beyond what contrition could repair-- and Musk hasn't publicly apologized for this, even.
I have all admiration for him that can't be taken away by any kind of fan base.
That's just my opinion, but I don't admire someone that prioritizes profit over human life.
This isn't necessarily the same as forcing people to work, but I have no idea if Tesla employees willing to return vs. those deciding to follow county rules saw any advantages or disadvantages at work as a result. Certainly forcing people to defy government rules to keep their jobs would be highly problematic to me as well, for example.
The only problem is that the stock price was growing more than the revenue, so I’m not sure how fast it can keep up growing, and what the current employees are expecting.
Edit: Just kind of seems in contradiction to the previous stories of him where it focused on his intelligence/de facto technocratic authority to save the world. It wasn't so much his courage, but his moral rectitude combined with capital resources -- "he is going to save the world! Take us to mars!"
Could Boeing built a self-landing reusable rocket? Almost certainly. Would they have been willing to, considering it almost certainly involves failing in explosive ways multiple times? That may be a risk they aren't willing to take.
McDonnell Douglas is part of Boeing and (before they were part of Boeing) did the DC-X prototype.
One failure ended the program, but it was transfered from McDonnell to NASA at that point I think and funding was shifted towards the reusable VentureStar. But it did demonstrate reuse and went through a partial failure of a hydrogen explosion and recovery:
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_McDonnell_Douglas_DC-...
Which, if Musk has value, is where it comes in.
Even if you say that someone like him simply enjoys work, it seems clear that he's often working an uncomfortable amount, in order to achieve his two stated objectives, which at least in his perspective are altruistic (and are objectively not the best ways for him to get richer.)
I say this while having an appreciation for the existence of Tesla and SpaceX, but let's not pretend he supresses unionisation at his factories because he cares too much.
They are working on interesting problems though, far more interesting to me than most companies (including Tesla)
I'd say it's the most important company on the planet seeing as it's the only one that's truly carving a path for us to one day become a spacefaring civilization and doing so at a seemingly 10x faster pace than competitors
The average stellar density around our sun is about 0.004 per cubic light year, so definitely don't get your hopes up on some Star Trek scenario for the next few hundred years at least.
What is SpaceX's value again? P.S. Musk himself admits that SpaceX wouldn't be a thing if it hadn't been saved by a phone call from NASA. You know, the government, the same entity that Musk worshipers seem to dismiss as the lesser party when it comes to ingenuity and forward-progression.
Whether it was saved by a phone call from NASA doesn't detract from its merits
I believe you, but when I tell other people that they don't believe me. Do you have something I can show them.
Reusable rockets are about satellites and maybe the space station. But until we see something use the cheap launches to improve life on earth, it's meaningless.
That said, I'd invest in SpaceX for the Starlink potential if it was public.
Because if all we're going to do is launch a few probes every few years, than the cost of the launches is a minor improvement.
But the main point is the side comment: I’m having fun coding whenever I want to, but I strictly do non-payed hobby projects, as I don’t want to get into commitments ever again.
One of the only (if not the only) state where that happens.
The main reason not to own in CA is the insane purchase price, not the taxes.
If one looked at life and fame as an engineer, having a rabid and large fanbase allows for new opportunities (financial and otherwise). So it'd be suboptimal not to encourage that.
Or as Matt Levine pontificated, if you're the kind of guy who can spike a cryptocurrency by writing something nice on Twitter, and you manage a public company, there's an argument that it's your fiduciary responsibility to do so in a buy-tweet-sell manner.
He can be both smart and evil. It happens often (not all the time, but most of the time).
As for "suboptimal", if you're trying to maximize financial or other gains regardless of societal impact or human suffering, maybe what you describe is correct, but it also requires the person to be a bit of a sociopathic asshole to choose that path.
I work under the default assumption that most CEOs of successful companies, when taking actions on their company's behalf, are sociopathic assholes.
It's certainly true that Tesla wouldn't have been able to raise as much money from equities markets if Elon had been quieter.
Separately from that is the way Musk keeps Tesla in the public eye through various stunts etc., which is a little different than a pump & dump. How much of that is his personality, and how much of it is deliberate strategy? I don't know. I'd speculate that some of it started as personality, and when he saw the results he leaned into it hard and it became strategy. On that aspect of things, you have a point in that a CEO who can do that should probably take advantage of it, and I wouldn't necessarily attach sociopathic tendencies to that behavior as a requirement for acting that way: it doesn't seem to hurt anyone. At least I think it doesn't? Who suffers if TSLA is overvalued? And that would require a good way of determining if it actually is overvalued, something I don't think is straightforward. I guess short sellers suffer, but they could simply have been wrong about TSLA being over valued, and that's on them.
