Difficult not to see this as anything other petulance. It's Musk's site and he's free to do whatever he wants with it, but this seems squarely against "any legal speech will be allowed"
Not at all a fan of his actions on this, and I don't think publishing public information in the way elonjet did should be banned from any platform. BUT, it's a very bad faith argument to not correlate a mobile conveyance, like a private jet or personal car, to the individual who actively uses it the vast major of the time. It wouldn't be called "ElonJet" if it wasn't meant to track Elon, and it's highly unlikely ElonJet would continue to track that specific tail number if Elon traded it for another jet or sold it.
I think the distinction between tracking a private jet and tracking a private car is fairly clear cut. The point isn't to actually show where Musk is at any one point (who cares?), but I think the intent of the account is to show the intense disconnect between him and normal (non-private-jet-owning folks).
Unless I'm misremembering, the ElonJet account listed the cost and the amount of fuel consumed for every flight right? His willingness to burn 10 tonnes of jet fuel on a whim definitely doesn't mesh well with his brand as "The EV-guy".
If they don't share the conformist, leftist authoritarian views of the HN crowd, then it is legal to do anything to them and they're probably transphobic.
In most American jurisdictions, yes, that's legal. The California stalking statute for example (Penal Code 646.9(a)) only applies if the person who's following you intends to make you afraid for yourself or your family. This why stalking victims so often struggle to do anything about it.
I defended Elon many times on HN but this is straight up incompetence. Even if they violated some silly location sharing rule they invented yesterday, there's no good excuse.
The saddest thing is this only adds fuel to the pro-censorship crowd.
Not that this is a good defense, but I think "genuinely scared for his or his child's safety" is a real possibility. Especially if he (rightly or wrongly, no comment there) thinks someone threatened his child... well, protecting your children is one of the more powerful instincts humans have, one of the handful powerful enough to outweigh an ego like Elon's. Plus he has to be at least a little frazzled by Twitter having no credible plan for being financially solvent after scaring off all the advertisers, so I'm guessing he's not doing cold, rational threat assessments of anything. Maybe that interaction of fear and irrationality does start overlapping with petulance too, I don't know.
I think people should take into account that something deep inside Elon knows he's in deep shit, and is probably contributing to him taking rash actions and generally lashing out. He was never a wise man, but I still suspect we're seeing him at a low ebb of rationality. Again, no sort of defense: this is a problem entirely of his own making.
It seems more likely the story about his kid is just another lie to try win the moment. The LAPD statement is careful not to state that no crime has been reported or under investigation, but to leave that interpretation open. They are “aware of the tweet.”
Definitely a solid possibility. Also a possibility he's just drinking his own koolaid, fully "believing" whatever is convenient. But honestly, the dude has probably been getting death threats for years already, in which case he already had reasons to be a little afraid. It's easy for me to imagine that fear cropping up here as being just one of the more prominent ways he's coming unglued under stress.
> Musk tweeted, "My firstborn child died in my arms. I felt his last heartbeat. I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame."
> Soon, Elon's ex-wife Justine Musk revealed the real story and stated that it wasn't the techie but she was holding the child. She wrote, "A SIDS-related incident that put him on life support. He was declared brain-dead. And not that it matters to anyone except me, because it is one of the most sacred and defining moments of my life, but I was the one who was holding him."
If Musk wants to turn over a new leaf and decide free speech is secondary to protecting children, he should consider banning the accounts that have whipped up bomb threats against childrens' hospitals of late.
>That's some psychopathic level lack of empathy for someone who's child died.
You can simultaneously have empathy for someone for the simple fact that their child died, and also think they're lying about the details for their own personal gain. The two are not mutually exclusive.
> The LAPD statement is careful not to state that no crime has been reported
"LAPD's Threat Management Unit (TMU) is aware of the situation and tweet by Elon Musk and is in contact with his representatives and security team. No crime reports have been filed yet." (emphasis mine)
Statistics. He has apparently 10 kids with however many women while being a workaholic and a tweetaholic. How much time could he possibly spend with them?
Yes, he's previously complained that marxism turned his child transgender
> In a new interview with Financial Times, the Tesla CEO, 51, said he believes his daughter — who legally changed her last name in June from Musk to Wilson — no longer wants to be associated with him because of the supposed takeover of elite schools and universities by neo-Marxists.
> "It's full-on communism . . . and a general sentiment that if you're rich, you're evil," said Musk, who is a dad of 10. "It [the relationship] may change, but I have very good relationships with all the others [children]. Can't win them all."
> Musk's comments come six months after Vivian filed a petition to legally change her name and gender.
Remember Elon joking about pronouns earlier? It's hard for me to read that as anything other than spiting his transgender daughter. Between that and his "can't win em all " statement, I don't think Elon cares all that much for his kids.
But I certainly agree that he's going through a crapton of stress right now, and that can't be helping. I hope he finds a feeling of safety, but I also hope that his daughter also finds the peace she needs...
> I think "genuinely scared for his or his child's safety" is a real possibility.
I think he's scared for his own safety. In fact he has basically said as much. As rich as he is, he still owes a lot of money and favors to a lot of people. Some of them are quite powerful and ruthless. They're likely displeased at how he's pissing away the value of an asset in which they have an interest. Just because he's paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get him. If I had the kinds of friends or enemies that he has, and particularly if I had been busy converting the first into the second, I'd be worried too.
That's as good of an explanation as I've seen so far. The only problem is that nothing that he has done so far would reduce that exposure, in fact plenty of his actions increased it.
Right, that would be the "rash actions and lashing out" part. Decisions made in fear are pretty well known for making things worse, not better, even directly with respect to the reason for said fear.
That is approximately what I was getting at, so thank you. The guy's obviously operating in a fog of fear. This is probably exacerbated (if not caused by) his notoriously bad sleep habits, and/or whatever chemical help he uses to sleep at all. What's amazing is that so many people don't seem to recognize. I guess they just never lived in environments where you learn to recognize the signs.
When you're in a persistent fear state, rational decisions become almost impossible and actions directly contrary to one's own interest become commonplace. It's like the skier who's trying to avoid a rock, but keeps staring at it and naturally starts turning toward it instead. Sometimes it's better to look away, even literally, toward the path you should take instead. Unfortunately for us all, Musk so far seems unable to do that.
Those numbers are swelling steadily. And with every sale that Musk does he is adding to that pile. You have to wonder what makes him believe that Tesla stock is overvalued.
He cares so much about his children that one have gone a long way to have nothing to do with him [1]. His personal life is a mess, really a mess [2]. Like many billioners entrepreneurs I think he is just an absent father who only cares about him self.
For better or worse, that has very little to do with the kind of emotions I'm talking about. They seem (to me anyway) to start just north of the so-called lizard brain.
my opinion is you're lying, so right truthful doesn't apply. since we just get to follow your example and make everything potential bad faith, we can't trust you to tell the truth about anything.
This is indistinguishable from
psychotherapy nonsense, palm-reading, soothsaying, entrail evaluation. There is zero factual basis for this “assessment,” and if you believe there is and buy into this, then you are only fooling yourself.
Which is exactly the position that Musk is supposedly fighting against -- it's almost like he has no actual principles and is at best no different than the people he's replacing
Posting a link to a web page that publishes the public tracking information without even mentioning any person’s name almost certainly does not constitute doxing.
That seems pretty narrowly scoped to protecting witnesses, jurors, informants, public servants, and their immediate family members. The personal information it covers is also limited to SSN, home address, phone numbers, and personal email.
Did you watch the same video I did? It's easy to see this as something other than petulance. It's not complicated. Elon is scared for his family. That's a very human thing. In his place I'd do everything I could to protect them. The elonjet account was a security risk to a public figure in the same way that publishing the home address of Supreme Court Justices is a legitimate security risk -- and in the same way that it led to an attempted assassination of Judge Kavanaugh.
It's not what Free Speech means, but in the run-up to his buying Twitter, that's all it seemed to mean in many of the discussions. Of course, we know that they weren't serious about such things as shown by their silence in the face of Elon's actions.
More seriously, Twitter has been a toxic cesspool long before Elon made it worse, and I’m happy I deleted my account and have never missed it. Actually it’s been a boon when I visit a Twitter link and then Twitter nags me to sign in, it’s a great reminder to close that tab and move on with my life.
And my guess is Elon's just spouting random half-ass commands like "banscript anyone who ever mentioned @elonjet" and the hardcore codemonkeys (read: trapped and unable to quit so obviously fearful of being fired) just run them rather than talkback.
I know Paul has been speedrunning awful out-of-touch takes these last few years, but this is literally just that meme of weird nerds diving in front of Elon to deflect criticism.
I mean, apparently it's all about ElonJet based on the story, so "without explanation" doesn't make since here, since they're going by a pre-existing policy about real-time tweeting of one's current physical location to enable harassment.
No, you can find it on the Wayback machine from a year ago. They only added a new sentence to it clarifying that they're worried about things that threaten someone's safety.
So this is how Twitter goes out: not with a bang but with a seemingly endless stream of stories about the little ways Elon is ruining the service each day.
Just staggers me that Elon could have just… not done any of this. And yet here we are. He’s had to sell billions in Tesla stock to finance this ongoing mayhem, this is surely going to be up there as one of the greatest examples of hubris in modern business.
Maybe milking elderly people with robocalls about the "liberal conspiracy" is really that lucrative, and lighting $44B on fire was just an investment to get into that club?
As best I’ve been able to discern it, Musk said he was going to buy Twitter for a way overvalued sum ($44bn) as a troll? But ended up getting in so deep that he found himself with a legal obligation to buy the thing for an absurd price.
It’s the explanation that makes the most sense to me: obscenely rich man is very used to doing whatever the hell he wants with no repercussions, particularly when shitposting on Twitter (see: SEC) and there was no-one around to tell him to stop.
And even worse than that, he would have had to have been deposed before paying for it. A bunch of his conversations about the deal were already released in discovery. Twitter lawyers were salivating about catching Elon in a lie at the deposition. It’s notable Musk was willing to deal juuust before the deposition was finally going to happen.
Because he's not a business genius, he's just a guy who has made a few big bets and they've happened to work out (specifically PayPal and Tesla, and maybe SpaceX eventually). After that, he thought he had a magic touch and started putting money into companies that caught his fancy because it worked for him in the past. Before twitter it was the Boring Company.
The Boring Company is absolutely a success and imo it's the best example of Elon's tried and true strategy: convince government officials of some idea only the government could buy. Boring Company is a money making machine just like SolarCity, Tesla, and SpaceX even though not a single one of those companies could be profitable without the heavy subsidization they receive.
Good Jobs First track how much subsidies are given out to specific companies. Tesla's racked up $2.5 billion from states and the federal government and another half billion in loans/bailouts[^0] (for comparison, Tesla' net income in 2022 was $11.19B). SpaceX is all government contracts where NASA basically pays a private company to do the things they could and want to do but can't because of political impediments. We're still the ones funding it, we're just paying more and letting a private company take credit. Starlink's subsidized by the FCC, SolarCity's subsidized by a number of states as well as the federal gov'ts subsidization through tax credits for 30% of the cost of solar panels, etc.
And people aren't dumb. He's been sued in a number of countries for subsidy fraud already. Remember when Tesla pretended to have rapid battery exchange ready to go and announced it was live? That was purely to take advantage of a poorly written subsidy package in CA that didn't actually stipulate they had to give people access to it. Tesla won that lawsuit too iirc.
Elon Musk became the richest man on earth without ever running a profitable company. In fact, I'd say it's precisely by NOT running profitable companies that he got to where he is today
Wow. Thank you for explaining so thoughtfully. Would you get banned if you say this in Twitter. Why no journalist asks these questions and make people realize it's their money in someone else's pocket.
A disastrous failure worth $6b! That's my point. Neurolink and SolarCity are also disastrous failures. But Boring Company has gotten contract in Las Vegas, Chicago, LA, and more. And despite all these failures Miami, amongst a few other FL and CA cities, is still in talks about a contract.
That's the business. Continue selling a dream. Talk to any actual engineer with relevant knowledge and they'd likely tell you it was a terribly thought out idea from the start. But those engineers aren't the ones signing gov't contracts
The military wanting to spend money on a starlink like low earth orbit system is nothing new or surprising.
They have been spending vast amounts of money on various types of geostationary based two-way satellite communications technology for 40 years. And they currently do so on some very low term projects and contracts.
Remember that the US DoD is what saved Iridium too.
They are always on the lookout for new or better tech.
Musk entirely aside for the moment, fact is that the starlink Redmond team has been first to market with something that is WAY ahead of kuiper, oneweb, telesat or any other leo satellite network in real world results.
This seems to be giving him more credit than he deserves. If he's trying to get republicans on board, all he needs to do is keep crowing about free speech and cancel culture. Actually making any changes to twitter isn't required. IMO he banned journalists that criticized him... because they criticized him. occams razor
The references support facts that are not in dispute. The only fact in dispute is whether the Twitter purchase was instrumental to this contract, not that Starlink is a military contractor with industry connections.
But I agree that we should be concerned about the military applications of Starlink, and that we should be discussing it more. And I appreciate you highlighting it because I wasn't aware.
Republicans are strongest when they have plenty of liberals to criticize. No liberals on his platform means no ammo for Republicans which means they cannot get votes.
Exactly. Occam's razor needs some sharpening here. Musk is just red pilled. There's no need for a conspiracy theory involving the military industrial complex. It's unfortunate, but hardly unique.
He has probably actually been radicalized by Twitter though, instead of just pretending to be. I suspect that he is actually emotionally invested in his chosen side in the “culture war” and feels genuinely compelled to “own the libs” and whatnot.
I have to say this initially rings to me like a conspiracy theory, but there's lots of info you shared that I wasn't aware of and is quite interesting.
I personally would not be against an interest group pushing over their lifetime for a common interest such as space exploration. Although turning this into a "Twitter is a way to curry favours" conclusion is a stretch.
This comment reads like something that is probably true but is hard to prove because it’s a judgment of something that is intangible by nature (motivations) unless its complimented by a bevy of concrete evidence (e.g. emails, testimonies).
I think that you’re tangentially right. I wouldn’t be surprised if Elon Musk purchased Twitter because he had to, but I wouldn’t be surprised if whatever motivated him to posture toward buying it in the first place was motivated by what you’re explaining.
To people who have seen similar deals in the past like this it was also my conclusion.
It’s like Elon is the modern government agency cut out, but instead of having a handler or agency association - he’s just generally a free agent cut out for anyone who will fund him.
But it’s also the plot of the much maligned movie ‘Aloha’. To the keen eye it is a disturbingly insightful film.
I dunno. Why wouldn't Starlink have gotten that contract anyway...? And why would he threaten to cut off Ukraine if securing this contract were a number one priority for him...? Democrats aren't really less keen on military spending than Republicans, if you want to be a huge military contractor, you'd want the support of both.
I mean this is an intriguing rationalization, but I don’t buy it.
Buying votes simply doesn’t cost this much, by orders of magnitude. Burning your empire to ashes as a loyalty test doesn’t hold water either: It’s politicians that partake in loyalty tests, not donors.
> a massive DoD program, which requires Republicans to fund.
Contrary to the partisan memes, support for military funding is actually bipartisan. Republicans often like to say that Democratic politicians don't support the military, to pander to their base, but this isn't actually true. And Democratic Party sometimes like to play at being peaceniks, again to pander to their base, but this isn't true either.
Look up the composition of the United States Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. 50/50 split between parties. You don't get DoD projects funded by sucking up to Republicans, you need to convince politicians on both sides of the aisle.
@georgeg23, comments in this thread are now disabled for new users so I'll reply here. It doesn't matter if SDI was originally Reagan's baby. Reagan is dead and nothing will get funded without approval from both parties. The Republicans can't fund the SDA on their own.
But in this case, the DoD project is decidedly Republican. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was a Reagan initiative and an attempt at rebooting it is a hallmark of every Republican administration since.
It's a particularly spectacle-heavy fall, but it's actually not that uncommon for social networks to decline quickly. Digg famously had their userbase fall apart near-instantly after their v4 launch.
Underrated take IMO. Something many haven't learned ... these things are ephemeral. In the same way they are made new they are made old.
If you care about your online presence and the branding "value" it has, then work to separate the brand from the platform as much as possible.
If you care about your social connections, find some way to separate them from the platform too: follow them on another platform, learn their general identity so you can find them elsewhere, and maybe we can all try to value having our own personal homes on the web separate from any real platform again.
Elon is certainly awful for all that he’s doing, but couldn’t Twitter have simply told him to buzz off when he proposed buying the company instead of taking legal action to ensure he did it?
People up top were eager to cash out at the expense of all the employees under them. That’s equally disgusting to me.
Not really, at least not within a reasonable amount of time to close the deal. Lots of Levine about how Musk couldn't really force the deal with a tender offer, right?
But, I mean, the board did the right thing; their obligation is to the shareholders, and the price Musk offered was absurdly high.
This is where the government should’ve protected our “town square” by blocking the deal (Elon has too many government military entanglements to be allowed to own a social media company, too many conflicts of interest, and Elon’s past history of using Twitter to flagrantly violate the law).
Expecting the shareholders not to take the money and run is unreasonable.
Twitter did tell him to buzz off at first. That was the point of the poison pill. Then he offered stupid amounts of money at astonishingly good terms. All along the way he took shots at Twitter that reduced its value.
Twitter’s shareholders voted to accept the deal at his offered price. When Musk wanted out the shareholders weren’t interested enough to even vote a second time.
Twitter was an unprofitable laughing stock until 2016, and with Trump gone they were very likely to revert to that whoever was in charge. It's hard to justify not taking twice what you're worth for that. Frankly even for employees, getting cashed out on your RSUs at double value and the option to walk away with 3 months' severance sounds better than staying there while it slowly runs into the ground.
Why is this myth so pervasive. Pre-musk, Twitter was making upwards of $1m per employee. If only we could all “fail” this way… It not being profitable was due to short term capital expenditures.
They've had literally two profitable quarters in their whole corporate history. They went from being considered an equal competitor to Facebook to... not, as Facebook was able to bring in advertising revenue and Twitter wasn't.
Every money-losing tech company claims that they could turn the spigot to profitability at any time and the reason they're not profitable is short term capital expenditures; the proof is in the pudding.
> Every money-losing tech company claims that they could turn the spigot to profitability at any time
A bit of an exaggeration but there is some truth here, tech companies are notorious for feeding all their revenue back into growth. However in Twitter’s case it was absolutely true. It had a solid perch and wasn’t going anywhere… until Elon took over and became Trump 2.0 except “this time, he owns the site!”
Elon's slide into max doucheness is a real shame.
I used to tell my kids he was one of the most admirable people around for jump starting the EV industry (yes, I know he didn't do it all).
Then came the pedo guy comments. I cut him slack, he must be tired/strung out, he'll apologise. He never did.
Now he's become like a meme of himself, or perhaps just himself as he always was but now right out there, and it's not good to see.
I feel this comment. I wasn't always a 'fan' per-se of Elon, but I was definitely able to appreciate what his associated companies had put forth. Anymore, I can't stomach the continuous news stream of awful behavior, treatment of others displayed, etc. I cannot support a person like him or what he stands for/represents at this time (or in the foreseeable future).
This seems like the right place for me to speculate idly: I've often wondered about sufficient margins for social engagement on these sorts of things.
For example: how would you or I behave if, no matter what we did, over 50,000 people immediately reaffirmed us online? Would it take 50,000, or would 10,000 be enough? 5,000, 1,000?
This isn't mean to exculpate Musk: he's encouraged this behavior for years, and his own behavior long predates mega-engagement by his fans on social media. And still I can't help but wonder how many of us would be able to similarly contort ourselves, if so much affirmation was on the line.
"To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and remain absolutely sober". -Logan Pearsall Smith
I feel like the fact that he is evidently posting without a filter and probably reading the endless streams of meaningless confirmation is extra damaging.
We all sometimes ridicule the stilted corporate speech of some rich people and their reluctance to appear in public, but increasingly I feel like some of them do it to not fall into the social media trap.
Having a public team write your statements and asking them to provide a weekly/monthly report on the good and the bad seems like a working strategy.
Those people are doing their job and you can even employ different teams to get a more nuanced view while you yourself can be more distanced and collected.
Of course Elon Musk specifically is s social media addict who seems to enjoy being praised by sycophants no matter what he does. He chooses this.
Yes, I wasn't a "fan" but in general I found Tesla and SpaceX to be really cool companies doing things I didn't think I'd see in my life time. When he was a goofball or a little unprofessional it didn't bug me too much, sometimes it was even a little funny, but it got more and more troll-ish and pandering to a mean spirited crowd. Now he's just obnoxious and I wish he'd go away.
Maybe three or four years ago I thought that musk was basically something like the second incarnation of Howard Hughes. Some sort of eccentric high tech aerospace industry misunderstand genius.
Now I can clearly see he's just some guy who is both smart and also a raging narcissistic asshole who came from daddy's apartheid era emerald mine money.
Turns out that shitposting your way through life like an edgelord 14 year old boy on the internet is not an admirable lifestyle unless you are a hardcore musk stan.
Hughes as a company did a lot of cool stuff way after the ww2 era, in fact Boeing's satellite business for large and serious commercial and military geostationary satellites is what used to be Hughes in El Segundo CA, acquired about 20 years ago.
Hughes (now Boeing via McDonnell Douglas) helicopters are quite something. The 500 is generally regarded as quite the hot rod (especially compared to the 206/407). You can even get one in single rotor configuration (NOTAR). Hughes left quite a legacy beyond the Spruce Goose and hopefully El Muskrat will too. It'd be a damn shame if he succeeds in completely destroying Tesla and Space-X.
Oakland PD has a couple of 500s which is neat, but what always brings a chuckle is the tale of how New Zealand farmers went all in on the 500 because nothing else could touch the performance for… hunting deer.
The trouble is that all the cool stuff was also the stuff that Hughes Jr never really cared for. Lasers, Radar, electronics escaped his interest. Hughes wanted you to build world class airframes and sadly this is the one thing Hughes Aircraft never really did well.
I read the other day that Hughes suffered pretty severely de-habilitating mental illness, and that it isn’t fair to him to compare his decline to Elon. He had severe OCD, allodynia, and other things driving his increasingly erratic behavior.
Additionally there is fairly good evidence he screwed up his lower back in early plane crashes and took an increasingly assorted and unusual series of addictive pain medication after age 40+. The 1930s through 1960s were not exactly a golden age of harmless non-addictive pharmaceuticals.
>Turns out that shitposting your way through life like an edgelord 14 year old boy on the internet is not an admirable lifestyle
Unless you do it to the outgroup. Then it's fine! Laudable even!
Same as shutting down journalists and other accounts. It was nothing to fret about when the opposite side used to do it, "they were misinforming or borderline bad anyway, and they could always start their own blog or something, so it wasn't censorship" and so on.
The Twitter of yore shutting down conservatives and other such "controversial" opinions. I don't care much for bipartisan politics, but the partisan bias in all this is palpable, as is a "the tables have turned and we don't like it so we revert to general principles we pissed on before" vibe ...
It's also comic: pundits pissing on free speech (tons of cheering when people were cancelled before, and lots of articles on how it's justified and free speech is not the be all end-all) making a u-turn to call for free speech and condemn Musk's account shutdowns now, while Musk and co that was defending free-speech before is now censoring accounts, while the "free speech" proponents in the previous round are now cheering him for it...
From that article, it certainly appears true that his dad once held shares in an emerald mine. ("This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia.")
I mean, 1980 Zambia is literally apartheid era. That's a statement of fact.
You don't like the associations that "apartheid" evokes? And yet, for an emerald mine in Zambia, apartheid was certainly a big factor in the working conditions there. The mines in Zambia (mostly copper) benefited the most by apartheid, where white workers were paid over ten times what black workers were paid. Even during the 80s, when supposedly the color bar had been dismantled, mines got around that be defining all black labor as "local" (even if the workers were immigrants) and white workers as "skilled expats" (even if the whites were born next door). [1]
Mining, indeed, was heavily tied to the apartheid from the very start. [2]
So it's very relevant that it's an "apartheid era." You could not invest in a mine in Zambia or South Africa without knowing that you were investing into a apartheid system, and hoping to make money off the backs of the apartheid abuses.