I don't think all CEOs should give it a try though. First because, well, most just don't have whatever quality is necessary to make it work. Second because if everyone tried it, it would just become so much noise, and probably drown out the efforts of those like Musk who can actually pull it off. In Levine-esque speculation, I wonder if Musk would have a legal case against those CEO's if they made his own antics worthless? Some type of tortious interference maybe?
+1 agreed on the rest. It's an interesting thought problem. Capital was less formal during the late 19th century monopoly era in the US, but it makes me wonder if there were schemes where Morgan or Rockefeller publicly circulated market moves.
The guy knows how to hire smart people and keep them around, that in an of itself is rare these days and worth admiration. I can't think of many living CEOs as effective as him in this regard.
I wouldn't say my admiration extends outside of areas he is an expert in though, usually when he starts talking about anything else he talks out of his ass.
I mean he's clearly doing something right. But the people at the top are most definitely not staying around.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-executives-who-report-...
I know for a fact the good engineers are sticking around because I know a bunch of them personally. I wouldn't say all of them are staying because of Elon alone but it generally factors into the calculation (along with massively appreciated stock options ofcourse...)
Give someone a massive retention bonus (in this case structured as an RSU) to get them to stay doesn't seem like unique genius to me
Going to Tesla a few years ago was a hard choice, they paid below market (substantially) but offered pretty generous stock grants.
The stock hadn't really appreciated in-line with the companies growth because of the enormous risk of the Model 3 project. This represented massive risk overhang that until cleared didn't allow the stock to really take off.
2020 (over?) corrected for that however so now the employees that have put in the years are sitting on massive unrealized gains.
He has retained (and attracted away from places like Apple) really high quality talent for over a decade.
Ok, so by that very definition, what does that make Elon Musk as a Chief EXECUTIVE Officer...
You are saying Elon hired a bunch of dumb people to be executives for his companies.
Not sure that's what you want to imply.
If you are idolizing someone, it's because the veil hasn't fallen off yet. Everyone is crazy. The question for me is: does the good outweigh the bad?
I'd say it does for Elon. Reusable rockets and helping push EVs over the adoption hump are far more important than trolling like a thirteen year old boy on Twitter or playing Dukes of Hazard with the SEC.
But I can't comment on the reusable rockets thing, I suppose time will only tell.
Nah, it just doesn't work that way. Things don't happen until someone does them. Doesn't matter how easy the pitch is. Someone has to hit the ball.
In my experience most companies and governments are risk-averse and nobody wants to do anything until the mythical "someone else" does it. In the absence of a market equilibrium "defector" (game theory) it usually takes a government mandate or subsidy, and even that often fails if it results in "malicious compliance" like GM's EV1 debacle. (The EV1 was clearly sabotaged. It was intended to fail and when drivers actually liked it it was pulled, with GM even more or less confiscating and crushing them.)
The truth is that a significant proportion of the classical auto industry hated EVs. Some still do. The car industry is long wedded to the ICE and the good old fashioned "vroom vroom" as being essential to what makes a car a car, and everyone from unions to equipment makers to oil companies and petrostates had no interest in disruption.
There are still holdouts like Toyota that are just now being dragged into EVs and Koch Industries is still bankrolling anti-EV disinformation.
The reusable rockets thing was much worse than EVs. The space industry used to be smaller and was dominated by stolid mega-corporations with backgrounds in defense contracting that had absolutely zero incentive to change anything. The conventional wisdom in engineering was that current space launch tech was as good as it could get to the point that you had people authoring paper studies claiming that reusability actually wouldn't deliver much of a win (stop laughing!).
It took an utter lunatic to be willing to lose hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to disrupt space. As SpaceX worked on reusability they did so against a chorus of classical aerospace people and even NASA people claiming they would either fail or build a system that would be more expensive than disposable rockets.
I heard people continuing to make this claim even after F9 cores had been flown multiple times. They seemed to shut up when the video of those two Falcon Heavy cores landing in unison came out.
I think the Shuttle experience convinced everyone that reusability wasn't economically feasible. The whole industry had a bad case of learned helplessness combined with an addiction to cost plus contracts.
Edit: speaking of EVs:
I have this hypothesis that Elon's sort of kind of flirting with the alt-right and Trumpism was a ploy to ingratiate himself to Trump during the Trump era to possibly stop any attempt by Trump to kill either Tesla or SpaceX on behalf of his oil company and old school defense contractor allies. Elon may have decided that sucking up to Trump was the price of avoiding a backlash until Trump was out of office.