> imply a not insignificant portion of daddy’s money came from that mine
Yes, I agreed that that wasn't backed by known evidence in my statement above.
Using my numbered list above (arrow is chain of relevance):
2 -> 1 -> 3 -> 4
If you’re getting tripped up about apartheid and the mine being separated, just combine them.
1+2 -> 3 -> 4
In GPs post, 2 is not relevant to 4 unless you establish 3. Unless GP is trying to make an unfounded claim that “Elon’s current state is associated with the crimes of apartheid” (where associated means having a not insignificant impact on that state), including 1+2 isn’t relevant. It’s irrelevant that it’s an apartheid era mine because it’s irrelevant that it’s a mine. 4 is not associated with 2 by way of 1+3 like, IIUC, GP implied.
Same. I knew he was arrogant etc., but some degree of that almost comes with the territory. And he is prone to intense idiosyncratic interpretations that lead to unusual behaviour. But I also got suckered into thinking the man had some sort of primarily altruistic drive. Maybe he once did. Celebrity tends to ruin even good men.
Think about a wedding. Think about a bride and groom happily dancing, looking forward to their life together. And what does Elon say at this moment? "As we danced at our wedding reception, Elon told me, 'I am the alpha in this relationship.'"
No thanks. Sounds like you're trying to pile rubbish on someone's name by promoting personal hit piece articles from their ex-partners. That's low quality.
Interview anyone's ex and you'll find grubby things to hold up in the light, if that's your agenda.
If you look for dirt, and want dirt, you'll find dirt.
"Hey everyone, read what his ex wife said"... is nothing but encouraging others to look for dirt as you have done. Nothing to do with the current topic about twitter bans. Similar to what cheap tabloid reporting does.
Well, it is one thing when we hear about someone who is a douchebag but we have no proof. Another entirely different thing is to witness this kind of behavior up close. This is what EM is providing everyone since the last few months.
>Then came the pedo guy comments. I cut him slack, he must be tired/strung out, he'll apologise. He never did.
Same. It's one thing to use a slur like that in some personal dispute; but this was against a hero who had saved children, and on a public forum. I've lied to myself that this was a minor dispute. And it would be that if he'd apologized. But the lack of apology is a very serious red flag of character. Impulsive unkind and unfair behavior is something we all are guilty of some time. But to not acknowledge it and make amends? That's wrong. Because the easy thing was the apology, sincere or not. Musk must have pushed back against his people to not apologize. Musk wanted to hurt that man, and he still wants to hurt him, would hurt him again if given the chance, worse if it was legal. And for what? Publicly criticizing Musk's (frankly hair-brained) idea to save those kids. (Honestly, I don't remember the details.) He reacted very badly to a fair criticism, with personal malice and rage, and he believes these reactions to be appropriate and, if anything, displaying admirable restraint.
I can't help but see echos of that lack of empathy, that meanness, as he takes his various actions now with Twitter - firing large swaths of staff, sending demanding emails to the remaining staff on very short term. We are all capitalists and so give a proven leader like Musk enormous leeway in this position. But his behavior has been absolutely rotten. Even layoffs can be delivered with more grace! His words and actions, apart from layoffs, feel like angry, vengeful behavior rather than "effective leader" behavior - all echoes of the "pedo guy" incident.
To give this more context, Vern Unsworth was mocking Elon Musks attempts to help on request of the lead diver, after providing many batteries and engineers time to work on a solution. Vern himself was not an actual diver in the rescue.
He wasn't a rescue diver, he was the local expert, having mapped the cave and knowing more about its structure than anybody else in the world. he was truly qualified to say that Elon's attempt wasn't going to work and was hogging to much attention.
But he initiated being derisive and mocking of another person whom was personally invited to help by the dive team. Contributed time and resources to the effort as per the instruction of the lead diver. Doesn't sound particularly heroic. People love to leave this out of the story that Vern Unsworth brought it on himself by initiating the negativity, wasn't a diver, and ultimately lost his case.
Yes, I agree he (vern) did "initiate it being derisive". It was a poor choice made by a person who was currently working in an active emergency that was being seen by the whole world. And I do know that he lost his case- a real shame in my mind.
He was a diver- just not a rescue diver in this case.
Unsworth had a bunch of lives to save and his response to Musk was - given the circumstances - a lot more courteous than I would have been in the same situation.
That still doesn't excuse Elon though. If you respond to this comment by mocking me for being clueless does that give me the right to call you a pedo? It shouldn't.
> "the lack of apology is a very serious red flag"
Sounds like something a bot would write.
Musk's Twitter apology to the 'pedo guy' at the time made headlines. A simple google will sort out your confusion. He also apologized in court, and repeatedly stated how it was the stupidest thing he's done.
> "We are all capitalists..."
Again, sounds like something a chat bot would write.
I'm curious, what is the simple google search that will find this apology? And what's with accusing me of being a bot? That seems strange and off topic, and not a little unkind.
The simple google search might be "Elon Musk apologizes for ‘pedo guy’ comment".
It's strange you doubled-down on Musk not apologizing, when it was headline news at the time about his multiple apologies and statements of regret over the incident.
You stated: "honestly, I don't remember the details" yet proceeded at length with your analysis and judgement.
People have been using the new chat AI tools to post comments. Your comment was strangely drawn out, laboring on disjointed ideas, pressing inaccuracies like how the new bots do it.
I didn't double down. I asked. And yes, Musk apologized during the defamation trial. That's better than nothing, but not by much- he was under $150M of duress at that point. The vibe I got was distinctive, and softened, but not invalidated by this new information.
I think this is maybe in reference to LBJ's lifelong biographer Robert Caro where he states that "power does not corrupt, power reveals". In it he asserts that what one does with power after obtaining it reveals what the person is. It was there all along, power simply makes it show up prominently.
Yes I understand but I am challenging that with my question (besides "power" in the abstract is very different vs "being constantly recognized/followed"). Certainly being followed, attacked and assaulted in public constantly for being famous can bring trauma, and trauma can change a person, usually for the worse.
Well, there are multiple facets to it. Suddenly having money and having random relatives and old acquaintances show up in your life asking for it might make someone disillusioned about what they thought about the people.
But it won't make genuinely nice person into an asshole that kicks kittens, the money just acts as enabler for stuff they might've been afraid to do before coz of consequences. Like for example pretending to be nice to get promotion at work vs unleashing assholery once there is nobody there to kick you down for your behaviour
It doesn't need to be as conspiratorial as Musk being a foreign asset.
If Twitter took loans from interests either connected to or sympathetic to foreign governments e.g. Saudi Arabia, Russia then simply trying to keep them onboard could be enough to influence his decisions.
The Saudis are major shareholders in Twitter, although personally I doubt they're telling Musk what to do so much as being content to let him run it into the ground; it's a win for them whether Twitter under Musk succeeds or fails.
I don't actually even remotely believe that he is a foreign government asset, but I don't think that's a good argument: giving Starlink to Ukraine is exactly one of the things that a Russian asset would do.
Nearly all of the value of his companies comes form government grants and loans. He also has large security state contracts with SpaceX and Starlink. He's a US govt asset, which is worse, imo.
Tesla got carried over the chasm by hundreds of millions of dollars in DOE-backed loans, their product is subsidized by state and federal price supports, and all of their profits are due to air pollution swaps, another government subsidy. Good for Tesla for being aligned with the government, I guess.
This is to say nothing of Elon's small-potatoes stealing from local governments via Boring.
Ok, but the vast majority of revenue was not generated from selling credits over the entire lifetime of the company, which is what matters when we are talking about Tesla's present-day value (and therefore the source of Musk's wealth).
Most of the value comes from the ponzi scheme that is their stock. Nothing they have in assets, physical or otherwise, ever justified the price of the stock even at half of what it is today.
I guess a definition of "value" as "the intangibles that allow it to keep functioning" would make your statement correct, but a definition that relies on "how it generates revenue" would probably not.
5% of Tesla 2021 Q1 revenue was generated from selling emission credits, 1% from trading Bitcoin, for a total of 6% generated from not selling cars / energy products / etc.
So yes, the vast majority of revenue generators (and therefore value generators) for Tesla (at least in Q1 2021, as per the article you linked) are the things I listed in my first comment.
You were seemingly thinking about what was generating profit, which is generally not how value is calculated, otherwise my (profitable) two-man company would be more valuable than Twitter. But given that you explicitly said "how it generates revenue" at the end of your comment I'm actually a bit confused as to your position.
> Emissions credits accounted for $518 million in revenue in a quarter that saw a pretax income of $533 million and a net income of $438 million on a GAAP basis. Needless to say, the credits account for almost the entirety of Tesla's profit for this quarter
518/533 ~= 97%, not 5%. I must be misunderstanding something somewhere. Explicitly, I'm saying that (per my understanding of that article) Tesla derived more income from selling emissions credits than from selling cars in that particular quarter (and, I think it's reasonable to assume, other quarters, given how overwhelmingly that seems to be their business model).
You are conflating "net income" (profit) with revenue. I do not disagree that the vast majority of profit was generated by selling credits, but revenue is how most people measure value for corps (this is how Amazon could be an amazingly valuable company while not turning a profit for years). Re-read the last para in my other comment for another example of why you don't use profit to benchmark "value".
Even the emission credits being "pure profit" is misleading, given that the only reason Tesla can sell those is because of the cars/batteries/etc they are producing, so realistically the cost of producing those things should be deducted against the revenue generated by selling the credits.
Right... or those are both ludicrous rationalisations for someone who was always a gaping asshole. Many of us managed to never have been fooled by him.
If anything turned him into who he is, it would be his childhood. When he writes the xmas card to his half sister / niece, it must be difficult deciding how to fill out the card.
I've seen enough behind closed doors to believe wealthy+successful+powerful people are given every opportunity to go down dark paths of personal "development" and that statistically some are likely to turn out "bad" while protected by many layers of power and appearance and prestige.
I recall having conversations with some people, who seemed to follow the "scene" more than I, telling me that his image was relatively well curated and managed by PR people in and around his companies, and that his "quirkiness" was allowed out in managed quantities so as to maximise interest and attractiveness without being off-putting.
I never looked into it because I didn't care much. The rockets stuff is cool but also profitable so good for him and capitalism. But I found it highly believable and never really understood the cultism around him. I wouldn't have predicted this twitter or doucheness, but I certainly don't find it surprising.
Why twitter though, it's quite small and not very influent except maybe in some countries like the US, could have bought Weibo and reached a huge market for potential clients and way more ways to make money.
America is probably saturated, it's not even like it wants to buy Musk products, and Musk feels so much more like a Chinese boss than the head of an american social platform having to navigate impossible compromises :D
The strategy to act like a republican douche courting Trump to try to maybe make them like barely finished EVs might pay off, but it's such a risky bet. I d pay good money to witness one day american conservatives "owning the libs" through buying his electric cars.
Twitter itself will never yield him 44bn, so there s no economic rationality for the buyout: it can only be now a derivative gain.
The EV industry is a distraction to prevent us from doing what is needed to save the environment: ie. minimise the use of cars. It (much like the hyperloop scam it necessitated) is simply an attack on car-free living and public transport.
No, that's dumb. These are largely orthogonal problems.
Not having EV's wouldn't have made everyone suddenly switch to public transit and bikes, as cool as that might be. They'd just keep driving gas and diesel vehicles.
And realistically, you can't get rid of cars and trucks entirely. Even super dense areas with strong public transit still use plenty of cars and trucks, because they're useful. You think Singapore and Tokyo and Seoul could run on no cars or trucks whatsoever?
Car-free living doesn't imply the total eradication of all cars. It just means reducing dependency on them to a bare minimum: ie. those uses which cannot possibly be replaced. The former is something that literally nobody has ever proposed. The latter is something which is a serious policy option.
Also you are making a logical fallacy by assuming I am saying that -EV's- (sorry: "EV industry", different thing) are singularly responsible for the lack of decent climate policies. I just said they were an attack on the objective. One of many.
FYI: I live in Seoul and there's certainly a lot that could be done to reduce the insane amount of cars from current nightmare levels. Korea has a very powerful auto industry, one thing they could do is stop subsidizing it. Switching to EV's will undermine any effort to do that "bEcaUsE EV's aRe grEeN!"
It's not an "attack". You can have good public transport and cars live in harmony if you design cities properly. Hell, in fact it synergises well, the more people opt in for public transport the less cars on the roads there are.
It's just abhorrent design of cities, that is the problem, especially in US.
I feel like this was something that he was turned into. Things like the pedo guy comments and the Covid skepticism and a bunch more are genuine criticisms, but for every story of substance there has been a deluge of pure character assassination. Between the years of long work hours and a stream of hot or cold praise or condemnation I think it's quite easy to lose your moral compass.
I think a lot of my friends think I'm a die hard Musk fan when I say a criticism is unfair. I actually just think he's a human being under a microscope coping poorly. I'll support the criticism when I think it's warranted. The is a culture of everything is bad because bad man is bad, that unsettles me.
As for this particular story on HN, I really don't know. Twitter is a chaos box at the moment, It's hard to tell whether Musk is directly involved. These actions (or any actions really) might be policy, edicts from the top, officious middle employees or just plain screw ups.
I believe the person you replied to was saying that was an example of a legitimate issue with Elon's behavior, as compared to the "pure character assassination."
>Twitter is a chaos box at the moment, It's hard to tell whether Musk is directly involved. These actions (or any actions really) might be policy, edicts from the top, officious middle employees or just plain screw ups.
This is an issue that allegedly involves Musk's family. He's tweeted about it directly multiple times stretching back to his initial offer of cash for @elonjet to go away, and has directly discussed this policy change in his own tweets over the past 24 hours, including tweeting about this round of bans.
Are you actually saying "it's hard to tell whether Musk is directly involved" in this specific issue, or...?
In that respect I was talking about the journalist bans rather than the elonjet bans. Now that I see he has weighed in on this issue it does seem to be that he was involved in the policy. The policy itself seems at odds with his previous statements but the no doxxing rule does seem to be arguably a reasonable thing to have.
Whether those banned were actually in violation of those rules I don't know. I would have said remains to be seen, but I fear such details will be lost in the news churn.
He apologised more than once. Including on Twitter and again in court where he looked the guy directly in the face and apologised.
I mean, it was widely reported but somehow you missed the headlines at the time such as Washington Post's "Elon Musk apologizes for ‘pedo guy’ comment: ‘The fault is mine and mine alone’"!
You're right, I did miss it. But it looks he followed up with this (after the apology) so the point stands:
He blasted: "He's an old, single white guy from England who's been travelling to or living in Thailand for 30 to 40 years, mostly Pattaya Beach, until moving to Chiang Rai for a child bride who was about 12 years old at the time.
"There's only one reason people go to Pattaya Beach. It isn't where you go for caves, but it is where you'd go for something else.
"Chiang Rai is renowned for child sex-trafficking."
But you wrote the statement "he never did", as if you'd done your homework and had concrete facts. And others have replied to your comment saying "yeh he never apologised" etc. Note the virality of wrong information when you're on an attack path.
Here's some facts... The diver guy launched a public attack on Musk at a time when kids needed help. Everyone was focused on helping the kids, but this diver decided to get some attention by insulting Musk out of the blue, in a CNN interview.
Musk's sub wasn't used for the cave rescue, but was kept by the Thai Navy who said they could use it for future rescues. The navy were trained in how to use it.
The diver guy was wrong to attack Musk. So the sub couldn't be used in the cave, so what? It was help, undeserving of scorn. I'm not excusing Musk's reactionary comments, but I'm glad the diver lost the court case. The diver wanted 160 million dollars and was awarded zero by the jury.
And speaking of apologies, the diver never apologised or backed away from accusing Musk of a stunt and telling him to stick his sub up his rear end. A sub that a team of people worked on, not just Musk.
> Here's some facts... The diver guy launched a public attack on Musk at a time when kids needed help. Everyone was focused on helping the kids, but this diver decided to get some attention by insulting Musk out of the blue, in a CNN interview.
My guess is that both the diver and Musk desperately wanted to help the kids. The divers attack on musk (I believe attack is too strong a word, but sticking with your terminology) was likely motivated by the view that Musk was making things worse, not better, with impractical ideas. From what I've read of the case, musk's submarine was indeed not practical - for this requirement.
However, whatever the divers motivation, responding by falsely accusing someone of being a paedophile is vicious, uncalled for and indicative of being a giant douche. Apologizing and then unapologising - and doubling down on the false smears of someone way below him on the ladder - is more of the same.
Not to mention, hiring a PI to dig up dirt on the guy to try and defame the diver further. It's one thing to hurtle insults around on Twitter, is another thing entirely to mess with people's actual lives.
You're claiming to know the motivations of others, but your record of accuracy is not great in this thread.
Building and delivering a sub with the intention to help, is never going to "make things worse" even if the sub isn't used.
If my colleague writes a program that ends up not fitting the application, I would never tell them to shove their code up their arse. Who would do that other than a giant douche?
Both the Diver and Musk engaged in a squabble in public, started by the diver, escalated by Musk. You're focusing too much on the contents of the insults, and deciding Musk's was not only the greater crime, but the only crime. You've pardoned the diver of any fault, and invented a squeaky-clean backstory to explain his remarks.
I agree. This slide into barefaced shittiness hurts all the more because, at first, he felt like the hero we needed.
EDIT: "barefaced" intentional because there's significant evidence to claim that these character traits were always present (see - the famous essay by his ex-wife), just less noticed.
Yeah I think he's lost it - all that money seems to really have gone to his head. Really he should be doing one thing well (pick cars or rockets) and enjoying life - spending hours a day personally banning people he doesn't like on twitter can't be good for his mental health - frankly the emperor has no clothes
I think Twitter was long dead. It just had no prospect of making money, but slowly degrade into more “heavy VF” propaganda machine it had been for years, and recent series of events is its heart attack at Leviathan timescale.
I don’t understand why people say this: Twitter wasn’t lucrative in the way that Facebook is, but they made a healthy profit in 2019 and probably would have made a small profit in 2021 had it not made settlement payments. Their revenue per employee was close to $1M, which is about 2/3rds of Google’s.
It’s not clear, either then or now, that Twitter “had no prospect of making money.” By most metrics, it was a potentially (and in actuality) very profitable company with a history of mismanagement.
Twitter was already struggling with right wing nutjobs and banana republics before El Muskrat got into the mix. Beyond that, Twitter was absolutely struggling to monetize eyeballs. While it wasn't about to implode in the short-term I don't think anyone expected Twitter to stick around long-term without significant changes. El Muskrat just doused the whole thing in acetone and dropped a big fat blunt on it.
Twitter was profitable for, what, a single quarter in 2019? That's not sustainable. But yeah we're talking years before a major cash crunch not weeks. Elno accelerated that timeline pretty dramatically.
If pigs had wings they could fly, but they don't so they can't. Almost profitable is not actually profitable, and Twitter was profitable for a brief moment in time with no indication that it was or would be sustainable.
I agree with this! My point was that Twitter was not destined to fail: it had (has!) hundreds of millions of high-value users who treated (treat!) it as a news and culture feed. They made lots of money off of those users; the fact that they weren't more regularly profitable is an indictment of management rather than the fundamental business model.
This entire thing is an extended farce in two acts: (1) Twitter's leadership's inability to turn a highly addictive social media network into a regular money fountain, and (2) the sale of a potential regular money fountain to the single least qualified person possible.
Twitter had reasonably healthy finances and steadily growing revenue. It turned profit in 2018 and 2019 and could have fully recovered from the 2020 slump within a few more quarters.
A change in leadership (never been a fan of Dorsey) and a refocus on core competencies could have given it a big boost - if it was planned and executed competently. But what we got with Musk is the exact opposite of that. The amount of fuckup is truly amazing to watch.
Exactly! I couldn't help but think of Hughes recently with his crazy choices. He hasn't got the injury from a plane accident to attribute his awfulness to though.
I feel like the media determined they were going to report it as a failure regardless of what the facts are. Remember all the stories about how Twitter was definitely going to fall apart during the world cup?
PG has been a Musk fanboy defending his every crazy action on Twitter. Even now his first instinct was to assume that there was some foul play. Anyway he saying it’s bad is a change for sure.
He's confidently stating now that there was a "coordinated campaign" to continue posting the jet tracker link (e.g. https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af). From the chrysalis emerges the caterpillar.
I read it that way at first too, but I think he’s saying that’s why he originally suspected the bans were due to an algorithm gone awry. And that’s a reasonable worry — it was possible that a particular url was causing the accounts to be banned, e.g. if Musk added ElonJet to some kind of internal ban list, that’d do it.
No, he's claiming the journalists "coordinated" a campaign to share external links to the jet tracker. Some of them admit that they did (not "coordinated" -- alternate sites of this public data has been very widely shared), but others are at a loss and claim they did no such thing. One had reported on an LAPD statement -- that despite the imminent harm Elon claimed, they hadn't gotten a crime report and actually had to reach out to Elon's people -- and shortly after got suspended.
Elon is constantly leveraging the "for the children" cover for his petulance.
"My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the
account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal
safety risk," he tweeted on Nov. 6.
> So this is how Twitter goes out: not with a bang but with a seemingly endless stream of stories about the little ways Elon is ruining the service each day.
He also brought back a ton of banned people … who were similarly banned without explanation.
In this case, he needs to set rules and judges for his kingdom if he wants a certain group to keep using it.
As an aside, one of the people banned was known to take clips out of context. Add commentary on top, and actively mislead people. Imo these aren’t journalists, they’re activists
> As an aside, one of the people banned was known to take clips out of context. Add commentary on top, and actively mislead people. Imo these aren’t journalists, they’re activists
All of these things - mischaracterization, commentary, misinformation, activism - fall well within the "free speech" Musk said he'd be protecting, even if your assertions are true.
“A Twitter representative said the action followed the violation of rules prohibiting “operating fake accounts” and attempting to “artificially amplify or disrupt conversations through the use of multiple accounts,” as noted here.”
“Update: The image was in fact redacted, I thought it was done by the person who took the screenshot but the first digits were removed in the original tweet.”
It's hard to overstate what a crucial time this is for Tesla. They had early-adopter success when they had the field to themselves. But now every major car company plus a bunch of other people (possibly including Apple) are coming for them. Pivoting to the mainstream market and fending off all the competition is going to take both dedication and gobs of capital. Capital that is going going to be harder to raise with a distracted CEO and a bunch of investors who've had their fingers burned.
Latest rumor is that they pushed it from 2025 to 2026.
By 2026 it'll be next to impossible to make any serious impact in EV market, certainly not serious enough to affect Tesla.
In 2026 Tesla will be at run rate of 5+ millions cars.
There's no magic in this business.
Even if Apple has a car with that kind of demand, it takes 1 year to build a factory and 3 years to ramp it to 1 million cars a year. This is what Giga Shanghai did and that's faster than anyone ever done it.
So we're talking 2030 for 1 million cars, if somehow Apple can build it's first factory at the same scale and speed as Tesla it's second factory, after lots of painful learning scaling Fremont production.
Plus, without robotaxi what's the point? Luxury brands like BMW / Audi / Mercedes top out at ~2.5 million a year. That's a business, but it's not a Tesla destroying business.
Apple is extremely good at being a late mover in key markets. Few even remember MP3 players before the iPod or smartphones before the iPhone. Or look at how the smartwatch market changed after the Apple Watch was introduced.
They also have one of the world's strongest brands, with a lot of dedicated customers. They don't have to compete on price, so despite having 13% of the global phone market, they are making 75% of all smartphone profits: https://www.imore.com/apple-takes-75-smartphone-profits-desp...
I am not an Apple fan and own none of their gear, but even I can recognize how Apple would be a formidable player.
> Few even remember MP3 players before the iPod or smartphones before the iPhone. Or look at how the smartwatch market changed after the Apple Watch was introduced.
You say your not an Apple fan, but really sounds like you've been hanging out the Apple Store a bit too much lately.
Those are all cold business fact. At the various times, I owned an Archos Jukebox, a series of Palm devices, and a Pebble, so I was paying attention to all of those markets as Apple swept in. I have never owned an Apple device, as I dislike their sealed-box, consumerist nature, and I thought Jobs was a gaping asshole. But despite my personal dislike, I can recognize that there are reasons they are the world's most valuable company (4x Tesla's value): https://companiesmarketcap.com/
It might have lost short-term gamblers a lot of money, yes. But if you lose money through gambling, the only person you should blame is yourself.
If you’re an investor who’s in it for the long run, I don’t see what today’s stock price has to do with anything though. You can’t use the current stock price as an answer to what the stock is worth.
> Capital that is going going to be harder to raise
Tesla has over $10 billions in cash and adding few billions every quarter. They don't need to raise ever again.
> They had early-adopter success
Yes. Also, they became the largest EV company in the world with 2x margin of other car companies.
> when they had the field to themselves
Nissan Leaf and Bolt EV launched before Model 3.
Jaguar i-Pace, Audi eTron, BMW i5, VW ID.3 and ID.4, few models from Hyundai and quite a few more.
Model 3 and Model Y had plenty of competition for several years.
That competition didn't sell many cars and Tesla did.
> But now every major car company ... are coming for them
More like desperately trying to catch up. Tesla is still ahead of everyone in things that matter, like securing raw materials for batteries, building battery cells, securing battery cells from suppliers, manufacturing (gigacasting, spending less time and money to build a car), building more factories (ramping up 2, soon announcing 2 or more), Tesla Semi with best specs by far, still the best motors, the most efficient cars, the safest cars, building insurance business, shipping more software updates than anyone. This is not a complete list.
The question for the future is not: will Toyota or Honda kill Tesla.
It's: will Toyota and Honda keep up enough to not go bankrupt.
As to the future, we'll see, but it's perfectly possible that Tesla will end up in the bucket with Groupon: promising early start, but in retrospect only of historical interest.
Staying in the car business during a time of transition is an expensive game. Tesla may well need to raise money again and the way their stockprice has been going as of late isn't going to help them with that.
I agree the first bit is true; I just don't think it guarantees future success. Looking at the top 25 vehicles in 2021, Tesla only has one on the list, and that's way down at #17. They have a lot of climbing to do to get to #1. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g36005989/best-selling-car...
The latter argument is addressed in the article: "Tesla's value is down more than 52% since the Twitter buyout was approved on April 25, while the S&P 500 is only off 5.5%. And Tesla stock is off 29% since the deal closed on Oct. 27, much worse than the S&P 500's 6.6% gain in that time."
> I agree the first bit is true; I just don't think it guarantees future success. Looking at the top 25 vehicles in 2021, Tesla only has one on the list, and that's way down at #17. They have a lot of climbing to do to get to #1.
That's true, however the majority of people still purchase non EVs, which is not the market Tesla is in. As multiple parts of the world are moving to ban sales of new petrol cars (UK 2040, EU 2035, Chili 2035, Hong Kong 2035, India 2040, etc), there will be an interesting point where most new cars purchased worldwide are EVs.
I don't believe Tesla are the ones who need to catch up to the petrol manufacturer market - the opposite is true. The traditional manufacturers have about 10 years to catch up or start bleeding, as laws will force purchasers to buy an EV.
RE the value loss argument, it is certain that the overvalued Tesla stock is dropping, however that 52% is during a period that tech stocks (which I would argue Tesla is one of) have been dropping like crazy. The NASDAQ is down almost 30% from the start of the years, mostly pulled downwards by tech stocks:
I don't think they're in a worse position than any other tech stock, especially with global legislation effectively guranteeing them a long term pay off.
Your theory appears to be that with the shift to EVs over the next 15-20 years, most people will shift manufacturers to an EV-specific one, specifically Tesla.
But it's at least as reasonable to think that people will keep buying EV versions of their favorite cars. Not only is there significant brand loyalty in the car markets, but there's no particular reason to think that Telsa can be all things to all people. Tesla only has 3 models total; Toyota alone has 5 models on the top-25 list. The current Tesla model lineup appeals to a pretty specific demographic, and I don't see much sign Telsa can expand beyond that.
There's plenty of sign that other manufacturers will catch up. Consumer Reports has studied 20 EVs. They recommend 5. Tesla only has one model they recommend, and it's in the middle the scores for those 5. The Kia EV 6 gets a 91 and the Genesis GV60 gets an 84. The Tesla Model 3 gets a 78.
That's all before we get to Musk. Tesla got gobs of free publicity and cheap capital because of his PR savvy. But that has now gone into reverse, with no sign that Musk even thinks that's a problem: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4562466-can-tesla-survive-w...
And personally, I think "Tesla is a tech stock" and "Tesla will become the dominant car manufacturer" are theses that are at odds. Tech stocks are high margin businesses. Niche luxury cars, as Tesla has been to this point, can be high-margin efforts. But the mainstream market won't be.
Not sure what indications we have that Twitter is "going out". User numbers are higher than ever.
He unbanned a lot of people that were also banned previously for no reason. I think a lot of the outrage comes from the "unfairness" now being dished out to those people with whom the outraged agree with...
His advertising has plummeted, the service is now in extreme debt and he’s not even paying the bills lol. There’s plenty of evidence if you bother to look.
If Musk does end up taking out Twitter, it’ll be up there with electric cars and rebooting the private space travel industry as a service to humanity. Twitter is an awful platform that relies on cognitive hacks to elevate the worst people (across the spectrum) to prominence. Do you remember the last few years? We got to the point where respectable news outlets were reporting on cable news the insane takes that were flitting through Twitter. Nuking Twitter from orbit is a goddamn public service.
"In 1918, Ford purchased his hometown newspaper, The Dearborn Independent.[76] A year and a half later, Ford began publishing a series of articles in the paper under his own name, claiming a vast Jewish conspiracy was affecting America.[77] The series ran in 91 issues. Every Ford dealership nationwide was required carry the paper and distribute it to its customers.
"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford#Antisemitism_and_Th...
I think Musk bought Twitter to serve as his own platform, to spread his ideas and to suppress those of others.
Whoa. I didn’t downvote, but that’s a surprising take from you.
One obvious problem with it is that if Twitter dies, some other site will take its place. The idea of tweeting isn’t going anywhere. It’d be a bit like trying to uninvent a bicycle.
More generally, a bunch of thoughtful people use Twitter, and Twitter DMs changed my life. It’s the AOL messenger of the 2020s. A low friction “DMs open” platform is very hard to come by — the closest before the messenger era was email, which usually isn’t a conversation. So there would be a real loss in terms of social value. E.g. TikTok requires both people follow each other before DMing, so there’s not even an option.
You’re not entirely mistaken, but the caveats seem worth calling out. On the whole it seems like more harm than good would come from the implosion.
> not with a bang but with a seemingly endless stream of stories about the little ways Elon is ruining the service each day
Is Musk making mistakes in his management of Twitter? I'm sure he is.
On the other hand, it is also true that a lot of people now have it in for him, and will amplify any story about such a mistake, regardless of how real it is, simply because it is what they want to hear, it feeds the current narrative, it makes great clickbait.
In terms of how Twitter actually turns out, I think we are really going to have to give it time, including waiting until the media gets bored with it and moves on to some other topic. It is probably going to do worse than Musk hopes, but also not as badly as many of his detractors predict.
Of course, Musk isn't helping things by feeding that media outrage cycle himself. But I can only imagine that behind the scenes, cooler heads – such as Gwynne Shotwell and Robyn Denholm – are urging him to step away from the controversy for a bit, stop feeding it and let it die down. Hurry up and find a new CEO for Twitter, then go spend a few weeks chilling on a tropical island.
> He’s had to sell billions in Tesla stock to finance this ongoing mayhem, this is surely going to be up there as one of the greatest examples of hubris in modern business.
He's always been willing to stake it all on the left field idea. Sometimes that has worked really well for him (Tesla, SpaceX), other times it has gone rather poorly (Twitter). But, you can't really have one without the other – either you take big risks, sometimes strike it lucky and make it big, other times get badly burnt; or else you don't, and you avoid the burns, but you'll never make it as big either. The kind of person who always takes the right big risks and never the wrong ones, is either too lucky or too wise to actually exist.
He made a huge amount of money really fast, and now he's gone back a lot on that. But he's likely got another 20-40 years of life ahead of him, he could easily make it all back and then some.
> I think we are really going to have to give it time
Yes and no. The acquisition is now complete, so we can judge what led up to that. And it was terribly done. The dude made an offer on a lark, thought he could wiggle out, and discovered that, however much he normally can get away with shenanigans, a Delaware chancery judge was not among the people who would let him slide. So he was forced to buy a business he had spent months trashing publicly. He easily lost $20 billion the moment the deal closed. It's one of the most spectacular own-goals in business history.
We can also start judging the actual takeover. There is absolutely no reasonable business goal that justifies the level of chaos and mismanagement during the takeover. Even if one believes that cutting 75-80% of the staff was necessary, it was very poorly done. If someone had wanted to maximize the level of media attention, they could have hardly done better than all the dramatics.
So is it possible that he'll pull Twitter out of a dive and turn it into a functioning business again? Yes. Network-effects businesses are notoriously hard to kill, which is why Twitter survived all these years despite its problems. But it it likely he'll ever turn a profit on it? I doubt it.
But I think the real long-term cost here to Elon is in brand damage. He was a media darling for quite a while, with a lot of people buying his Tony Stark/Edison 2.0 routine. But those days are over. Tech reporters can be pretty credulous, as they are paid to get eyeballs. But business reporters are much less forgiving, as they're paid to be useful to people trying to make money. And now that Musk has made himself look so erratic, there will always be questions about his competence. His media honeymoon is over, and given how much he used his brand to hawk products and get cheap capital, that's going to be a big problem for him going forward.
What seems an obviously right course of action to you is not to others and it comes down to value systems. Only time will tell the outcome. My colleagues wife’s company was acquired by a huge media company and she and dozens of her colleagues have spent the last 6 months wondering if they are going to have jobs. The stress is palpable every time I see her. That’s not more humane to me than what Musk did (let everyone know within weeks where they stand). It impacts her, it impacts my team lead which impacts me. It’s horrible.
I remember a few weeks ago Twitter wouldn’t be able to keep the lights on. That’s obviously not the case. Interesting how fast the narratives are moving.
Let’s pretend for a minute Musk wasnt liberal public enemy #1 and the machine wasnt fully activated to take him down (now that we have confirmation of what we already knew, that media companies collude to suppress or amplify coverage)… he is running Twitter without any noticeable impact to the operation of the services with 70% less staff. That’s astounding to me. All else equal, this business would have been significantly more profitable over night.
The fact of the matter is, companies will go where the users are. Once the noise dies down, why wouldn’t you continue spending money on Twitter if your competition is?
> What seems an obviously right course of action to you is not to others and it comes down to value systems.
Thus far a lack of one is being demonstrated.
> Let’s pretend for a minute Musk wasnt liberal public enemy #1...
When was Musk "liberal public enemy #1"?
> he is running Twitter without any noticeable impact to the operation of the services with 70% less staff
My house would hum along for a few months if I died suddenly, but eventually the power would get cut for lack of payment. The impacts of cutting staff dramatically may take time to become evident.
Are there value systems by which Musk's bid for Twitter was well done? yes. For one, comedians certainly appreciated it. But by the value system of the Wall Street Journal or the average business school professor, it was terribly done. And that's the one that interests me here.
I agree that the post-purchase stuff is harder to evaluate. But I don't think there's a good case to be made that it was competently done for any set of reasonable business goals. If you'd like to try, feel free. Any value system you like.
> he is running Twitter without any noticeable impact to the operation of the services with 70% less staff.
There is more to the service than just the technical. His decimation of the moderation teams is immensely noticeable.
> The fact of the matter is, companies will go where the users are. Once the noise dies down, why wouldn’t you continue spending money on Twitter if your competition is?
When the CEO is spreading outright hate speech, sane people go elsewhere. Brands won't want their image tarnished by looking like they are supporting hate speech.
Right now there isn't a great alternative to Twitter. Mastodon is definitely not it. But once there is, e.g. something like t2.social, my guess is that Twitter will be toast faster than people imagine. I'm sure the hardcore alt-right will hang on, but it will be a shadow of its former self.
> He easily lost $20 billion the moment the deal closed. It's one of the most spectacular own-goals in business history.
I'm sure he regrets a lot of it, and wishes he could go back and change some of it. However, a big part of that was poor timing with the economic cycle – if Putin hadn't invaded Ukraine, the markets might be in much better shape right now, and the deal would have turned out a lot less bad. He took a stupid risk, and it blew up on him – but it might not have, and people would have paid far less attention if it hadn't. Anyway, while US$20 billion is a huge loss in absolute terms, it is only around 10% of his net worth, even less at the time it was incurred. I'm sure he's not the first and won't be the last billionaire to lose 10% of their net worth on a bad deal, and many have bounced back from that kind of loss before. Maybe he's even learned his lesson, and will be more financially conservative in the future.
> Even if one believes that cutting 75-80% of the staff was necessary, it was very poorly done
I find it very hard to work out what is actually true about that. I heard people here condemning him for planning to let people go with no severance, and then suddenly he is giving people three months instead. Did he backtrack under pressure? Were the earlier claims just unsubstantiated rumours? How am I supposed to know. My gut feel, is he probably did make somewhat of a mess of the whole thing, but not quite as bad a mess as many claim.
> But I think the real long-term cost here to Elon is in brand damage. He was a media darling for quite a while
I think that is somewhat overstated. Remember the whole "pedo guy" incident? The "Texas Institute of Technology & Science"? A lot of people (both in the media and the general public) have disliked him for years, and they do have some legitimate reasons for that dislike. All Twitter has really done, is added to those reasons, and drawn attention to them, rather than creating something which wasn't there before.
How is SpaceX Starship going to go? Nobody really knows. Worse case scenario, is it flounders and turns into an expensive boondoggle. Best case scenario, it successfully pulls off Artemis III and dearMoon, people forget about the delays and Musk's endlessly over-optimistic timelines. If the best case scenario happens, what are people going to think of him when Twitter is yesterday's news, and Musk-founded SpaceX played a key role in returning Americans to the surface of the Moon? Especially if it happens under a Republican administration, a GOP White House will probably be rushing to give Musk a "Presidential Medal of Freedom" if Artemis III succeeds, and those who can't stand him will probably just have to bite their tongue.
Yup I don't like Elon but I assumed twitter would mostly stay the same with a bit more trumpism. I was fine with that but after the sheer stupidity of the last few weeks I'm going to have to leave.
He has lost 40% of his net worth (over $110 billion) so far this year largely because of this one deal. Truly one of the most disastrous business decisions of all time.
The silver lining here is that we are quickly learning beyond all shadow of doubt that you would not want to live on Mars in a dome owned by Elon Musk, at the same time the odds of that ever happening are dropping faster than his net worth.
This is ultimately a long awaited revenge against sour activism taken too far, and exposure of alarming things hidden or ignored for ages — things Twitter and its Big Club have been known for for a long time.
A significant fraction of our ascendant elite are overworked, overmedicated and alone. Musk is likely the most critical of the afflicted by Kayne syndrome.
Musk has a long history of attacking journalists who write stories critical about him or his company, and he famously called a guy who helped save a bunch of kids a pedophile for criticizing his ill-advised efforts to help out. When he was a kid, he was pushed down a flight of stairs for making fun of a fellow student's father's suicide, and Musk's father was not on his son's side.
Elon did everything in his power to ruin the life of a whistle-blower. After they were able to identify the source of the leak, Martin Tripp, someone who had a personal vendetta against Tripp called in a false police report that he was planning a mass shooting. I cannot say who that someone was, but both Tesla and Musk himself were spreading rhetoric that Tripp was a dangerous individual.
> Sweeney said he hasn't received any notification of legal action, and the last time his bot tweeted anything was Dec. 12, "which is not last night, so I don’t get how that’s connected.”
Oh, that may be why Musk is so anti trans all of a sudden, first his child disowns him and now he loses his lover to a trans person. Taking Musk's ego into account some kind of response is inevitable.
Hmm..
- not the world's largest auto company by a long shot. not even in the top 10.
- had to borrow billions (at least 13B) from banks to buy twitter (banks that now want out)
- twitter not remotely the biggest social media company in the world. again.. likely not even in the top 10.
If you are anything like me, you were fooled for a long time because of SpaceX.
It's become clearer and clearer however that SpaceX succeeded in spite of Elon, not because of him. There are all sorts of reports around now that SpaceX management is very effective at building a firewall around Elon to stop him doing a lot of damage.
But his politics, narcissism, deception, misrepresentation and incompetence actually aren't new. Lying about his education, his role in Paypal, founding tesla and so on. It goes back decades.
Personally I'm not surprised at Elon's temper tantrum and banning people who are mean to him on Twitter. What saddens me however is how many stans and apologists ("dick riders" if you will) Elon still has. Elon does not care about you. You will never be Elon. For the record, this is a general "you", not who I'm replying to specifically.
It's a pretty obvious midlife crisis. Dude's baby mama left him for a trans woman. His own gender-reaffirming hair implants turned out all wrong. Tough time to be Elon.
You trolling? I don't care for Olbermann all that much but it's hypocritical for Twitter under Musk to ban him. If there are new "doxxing" rules perhaps a warning is reasonable instead of an immediate ban
It remains very funny that he paid forty-five billion dollars for the privilege of humiliating himself daily with these petulant temper-tantrums. Amazing bit.
To note, he didn't pay the whole forty-five billion dollars, investment banks have a part of that and are also eating dirt. I have no sympathy for them either, but it brings more flavors to the whole thing.
Secured as debt against his Tesla shares as collateral, which with the slide, means he has to put up more Tesla shares, causing a very nasty snowball effect
That’s not true. Most of the debt was leveraged against Twitter, it’s a classic LBO.
The investment banks have been attempting to change that to a margin loan against TSLA shares, because of course they are. They are holding effectively unsellable debt now.
IFAIK the loans are secured by Twitter equity. Trouble is the loans add up to more than what Twitter is worth. The banks will have to write down the value of those loans. But the equity investors, including Elon, will get what scraps, if any, are left after creditors get paid.
Musk is still on the hook for the loans whether Twitter goes under or not. The danger they face is if Musk loses enough to not be able to cover the loans personally.
If you go out just a little bit not everyone hates him. Personally I think he hasn’t don’t anything overt yet. So he banned a few journalists, do you know why? No right? So why judge so early?
Given that the rule didn’t exist when Elon originally banned @ElonJet?
I’d suggest that you care about the fact that Elon will ban anyone he wants banned, and make up a justification post-facto. If you don’t care who gets banned from Twitter, then I retract my suggestion.
Elon is pulling the wool to incite his mob. He states people are doxxing his real-time location. The only people he’s banning are those that reference publicly available FAA flight data. I even think the owner of the Twitter account put the tweet on a time delay. Far from the truth.
The wave of bans from the muskjet thing has been quite dramatic.
It'll be interesting to see if the people who've been lauding musk for his supposedly pro free speech attitudes will reckon with what's been happening in actuality, or if they'll just accept this as "freedom for me but not for thee".
Or they are quiet, as they are getting the results that they've wanted and that the time of propping up ridiculous Free Speech Absolutism arguments has passed.
Doxxing is a common attack on people who are guilty of wrongspeak.
I have no strong opinion about how doxxing relates to free speech, but desire to hide your private life is understandable, and I don't see any benefit for the society from realtime doxxing.
I think he was legit shaken by the incident with the kook stalker and his son. Which is certainly understandable. People need to dial the hate way down. Way, way down.
And the rule change was quite clear that linking to the jet tracking was prohibited.
That all said, he's gone too far here. And it's an unwinnable fight anyway.
So what would banning a jet tracking account have to do with a stalker (for which no police report was filed)? And why ban journalists? In addition, the rule change was just to enable the banning of the jet tracking, not because it was it came from some higher sense of duty.
> So what would banning a jet tracking account have to do with a stalker
From what I can gather and infer, a couple of days ago Musk's son got off the jet and into a car, then that car was attacked by a stalker looking for Musk himself. Musk believes that the stalker got the information from the ElonJet Twitter account.
> And again, no police report filed. You were dooped.
I see a video of the supposed stalker in a balaclava. I do think Musk took the opportunity to get rid of something he already disliked, but I don't yet believe he faked the attack if that's what you're implying.
I believe the car was followed from the jet (possibly after the car dropped off Musk, or collected Musk's son from Musk), which was at Los Angeles International Airport earlier that day.
The car itself doesn't have a live tracker, so it seems less likely that someone dressed up in all black balaclava/gloves would find it otherwise - if it's even a known car at all.
> days after
Days after what?
> that’s the price you pay for a private jet using public air space.
A stalker attacking the car containing your 2-year-old son is NOT just a price to pay.
You’re missing that the incident in question was days after the jet landed at the airport. DAYS. There was no following from earlier that day.
My statement of price to pay was public jet location information using public airspace. This is the case for everyone. It was done for years and there’s no evidence it was a factor in the incident here despite many trying to find an excuse after the fact.
> You’re missing that the incident in question was days after the jet landed at the airport. DAYS. There was no following from earlier that day.
I could be making a mistake but I don't believe this is true. Are we looking at the same plane (N628TS)? It seems to have been at Los Angeles International Airport the same day.
It's also not particularly public information (https://archive.vn/cB7Lh). Would you defend doxxing sites like Kiwi Farms, on the basis that they're correlating/archiving public information?
He actively promoted a conspiracy that Paul Pelosi was attacked by a gay prostitute. (While Pelosi was still in the hospital recovering from serious injuries.) Why should he expect sympathy now?
Has LAPD commented on these accusations? Has a complaint been filed? Usually I’m a believer in people that claim to be victims of violence but in the case of Elon, I’m gonna wait until I hear from the appropriate authorities before I believe this story.
I think you have to give sympathy in similar situations to expect sympathy in return in that same situation. As mentioned, the Pelosi incident comes to mind.
Oh, just like when pre-Musk Twitter banned NY Post/journalists over a true story about Hunter Biden's laptop. I don't see how an anti-doxxing rule banning people tracking Elon Musk's whereabouts is worse.
> Oh, just like when pre-Musk Twitter banned NY Post/journalists over a true story about Hunter Biden's laptop. I don't see how an anti-doxxing rule banning people tracking Elon Musk's whereabouts is worse.
Calling it "Hunter Biden's laptop" ignores the fact that it was hacked information provided by a foreign adversary to sow division and influence an election. That is not comparable to sharing publicly available information about aircraft movements.
That being said, I also think the extent to which they went to bury and remove the real photos and videos of Hunter Biden smoking crack was a huge overreach. They tried to paint it as a conspiracy theory that had no factual basis — that's biased censorship.
> it was hacked information provided by a foreign adversary to sow division and influence an election.
Every single one of these claims is false. Hunter Biden gave his laptop to a repair shop, the repair shop shared its contents with the New York Post and the FBI. At no point was any foreign agent involved, at no point was anything "hacked"
You're right, Rudy Giuliani is clearly a credible figure and his account of how he happened to come across Hunter Biden's laptop is sensible and not-suspicous in the least.
Hey, quick question completely unrelated to this, was Trump pro or anti Putin? Did Julian Assange leak information in good faith or did he co-ordinate with Republicans to release only information that made Democrats look bad, in the 2016 election? Who provided Assange that information?
I never mentioned Rudy Guiliani? The story you linked is about a completely separate and unrelated story. WikiLeaks and Assange were not involved with Hunter Biden's laptop. As for the provenance of the laptop: Hunter Biden never denied giving the laptop to the repair shop. And the repair shop, voluntarily and on its own initiative, gave the laptop and all its contents to the FBI, who would presumably have found any foreign involvment, if it existed, in their investigation of the matter.
> The story you linked is about a completely separate and unrelated story. WikiLeaks and Assange were not involved here.