I have also wondered if his Texas move and appeals to "red America" aren't a marketing ploy to sell that demographic on EVs, since obviously the latte sipping liberal crowd are already on board with the EV revolution. Tesla is capped at blue state early adopters if they can't cross over into the mainstream and that means selling the non-techno-nerd and non-progressive part of car culture.
No clue, just speculation. Elon is first and foremost a marketer.
For a single person, this is still a significant contribution (if we presume that Tesla would not have survivied without him), which just happened to also make him wealthy.
Cult: a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.
If the former, I disagree as it seems people do hate him, follow, and reply on the regular. Pretty much trolling.
If the latter, what makes you think those trolls wouldn't spite vote if they take the time to write toxic replies.
I love this is the nitpicky stuff people get into about Elon.
It's usually some pedantic thing like a Twitter poll.
Hacker News turns into E! news for Elon articles.
I would hope they wouldn't hate visit his twitter. But I didn't think it was a principle thing. I would imagine trust in a poll correlates with trust in the person putting on the poll. People who hated American Idol didn't hate call in options, even though they could have.
> It's usually some pedantic thing like a Twitter poll.
I think that's more because everyone here has a view of Elon that's mostly immutable. The minutia leads to interesting discussions (sometimes)
If he's indeed seeking to participate actively in changing things at Twitter, he may have opened yet another front in his antagonization of the SEC.
[1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/17/240.13d-1
Background: the SEC requires purchasers of >5% of a U.S. public company to provide certain information about themselves and their intentions in making the purchase. Generally, you file Schedule 13D if you're seeking to conduct a takeover bid. The shorter Schedule 13G is supposed to be used only for "passive" investors.
Here, perhaps Musk would say he's not seeking a change in the "control" of the company (voting share ownership), just a change in governance practices not involving a change in control.
This will be interesting...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-twitter-investment-r...
Second update: the inevitable Matt Levine column on the same theme: https://www.bloomberglaw.com/bloomberglawnews/mergers-and-ac...
But sure, he's one of us because one of the many places he stays at is a prefab house that's right next to his work.
He doesn't have many expensive tastes. He doesn't live a life of luxury, he's not covered from head to toe in brand name clothes. He doesn't own a private island. He could care less about that stuff. Yes he has a huge ego but rightfully so. Look at all that he has accomplished against incredible odds (Tesla and SpaceX almost failing).
I do think he is genuinely trying to expand the realm of human consciousness and save the planet and create a backup plan for humans (colonizing Mars). Overall I think he is a net positive for mankind.
If anyone really thinks he is doing all this just to get rich needs to do some more research on him.
He absolutely live a life of luxury. He literally used to daily drive a McLaren F1. He stays around in his billionaire friends' mansions when he travels: https://observer.com/2021/12/elon-musk-staying-at-billionair...
And he absolutely is dressed in designer cloths from head to toe for all his public events.
No seriously:
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/fashion/article/elon-musk-snl
https://www.inputmag.com/style/elon-musk-tesla-air-jordan-1-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/findfashion/comments/8q43av/does_an...
Elon is extremely vain so he doesn't put on anything by accidents.
>If anyone really thinks he is doing all this just to get rich needs to do some more research on him.
It's incredibly obvious he's doing this to be rich. He has incredibly expensive taste that goes far beyond than things like fancy yachts or private islands. He cares about money because it affords him soft power, influence, public adoration and the ability to buy things like you know... *10% of Twitter*.
He is both very well accomplished and a textbook narcissist who ties his sense of self-identity with the world's perception of him. That's why he gets incredibly defensive against naysayers and he is always pushing to "one-up" others.
So yeah, he absolutely cares about being rich because to him it's a validation of his own ego and also allows him to continue to purchase influence and power and attention.
If he's doing it all for money then why start the companies he did? All of them are helping to solve a problem for mankind. He didn't become a drug dealer, sell things that are addicting, etc. He doesn't run a tobacco company.
He doesn't most of the time. Read the first link I sent you. He stays in his friend's estate.
People care about different kind of luxury.
Man you are really personally enamored with him. There is nothing that says you can't do good for the society and be extremely profit driven.
>All of them are helping to solve a problem for mankind.
And solving problems for mankind is very profitable.