I am aware. My point is that there is a precedent for this behaviour and neither Trump nor Republicans are credible.
> As for the provenance of the laptop: Hunter Biden never denied giving the laptop to the repair shop. And the repair shop gave the laptop and all its contents to the FBI, who would presumably have found any foreign involvment, if it existed, in their investigation of the matter.
Let me be clear: I have no doubt in the veracity of any of the information or materials leaked. I distinctly recall seeing posts on /pol/ containing videos of Hunter smoking crack and banging hookers (that have since been scrubbed from the Internet), and people allegedly attempting to hack his iCloud account.
However, the I do not find the story and chain-of-custody of his laptop credible. I have been looking further since your prior comment and I cannot find anything that unambiguously confirms its provenance.
On the flip side, I also do not find a lack of official condemnation or attribution to Russia to be sufficient in disproving it. Joe Biden and the Democrats were clearly trying to kill the story and scrub any mention of it, so acknowledging it only gives it legitimacy.
Happy to ammend my comment if you can point me to something that proves otherwise, though. Jeffrey Epstein was discovered in part because a woman stumbled across his black book on the sidewalk — sometimes unlikely coincidences happen.
~~Donald J. Trump was not directly involved in the breaking of the laptop story.~~ (edit: my bad) "Republicans" is a group containing tens of millions of people (though I am not aware of the repair shop owner's party affiliation, if any?)
> Donald J. Trump was not directly involved in the breaking of the laptop story.
Do you really believe that Rudy Guiliani, a man acting as Trump's lackey for numerous things, received bombshell information and publicized it without Trump having any knowledge or involvement?
Michael Cohen testified under oauth that Trump knew about leaked DNC emails in advance of the 2016 election. Fast-forward to ~2019 and Trump had already personally tried to pressure Ukraine into providing damaging information about Joe Biden. There is very little plausible deniability here.
> "Republicans" is a group containing tens of millions of people (though I am not aware of the repair shop owner's party affiliation, if any?)
I am obviously not referring to a collective conspiracy of between hundreds of millions of American citizens. I meant the Republican Party.
> My mistake, I had forgotten about Rudy Giuliani's involvement.
That's okay, I had to go back and re-check the details of the story multiple times.
Based on your other comments, I think we're probably share a similar view about it. All I'm saying is that, while the validity of the content itself unimpeachable, the story about how it was uncovered is highly suspicious.
> Which contains many thousands of people, many of whom do not get along. It's a minor miracle that it is still holding together at all!
Of course, but they demonstrably put up a rather unified front against the Democrats; Catholics and Protestants hated each other, yet put aside their differences to vote for common interests.
Aren't the GOP currently spearheading an investigation into Hunter Biden's laptop?
I don't think it's suspicious. If the Russians (or whoever) had stolen the personal labtop of a close Biden family member, it doesn't seem plausible to me that the Bidens would not make that fact public. Joe Biden would not cover up a foreign adversary's crimes when both political and financial incentives run the other way.
> it doesn't seem plausible to me that the Bidens would not make that fact public
It makes sense to me, considering how damaging and embarrassing the content was. If they confirm it, they lose plausible deniability in being able to claim it's fake.
For a large period of time there was a coordinated effort to purge everything from the Internet and paint anyone bringing it up as a conspiracy theorist. It's harder to get away with that if you call attention to the leak and confirm it's authenticity.
Perhaps the laptop truly belonged to Hunter Biden. Without a confirmation or proper chain of custody, it's hard to say either way. It's not implausible that an advanced threat actor, especially one backed by a nation-state, could create an elaborate laptop forgery to 'layer'[0] hacked material into a legitimate news story and avoid the hack itself taking centre-stage like in 2016 — of course, this is speculation on my part.
I don't understand why the chain of custody matters if DKIM and DMARC are legitimate ways to verify the communications contained in the laptop. The focus on crack smoking hookers getting clapped by Biden isn't as interesting when it comes to political malfeasance.
> I don't understand why the chain of custody matters if DKIM and DMARC are legitimate ways to verify the communications contained in the laptop.
Whether the information is real is orthogonal to how it was obtained. Conspiring with a hostile adversary to release damaging information about a political opponent is also political malfeasance.
The circumstances of how the information was obtained is incredibly suspect and that deserves scrutiny, even if the information is legitimate and actionable.
> The focus on crack smoking hookers getting clapped by Biden isn't as interesting when it comes to political malfeasance.
That's kind of my point: why was that stuff leaked and spread when there was actually damning evidence? To me, it seems like the point was to release as much damaging and embarrassing content as possible to harm Joe Biden.
Under Twitter's definition[1] the repair shop accessing the contents and sharing them would be considered "hacked".
During the NY Post story, on Twitter you weren't allowed to link to "hacked" material (though this was probably not well enforced).[2]
Twitter changed that policy and reverted the account freezes[3] so that it was fine to link to "hacked" material as long as you weren't directly affiliated with the entity that produced the "hacked" material. [4]
There is not proof it was by a foreign government afaik. Though from the reporting I've read it does seem to be murky at a minimum, and not proven to be as clear as top comment-or said. Doesn't matter though.
That specific context you mention is VERY important:
Russia already did this.
The FBI specifically warned to TW that a leak like this had high chance of happening just at the time it did.
Twitter was right to be cautious.
Maybe didn't do everything consistently or perfectly, but I would far prefer them limiting the reach of Hunter dick pics and crack photos than letting a foreign government do so much damage again.
I think their main error was being slow as more background & info was uncovered.
The computer store owner in the USA is not a foreign adversary. The content is real and criminal. Ties to foreign adversary China and Russia too.
Be honest, and ask yourself if that had been Trump's son's laptop would Twitter, The Washington Post, and the others have done the same? I don't think so.
If I collate publicy available information and publish it continuously on any person, you are OK with that? If it happens to you?
> The computer store owner in the USA is not a foreign adversary.
Sure, if you presuppose that the people responsible for disclosing it are credible and honest.
I personally have some questions why a computer store owner would, faced with an abandoned laptop from a customer, decided to snoop through its contents and give it to Rudy Giuliani, of all people.
If you take the story at face value it's still a massive breach of privacy. You have to go out of your way to find this stuff; an ethical repair shop would go out of their way to avoid accidentally stumping across private information.
Even still, if you assume that he stumbled across extremely concerning information in a manner no fault of his own, why did he feel it necessary to leak videos of Hunter Biden smoking crack and having sex? Imagine how creepy it would be if a woman dropped her laptop off at a repair shop and the owner leaked her nudes?
The most charitable interpretation is that Hunter Biden dropped his laptop off at a computer repair shop, and the owner decided to snoop for compromising information and give it to his father's political rival, presumably for politically-motivated reasons.
> Be honest, and ask yourself if that had been Trump's son's laptop would Twitter, The Washington Post, and the others have done the same? I don't think so.
Pre-Musk Twitter didn't specifically try to present itself as a bastion of free speech.
On top of that, in case of this particular account, Musk specifically said that it would be allowed on the platform per his understanding of free speech.
For a day, for something that was nominally outside their TOS, which lead to strong internal tensions and in the end also was a complete nothingburger that didn’t matter at all.
This, to me, clearly seems to be a small mistake with no material negative impact on the world. Shit happens.
Elon is consistently and repeatedly making far worse mistakes.
I thought the Post journalists on that story didn't want it to run in the first place and weren't banned?
(Edit: may have been just the original author and at least one other:
> The New York Post published images and PDF copies of the alleged emails, but their authenticity and origin have not been determined.[23] According to an investigation by The New York Times, editors at the New York Post "pressed staff members to add their bylines to the story", and at least one refused, in addition to the original author, reportedly because of a lack of confidence in its credibility. Of the two writers eventually credited on the article, the second did not know her name was attached to it until after The Post published it.[24] In its opening sentence, the New York Post story misleadingly asserted "the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating" Burisma, despite the fact that Shokin had not pursued an investigation into Burisma's founder.
)
I was excited to see his pro free speech approach and this ban wave disappoints me.
I'm actually okay with bans, suspensions and all the rest. But only if there is the following
- A redemptive path back
- Due process
- Transparency
- Fair application of the rules.
These recent bans have had none of that. The rule change should have been announced before the bans. There should have been warnings to remove the tweets before instant bans. The accounts should be given the opportunity to comply with the rules and come back.
While I'm sad Elon has taken this turn I still don't think Twitter is any worse off. They did this before just to a different group.
At least they appear to be making progress on removing child exploitation.
I don't know if the platform can survive the disruption and unpredictably that Musk has introduced but from a moral standing, removing child exploitation wins a lot of points with me.
He’s not done anything except fire the team responsible for monitoring it working collaboratively with other groups on tools. Oh, and and talking loudly. Are you always this easily fooled?
Everyone wants that but there is no feasible way to do this economically - there are too many people and too many bad actors ready to go if they even were to try to do this. Twitter is worse off - it wasn't perfect before, faltered and everyone who clamored for what you are asking for just never considered the true costs of the alternative.
That is normally not how cults work—and yes, I am claiming elon is a cult.
When a cult leader fails to deliver, or otherwise issues a prediction that never materializes, the cult member usually grow stronger in the cult’s convictions. This is kind of a counterintuitive psychological phenomena but it has been demonstrated quite a few times. There may be something of a cognitive dissonance driving this. It is that after you see your cult leader fail, you can either dismiss all your prior believes, or change your version of reality to match the cult’s altered dogma. It seems as if doing the latter is easier for most people, so this is in turn what most people do.
I doubt it. As your sibling points out, the Jonestown massacre had its member much more psychologically manipulated then Elon could even dream of. While I still stand by me calling Elon a cult, there is definitely a huge difference between him and Jim Jones, and how much manipulation members of each cult have endured.
I would be interested in seeing some citations to back up that claim. The famous Jonestown incident was a case of people having left everything they knew, relocated to an isolated place in a different country, etc. And even then, some members of the cult were forced to drink the poisoned kool-aid and some drank it not knowing it was poisoned.
Residents of the commune later committed suicide by drinking a flavored beverage laced with potassium cyanide; some were forced to drink it, some (such as small children) drank it unknowingly.
I have a longstanding interest in social psychology and the way a cult generally arranges to control people is to cut them off financially, socially, etc. This is the same way that abusive husbands typically treat their abused wives. One study sought to identify character traits that made abused women more likely to kill their abusive husband and could not do so. Instead, they found that the women who murdered their abusive husbands were the most isolated, the most abused, the most painted into a corner. In short, they were women who found themselves with no other way out.
I suppose if you work for the man or are enthralled by his billions or some such, that's going to hold sway for some people. But I have trouble comparing his Twitter debacle to what cults do.
Anyway, just rambling on. Not actually interested in discussing this Twitter mess that I am mostly trying to avoid discussing in spite of the entire world seeming to discuss nothing else.
But if you have some citations to back up your social psychology related statement, I would be interested in seeing those as it's an area of interest of mine.
There's one source that usually comes up in such discussions, When Prophecy Fails (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails). It's difficult to respect it completely as a controlled act of science, like much social psych from that era (and an ongoing battle for the discipline, to be sure), but it's definitely far from an unworthy read.
This fits with my general knowledge of how such things work. TLDR: Those with the most skin in the game were the most likely to try to save face and double-down on their stated beliefs. Those who had lost less had an easier time going "Whoops! I was wrong!" and getting on with their lives:
Some of the believers took significant actions that indicated a high degree of commitment to the prophecy. Some left or lost their jobs, neglected or ended their studies, ended relationships and friendships with non-believers, gave away money and / or disposed of possessions to prepare for their departure on a flying saucer, which they believed would rescue them and others in advance of the flood.
As anticipated by the research team, the prophesied date passed with no sign of the predicted flood, causing a dissonance between the group's commitment to the prophecy and the unfolding reality. Different members of the group reacted in different ways. Many of those with the highest levels of belief, commitment and social support became more committed to their beliefs, began to court publicity in a way they had not before, and developed various rationalisations for the absence of the flood. Some others, with less prior conviction and commitment, and / or less access to ongoing group support, were less able to sustain or increase their previous levels of belief and involvement, and several left the group.
This is not inconsistent with what we know about the process by which people are radicalized and become members of extremist political groups and the like. Part of the process is that it becomes increasingly difficult to get respect, make meaningful social contacts etc with people outside the group. Once you pass some point of extremism, outsiders become openly hostile and their reactions give you no good path back from your position.
Being seen as "crazy" or "wrong" or "stupid" is too much to bear. Better to reject the entire world -- knowing it won't be nice to you at this point -- than to admit "Okay, maybe that wasn't the most rational thing to do."
No, cults cut you off from the outside world first, not because you "criticized the current #thing". They create an atmosphere of fear where most people won't want to speak up, knowing their lives are now controlled by these people.
You may have already seen it, but one of the most famous cases of religious failure leading to deepened faith in some of the adherents is the Great Disappointment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Disappointment
One of the groups that formed out of it is still active today more than 150 years later.
Many followers had given up their possessions in expectation of Christ's return...
There were also the instances of violence: a Millerite church was burned in Ithaca, New York, and two were vandalized in Dansville and Scottsville. In Loraine, Illinois, a mob attacked the Millerite congregation with clubs and knives, while a group in Toronto was tarred and feathered. Shots were fired at another Canadian group meeting in a private house.
Perhaps we shouldn't give people so much hell for simply being wrong?
I bet at least some of the vandalism of Millerite churches was carried out by recently made ex-Millerites who were mad about being duped. Of anybody around, they had the most reason to be upset. Some of those people gave up all their belongings because of the cult, and subsequently had nothing to lose when their belief system crumbled.
> I would be interested in seeing some citations to back up that claim.
Not exactly a citation, but none of the predictions or claims of the original QAnon poster have come true or been proven. Yet the Q movement is still around, and for some of them their beliefs are getting stranger.
Doxxing adds nothing to the conversation. It’s not an opinion, an argument, or an artful expression — forms that free speech laws are designed to protect. Rather, doxxing is merely harassment and adds nothing substantive. Same argument can be made for racial slurs and the like. Anyone pretending otherwise is being disingenuous.
That’s obviously not the motivation of ElonJet. Again, disingenuous.
If there was anything substantive about ElonJet, it would have been the statistics on jet fuel consumption, because that makes a statement about hypocrisy. They could have posted that without revealing locations, which crosses the line to singling out an individual for the purpose of harassment.
The degree to which Musk is upset by this makes me wonder if there isn't something more to it than just 'personal safety' concerns fed by paranoia. It may well be that the location of his plane tells a story that he does not want exposed. Because frankly the amount of goodwill that he's burning over this makes no sense at all.
For me the simpler explanation is that he had a legitimately scary experience involving his child. Combine that with the (self-inflicted) stress of his last few months, his thin-skinned nature, and him firing anybody at Twitter with a backbone and it seems very plausible to me that he's lashing out and thinking he's doing great.
Somebody described his Twitter purchase as "fragile narcissist buys criticism factory", so I think he has wedged himself into a situation that his ego makes both intolerable and inescapable. If he had somebody in his life to talk sense into him ("honey, put down your phone and come to bed"), I'd expect him to walk away and consider it rationally. But here I could imagine him continuing to spiral for quite a while.
To me, it's tragic in the way that Rudy Giuliani or Kanye West is: too much success can create the conditions for a long, lonely downward slide.
Trump, and most right wingers were all banned from TOS violations and harassment and doxxing. Look up LibsofTikTok and what they did too. Suddenly you change your tube on “free speech absolutely” back to something even more obscured. Good job.
>Trump, and most right wingers were all banned from TOS violations and harassment and doxxing.
This is directly contrary to the reporting in Twitter Files by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger whose journalistic integrity and credentials exceed yours and mine combined by orders of magnitude:
"On Jan 7, senior Twitter execs:
- create justifications to ban Trump
- seek a change of policy for Trump alone, distinct from other political leaders
- express no concern for the free speech or democracy implications of a ban"
And the only doxxing related to LibsOfTikTok was Taylor Lorenz doxxing LibsOfTikTok, to the point that Lorenz showed up at LibsOfTikTok's house in person herself. She didn't just doxx her, she went to her house in person. There are pictures.
edit: Rate limited for telling a truth that HN dislikes again...
Here's my reply to the below:
>If they then publish your home address? Sure.
She did publish her home address, after showing up there. Some tweets containing it are apparently still up, as she complained about it to Musk in a thread about the journalists being suspended (for 7 days it turns out).
… okay, a journalist showing up at your house is not doxxing. If they then publish your home address? Sure. But a journalist knocking on your door to get your side of the story is not and has never been doxing.
And I’m saying this as someone who thinks the decision to publish LOTT’s real name was borderline, despite the fact that LOTT decided to use her real name for her domain registration.
Trump has numerous examples of TOS violations and was even suspended at first for them. He was treated very differently from everyone else. THATS WHAT THEY SEEKED TO CHANGE.
You conveniently misinterpreted or even left our crucial pieces of the so called “twitter files” including that the policies of shadow banning and such were already mentioned and known.
Some of the employees were literally asking for reasons to KEEP certain right wing accounts on twitter.
They listened to violations of revenge porn AND TOS violations of Hunter Biden’s dick. The right wing really seems obsessed with seeing it because the links that were all mentioned in the docs were all of his dick LOL
LibsofTikTok causing harassment to children’s hospitals and they still weren’t even banned. No they weren’t promoted in the algorithm but there’s no right to be amplified.
> the policies of shadow banning and such were already mentioned and known.
They were "known" in the same sense that everybody already "knew" that the US government spies on us before Snowden leaked the details.
Twitter claimed that they didn't shadowban - in fact there's a tweet out there somewhere (I think I saw it shared in one of the Twitter Files threads itself) in which Jack Dorsey himself explicitly denies that Twitter shadowbans. To claim that the Files didn't reveal any new information is utterly disingenuous.
What they reviewed is a normal process of a moderation group. There’s nothing explosive in them.
Interesting how you moved on from “government involvement” when everyone realizes Biden campaign wasn’t the government and it was dick picks they were trying to remove.
Is the claim that Twitter changed their ToS in order to justify banning Trump? If so, can you share the before and after texts? I assume the Internet Archive would have snapshots.
Or is the point, literally, that people at Twitter discussed whether a change of policy was a good idea in the context of the Jan 6 insurrection? In which case, like...wouldn't you sort of expect them to have conversations about the fitness of the ToS to an unprecedented situation? That sounds like doing their jobs competently, no?
Are you being ironic? I'm genuinely not sure if I understand what you're saying. You know the Twitter files have been released, right? Or has HN really done that good a job of burying discussion on them?
You don't have right to privacy when you fly your jet in public airspace. Elon has a choice, he can take commercial. Just like you don't the right privacy when people take pictures of your house as proven with the famous Streisand case. Do you think Streisand case should have went the other way?
It seems most people aren't arguing Musk doesn't have the right to ban this, they're just pointing out that literally a couple of weeks ago Musk said this exact account was an example of free speech he would protect.
If Musk hadn't been making a big deal about supporting free speech for the last several months there wouldn't be a problem with him banning all these accounts. It's his platform he can do what he wants. dang can ban me at any time here, it's kind of his party in many ways. But dang isn't running around claiming to support all forms of legal speech, he's made a point he's trying to enforce his and the team's ideas of community guidelines.
He also has no problems violating his on rules and is asking his followers to doxx someone. Appropriate solution is file a police report which he didn't do.
As one of those people: yeah, this is pretty terrible. I don't think being allowed to share the exact location of individual private jets is nearly as important for the public discourse as some of the other stories Twitter has censored in the past (pre-Elon), but this still represents a significant departure from what Musk was promising before the buyout (that basically anything legal to say would be allowed). I'd much rather he have erred on that side of things.
Hopefully this makes more people aware of just how much power social media companies have, and have always had, over the public discourse and that results in the institution of legal and/or technical measures that limit that power across the board. I'm not optimistic though, given how much of the public attention right now seems to be focused on admonishing Elon personally rather than on the overall system that makes this kind of censorship possible.
If the data were gathered from already public information, I wouldn't have a problem with it. How is synthesizing data that's already public (indeed, required by law to be public) a problem?
Anyone that actually wanted to use this data to harm Musk would have no trouble simply using the exact same original data.
Based on the evidence (safety claim by Elon, death of Diana) it appears that promoting and publicising it makes it accessible to a wider audience that does have an effect on real world consequences. I presume this is also why marketing works on a platform that enhances the reach and distribution of a particular piece of information.
Anecdotally, I did see the @ElonJet account, and have still never seen the source of the data.
> that promoting and publicising it makes it accessible to a wider audience that does have an effect on real world consequences.
So you'd be okay with banning misinformation about COVID and the COVID vaccine? Misinformation and agitprop had very real consequences in the real world.
The test of the truth of a live location is trivial. The test of truth of COVID information is not. In the case are spreading something that is provably untrue eg. 1 + 1 = 3, even in that case, you should just rebut and explain why it is untrue.
Nice strawman!
It's a question of safety of provably true information in this case.
>The test of the truth of a live location is trivial. The test of truth of COVID information is not.
The assertion that posting a 'live location' create dangerous real world consequences is completely absurd. We know plenty about the dead humans COVID misinformation left in its wake.
You are okay with censorship here because you agree with it. Full stop.
>It's a question of safety of provably true information in this case.
Yeah, misinformation and agitprop have very real consequences, but Twitter still shouldn't ban, e.g., Anthony Fauci (if he had an account) or CNN, no matter how much misinformation or agitprop they spread. That stuff should be addressed with replies, community notes, and other commentary.
> Based on the evidence (safety claim by Elon, death of Diana) it appears that promoting and publicising it makes it accessible to a wider audience that does have an effect on real world consequences.
Wow, you have to reach back 25 years, and it's an absolutely terrible example because it has nothing to do with a constant publication of location to the general public. Instead paparazzi used their own private communications (paparazzi who saw her board in Sardinia told other paparazzi in France). And her death wasn't caused by someone who found out her location and wanted to do her harm.
"Safety claim by Elon" is also completely meaningless since he's literally the person who wanted this shut down.
So two really bad examples over 25 years is not evidence for your claim.
Finally, using public information to say the state or country Elon has recently flown to is a far cry from actually giving away his current location.
Again, the account didn't post passenger manifests. It posted publicly available ADS-B data, automatically. You can review the source, if you like: https://github.com/Jxck-S/plane-notify
1. A small number of large tech companies have collectively managed to gain a huge amount of control over what information millions of people are allowed to see.
2. There are nearly no legal restrictions on how they're allowed to exercise that control.
I'm not sure precisely what the solution to that should be, but the problem only exists as long as both 1 and 2 remain true, so you could theoretically approach the problem from either of those angles, or both.
These companies have less power than a small amount of media companies had in the past, if anything. Where were you going to go for TV news in 1950 outside of the major networks? And unless Chrome/Safari/etc build content-based blocking "allowed to see" is an ENORMOUS stretch. "A small number of publishers have large reach and exercise certain controls over their media" is more accurate.
As for whether or not their should be legal restrictions on what publishers can publish... take your best shot at suggesting some legal rules. I think there would be holes that you could drive a truck through that would upset you regardless of your own views.
Not everyone needs a global megaphone. And nobody intrinisicly deserves one.
Go back even further and you’d have real media power — the newspapers of the 1890s. The time of Hearst vs Pulitzer was quite a time for newspapers and showed the power of publishers.
That may have been poorly phrased on my part. My intent was to put the focus on the listener rather than the speaker, since Google search (for example) doesn't control what people say, but it can control what people see. Censorship at that level is just as much of an issue as it is at the level of social media. "Freedom of speech" and "freedom to listen" are really the same thing. I prefer the term "the free exchange of ideas" since that includes both speech and listening, is agnostic to the medium (listening, reading etc.), and conveniently excludes things like CSAM and spam, since those aren't ideas.
I'd also argue you can't "just go somewhere else" to find content you aren't even aware exists in the first place, so I think the phrasing "allowed to see" makes more sense than you give it credit for once you consider the chilling effect of widespread censorship.
That last sentence startles me. Are you proposing some people or companies have a legal obligation to make you aware of the existence of content you aren't aware of?
That sounds like a big jump even beyond "they shouldn't be able to control what they publish." Are we now going to require Twitter actively promote everything too?
How many obligations would you impose on everyone else in service of this hypothetical listener who demands to be spoon fed all points of view in the world without effort? Is a library allowed to have a collection if they don't fully advertise it's breadth? Is a bookstore allowed to choose what to and to not put on their shelves? Am I allowed to tell you what I think without telling you how many possible other views there are? Any of those are just as "chilling" as "twitter.com" not having all the content that "elonsjet.com" or "jacobin.com" or "foxnews.com" would...
Twitter/FB/etc are HARDLY important enough, and way less powerful than past media, to start telling people they have to amplify what other people say.
> A small number of large tech companies have collectively managed to gain a huge amount of control over what information millions of people are allowed to see.
Hmm, yes, that's why nobody can go to InfoWars anymore, right? They're banned from Facebook and YouTube, so I guess it's impossible to hear anything they have to say.
What's this? infowars.com still loads? It has videos on it? Impossible, the leftist lizard demons banned it
Wake me up when port 443 requires written consent from Zucc to operate.
Just because those few large companies only control what ~95% of people see instead of ~100%, that doesn't mean everything's fine. Or are you arguing Musk's censorship of Twitter here isn't a problem because people can just go to InfoWars to find out where Elon's jet is?
I agree it doesn't really matter that these accounts are banned. The only thing worth pointing out is literally this exact account was something Elon pointed to as an account he would protect on Twitter as an example of his support of free speech.
He can ban away, but he's just proving his free speech stance is meaningless. He'll just ban whatever he doesn't like regardless of if it's legal or not. Which is fine, but don't hold him up as some defender of free speech.
> Hmm, yes, that's why nobody can go to InfoWars anymore, right? They're banned from Facebook and YouTube, so I guess it's impossible to hear anything they have to say.
The thing is, deplatforming works. Banning far-right actors has drastically reduced the reach of their messages [1]. Personally, I see this as a Good Thing, simply because of the potential that spreading hate has to escalate to actual, real-world violence, from murders like in Charlottesville to an outright attempt at instigating a coup.
At every sudo prompt, we get the warning "With great power comes great responsibility" - for good reasons. It's the same with running a social network connecting literally billions of people... those operating them have great power by the sheer market size of their platforms, and a huge responsibility for just how much of the bad side of humanity can be empowered by them. Whatsapp, for example, was directly linked to dozens of murders and severe injuries after lies and propaganda led to lynch mobs [2][3][4].
The consolidation of media, ongoing for decades, has created concentrations of power that leave the entire media system vulnerable to people like Elon Musk. Twitter and Facebook are two particularly dense concentrations of power, but the general problem goes back a century at least and it's a problem with media generally, not specific to technology. Sinclair Broadcast Group (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE) and William Randolph Hearst come to mind particularly.
I agreed with most of what he's done up to the point where he banned ElonJet, and now these journalists. It's so dumb to ban an account that was simply sharing already public ADS-B data, it's completely legal, my guess is that he had a bunch of other rich friends that were calling for him to remove these accounts. As for journalists, I guess we'll need to wait, early guess is that Twitter has probably found some dirt involving them with old-Twitter board.
I'm willing to believe him that there was some kind of scary encounter for his driver and son last night. This would match his other stated exception to his free speech platform desire. That being refusing to reinstate Alex Jones, who he, as a father who lost a child, finds personally repugnant.
Anything he dislikes, if he filters through the lens of his children, he's willing to ban, apparently.
I think that ElonJet shouldn't have been banned and that Elon is behaving like a pathetic, petulant child, but if the recent bans bother you more than the fact that Twitter worked with the US security state to suppress a truthful and politically salient story (HB's laptop) in the run-up to an election, then you and I have very different priorities.
The people who cheered Musk for his "pro free speech" attitude don't actually believe or want free speech. They want free speech for themselves and censorship for people they don't like.
The mental gymnastics that folks go to excuse Musk's behavior will get ever more absurd.
Musk will continue to censor speech he doesn't like arbitrarily and use Twitter to promote right-wing extremists who will then hurt real people in the real world.
Musk has in the past and very recently supported conspiracy theories. Dr. Fauci, one of the greatest public servants we've had in this country, was accused by Musk of 'killing millions'.
Musk is a right-wing extremist who will protect his own.
Musk's definition of free speech in the past included calling his critics pedophiles and making false statements about his company's stock. Now it doesn't include publicly available information about the location of a vehicle he owns?
Clearly nothing is stopping someone from doing that anyway, but also nobody ever knows if Elon is actually on any of the three planes tracked (unless he posts about where he's going or where he is). They're not even his personal planes, they're owned by his companies and used by other people. If he's that worried about a stalker he should just charter a jet instead of flying on jets associated with him or his companies, then nobody would know.
It’s worth noting that the tracker doesn’t post destinations until, of course, the plane actually lands. You cannot use the data provided to determine where to meet him.
I don't know why it's so impossible to believe there are people who truly do want free speech.
I wasn't sure if Musk was going to deliver it, but I tried to remain open-minded. I did think previous Twitter management leaned left with some admittedly difficult moderation decisions, but obviously I'm finding out that Musk is even less supportive of true free speech.
Ironically this banning of Mastodon links is the #1 thing pushing me to start exploring Mastodon or other platforms.
Let me know when you find them. So far, every “free-speech“ platform has been a dumpster fire full of instant bans for anyone the user base does not agree with.
4chan is interesting because it feels like a holdover from the "old" internet. Less a "platform" and more an unruly forum with its own distinct culture.
If 4chan had anywhere near the size/reach of Twitter or Facebook, I think it would either be more toxic or more restrictive in its moderation.
It's impossible to believe because we know people who say that, and we know that their fundamental belief is that rules exist in two ways: 1) to protect and serve a certain class, without binding them, and 2) to bind the other class, without protecting the other class.
This is not a new phenomenon, the only thing that changes is the terms used to signal the meaning.
> I don't know why it's so impossible to believe there are people who truly do want free speech.
Anyone intelligent enough to think it through knows it's a paradox, so anyone who truly does want free speech clearly hasn't actually thought it through. They exist, but nobody should take them seriously.
Sure. Speech can, itself, restrict speech. "I have a gun in my pocket and I will shoot anyone who disagrees with me." It's just speech, but it restricts others' willingness to speak. If you allow all speech, some speakers will use that tool to restrict others' speech, which means not all speech is actually allowed. "Free speech" is a paradox.
It's not just speech - it's speech with an intention to do harm. That's like saying going into a bank and saying "my partner there has a gun and he will start shooting unless you give me money" is also abusing free speech - it's not about speech, it's about actions in the real world.
> If you allow all speech, some speakers will use that tool to restrict others' speech, which means not all speech is actually allowed
Nobody uses speech on its own to restrict others' speech.
Right, so now we've moved from "free speech" to "free speech unless it has an intention to do harm" which means you agree that some speech ought to be restricted. Suddenly things get really complicated (how do you define "harm" and "intention" and even "has"?), and now you're on the same page as the rest of us who understand that "free speech" is a paradox.
> Right, so now we've moved from "free speech" to "free speech unless it has an intention to do harm"
We haven't moved anywhere, because it's not speech that's illegal, it's the intention to do harm. You could perfectly well communicate your intentions to do harm with no speech at all, e.g. by pointing a gun to a bank teller without saying a word. If you use speech to offer to sell drugs to somebody, and a cop arrests you for it, that's not an issue of free speech, that's an issue of drug dealing.
The fact that you aren't allowed to commit crimes by using your speech doesn't make free speech itself a paradox - otherwise any use of the word "free" in the context of humans in society might as well be paradoxical. "We're not free to commit a murder, therefore individual freedom is a paradox" - that'd be quite a naive take on the matter.
You're losing track of the conversation. I'm not talking about laws or society or legality. I'm explaining how one person can use their speech to cause another person to choose not to speak, in other words, suppress that second person's speech. This is why it's a paradox: enabling free speech can itself suppress speech.
I'm not losing track of the conversation - free speech is a legal concept, and you haven't written that you're talking about the ideal of free speech. Please do not mistake your inability to express yourself with my ability to follow a conversation.
In case of free speech as an ideal, it's still a bullshit argument. You cannot suppress speech with speech alone. Go on any anonymous internet forum and try to suppress someone's speech by e.g. threatening to doxx/harm them - you will be laughed at, because on the internet there is no real threat of harm. It's always the threat of harm that actually suppresses speech, not speech itself.
That fact that you use speech to deliver the threat doesn't in itself create a paradox.
In context of freedom of movement, that argument would be akin to "free movement is a paradox because you can suppress someone's movement by holding them down". Yes, you use free movement to walk up to a person, but it's not your movement that holds them down.
Free speech is not a legal concept. The most cited example of speech being used to harm others is shouting "Fire" in crowded theatre and people dying in the stampede to leave. There is no legal protection for doing so. Speech has consequences, sometimes benign, sometimes not.
>don't know why it's so impossible to believe there are people who truly do want free speech.
Because everybody has a point where they don't want free speech anymore. If I gathered your home address and told everyone you were a pedophile that needed to be killed, you'd probably be less stoked about free speech.
I want free speech, hence I think Elon is a tremendous hypocrite for enacting this policy. Once you start deciding whether or not things are 'safe' to say you will end up in the exact situation Jack, et al. were in when they were censoring just with different biases. He doesn't seem to understand that and is doomed to repeat their mistakes.
There is some irony now seeing those that didn't believe the banning of accounts arbitrarily was an issue under previous management decrying this move by Elon.
> There is some irony now seeing those that didn't believe the banning of accounts arbitrarily was an issue under previous management decrying this move by Elon.
No, the irony is not that the site under both owners is trying to remove bad/harmful content (just defining it differently).
The irony is that Musk thought he wasn’t going to have to do it at all: “absolute free speech”, “public square”, “comedy is legal”, etc.
One of the banned journalists went on Mastodon and said (paraphrasing): “It’s his site and he can ban whoever he wants”
And to be fair, under both owners, accounts were banned for violating ToS policies. The policies are just different, but they’re still the rules you agree to when you use the site.
I just don’t think anyone thought “free speech” meant no parodying, no republishing public FAA info, etc.
Many journalists are singularly obsessed with the eradication of 'harmful' or 'unsafe' accounts from Twitter. They are particularly concerned about doxxing when it happens to political figures they're sympathetic to or journalists. Technically all home addresses are public information, just as FAA data is. Yet people get rather nervous when their home address ends up on the internet and rightly so.
Their entire argument is about the prevention of the exact sort of thing that Musk alleges happened to a car carrying his child - real world harm from online activity. So why exactly are they upset about this change in policy that while clearly motivated by self-interest rather than any principle, technically aligns with some of their goals? It's because they want to be able to doxx people they think deserve it. Because when they doxx it's journalism, but when their enemies doxx it's stochastic terrorism.
> They want free speech for themselves and censorship for people they don't like.
This is probably true, but it also describes Twitter prior to the takeover.
If anything is clear to me, it's that it seems impossible to have a completely neutral/fair public forum. Or perhaps it is possible, but people dislike the opposition so much they aren't interested in using it.
I think it should be obvious by this point that in the minds of today's "free speech" advocates, the term means "I get to make political statements and nobody can criticize me for them" and not anything like it was understood in the recent past.
There are nuances. It's obviously less okay to effectively ban public (edit: and even public health expert) criticism of public health policy than it is to ban sharing the live location of other people.
I knew he'd gone mad when he tweeted the Nancy Pelosi's husband conspiracy theory, but I was cautiously optimistic about Twitter up until ElonJet.
Our company had already stopped spending on Twitter ads back when the first (possibly false) reports about increased hatespeech on Twitter came out, where I was one of a few protesting the decision, since it seemed like giving in to the hysteria and just trying not to become the target of activist journalists. But now it's clear even to me that staying on Twitter is a brand safety issue.
We don't do ads on twitter (politics). but no brand I know would want to be associated with the crazy-ness and tons of negative press.
Maybe good opportunity for click arbitragers and bottom barrel DTC though! low competition!
twitter is already showing me taboola level ads lmfao
I just can't with hn anymore. came back to specifically read this thread.
at least reddit is fun and has shit posting.
a significant chunk of active commenters on hn have gone off the deep end. a stew of insane, mean, and flat out wrong comments that have nothing to do with tech or cool nerd stuff. and everything to do with mean-spirited (often right wing) politics
> While we don’t know what’s going on here yet, it’s possible that the suspensions are the result of automated content moderation gone awry. Some of the suspended accounts shared Mastodon and ElonJet’s Twitter handles as well as images of the tweet that appears to have gotten the former account suspended.
Automation gone crazy. I'm likely to believe this explanation rather than Musk personally hitting the "suspend" button on stuff he doesn't like.
If the algorithm is suspending accounts that shared screenshots Elon doesn't like (matching via checksum) then it's banning regardless if the account belongs to a journalist or not.
Interestingly it also explicitly says that you won't get permanently suspended unless your account is dedicated to live updates, or you do it again after being locked out and deleting the content.
Damn, couldn't even follow his own policy for 24 hours since the accounts seemed to have been banned with no warning.
> Sharing private or live location information:
> The first time you violate this policy by sharing private information (such as home address, identity documents etc.), we will require you to remove this content. We will also temporarily lock you out of your account before you can Tweet again. If you violate this policy by posting private information again after your first warning, your account will be permanently suspended.
> If your account is dedicated to sharing someone’s live location, your account will be automatically suspended.
Unfortunately, many people who call themselves "journalists," and especially those who brag about it, deserve the ridicule. Journalism was more honest when it was a lower-status job.
(Ridiculousness does not justify censorship, of course! Elon's actions and hypocrisy are indefensible)
Is it really that much of a spike though? There's always been a bias against "liberal media elite" from conservatives for at least a decade now. It's increased, sure, but I don't think by that much.
The fact that the ADS-b exchange account got banned too points towards at least some personal suspend button pushing happening on things that don’t suit Musk
> I'm likely to believe this explanation rather than Musk personally hitting the "suspend" button on stuff he doesn't like.
It’s amazing to me that despite despite several data points showing Musk would be capable of doing this, people are still giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Man sits up late every night shitposting and firing people on his new $44B social network, yet no way he’s sitting there banning people because they were mean to him. Utterly inconceivable!
I don't know that it has to be "benefit of the doubt", really. He's fired 2/3 of the company, it's very easy to imagine bugs not being caught before they reach production.
It's not because of branding, it's because he could do it himself. It's just unnecessarily complex. It's annoying to be accused of falling for branding if you do anything but automatically assume the absolute worst at all times. That kind of rhetoric makes any discussions about musk thoroughly annoying
> Twitter took action against Mastodon after the account linked to the Mastodon page of @ElonJet, a student-made bot that tracks the whereabouts of Musk’s private jet.
Yeah, no. They've also blocked anyone from posting links to major Mastodon instances like mastodon.social or mas.to, and if you try to click any existing links to those sites on Twitter, you'll get a scary warning that it's a malicious site.
'New Elon / New Kanye' I think is disillusioning for a lot of people.
It's one thing to see a random celebrity or business person lose their marbles, but there was (and continues to be) high hopes for Elon at least with Tesla and Space X.
I absolutely understand someone trying to shake things up for PR, but I can't see how he's winning here.
It will make it to Orbit. Despite all of Elons ways, there are good dedicated people working to make it happen. Making it to the Moon, I am doubtful. Making it to Mars... well lets get to he moon first.
starship has nothing to do with Elon. I know some SpaceX employees. They let Elon run around like the child he his pretending to be an engineer while they do the real work (and take his money)
SpaceX pays significantly higher than NASA if you believe levels.fyi, so I think it depends what industry average you are using. If you compare to general software engineering then it certainly pays less, but that is because there are many talented engineers happy to take a pay cut to work on something they find personally motivating (space exploration).
We know he's competent on some level, and a BS-er on some level given his bombastic announcements.
But bombast about literally going to Mars are different than bombast about QAnon in terms of credibility and inspiration.
Trump warned Europeans about Russian encroachment but he's cried wolf so many times he has no credibility.
Elon was nothing without the koolaid - I think he's a bit of an imposter - he's 'Iron Man' because they said that in a movie, and, SpaceX was able to stick the landing which gives him insane cred. He could make a million gallons of free koolaid for his staffers.
Smoking dope on YouTube is fully on brand.
Even calling out people on 'free speech' - fair enough.
But he's crossing a lot of lines and it's going to affect his ability to put people on Mars.
I have never had any aspiration to work for him, because I think he's glib - but - I would probably enjoy a tour at either organization, because hey that'd be fun. But now - I wouldn't really want to spend time there.
The Hero->Super Villain story is starting to become a meme.
Nearly all the dudes in the Valley I used to look up to are starting to act like like are a 2-pack-a-day smoker, 3 days after going 'cold turkey': thin skinned, short sighted, angry, arrogant, crude, conspiratorial, cynical, greedy, needlessly cold.
Some of the things they say make me believe they stopped reading books (other than business books) or travelling at age 19 to focus 100% on 'the game', and it's cost them deeply in terms of personal development and perspective.
They are not making the leap to 'Wise Sage Leaders' very well.
I wonder if regular corporate personal development is a better preparation for leading large, mature organizations.
I don't agree with Tim Cook on a lot of things but he definitely seems a league ahead in terms of social maturity than some of the Alpha Dogs of the Valley. Ditto for so many others.
A law was needed that made sure to personally hold twitter management liable just to make sure that twitter would actually suspend open Nazis (the kind that actually posts swastikas).
For some reason people who say things like this are completely unable to understand the data which supports that conservatives are amplified on social networks far more than liberals are. Conspiracy theorists aren't swayed by little things like data.
> “There is no evidence to support the claim that the major social media companies are suppressing, censoring or otherwise discriminating against conservatives on their platforms,” Barrett said. “In fact, it is often conservatives who gain the most in terms of engagement and online attention, thanks to the platforms’ systems of algorithmic promotion of content.”
I mean I don't see any difference between kanye 10 years ago and kanye now really. Ego and narcissism are a hell of a thing., and they don't get better when your wife kicks you to the curb .. probably for being the man that we all see today, but quieter in private.
One thing you can take away is the resilience of a network effect. Twitter as an application is laughably easy to build. But it's very hard to kill thanks to the massive audience and the individual connections.
The only way Twitter will die is if the network effect is killed, or somehow used against Twitter to create a competing platform.
> Twitter as an application is laughably easy to build.
I think parts of Twitter may be easy to build in isolation, but the entire platform as a whole is certainly not easy by any means and would be very expensive to construct.
A journalist is someone who gathers information on specific subjects from a variety of sources, including original documents, interviews with individuals, and others, then condenses that information down into a readable article or watchable video, with the goal of informing the public (in an unbiased manner) on that subject.
The closest profession to 'journalist' is probably 'historian', but the former reports on current events, while the latter synthesizes past events.
How does one distinguish between a journalist and a state-sponsored or corporate-sponsored propagandist, then? I think I'm going to go ask ChatGPT about this.
I can make a stab at that looking from that list. We're not looking at free speech here, we're looking at protected speech for nazis.
Our latest batch of nazis seem to think that people objecting to things like inciting violence, encouraging hate of minorities, white supremacism and all the anti-science nonsense they use to recruit new cult members should be protected speech in safe spaces. A very different idea to free speech.
Let Elon set fire to Twitter, it is a hard rule of the internet that any forum invaded by nazis is doomed to failure.
Huh. You're absolutely correct. Am now embarrassed I'd never thought about it like that.
Your framing neatly resolves the blog era slap fight. It was about access, what became known as "access journalism".
Traditional journalists didn't support mere bloggers having a seat at the table (gatekeeping). And the elite would only deign to talk to established journalists.
For my part, I've always felt the elite were accountable to the public. I was just a constituent who shared my experience and thoughts online. I didn't care what any one called (labeled) me, except when the purpose was to dismiss or exclude me.
Anyhoo... Thanks! Journalism is a verb. I love it.
I don't believe Journalism is elitist. Yes, there are standards to maintain. But by definition that's what Journalism is. Proven and established rules.
It's great that the internet allows for access. It's a tool for all. It's not great that anyone who strings two words together and "prints" them (on the internet) is now considered deserving of the title: Journalist. There's more to it. Just like giving me a scalpel and a pad for scripts doesn't make me a surgeon.
What I believe happen is that as the internet disrupted tradional media, Journalism panicked. It needed revenue. It need to cut costs. So it cut corners. The Standards were abandoned. They were too costly and couldn't produce sufficient results for a biz model based on clicks, views, etc. As a CYA they shamelessly continued to call it Journalism even if it was a lie. Fake Journalism if you will.
Since they were all doing it, since they were all fearing for their jobs few stepped up and said, "No, this is not Journalism."
The first section about the importance of investigative journalism is quite good. And ends on an unexpectedly positive note.
The rest of the movie is a true crime story. How perfidy and obstinance sacrificed journalism on the alter of corporate greed, beginning in the 50s. The rise of the internet was just the final blow.
Thanks, I appreciate it. Given some of the replies up the thread there are others who really need it. Badly. It's sad to watch other declaring the Titanic is not sinking. They'd make great "journalists" ;)
Keep in mind, the most memorable thing the NYT has published in recent years...
Wordle.
Don't get angry with me. I don't make the news. I simply report it. Now if only self-proclaimed journalists would do the same. Orwell would not be pleased with the current state of things.
And you can't be bothered to think before you type. Clearly, those are outliers. They are not anywhere near the norm, and the norm is low and getting lower. Yes, there was a time The NYT was fantastic. I was a long time subscriber. Those glory days are gone.
Don't get distracted by the glitter of such prizes, Don't worry about the past. Worry about who is holding down The Fourth Estate fort. It ain't The Times.
I'm confused on why he thinks posting public information falls under doxxing. Doxxing someone usually requires you to share private information about someone that they themselves aren't willing to share.
How can he say this is doxxing, but he's completely for people posting about Hunter Biden's laptop which actually contained private information not meant to be shared publicly.
Seems like he just changing the rules that effect him and ignoring the rest.
Essentially making Twitter the same as it was before he bought it lol.
Apparently the bans were because journalists were posting about Mastodon being banned on Twitter. They shared a tweet containing a screenshot of a tweet from Mastodon linking to a Mastodon profile ran by the ElonJet guy.
The tweets didn't include any "doxxing" materials even under Elon's new definition.
So you are completely right about him making stuff up as he goes along lol.
Collectively, I wonder how many tens or hundreds of millions of hours are burned, scrutinizing Musk, Twitter, Tesla, and every move Musk makes. Don’t like Twitter? Don’t use it. It’s like a Twitter/Musk addiction. I don’t care for for social media or Musk. Don’t understand why he lives in everyone’s mind, rent free.
I really want to encourage people to recognize, as I did just as strongly when Musk didn't own Twitter, that it isn't by itself "the public square". The site is designed to make you feel like you have to be on Twitter, that no other site could replace them in your daily life, that you'd better go check your feed right this second or you might miss out on some major world event. But none of that is true! It's an illusion they've constructed in order to keep your engagement metric high.
If there's a Twitter exodus, the public square will survive it, just as well as we survived the Myspace and Digg and Tumblr and Friendster and Livejournal exodii. Hopefully most communities will relocate to sites with healthier engagement models.
Twitter is where the world goes today to talk about things that matter (and obviously a lot of things that don’t). There may be something else that takes its place in the future but today it matters what happens to it.
People talk about things that matter in a wide variety of places. Twitter matters to the people and communities who are on it, of course, and it's a trendy software company which faces a lot of interesting and newsworthy challenges. But it's hard for me to see a story where some terrible Twitter policy change directly affects the lives of those of us who aren't on it.
It might be because most of the social platforms on that list don’t really fit the mould of a town square in my eyes. WhatsApp, YouTube, Snapchat, FB, FB messenger and others I recognise aren’t shaped in ways that look like public debate and are generally more siloed or are creator platforms.