---
The celebrity-persona parasocial identification scale (CPI) is designed to measure how media consumers develop identification with celebrities or popular fictional characters. Identification is defined as a persuasion process that occurs when an individual adopts the behavior or attitudes of another individual or group based on a self-defining relationship (Kelman, 1961, p. 63). Identification is a psychological orientation through which individuals define themselves based on their group membership and derive "strength and a sense of identity" from the affiliation (Kelman, 1961). Identification is often confused or entangled with parasocial interaction. Although both parasocial interaction and identification are both forms of audience involvement, they are distinct processes (Brown, Basil, & Bocarnea, 2003b, Brown & Fraser, 2006). Parasocial interaction often predicts identification because people commonly seek to adopt the values, beliefs, and behaviors of celebrities and media persona whom they admire. However, there are examples of celebrities that fans have strong parasocial interaction with, and yet the fans do not want to be like that person (Matviuk, 2006). This brief chapter discusses various aspects of the CPI online survey and its use in these contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2007-08047-038
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-10/elon-m...
Or is this not about rationality?
It's oddly naive to fail to understand how this works because it seems pretty obvious.
Why does anyone think that the US, Japan, UK etc. could not fall into the same trap other nations are in?
Russians right now believe Ukraine is a giant country of Nazis, and that the hundreds of dead bodies showing up after their Army withdraws are people killed by Ukrainians as a false flag, or they're actors, or fake, or 'it doesn't exist'. If the lie is big enough, and you keep telling it, it can be real.
Reality matters as much as anything else.
We probably need a constitutional amendment on that frankly.
And he used Twitter to bolster his campaign. The news coverage he garnered was worth billions from his outrageous takes.
He's a threat to modern democracy, the rule-of-law, and anything resembling sensible governance.
I do have some schadenfreude watching Truth Social(sic) fail, though.
> We probably need a constitutional amendment on that frankly.
Unfortunately you really cannot legislate for this, except in very specific cases like constitutional amendments against Holocaust denial. And even then there's plenty of ways to power that let it be changed or neutralized.
France, Ireland, the Netherlands voted against ratifying the treaty of Lisbon, which gave considerable sovereign to the EU. Sarkozy adopted it anyhow. EU leaders decided to forgo any form of referendum in the rest of Europe, because they knew they would lose.
It was one of the most blatant anti-democratic acts in all of history.
That's just the tip of the iceberg.
Paradoxically, the amount of Pro-EU propaganda and complete lack of both understanding and questioning of the institution is staggering.
It should be noted that at this very moment of crisis, the EU actually isn't providing leadership, rather individual EU nations are forging their own momentum: Baltic states + Poland are closing their borders, dumping Russian Oil, Macron is 'talking' to Putin (not Von Der Leyen), and from a military perspective the EU has no relevance it seems.
So no - that's the opposite of a good example and why we'd have to be careful about legislation.
CNN, Fox, MSNBC, are all full of propaganda and misrepresentation - the issue has fundamentally to do with material reality.
We can actually probably legislate against misinformation, that might be possible but probably not 'propaganda'.
For example: making unproven claims about medical technology - already there's health reasons for that, imagine how that would apply to vaccine misinformation? It might require skeptics to be very deliberate about their skepticism, which for example is fine, it's what we want. But they can't run around arbitrarily saying 'it causes cancer' etc..
For elections, if you want to make claims of 'stolen' you might have to provide evidence.
Perhaps if we treated drugs and election standing like individuals, who can be subject to slander and 'sue' their antagonists, there might be something there.
Who cares and just leave.
Twitter is beyond repair and it will still just keep running to the ground regardless. Where it is currently going (unless Musk does something) it will never change and it will only get worse.
Also, who cares about Trump these days. He has his own platform anyway and even if he does get unbanned (which is highly unlikely) just block him and move on.
The Taliban, Khomeini, Putin and many other war criminals have Twitter accounts screeching on the platform and I don't see you complaining about leaving. (yet)
Better make that search for an alternative soon then.
I just wish they could be a little more consistent with things like this.
It's a huge channel with a very poor and constrained platform under it, which I suspect is the opportunity. However, the only way to unlock it is with leadership who still want to grow for real, instead of keeping it leashed as a zero-sum political tool. If I were to speculate on what makes this a Musk super-play, Twitter seemed on the path to collapsing under the weight of all the fucks its managers and keepers have had to give, thus destroying the value of a historically unique channel. The best way to use that huge channel for real good and value is to open it up to users to build on and get out of the way. It's something he's almost uniquely capable of driving.
Musk: "Sorry to be a free speech absolutist" [2]
Investopedia: "Large shareholder blocs can therefore vote to fire a member of the board and replace them with somebody else for perceived mismanagement, ineffectual governance, or malfeasance." [3] The Board hires the CEO.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/18/1012066/emtech-s...
[2] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1499976967105433600?lang...
[3] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/072815/how-do-corpo...