Twitter seems to me more like an open free-for-all where any text can get amplified and publicly interacted with and very little is behind private accounts/groups/silos and anyone can easily contribute.
>Don’t understand why he lives in everyone’s mind, rent free.
It is fascinating to watch a slow motion disaster. The man is burning billions for seemingly no logical reason. That's gonna draw my eyeballs just due to the absurdity.
"But if we judge Twitter’s influence by its active users, we underestimate it massively. It has no peer as a forge of public opinion. In political analysis, publishing, public health, foreign policy, economics, history, the study of race, even in business and finance, Twitter has come to drive who gets quoted in the press. Who opines on TV. Who gets a podcast. In foreign affairs and political analysis, especially, it often determines whom we consider an authority. Almost every academic and journalist I know has come to read Twitter, even if they don’t have accounts."
It is a bit funny. Just few years ago most people said Twitter is mostly pointless, just a gimmick, and can't really compare to other social networks. It looks it has founds its niche in the end.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 504 ms ] threadAn airplane is not a person.
Unless I'm misremembering, the ElonJet account listed the cost and the amount of fuel consumed for every flight right? His willingness to burn 10 tonnes of jet fuel on a whim definitely doesn't mesh well with his brand as "The EV-guy".
(I can asked loaded questions too.)
The saddest thing is this only adds fuel to the pro-censorship crowd.
I think people should take into account that something deep inside Elon knows he's in deep shit, and is probably contributing to him taking rash actions and generally lashing out. He was never a wise man, but I still suspect we're seeing him at a low ebb of rationality. Again, no sort of defense: this is a problem entirely of his own making.
https://in.mashable.com/culture/42675/internet-slams-elon-mu...
> Musk tweeted, "My firstborn child died in my arms. I felt his last heartbeat. I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame."
> Soon, Elon's ex-wife Justine Musk revealed the real story and stated that it wasn't the techie but she was holding the child. She wrote, "A SIDS-related incident that put him on life support. He was declared brain-dead. And not that it matters to anyone except me, because it is one of the most sacred and defining moments of my life, but I was the one who was holding him."
If Musk wants to turn over a new leaf and decide free speech is secondary to protecting children, he should consider banning the accounts that have whipped up bomb threats against childrens' hospitals of late.
Like he has to provide forensic level testimony with a timeline of who's holding a child while it's dying?
That's some psychopathic level lack of empathy for someone who's child died.
Fabricating a story about his child to win points seems directly relevant here.
You can simultaneously have empathy for someone for the simple fact that their child died, and also think they're lying about the details for their own personal gain. The two are not mutually exclusive.
"LAPD's Threat Management Unit (TMU) is aware of the situation and tweet by Elon Musk and is in contact with his representatives and security team. No crime reports have been filed yet." (emphasis mine)
https://twitter.com/WesleyLowery/status/1603558240377151488
A family man isn’t a brand he’s been going for up until now.
This torrent of baseless confabulations about him is truly disgusting.
> In a new interview with Financial Times, the Tesla CEO, 51, said he believes his daughter — who legally changed her last name in June from Musk to Wilson — no longer wants to be associated with him because of the supposed takeover of elite schools and universities by neo-Marxists.
> "It's full-on communism . . . and a general sentiment that if you're rich, you're evil," said Musk, who is a dad of 10. "It [the relationship] may change, but I have very good relationships with all the others [children]. Can't win them all."
> Musk's comments come six months after Vivian filed a petition to legally change her name and gender.
But I certainly agree that he's going through a crapton of stress right now, and that can't be helping. I hope he finds a feeling of safety, but I also hope that his daughter also finds the peace she needs...
I think he's scared for his own safety. In fact he has basically said as much. As rich as he is, he still owes a lot of money and favors to a lot of people. Some of them are quite powerful and ruthless. They're likely displeased at how he's pissing away the value of an asset in which they have an interest. Just because he's paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get him. If I had the kinds of friends or enemies that he has, and particularly if I had been busy converting the first into the second, I'd be worried too.
When you're in a persistent fear state, rational decisions become almost impossible and actions directly contrary to one's own interest become commonplace. It's like the skier who's trying to avoid a rock, but keeps staring at it and naturally starts turning toward it instead. Sometimes it's better to look away, even literally, toward the path you should take instead. Unfortunately for us all, Musk so far seems unable to do that.
Those numbers are swelling steadily. And with every sale that Musk does he is adding to that pile. You have to wonder what makes him believe that Tesla stock is overvalued.
It seems more likely if you are rich or powerful, you have much better alternatives available.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/elon-musks-daughter-gra...
[2] https://people.com/parents/everything-to-know-about-elon-mus...
In my opinion, you're lying.
There are many shades of gray, of course.
"A warm welcome to all the newest converts to the great American cause of free speech!" @pmarca
—Elon Musk, April 2022
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1603555493238435840
"Apparently not. That's bad."
More seriously, Twitter has been a toxic cesspool long before Elon made it worse, and I’m happy I deleted my account and have never missed it. Actually it’s been a boon when I visit a Twitter link and then Twitter nags me to sign in, it’s a great reminder to close that tab and move on with my life.
Hmm. I guess there's not a number they can call or email to try.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/15/23512004/elon-musk-start...
Seems so.
https://www.choosingtherapy.com/narcissistic-collapse/
Read through. The paragraph about how it manafests in the workplace is quite telling.
Just staggers me that Elon could have just… not done any of this. And yet here we are. He’s had to sell billions in Tesla stock to finance this ongoing mayhem, this is surely going to be up there as one of the greatest examples of hubris in modern business.
Why do it by saddling the company with so much debt that it seems financially so difficult to survive?
Just from a business standpoint it doesn’t make sense.
It’s the explanation that makes the most sense to me: obscenely rich man is very used to doing whatever the hell he wants with no repercussions, particularly when shitposting on Twitter (see: SEC) and there was no-one around to tell him to stop.
I doubt very much anyone let him walk into a trap that bad. He had to have been kicking and screaming the entire way.
Good Jobs First track how much subsidies are given out to specific companies. Tesla's racked up $2.5 billion from states and the federal government and another half billion in loans/bailouts[^0] (for comparison, Tesla' net income in 2022 was $11.19B). SpaceX is all government contracts where NASA basically pays a private company to do the things they could and want to do but can't because of political impediments. We're still the ones funding it, we're just paying more and letting a private company take credit. Starlink's subsidized by the FCC, SolarCity's subsidized by a number of states as well as the federal gov'ts subsidization through tax credits for 30% of the cost of solar panels, etc.
And people aren't dumb. He's been sued in a number of countries for subsidy fraud already. Remember when Tesla pretended to have rapid battery exchange ready to go and announced it was live? That was purely to take advantage of a poorly written subsidy package in CA that didn't actually stipulate they had to give people access to it. Tesla won that lawsuit too iirc.
Elon Musk became the richest man on earth without ever running a profitable company. In fact, I'd say it's precisely by NOT running profitable companies that he got to where he is today
[^0]: https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc
edit: grammar & typos
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-su...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/07/tech/elon-musk-wsj-government...
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-201...
https://www.mic.com/impact/elon-musk-build-back-better-tesla...
https://www.carscoops.com/2022/11/elon-musks-the-boring-comp...
https://www.curbed.com/2022/01/elon-musk-las-vegas-tunnel-ce...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnbbrandon/2021/04/13/elon-mu...
https://www.jumpstartmag.com/what-we-can-learn-from-elon-mus...
That's the business. Continue selling a dream. Talk to any actual engineer with relevant knowledge and they'd likely tell you it was a terribly thought out idea from the start. But those engineers aren't the ones signing gov't contracts
Valued at $5.9B, not worth, a massive difference.
They have been spending vast amounts of money on various types of geostationary based two-way satellite communications technology for 40 years. And they currently do so on some very low term projects and contracts.
Remember that the US DoD is what saved Iridium too.
They are always on the lookout for new or better tech.
Musk entirely aside for the moment, fact is that the starlink Redmond team has been first to market with something that is WAY ahead of kuiper, oneweb, telesat or any other leo satellite network in real world results.
And voila: the new team successfully launched Starlink.
Remind me, what was the other company where Musk fired a bunch of people? It's been in the news recently.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-promises-to-pl...
But I agree that we should be concerned about the military applications of Starlink, and that we should be discussing it more. And I appreciate you highlighting it because I wasn't aware.
It makes no sense.
I personally would not be against an interest group pushing over their lifetime for a common interest such as space exploration. Although turning this into a "Twitter is a way to curry favours" conclusion is a stretch.
I think that you’re tangentially right. I wouldn’t be surprised if Elon Musk purchased Twitter because he had to, but I wouldn’t be surprised if whatever motivated him to posture toward buying it in the first place was motivated by what you’re explaining.
It’s like Elon is the modern government agency cut out, but instead of having a handler or agency association - he’s just generally a free agent cut out for anyone who will fund him.
But it’s also the plot of the much maligned movie ‘Aloha’. To the keen eye it is a disturbingly insightful film.
Buying votes simply doesn’t cost this much, by orders of magnitude. Burning your empire to ashes as a loyalty test doesn’t hold water either: It’s politicians that partake in loyalty tests, not donors.
Contrary to the partisan memes, support for military funding is actually bipartisan. Republicans often like to say that Democratic politicians don't support the military, to pander to their base, but this isn't actually true. And Democratic Party sometimes like to play at being peaceniks, again to pander to their base, but this isn't true either.
Look up the composition of the United States Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. 50/50 split between parties. You don't get DoD projects funded by sucking up to Republicans, you need to convince politicians on both sides of the aisle.
@georgeg23, comments in this thread are now disabled for new users so I'll reply here. It doesn't matter if SDI was originally Reagan's baby. Reagan is dead and nothing will get funded without approval from both parties. The Republicans can't fund the SDA on their own.
If you care about your online presence and the branding "value" it has, then work to separate the brand from the platform as much as possible.
If you care about your social connections, find some way to separate them from the platform too: follow them on another platform, learn their general identity so you can find them elsewhere, and maybe we can all try to value having our own personal homes on the web separate from any real platform again.
Do you actually need a good reputation to be successful in a platform that caters to mostly brain dead on the toilet chatter?
People up top were eager to cash out at the expense of all the employees under them. That’s equally disgusting to me.
But, I mean, the board did the right thing; their obligation is to the shareholders, and the price Musk offered was absurdly high.
There are very few accounts here on HN that will sympathize with such an extremely uncapitalist, anarchist take.
Expecting the shareholders not to take the money and run is unreasonable.
Twitter’s shareholders voted to accept the deal at his offered price. When Musk wanted out the shareholders weren’t interested enough to even vote a second time.
Every money-losing tech company claims that they could turn the spigot to profitability at any time and the reason they're not profitable is short term capital expenditures; the proof is in the pudding.
A bit of an exaggeration but there is some truth here, tech companies are notorious for feeding all their revenue back into growth. However in Twitter’s case it was absolutely true. It had a solid perch and wasn’t going anywhere… until Elon took over and became Trump 2.0 except “this time, he owns the site!”
Then came the pedo guy comments. I cut him slack, he must be tired/strung out, he'll apologise. He never did.
Now he's become like a meme of himself, or perhaps just himself as he always was but now right out there, and it's not good to see.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuygJnnyiYI
For example: how would you or I behave if, no matter what we did, over 50,000 people immediately reaffirmed us online? Would it take 50,000, or would 10,000 be enough? 5,000, 1,000?
This isn't mean to exculpate Musk: he's encouraged this behavior for years, and his own behavior long predates mega-engagement by his fans on social media. And still I can't help but wonder how many of us would be able to similarly contort ourselves, if so much affirmation was on the line.
We all sometimes ridicule the stilted corporate speech of some rich people and their reluctance to appear in public, but increasingly I feel like some of them do it to not fall into the social media trap.
Having a public team write your statements and asking them to provide a weekly/monthly report on the good and the bad seems like a working strategy.
Those people are doing their job and you can even employ different teams to get a more nuanced view while you yourself can be more distanced and collected.
Of course Elon Musk specifically is s social media addict who seems to enjoy being praised by sycophants no matter what he does. He chooses this.
Now I can clearly see he's just some guy who is both smart and also a raging narcissistic asshole who came from daddy's apartheid era emerald mine money.
Turns out that shitposting your way through life like an edgelord 14 year old boy on the internet is not an admirable lifestyle unless you are a hardcore musk stan.
Oakland PD has a couple of 500s which is neat, but what always brings a chuckle is the tale of how New Zealand farmers went all in on the 500 because nothing else could touch the performance for… hunting deer.
Unless you do it to the outgroup. Then it's fine! Laudable even!
Same as shutting down journalists and other accounts. It was nothing to fret about when the opposite side used to do it, "they were misinforming or borderline bad anyway, and they could always start their own blog or something, so it wasn't censorship" and so on.
It's also comic: pundits pissing on free speech (tons of cheering when people were cancelled before, and lots of articles on how it's justified and free speech is not the be all end-all) making a u-turn to call for free speech and condemn Musk's account shutdowns now, while Musk and co that was defending free-speech before is now censoring accounts, while the "free speech" proponents in the previous round are now cheering him for it...
This doesn’t appear to be true
https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...
Whether that made him millions is less clear.
Is not equivalent to
> came from daddy's apartheid era emerald mine money
“Came from” and “apartheid” are doing a lot of work here. That sentence is written in such a way to:
1) imply a not insignificant portion of daddy’s money came from that mine
2) associate that mine with all the bad things we associate with apartheid
3) imply daddy’s money had a not-insignificant impact on Elon’s outcome
4) so it can then associate Elon’s current state with the crimes of apartheid
If the above isn’t true, I have a hard time understanding why GP would mention apartheid or the mine.
You don't like the associations that "apartheid" evokes? And yet, for an emerald mine in Zambia, apartheid was certainly a big factor in the working conditions there. The mines in Zambia (mostly copper) benefited the most by apartheid, where white workers were paid over ten times what black workers were paid. Even during the 80s, when supposedly the color bar had been dismantled, mines got around that be defining all black labor as "local" (even if the workers were immigrants) and white workers as "skilled expats" (even if the whites were born next door). [1]
Mining, indeed, was heavily tied to the apartheid from the very start. [2]
So it's very relevant that it's an "apartheid era." You could not invest in a mine in Zambia or South Africa without knowing that you were investing into a apartheid system, and hoping to make money off the backs of the apartheid abuses.
> imply a not insignificant portion of daddy’s money came from that mine
Yes, I agreed that that wasn't backed by known evidence in my statement above.
1. https://theconversation.com/zambias-copper-mines-hard-baked-...
2. https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/cjpmefoundation/pages/...
The chain of relevance is broken.
Using my numbered list above (arrow is chain of relevance): 2 -> 1 -> 3 -> 4
If you’re getting tripped up about apartheid and the mine being separated, just combine them.
1+2 -> 3 -> 4
In GPs post, 2 is not relevant to 4 unless you establish 3. Unless GP is trying to make an unfounded claim that “Elon’s current state is associated with the crimes of apartheid” (where associated means having a not insignificant impact on that state), including 1+2 isn’t relevant. It’s irrelevant that it’s an apartheid era mine because it’s irrelevant that it’s a mine. 4 is not associated with 2 by way of 1+3 like, IIUC, GP implied.
Henry Ford bought a newspaper. Musk bought Twitter. The more the things change the more they stay the same.
Think about a wedding. Think about a bride and groom happily dancing, looking forward to their life together. And what does Elon say at this moment? "As we danced at our wedding reception, Elon told me, 'I am the alpha in this relationship.'"
Well he's certainly not mature and stable enough for a Beta release!
No thanks. Sounds like you're trying to pile rubbish on someone's name by promoting personal hit piece articles from their ex-partners. That's low quality.
Interview anyone's ex and you'll find grubby things to hold up in the light, if that's your agenda.
"Hey everyone, read what his ex wife said"... is nothing but encouraging others to look for dirt as you have done. Nothing to do with the current topic about twitter bans. Similar to what cheap tabloid reporting does.
Same. It's one thing to use a slur like that in some personal dispute; but this was against a hero who had saved children, and on a public forum. I've lied to myself that this was a minor dispute. And it would be that if he'd apologized. But the lack of apology is a very serious red flag of character. Impulsive unkind and unfair behavior is something we all are guilty of some time. But to not acknowledge it and make amends? That's wrong. Because the easy thing was the apology, sincere or not. Musk must have pushed back against his people to not apologize. Musk wanted to hurt that man, and he still wants to hurt him, would hurt him again if given the chance, worse if it was legal. And for what? Publicly criticizing Musk's (frankly hair-brained) idea to save those kids. (Honestly, I don't remember the details.) He reacted very badly to a fair criticism, with personal malice and rage, and he believes these reactions to be appropriate and, if anything, displaying admirable restraint.
I can't help but see echos of that lack of empathy, that meanness, as he takes his various actions now with Twitter - firing large swaths of staff, sending demanding emails to the remaining staff on very short term. We are all capitalists and so give a proven leader like Musk enormous leeway in this position. But his behavior has been absolutely rotten. Even layoffs can be delivered with more grace! His words and actions, apart from layoffs, feel like angry, vengeful behavior rather than "effective leader" behavior - all echoes of the "pedo guy" incident.
He was a diver- just not a rescue diver in this case.
That said, Musk's comments were unnecessary.
Sounds like something a bot would write.
Musk's Twitter apology to the 'pedo guy' at the time made headlines. A simple google will sort out your confusion. He also apologized in court, and repeatedly stated how it was the stupidest thing he's done.
> "We are all capitalists..."
Again, sounds like something a chat bot would write.
It's strange you doubled-down on Musk not apologizing, when it was headline news at the time about his multiple apologies and statements of regret over the incident.
You stated: "honestly, I don't remember the details" yet proceeded at length with your analysis and judgement.
People have been using the new chat AI tools to post comments. Your comment was strangely drawn out, laboring on disjointed ideas, pressing inaccuracies like how the new bots do it.
Tinfoil hat off: all the admiration and money he received turned him into whatever it is that we are seeing today.
...Too bad about Dave Chappelle, though. He's on his way to pulling a Gallagher.
But it won't make genuinely nice person into an asshole that kicks kittens, the money just acts as enabler for stuff they might've been afraid to do before coz of consequences. Like for example pretending to be nice to get promotion at work vs unleashing assholery once there is nobody there to kick you down for your behaviour
If Twitter took loans from interests either connected to or sympathetic to foreign governments e.g. Saudi Arabia, Russia then simply trying to keep them onboard could be enough to influence his decisions.
Or in having a Twitter that has more lax rules around what they can say.
Paid for (at least partially) by the U.S. government [1]. You can't easily say "no" to your own government even if you are a foreign asset.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/spacex-ukraine-elon-musk-...
The Saudis are major shareholders in Twitter, although personally I doubt they're telling Musk what to do so much as being content to let him run it into the ground; it's a win for them whether Twitter under Musk succeeds or fails.
This is to say nothing of Elon's small-potatoes stealing from local governments via Boring.
I guess a definition of "value" as "the intangibles that allow it to keep functioning" would make your statement correct, but a definition that relies on "how it generates revenue" would probably not.
So yes, the vast majority of revenue generators (and therefore value generators) for Tesla (at least in Q1 2021, as per the article you linked) are the things I listed in my first comment.
You were seemingly thinking about what was generating profit, which is generally not how value is calculated, otherwise my (profitable) two-man company would be more valuable than Twitter. But given that you explicitly said "how it generates revenue" at the end of your comment I'm actually a bit confused as to your position.
518/533 ~= 97%, not 5%. I must be misunderstanding something somewhere. Explicitly, I'm saying that (per my understanding of that article) Tesla derived more income from selling emissions credits than from selling cars in that particular quarter (and, I think it's reasonable to assume, other quarters, given how overwhelmingly that seems to be their business model).
Even the emission credits being "pure profit" is misleading, given that the only reason Tesla can sell those is because of the cars/batteries/etc they are producing, so realistically the cost of producing those things should be deducted against the revenue generated by selling the credits.
If anything turned him into who he is, it would be his childhood. When he writes the xmas card to his half sister / niece, it must be difficult deciding how to fill out the card.
I recall having conversations with some people, who seemed to follow the "scene" more than I, telling me that his image was relatively well curated and managed by PR people in and around his companies, and that his "quirkiness" was allowed out in managed quantities so as to maximise interest and attractiveness without being off-putting.
I never looked into it because I didn't care much. The rockets stuff is cool but also profitable so good for him and capitalism. But I found it highly believable and never really understood the cultism around him. I wouldn't have predicted this twitter or doucheness, but I certainly don't find it surprising.
America is probably saturated, it's not even like it wants to buy Musk products, and Musk feels so much more like a Chinese boss than the head of an american social platform having to navigate impossible compromises :D
The strategy to act like a republican douche courting Trump to try to maybe make them like barely finished EVs might pay off, but it's such a risky bet. I d pay good money to witness one day american conservatives "owning the libs" through buying his electric cars.
Twitter itself will never yield him 44bn, so there s no economic rationality for the buyout: it can only be now a derivative gain.
I really don't think Elon would do well in quietly taking orders from CCP.
Not having EV's wouldn't have made everyone suddenly switch to public transit and bikes, as cool as that might be. They'd just keep driving gas and diesel vehicles.
And realistically, you can't get rid of cars and trucks entirely. Even super dense areas with strong public transit still use plenty of cars and trucks, because they're useful. You think Singapore and Tokyo and Seoul could run on no cars or trucks whatsoever?
Also you are making a logical fallacy by assuming I am saying that -EV's- (sorry: "EV industry", different thing) are singularly responsible for the lack of decent climate policies. I just said they were an attack on the objective. One of many.
FYI: I live in Seoul and there's certainly a lot that could be done to reduce the insane amount of cars from current nightmare levels. Korea has a very powerful auto industry, one thing they could do is stop subsidizing it. Switching to EV's will undermine any effort to do that "bEcaUsE EV's aRe grEeN!"
Yeah no shit. That's why EV's are super useful, even if you wish we had a lot less cars, like me.
> I just said they were an attack on the objective. One of many.
Doesn't matter. EV's still help the climate relative to keeping gas and diesel vehicles around. Blaming them is stupid.
> Switching to EV's will undermine any effort to do that "bEcaUsE EV's aRe grEeN!"
Nah. The problems preventing greater uptake of public transit are largely unrelated.
It's just abhorrent design of cities, that is the problem, especially in US.
I think a lot of my friends think I'm a die hard Musk fan when I say a criticism is unfair. I actually just think he's a human being under a microscope coping poorly. I'll support the criticism when I think it's warranted. The is a culture of everything is bad because bad man is bad, that unsettles me.
As for this particular story on HN, I really don't know. Twitter is a chaos box at the moment, It's hard to tell whether Musk is directly involved. These actions (or any actions really) might be policy, edicts from the top, officious middle employees or just plain screw ups.
This is an issue that allegedly involves Musk's family. He's tweeted about it directly multiple times stretching back to his initial offer of cash for @elonjet to go away, and has directly discussed this policy change in his own tweets over the past 24 hours, including tweeting about this round of bans.
Are you actually saying "it's hard to tell whether Musk is directly involved" in this specific issue, or...?
Whether those banned were actually in violation of those rules I don't know. I would have said remains to be seen, but I fear such details will be lost in the news churn.
He apologised more than once. Including on Twitter and again in court where he looked the guy directly in the face and apologised.
I mean, it was widely reported but somehow you missed the headlines at the time such as Washington Post's "Elon Musk apologizes for ‘pedo guy’ comment: ‘The fault is mine and mine alone’"!
He blasted: "He's an old, single white guy from England who's been travelling to or living in Thailand for 30 to 40 years, mostly Pattaya Beach, until moving to Chiang Rai for a child bride who was about 12 years old at the time.
"There's only one reason people go to Pattaya Beach. It isn't where you go for caves, but it is where you'd go for something else.
"Chiang Rai is renowned for child sex-trafficking."
Here's some facts... The diver guy launched a public attack on Musk at a time when kids needed help. Everyone was focused on helping the kids, but this diver decided to get some attention by insulting Musk out of the blue, in a CNN interview.
Musk's sub wasn't used for the cave rescue, but was kept by the Thai Navy who said they could use it for future rescues. The navy were trained in how to use it.
The diver guy was wrong to attack Musk. So the sub couldn't be used in the cave, so what? It was help, undeserving of scorn. I'm not excusing Musk's reactionary comments, but I'm glad the diver lost the court case. The diver wanted 160 million dollars and was awarded zero by the jury.
And speaking of apologies, the diver never apologised or backed away from accusing Musk of a stunt and telling him to stick his sub up his rear end. A sub that a team of people worked on, not just Musk.
My guess is that both the diver and Musk desperately wanted to help the kids. The divers attack on musk (I believe attack is too strong a word, but sticking with your terminology) was likely motivated by the view that Musk was making things worse, not better, with impractical ideas. From what I've read of the case, musk's submarine was indeed not practical - for this requirement.
However, whatever the divers motivation, responding by falsely accusing someone of being a paedophile is vicious, uncalled for and indicative of being a giant douche. Apologizing and then unapologising - and doubling down on the false smears of someone way below him on the ladder - is more of the same.
You're claiming to know the motivations of others, but your record of accuracy is not great in this thread.
Building and delivering a sub with the intention to help, is never going to "make things worse" even if the sub isn't used.
If my colleague writes a program that ends up not fitting the application, I would never tell them to shove their code up their arse. Who would do that other than a giant douche?
Both the Diver and Musk engaged in a squabble in public, started by the diver, escalated by Musk. You're focusing too much on the contents of the insults, and deciding Musk's was not only the greater crime, but the only crime. You've pardoned the diver of any fault, and invented a squeaky-clean backstory to explain his remarks.
EDIT: "barefaced" intentional because there's significant evidence to claim that these character traits were always present (see - the famous essay by his ex-wife), just less noticed.
It’s not clear, either then or now, that Twitter “had no prospect of making money.” By most metrics, it was a potentially (and in actuality) very profitable company with a history of mismanagement.
It was struggling in the "big tech megaprofit" way, not in the "pay for the servers" way.
This entire thing is an extended farce in two acts: (1) Twitter's leadership's inability to turn a highly addictive social media network into a regular money fountain, and (2) the sale of a potential regular money fountain to the single least qualified person possible.
A change in leadership (never been a fan of Dorsey) and a refocus on core competencies could have given it a big boost - if it was planned and executed competently. But what we got with Musk is the exact opposite of that. The amount of fuckup is truly amazing to watch.
Ah, apparently he mistaken the Streisand Effect for a "coordinated campaign". We are closer than I thought.
You can practically see the switch flip. I’m not sure he’s openly said Musk has made bad decisions until this moment.
pg’s still on the side of journalism.
Elon is constantly leveraging the "for the children" cover for his petulance.
I'm surprised people think creepy stalking is free-speech.
Now anyone who reports on it is banned too?
He also brought back a ton of banned people … who were similarly banned without explanation.
In this case, he needs to set rules and judges for his kingdom if he wants a certain group to keep using it.
As an aside, one of the people banned was known to take clips out of context. Add commentary on top, and actively mislead people. Imo these aren’t journalists, they’re activists
Certainly a good reason to ban everyone who had the same vowel in their name... or something.
All of these things - mischaracterization, commentary, misinformation, activism - fall well within the "free speech" Musk said he'd be protecting, even if your assertions are true.
Musk isn’t actually doing anything but applying the already existing anti-doxing rules.
Project Veritas (also a “journalists”) was banned for over a year for accidentally having an address in one of their videos.
I think both cases are ridiculous, but the same journalists who were recently banned cheered veritas being banned.
No banning, anyone, for any reasons, besides direct threats - aka first amendment (I would argue real-time tracking is probably a threat, but idk)
False. They very publicly tweaked those rules after the ban. (They also include a media exemption, which is being ignored.) https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1603165959669354496
> Project Veritas (also a “journalists”) was banned for over a year for accidentally having an address in one of their videos.
No, he wasn’t.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/15/twitter-bans-james-okeefe-...
“A Twitter representative said the action followed the violation of rules prohibiting “operating fake accounts” and attempting to “artificially amplify or disrupt conversations through the use of multiple accounts,” as noted here.”
“Update: The image was in fact redacted, I thought it was done by the person who took the screenshot but the first digits were removed in the original tweet.”
It's hard to overstate what a crucial time this is for Tesla. They had early-adopter success when they had the field to themselves. But now every major car company plus a bunch of other people (possibly including Apple) are coming for them. Pivoting to the mainstream market and fending off all the competition is going to take both dedication and gobs of capital. Capital that is going going to be harder to raise with a distracted CEO and a bunch of investors who've had their fingers burned.
The latest is that they have given up trying to make it autonomous-only and will be looking to launch in the next few years.
Not entirely implausible given that their close partner Foxconn is already making EVs:
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/10/18/business/foxconn-electric...
By 2026 it'll be next to impossible to make any serious impact in EV market, certainly not serious enough to affect Tesla.
In 2026 Tesla will be at run rate of 5+ millions cars.
There's no magic in this business.
Even if Apple has a car with that kind of demand, it takes 1 year to build a factory and 3 years to ramp it to 1 million cars a year. This is what Giga Shanghai did and that's faster than anyone ever done it.
So we're talking 2030 for 1 million cars, if somehow Apple can build it's first factory at the same scale and speed as Tesla it's second factory, after lots of painful learning scaling Fremont production.
Plus, without robotaxi what's the point? Luxury brands like BMW / Audi / Mercedes top out at ~2.5 million a year. That's a business, but it's not a Tesla destroying business.
a) People buy more than one car in their life so winners and losers will change over time.
b) We are close to to 2023 and EVs represent just 10% of total car sales.
They also have one of the world's strongest brands, with a lot of dedicated customers. They don't have to compete on price, so despite having 13% of the global phone market, they are making 75% of all smartphone profits: https://www.imore.com/apple-takes-75-smartphone-profits-desp...
I am not an Apple fan and own none of their gear, but even I can recognize how Apple would be a formidable player.
Those wanting more should look at two recent articles from Jean-Louis Gassee. One where he makes the pro case: https://mondaynote.com/apple-car-software-and-money-51f86a33...
And one where he makes the anti: https://mondaynote.com/apple-car-bad-idea-after-all-94689476...
You say your not an Apple fan, but really sounds like you've been hanging out the Apple Store a bit too much lately.
> Apple would be a formidable player.
Hehe. Stop.
If you’re an investor who’s in it for the long run, I don’t see what today’s stock price has to do with anything though. You can’t use the current stock price as an answer to what the stock is worth.
> Capital that is going going to be harder to raise
Tesla has over $10 billions in cash and adding few billions every quarter. They don't need to raise ever again.
> They had early-adopter success
Yes. Also, they became the largest EV company in the world with 2x margin of other car companies.
> when they had the field to themselves
Nissan Leaf and Bolt EV launched before Model 3.
Jaguar i-Pace, Audi eTron, BMW i5, VW ID.3 and ID.4, few models from Hyundai and quite a few more.
Model 3 and Model Y had plenty of competition for several years.
That competition didn't sell many cars and Tesla did.
> But now every major car company ... are coming for them
More like desperately trying to catch up. Tesla is still ahead of everyone in things that matter, like securing raw materials for batteries, building battery cells, securing battery cells from suppliers, manufacturing (gigacasting, spending less time and money to build a car), building more factories (ramping up 2, soon announcing 2 or more), Tesla Semi with best specs by far, still the best motors, the most efficient cars, the safest cars, building insurance business, shipping more software updates than anyone. This is not a complete list.
The question for the future is not: will Toyota or Honda kill Tesla.
It's: will Toyota and Honda keep up enough to not go bankrupt.
Having $10 billion in cash sounds like a lot. But that's against the $500 billion car companies will be investing this decade: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/exclus...
It's also not much compared to the $130 billion Tesla's top 10 investors have lost on Telsa since the Twitter takeover started: https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/tesla-stock...
And Tesla is coming under pressure to spend their cash not on investments, but on stock buybacks: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/tesla-stock-...
As to the future, we'll see, but it's perfectly possible that Tesla will end up in the bucket with Groupon: promising early start, but in retrospect only of historical interest.
And the stock in Tesla dropping directly correlates with the stock in the SV bubble economy dropping, mass layoffs, and overall economical downturn.
The latter argument is addressed in the article: "Tesla's value is down more than 52% since the Twitter buyout was approved on April 25, while the S&P 500 is only off 5.5%. And Tesla stock is off 29% since the deal closed on Oct. 27, much worse than the S&P 500's 6.6% gain in that time."
That's true, however the majority of people still purchase non EVs, which is not the market Tesla is in. As multiple parts of the world are moving to ban sales of new petrol cars (UK 2040, EU 2035, Chili 2035, Hong Kong 2035, India 2040, etc), there will be an interesting point where most new cars purchased worldwide are EVs.
I don't believe Tesla are the ones who need to catch up to the petrol manufacturer market - the opposite is true. The traditional manufacturers have about 10 years to catch up or start bleeding, as laws will force purchasers to buy an EV.
RE the value loss argument, it is certain that the overvalued Tesla stock is dropping, however that 52% is during a period that tech stocks (which I would argue Tesla is one of) have been dropping like crazy. The NASDAQ is down almost 30% from the start of the years, mostly pulled downwards by tech stocks:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fallen-faangs-nasdaq-wipeout-...
I don't think they're in a worse position than any other tech stock, especially with global legislation effectively guranteeing them a long term pay off.
But it's at least as reasonable to think that people will keep buying EV versions of their favorite cars. Not only is there significant brand loyalty in the car markets, but there's no particular reason to think that Telsa can be all things to all people. Tesla only has 3 models total; Toyota alone has 5 models on the top-25 list. The current Tesla model lineup appeals to a pretty specific demographic, and I don't see much sign Telsa can expand beyond that.
There's plenty of sign that other manufacturers will catch up. Consumer Reports has studied 20 EVs. They recommend 5. Tesla only has one model they recommend, and it's in the middle the scores for those 5. The Kia EV 6 gets a 91 and the Genesis GV60 gets an 84. The Tesla Model 3 gets a 78.
That's all before we get to Musk. Tesla got gobs of free publicity and cheap capital because of his PR savvy. But that has now gone into reverse, with no sign that Musk even thinks that's a problem: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4562466-can-tesla-survive-w...
And personally, I think "Tesla is a tech stock" and "Tesla will become the dominant car manufacturer" are theses that are at odds. Tech stocks are high margin businesses. Niche luxury cars, as Tesla has been to this point, can be high-margin efforts. But the mainstream market won't be.
He unbanned a lot of people that were also banned previously for no reason. I think a lot of the outrage comes from the "unfairness" now being dished out to those people with whom the outraged agree with...
"In 1918, Ford purchased his hometown newspaper, The Dearborn Independent.[76] A year and a half later, Ford began publishing a series of articles in the paper under his own name, claiming a vast Jewish conspiracy was affecting America.[77] The series ran in 91 issues. Every Ford dealership nationwide was required carry the paper and distribute it to its customers. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford#Antisemitism_and_Th...
I think Musk bought Twitter to serve as his own platform, to spread his ideas and to suppress those of others.
One obvious problem with it is that if Twitter dies, some other site will take its place. The idea of tweeting isn’t going anywhere. It’d be a bit like trying to uninvent a bicycle.
More generally, a bunch of thoughtful people use Twitter, and Twitter DMs changed my life. It’s the AOL messenger of the 2020s. A low friction “DMs open” platform is very hard to come by — the closest before the messenger era was email, which usually isn’t a conversation. So there would be a real loss in terms of social value. E.g. TikTok requires both people follow each other before DMing, so there’s not even an option.
You’re not entirely mistaken, but the caveats seem worth calling out. On the whole it seems like more harm than good would come from the implosion.
Is Musk making mistakes in his management of Twitter? I'm sure he is.
On the other hand, it is also true that a lot of people now have it in for him, and will amplify any story about such a mistake, regardless of how real it is, simply because it is what they want to hear, it feeds the current narrative, it makes great clickbait.
In terms of how Twitter actually turns out, I think we are really going to have to give it time, including waiting until the media gets bored with it and moves on to some other topic. It is probably going to do worse than Musk hopes, but also not as badly as many of his detractors predict.
Of course, Musk isn't helping things by feeding that media outrage cycle himself. But I can only imagine that behind the scenes, cooler heads – such as Gwynne Shotwell and Robyn Denholm – are urging him to step away from the controversy for a bit, stop feeding it and let it die down. Hurry up and find a new CEO for Twitter, then go spend a few weeks chilling on a tropical island.
> He’s had to sell billions in Tesla stock to finance this ongoing mayhem, this is surely going to be up there as one of the greatest examples of hubris in modern business.
He's always been willing to stake it all on the left field idea. Sometimes that has worked really well for him (Tesla, SpaceX), other times it has gone rather poorly (Twitter). But, you can't really have one without the other – either you take big risks, sometimes strike it lucky and make it big, other times get badly burnt; or else you don't, and you avoid the burns, but you'll never make it as big either. The kind of person who always takes the right big risks and never the wrong ones, is either too lucky or too wise to actually exist.
He made a huge amount of money really fast, and now he's gone back a lot on that. But he's likely got another 20-40 years of life ahead of him, he could easily make it all back and then some.
Yes and no. The acquisition is now complete, so we can judge what led up to that. And it was terribly done. The dude made an offer on a lark, thought he could wiggle out, and discovered that, however much he normally can get away with shenanigans, a Delaware chancery judge was not among the people who would let him slide. So he was forced to buy a business he had spent months trashing publicly. He easily lost $20 billion the moment the deal closed. It's one of the most spectacular own-goals in business history.
We can also start judging the actual takeover. There is absolutely no reasonable business goal that justifies the level of chaos and mismanagement during the takeover. Even if one believes that cutting 75-80% of the staff was necessary, it was very poorly done. If someone had wanted to maximize the level of media attention, they could have hardly done better than all the dramatics.
So is it possible that he'll pull Twitter out of a dive and turn it into a functioning business again? Yes. Network-effects businesses are notoriously hard to kill, which is why Twitter survived all these years despite its problems. But it it likely he'll ever turn a profit on it? I doubt it.
But I think the real long-term cost here to Elon is in brand damage. He was a media darling for quite a while, with a lot of people buying his Tony Stark/Edison 2.0 routine. But those days are over. Tech reporters can be pretty credulous, as they are paid to get eyeballs. But business reporters are much less forgiving, as they're paid to be useful to people trying to make money. And now that Musk has made himself look so erratic, there will always be questions about his competence. His media honeymoon is over, and given how much he used his brand to hawk products and get cheap capital, that's going to be a big problem for him going forward.
I remember a few weeks ago Twitter wouldn’t be able to keep the lights on. That’s obviously not the case. Interesting how fast the narratives are moving.
Let’s pretend for a minute Musk wasnt liberal public enemy #1 and the machine wasnt fully activated to take him down (now that we have confirmation of what we already knew, that media companies collude to suppress or amplify coverage)… he is running Twitter without any noticeable impact to the operation of the services with 70% less staff. That’s astounding to me. All else equal, this business would have been significantly more profitable over night.
The fact of the matter is, companies will go where the users are. Once the noise dies down, why wouldn’t you continue spending money on Twitter if your competition is?
Thus far a lack of one is being demonstrated.
> Let’s pretend for a minute Musk wasnt liberal public enemy #1...
When was Musk "liberal public enemy #1"?
> he is running Twitter without any noticeable impact to the operation of the services with 70% less staff
My house would hum along for a few months if I died suddenly, but eventually the power would get cut for lack of payment. The impacts of cutting staff dramatically may take time to become evident.
Are there value systems by which Musk's bid for Twitter was well done? yes. For one, comedians certainly appreciated it. But by the value system of the Wall Street Journal or the average business school professor, it was terribly done. And that's the one that interests me here.
I agree that the post-purchase stuff is harder to evaluate. But I don't think there's a good case to be made that it was competently done for any set of reasonable business goals. If you'd like to try, feel free. Any value system you like.
There is more to the service than just the technical. His decimation of the moderation teams is immensely noticeable.
> The fact of the matter is, companies will go where the users are. Once the noise dies down, why wouldn’t you continue spending money on Twitter if your competition is?
When the CEO is spreading outright hate speech, sane people go elsewhere. Brands won't want their image tarnished by looking like they are supporting hate speech.
Right now there isn't a great alternative to Twitter. Mastodon is definitely not it. But once there is, e.g. something like t2.social, my guess is that Twitter will be toast faster than people imagine. I'm sure the hardcore alt-right will hang on, but it will be a shadow of its former self.
I'm sure he regrets a lot of it, and wishes he could go back and change some of it. However, a big part of that was poor timing with the economic cycle – if Putin hadn't invaded Ukraine, the markets might be in much better shape right now, and the deal would have turned out a lot less bad. He took a stupid risk, and it blew up on him – but it might not have, and people would have paid far less attention if it hadn't. Anyway, while US$20 billion is a huge loss in absolute terms, it is only around 10% of his net worth, even less at the time it was incurred. I'm sure he's not the first and won't be the last billionaire to lose 10% of their net worth on a bad deal, and many have bounced back from that kind of loss before. Maybe he's even learned his lesson, and will be more financially conservative in the future.
> Even if one believes that cutting 75-80% of the staff was necessary, it was very poorly done
I find it very hard to work out what is actually true about that. I heard people here condemning him for planning to let people go with no severance, and then suddenly he is giving people three months instead. Did he backtrack under pressure? Were the earlier claims just unsubstantiated rumours? How am I supposed to know. My gut feel, is he probably did make somewhat of a mess of the whole thing, but not quite as bad a mess as many claim.
> But I think the real long-term cost here to Elon is in brand damage. He was a media darling for quite a while
I think that is somewhat overstated. Remember the whole "pedo guy" incident? The "Texas Institute of Technology & Science"? A lot of people (both in the media and the general public) have disliked him for years, and they do have some legitimate reasons for that dislike. All Twitter has really done, is added to those reasons, and drawn attention to them, rather than creating something which wasn't there before.
How is SpaceX Starship going to go? Nobody really knows. Worse case scenario, is it flounders and turns into an expensive boondoggle. Best case scenario, it successfully pulls off Artemis III and dearMoon, people forget about the delays and Musk's endlessly over-optimistic timelines. If the best case scenario happens, what are people going to think of him when Twitter is yesterday's news, and Musk-founded SpaceX played a key role in returning Americans to the surface of the Moon? Especially if it happens under a Republican administration, a GOP White House will probably be rushing to give Musk a "Presidential Medal of Freedom" if Artemis III succeeds, and those who can't stand him will probably just have to bite their tongue.
They'll find somewhere else to go
It'd arguably be nice to have a national election without Twitter.
A significant fraction of our ascendant elite are overworked, overmedicated and alone. Musk is likely the most critical of the afflicted by Kayne syndrome.
He seems to try very hard to show who he is, some people just won’t take him at is word / actions.
This is not new behavior.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when-elon...
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/twitter-suspe...
Last I checked, the police claimed they hadn't received any reports about the incident, either.
So this stalker followed him home to Grimes' home and there's no police report?
[1] https://observer.com/2018/06/grimes-buys-house-pasadena-los-...
Elon claims that "lil X" was in the car, which could either be the rapper Lil Nas X or his son (with Grimes) X Æ A-Xii.
I can't find the original, but from read it seems like the last tweet was a day before this.
On the insta this was closest i could find and it looks like was LAX not huntington
Yeah, he owns the worlds largest auto company, largest rocket company, and just threw down $40 billion to buy the worlds biggest social media company.
Dude is in dire straights indeed.
No, he doesn't. That would be Volkswagen.
username is surely parody.
It's become clearer and clearer however that SpaceX succeeded in spite of Elon, not because of him. There are all sorts of reports around now that SpaceX management is very effective at building a firewall around Elon to stop him doing a lot of damage.
But his politics, narcissism, deception, misrepresentation and incompetence actually aren't new. Lying about his education, his role in Paypal, founding tesla and so on. It goes back decades.
Personally I'm not surprised at Elon's temper tantrum and banning people who are mean to him on Twitter. What saddens me however is how many stans and apologists ("dick riders" if you will) Elon still has. Elon does not care about you. You will never be Elon. For the record, this is a general "you", not who I'm replying to specifically.
This is very good podcast about this exact topic.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/05/banks-financing-musks-twitte...
The investment banks have been attempting to change that to a margin loan against TSLA shares, because of course they are. They are holding effectively unsellable debt now.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/30/technology/elon-musk-twit...
Musk himself is personally on the hook for $25 billion
They thumbed their nose at a rule, got banned, and then cried about it.
What am I supposed to care about, exactly?
I’d suggest that you care about the fact that Elon will ban anyone he wants banned, and make up a justification post-facto. If you don’t care who gets banned from Twitter, then I retract my suggestion.
*granted he had to do a tiny bit of work to counter the insufficient obfuscation the FAA allows for privacy.
what a joker.
…and I’m supposed to care?
Like calling people risking their lives to save a bunch of kids pedophiles? Or using fascist dogwhistles?
“…the Aristocrats!”
It'll be interesting to see if the people who've been lauding musk for his supposedly pro free speech attitudes will reckon with what's been happening in actuality, or if they'll just accept this as "freedom for me but not for thee".
I have no strong opinion about how doxxing relates to free speech, but desire to hide your private life is understandable, and I don't see any benefit for the society from realtime doxxing.
And the rule change was quite clear that linking to the jet tracking was prohibited.
That all said, he's gone too far here. And it's an unwinnable fight anyway.
From what I can gather and infer, a couple of days ago Musk's son got off the jet and into a car, then that car was attacked by a stalker looking for Musk himself. Musk believes that the stalker got the information from the ElonJet Twitter account.
> [Other comment:] days after. so by musk's own rules.. fine to post. wasn't real time.
Location of the jet was shared in real-time to my understanding, checking with the link given on https://grndcntrl.net/falconlanding/
> And again, no police report filed. You were dooped.
I see a video of the supposed stalker in a balaclava. I do think Musk took the opportunity to get rid of something he already disliked, but I don't yet believe he faked the attack if that's what you're implying.
I believe the car was followed from the jet (possibly after the car dropped off Musk, or collected Musk's son from Musk), which was at Los Angeles International Airport earlier that day.
The car itself doesn't have a live tracker, so it seems less likely that someone dressed up in all black balaclava/gloves would find it otherwise - if it's even a known car at all.
> days after
Days after what?
> that’s the price you pay for a private jet using public air space.
A stalker attacking the car containing your 2-year-old son is NOT just a price to pay.
My statement of price to pay was public jet location information using public airspace. This is the case for everyone. It was done for years and there’s no evidence it was a factor in the incident here despite many trying to find an excuse after the fact.
I could be making a mistake but I don't believe this is true. Are we looking at the same plane (N628TS)? It seems to have been at Los Angeles International Airport the same day.
It's also not particularly public information (https://archive.vn/cB7Lh). Would you defend doxxing sites like Kiwi Farms, on the basis that they're correlating/archiving public information?
https://twitter.com/WesleyLowery/status/1603558240377151488
Calling it "Hunter Biden's laptop" ignores the fact that it was hacked information provided by a foreign adversary to sow division and influence an election. That is not comparable to sharing publicly available information about aircraft movements.
That being said, I also think the extent to which they went to bury and remove the real photos and videos of Hunter Biden smoking crack was a huge overreach. They tried to paint it as a conspiracy theory that had no factual basis — that's biased censorship.
Every single one of these claims is false. Hunter Biden gave his laptop to a repair shop, the repair shop shared its contents with the New York Post and the FBI. At no point was any foreign agent involved, at no point was anything "hacked"
You're right, Rudy Giuliani is clearly a credible figure and his account of how he happened to come across Hunter Biden's laptop is sensible and not-suspicous in the least.
Hey, quick question completely unrelated to this, was Trump pro or anti Putin? Did Julian Assange leak information in good faith or did he co-ordinate with Republicans to release only information that made Democrats look bad, in the 2016 election? Who provided Assange that information?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-assange-idUSKBN20...
I am aware. My point is that there is a precedent for this behaviour and neither Trump nor Republicans are credible.
> As for the provenance of the laptop: Hunter Biden never denied giving the laptop to the repair shop. And the repair shop gave the laptop and all its contents to the FBI, who would presumably have found any foreign involvment, if it existed, in their investigation of the matter.
Let me be clear: I have no doubt in the veracity of any of the information or materials leaked. I distinctly recall seeing posts on /pol/ containing videos of Hunter smoking crack and banging hookers (that have since been scrubbed from the Internet), and people allegedly attempting to hack his iCloud account.
However, the I do not find the story and chain-of-custody of his laptop credible. I have been looking further since your prior comment and I cannot find anything that unambiguously confirms its provenance.
On the flip side, I also do not find a lack of official condemnation or attribution to Russia to be sufficient in disproving it. Joe Biden and the Democrats were clearly trying to kill the story and scrub any mention of it, so acknowledging it only gives it legitimacy.
Happy to ammend my comment if you can point me to something that proves otherwise, though. Jeffrey Epstein was discovered in part because a woman stumbled across his black book on the sidewalk — sometimes unlikely coincidences happen.
~~Donald J. Trump was not directly involved in the breaking of the laptop story.~~ (edit: my bad) "Republicans" is a group containing tens of millions of people (though I am not aware of the repair shop owner's party affiliation, if any?)
Do you really believe that Rudy Guiliani, a man acting as Trump's lackey for numerous things, received bombshell information and publicized it without Trump having any knowledge or involvement?
Michael Cohen testified under oauth that Trump knew about leaked DNC emails in advance of the 2016 election. Fast-forward to ~2019 and Trump had already personally tried to pressure Ukraine into providing damaging information about Joe Biden. There is very little plausible deniability here.
> "Republicans" is a group containing tens of millions of people (though I am not aware of the repair shop owner's party affiliation, if any?)
I am obviously not referring to a collective conspiracy of between hundreds of millions of American citizens. I meant the Republican Party.
> I meant the Republican Party.
Which contains many thousands of people, many of whom do not get along. It's a minor miracle that it is still holding together at all!
That's okay, I had to go back and re-check the details of the story multiple times.
Based on your other comments, I think we're probably share a similar view about it. All I'm saying is that, while the validity of the content itself unimpeachable, the story about how it was uncovered is highly suspicious.
> Which contains many thousands of people, many of whom do not get along. It's a minor miracle that it is still holding together at all!
Of course, but they demonstrably put up a rather unified front against the Democrats; Catholics and Protestants hated each other, yet put aside their differences to vote for common interests.
Aren't the GOP currently spearheading an investigation into Hunter Biden's laptop?
https://twitter.com/housegop/status/1593253229747265545
https://i.redd.it/4yfum3kpzy0a1.jpg (I'm too lazy to find the actual tweet)
It makes sense to me, considering how damaging and embarrassing the content was. If they confirm it, they lose plausible deniability in being able to claim it's fake.
For a large period of time there was a coordinated effort to purge everything from the Internet and paint anyone bringing it up as a conspiracy theorist. It's harder to get away with that if you call attention to the leak and confirm it's authenticity.
Perhaps the laptop truly belonged to Hunter Biden. Without a confirmation or proper chain of custody, it's hard to say either way. It's not implausible that an advanced threat actor, especially one backed by a nation-state, could create an elaborate laptop forgery to 'layer'[0] hacked material into a legitimate news story and avoid the hack itself taking centre-stage like in 2016 — of course, this is speculation on my part.
[0] https://www.moneylaundering.ca/public/law/3_stages_ML.php#:~...
Whether the information is real is orthogonal to how it was obtained. Conspiring with a hostile adversary to release damaging information about a political opponent is also political malfeasance.
The circumstances of how the information was obtained is incredibly suspect and that deserves scrutiny, even if the information is legitimate and actionable.
> The focus on crack smoking hookers getting clapped by Biden isn't as interesting when it comes to political malfeasance.
That's kind of my point: why was that stuff leaked and spread when there was actually damning evidence? To me, it seems like the point was to release as much damaging and embarrassing content as possible to harm Joe Biden.
During the NY Post story, on Twitter you weren't allowed to link to "hacked" material (though this was probably not well enforced).[2]
Twitter changed that policy and reverted the account freezes[3] so that it was fine to link to "hacked" material as long as you weren't directly affiliated with the entity that produced the "hacked" material. [4]
[1] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hacked-materi...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20200603215859/https://help.twit...
[3] https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/twitter-ceo-nypost-blo...
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20210301054617/https://help.twit...
A stranger should not be able to unplug your hard-drive and access your nudes.
It was neither of those things.
That specific context you mention is VERY important:
Russia already did this.
The FBI specifically warned to TW that a leak like this had high chance of happening just at the time it did.
Twitter was right to be cautious.
Maybe didn't do everything consistently or perfectly, but I would far prefer them limiting the reach of Hunter dick pics and crack photos than letting a foreign government do so much damage again.
I think their main error was being slow as more background & info was uncovered.
Be honest, and ask yourself if that had been Trump's son's laptop would Twitter, The Washington Post, and the others have done the same? I don't think so.
If I collate publicy available information and publish it continuously on any person, you are OK with that? If it happens to you?
Sure, if you presuppose that the people responsible for disclosing it are credible and honest.
I personally have some questions why a computer store owner would, faced with an abandoned laptop from a customer, decided to snoop through its contents and give it to Rudy Giuliani, of all people.
If you take the story at face value it's still a massive breach of privacy. You have to go out of your way to find this stuff; an ethical repair shop would go out of their way to avoid accidentally stumping across private information.
Even still, if you assume that he stumbled across extremely concerning information in a manner no fault of his own, why did he feel it necessary to leak videos of Hunter Biden smoking crack and having sex? Imagine how creepy it would be if a woman dropped her laptop off at a repair shop and the owner leaked her nudes?
The most charitable interpretation is that Hunter Biden dropped his laptop off at a computer repair shop, and the owner decided to snoop for compromising information and give it to his father's political rival, presumably for politically-motivated reasons.
> Be honest, and ask yourself if that had been Trump's son's laptop would Twitter, The Washington Post, and the others have done the same? I don't think so.
I agree.
On top of that, in case of this particular account, Musk specifically said that it would be allowed on the platform per his understanding of free speech.
Twitter only censored the oldest continually published newspaper in America during an election about the Hunter Biden laptop.
This, to me, clearly seems to be a small mistake with no material negative impact on the world. Shit happens.
Elon is consistently and repeatedly making far worse mistakes.
(Edit: may have been just the original author and at least one other:
> The New York Post published images and PDF copies of the alleged emails, but their authenticity and origin have not been determined.[23] According to an investigation by The New York Times, editors at the New York Post "pressed staff members to add their bylines to the story", and at least one refused, in addition to the original author, reportedly because of a lack of confidence in its credibility. Of the two writers eventually credited on the article, the second did not know her name was attached to it until after The Post published it.[24] In its opening sentence, the New York Post story misleadingly asserted "the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating" Burisma, despite the fact that Shokin had not pursued an investigation into Burisma's founder. )
I'm actually okay with bans, suspensions and all the rest. But only if there is the following
These recent bans have had none of that. The rule change should have been announced before the bans. There should have been warnings to remove the tweets before instant bans. The accounts should be given the opportunity to comply with the rules and come back.While I'm sad Elon has taken this turn I still don't think Twitter is any worse off. They did this before just to a different group. At least they appear to be making progress on removing child exploitation.
I don't know if the platform can survive the disruption and unpredictably that Musk has introduced but from a moral standing, removing child exploitation wins a lot of points with me.
I'm not sure how they can prove much here. All I've seen is an activist in the space supporting him. Specifically https://twitter.com/elizableu
I could be wrong.
And she's also Qanon or at least Qanon adjacent. Few days ago she tweeted that she did believe the world was run by a satanic pedo cult.
I can find any reputable news sources saying positive things about Twitter and child exploration.
Elon changed the TOS to obfuscate from it being a personal and vengeful decision.
I am not aware of any source for this claim except Elon himself.
When a cult leader fails to deliver, or otherwise issues a prediction that never materializes, the cult member usually grow stronger in the cult’s convictions. This is kind of a counterintuitive psychological phenomena but it has been demonstrated quite a few times. There may be something of a cognitive dissonance driving this. It is that after you see your cult leader fail, you can either dismiss all your prior believes, or change your version of reality to match the cult’s altered dogma. It seems as if doing the latter is easier for most people, so this is in turn what most people do.
Residents of the commune later committed suicide by drinking a flavored beverage laced with potassium cyanide; some were forced to drink it, some (such as small children) drank it unknowingly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-Aid
I have a longstanding interest in social psychology and the way a cult generally arranges to control people is to cut them off financially, socially, etc. This is the same way that abusive husbands typically treat their abused wives. One study sought to identify character traits that made abused women more likely to kill their abusive husband and could not do so. Instead, they found that the women who murdered their abusive husbands were the most isolated, the most abused, the most painted into a corner. In short, they were women who found themselves with no other way out.
I suppose if you work for the man or are enthralled by his billions or some such, that's going to hold sway for some people. But I have trouble comparing his Twitter debacle to what cults do.
Anyway, just rambling on. Not actually interested in discussing this Twitter mess that I am mostly trying to avoid discussing in spite of the entire world seeming to discuss nothing else.
But if you have some citations to back up your social psychology related statement, I would be interested in seeing those as it's an area of interest of mine.
This fits with my general knowledge of how such things work. TLDR: Those with the most skin in the game were the most likely to try to save face and double-down on their stated beliefs. Those who had lost less had an easier time going "Whoops! I was wrong!" and getting on with their lives:
Some of the believers took significant actions that indicated a high degree of commitment to the prophecy. Some left or lost their jobs, neglected or ended their studies, ended relationships and friendships with non-believers, gave away money and / or disposed of possessions to prepare for their departure on a flying saucer, which they believed would rescue them and others in advance of the flood.
As anticipated by the research team, the prophesied date passed with no sign of the predicted flood, causing a dissonance between the group's commitment to the prophecy and the unfolding reality. Different members of the group reacted in different ways. Many of those with the highest levels of belief, commitment and social support became more committed to their beliefs, began to court publicity in a way they had not before, and developed various rationalisations for the absence of the flood. Some others, with less prior conviction and commitment, and / or less access to ongoing group support, were less able to sustain or increase their previous levels of belief and involvement, and several left the group.
This is not inconsistent with what we know about the process by which people are radicalized and become members of extremist political groups and the like. Part of the process is that it becomes increasingly difficult to get respect, make meaningful social contacts etc with people outside the group. Once you pass some point of extremism, outsiders become openly hostile and their reactions give you no good path back from your position.
Being seen as "crazy" or "wrong" or "stupid" is too much to bear. Better to reject the entire world -- knowing it won't be nice to you at this point -- than to admit "Okay, maybe that wasn't the most rational thing to do."
So...cancel culture? Criticize the current #thing and get cut off financially and socially.
That would make #thing a cult, no?
One of the groups that formed out of it is still active today more than 150 years later.
In line with what I have noted elsewhere:
Many followers had given up their possessions in expectation of Christ's return...
There were also the instances of violence: a Millerite church was burned in Ithaca, New York, and two were vandalized in Dansville and Scottsville. In Loraine, Illinois, a mob attacked the Millerite congregation with clubs and knives, while a group in Toronto was tarred and feathered. Shots were fired at another Canadian group meeting in a private house.
Perhaps we shouldn't give people so much hell for simply being wrong?
Not exactly a citation, but none of the predictions or claims of the original QAnon poster have come true or been proven. Yet the Q movement is still around, and for some of them their beliefs are getting stranger.
If there was anything substantive about ElonJet, it would have been the statistics on jet fuel consumption, because that makes a statement about hypocrisy. They could have posted that without revealing locations, which crosses the line to singling out an individual for the purpose of harassment.
The degree to which Musk is upset by this makes me wonder if there isn't something more to it than just 'personal safety' concerns fed by paranoia. It may well be that the location of his plane tells a story that he does not want exposed. Because frankly the amount of goodwill that he's burning over this makes no sense at all.
Somebody described his Twitter purchase as "fragile narcissist buys criticism factory", so I think he has wedged himself into a situation that his ego makes both intolerable and inescapable. If he had somebody in his life to talk sense into him ("honey, put down your phone and come to bed"), I'd expect him to walk away and consider it rationally. But here I could imagine him continuing to spiral for quite a while.
To me, it's tragic in the way that Rudy Giuliani or Kanye West is: too much success can create the conditions for a long, lonely downward slide.
This is directly contrary to the reporting in Twitter Files by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger whose journalistic integrity and credentials exceed yours and mine combined by orders of magnitude:
"On Jan 7, senior Twitter execs:
- create justifications to ban Trump
- seek a change of policy for Trump alone, distinct from other political leaders
- express no concern for the free speech or democracy implications of a ban"
https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/16017204550055116...
And the only doxxing related to LibsOfTikTok was Taylor Lorenz doxxing LibsOfTikTok, to the point that Lorenz showed up at LibsOfTikTok's house in person herself. She didn't just doxx her, she went to her house in person. There are pictures.
edit: Rate limited for telling a truth that HN dislikes again...
Here's my reply to the below:
>If they then publish your home address? Sure.
She did publish her home address, after showing up there. Some tweets containing it are apparently still up, as she complained about it to Musk in a thread about the journalists being suspended (for 7 days it turns out).
She claimed the identity of the account was of public interest on CNN here: https://twitter.com/TPostMillennial/status/15182845369660456...
But then showed up at relatives' houses of LibsOfTikTok too: https://thepostmillennial.com/libs-of-tik-tok-exposes-taylor...
Do you mean to tell me that the relatives of that account were of public interest after exposing the account as an American woman?
It was a deliberate doxxing, by Taylor Lorenz aimed at LibsOfTikTok on purpose.
And I’m saying this as someone who thinks the decision to publish LOTT’s real name was borderline, despite the fact that LOTT decided to use her real name for her domain registration.
(Besides the fact that Elon literally doxxed his former employee trying to insinuate he is a pedo)
You conveniently misinterpreted or even left our crucial pieces of the so called “twitter files” including that the policies of shadow banning and such were already mentioned and known.
Some of the employees were literally asking for reasons to KEEP certain right wing accounts on twitter.
They listened to violations of revenge porn AND TOS violations of Hunter Biden’s dick. The right wing really seems obsessed with seeing it because the links that were all mentioned in the docs were all of his dick LOL
LibsofTikTok causing harassment to children’s hospitals and they still weren’t even banned. No they weren’t promoted in the algorithm but there’s no right to be amplified.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/02/lgbtq-t...
They were "known" in the same sense that everybody already "knew" that the US government spies on us before Snowden leaked the details.
Twitter claimed that they didn't shadowban - in fact there's a tweet out there somewhere (I think I saw it shared in one of the Twitter Files threads itself) in which Jack Dorsey himself explicitly denies that Twitter shadowbans. To claim that the Files didn't reveal any new information is utterly disingenuous.
Interesting how you moved on from “government involvement” when everyone realizes Biden campaign wasn’t the government and it was dick picks they were trying to remove.
Shadowban was literally talked about earlier this year. https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/5/23012046/twitter-prisoner-...
Is the claim that Twitter changed their ToS in order to justify banning Trump? If so, can you share the before and after texts? I assume the Internet Archive would have snapshots.
Or is the point, literally, that people at Twitter discussed whether a change of policy was a good idea in the context of the Jan 6 insurrection? In which case, like...wouldn't you sort of expect them to have conversations about the fitness of the ToS to an unprecedented situation? That sounds like doing their jobs competently, no?
> - create justifications to ban Trump
> - seek a change of policy for Trump alone, distinct from other political leaders
> - express no concern for the free speech or democracy implications of a ban"
Funnily enough this is literally exactly what Musk has done in the last 24 hours with regard to the @ElonJet account and the people reporting on it.
As Twitter’s policy has been, when they banned people for posting videos with visible house numbers because they doxxed the people in them.
Elon Musk @elonmusk "I simply mean that which matches the law.
I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.
If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect.
Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people."
If Musk hadn't been making a big deal about supporting free speech for the last several months there wouldn't be a problem with him banning all these accounts. It's his platform he can do what he wants. dang can ban me at any time here, it's kind of his party in many ways. But dang isn't running around claiming to support all forms of legal speech, he's made a point he's trying to enforce his and the team's ideas of community guidelines.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603235998263123969?s=20...
Hopefully this makes more people aware of just how much power social media companies have, and have always had, over the public discourse and that results in the institution of legal and/or technical measures that limit that power across the board. I'm not optimistic though, given how much of the public attention right now seems to be focused on admonishing Elon personally rather than on the overall system that makes this kind of censorship possible.
Anyone that actually wanted to use this data to harm Musk would have no trouble simply using the exact same original data.
Anecdotally, I did see the @ElonJet account, and have still never seen the source of the data.
So you'd be okay with banning misinformation about COVID and the COVID vaccine? Misinformation and agitprop had very real consequences in the real world.
Nice strawman!
It's a question of safety of provably true information in this case.
The assertion that posting a 'live location' create dangerous real world consequences is completely absurd. We know plenty about the dead humans COVID misinformation left in its wake.
You are okay with censorship here because you agree with it. Full stop.
>It's a question of safety of provably true information in this case.
Okay, prove the lack of safety.
The information is provably true by going to the location and verifying that the person is there.
It's here: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af
The source code for the bot: https://github.com/Jxck-S/plane-notify
ADSBexchange (and FlightRadar and several other orgs) are just tracking the public broadcasts each plane makes every second with its location, altitude, airspeed, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Dependent_Surveillan...
Wow, you have to reach back 25 years, and it's an absolutely terrible example because it has nothing to do with a constant publication of location to the general public. Instead paparazzi used their own private communications (paparazzi who saw her board in Sardinia told other paparazzi in France). And her death wasn't caused by someone who found out her location and wanted to do her harm.
"Safety claim by Elon" is also completely meaningless since he's literally the person who wanted this shut down.
So two really bad examples over 25 years is not evidence for your claim.
Finally, using public information to say the state or country Elon has recently flown to is a far cry from actually giving away his current location.
Obviously there are times when the rich and famous know that their location is public. At those times they generally have good security.
Even Air Force One shows up on ADSBexchange when it's in the air. https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=adfdf8
The data comes from https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af. You'll see no passenger list there.
Because, it happened.
Are you ok? Your replies are really weird behaviour.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34013246
"Members of the British Royal Family en route to Balmoral castle to see Queen Elizabeth after news of her failing health, very sad." - https://www.reddit.com/r/ADSB/comments/x91yli/members_of_the...
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=407d90
In this case it appears that you did not think.
What do you think this system is?
1. A small number of large tech companies have collectively managed to gain a huge amount of control over what information millions of people are allowed to see.
2. There are nearly no legal restrictions on how they're allowed to exercise that control.
I'm not sure precisely what the solution to that should be, but the problem only exists as long as both 1 and 2 remain true, so you could theoretically approach the problem from either of those angles, or both.
As for whether or not their should be legal restrictions on what publishers can publish... take your best shot at suggesting some legal rules. I think there would be holes that you could drive a truck through that would upset you regardless of your own views.
Not everyone needs a global megaphone. And nobody intrinisicly deserves one.
That may have been poorly phrased on my part. My intent was to put the focus on the listener rather than the speaker, since Google search (for example) doesn't control what people say, but it can control what people see. Censorship at that level is just as much of an issue as it is at the level of social media. "Freedom of speech" and "freedom to listen" are really the same thing. I prefer the term "the free exchange of ideas" since that includes both speech and listening, is agnostic to the medium (listening, reading etc.), and conveniently excludes things like CSAM and spam, since those aren't ideas.
I'd also argue you can't "just go somewhere else" to find content you aren't even aware exists in the first place, so I think the phrasing "allowed to see" makes more sense than you give it credit for once you consider the chilling effect of widespread censorship.
That sounds like a big jump even beyond "they shouldn't be able to control what they publish." Are we now going to require Twitter actively promote everything too?
How many obligations would you impose on everyone else in service of this hypothetical listener who demands to be spoon fed all points of view in the world without effort? Is a library allowed to have a collection if they don't fully advertise it's breadth? Is a bookstore allowed to choose what to and to not put on their shelves? Am I allowed to tell you what I think without telling you how many possible other views there are? Any of those are just as "chilling" as "twitter.com" not having all the content that "elonsjet.com" or "jacobin.com" or "foxnews.com" would...
Twitter/FB/etc are HARDLY important enough, and way less powerful than past media, to start telling people they have to amplify what other people say.
Hmm, yes, that's why nobody can go to InfoWars anymore, right? They're banned from Facebook and YouTube, so I guess it's impossible to hear anything they have to say.
What's this? infowars.com still loads? It has videos on it? Impossible, the leftist lizard demons banned it
Wake me up when port 443 requires written consent from Zucc to operate.
He can ban away, but he's just proving his free speech stance is meaningless. He'll just ban whatever he doesn't like regardless of if it's legal or not. Which is fine, but don't hold him up as some defender of free speech.
The thing is, deplatforming works. Banning far-right actors has drastically reduced the reach of their messages [1]. Personally, I see this as a Good Thing, simply because of the potential that spreading hate has to escalate to actual, real-world violence, from murders like in Charlottesville to an outright attempt at instigating a coup.
At every sudo prompt, we get the warning "With great power comes great responsibility" - for good reasons. It's the same with running a social network connecting literally billions of people... those operating them have great power by the sheer market size of their platforms, and a huge responsibility for just how much of the bad side of humanity can be empowered by them. Whatsapp, for example, was directly linked to dozens of murders and severe injuries after lies and propaganda led to lynch mobs [2][3][4].
[1] https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/06/deplatforming-works-this-n...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_WhatsApp_lynchings
[3] https://www.dailystar.co.uk/tech/news/chilling-whatsapp-chil...
[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-61794986
Anything he dislikes, if he filters through the lens of his children, he's willing to ban, apparently.
See the terrorist attacks against Drag Queens.
Or can you give other examples of disparity between free speech rule applications for themselves and people they don't like?
Posting public information publicly isn't doxxing and until you give up that falsehood, there isn't really anywhere the conversation can go.
Of course a free speech "absolutist" like Musk is a complete hypocrite for not allowing doxxing in the first place.
Sometimes it is.
For example, name plate on the mailbox is publicly available, but posting the address with full name online constitutes doxxing.
> a free speech "absolutist" like Musk is a complete hypocrite
One guy once said, who never changes his/her opinion, is a moron.
Musk will continue to censor speech he doesn't like arbitrarily and use Twitter to promote right-wing extremists who will then hurt real people in the real world.
I did not see evidence of that.
Musk is a right-wing extremist who will protect his own.
You might be referring to JM Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind."
The question is what facts are changing? Here, it looks like the only difference is that something bad happened to HIM.
People change mind even if facts do not change.
There are a few people with less money than Mush who have bodyguards.
I wasn't sure if Musk was going to deliver it, but I tried to remain open-minded. I did think previous Twitter management leaned left with some admittedly difficult moderation decisions, but obviously I'm finding out that Musk is even less supportive of true free speech.
Ironically this banning of Mastodon links is the #1 thing pushing me to start exploring Mastodon or other platforms.
If 4chan had anywhere near the size/reach of Twitter or Facebook, I think it would either be more toxic or more restrictive in its moderation.
This is not a new phenomenon, the only thing that changes is the terms used to signal the meaning.
Sure, there are phonies. Therefore it is impossible to believe that anyone is genuine? No.
Anyone intelligent enough to think it through knows it's a paradox, so anyone who truly does want free speech clearly hasn't actually thought it through. They exist, but nobody should take them seriously.
I don't, so I assume I'm not that intelligent. Would you please explain to me how is it a paradox?
It's not just speech - it's speech with an intention to do harm. That's like saying going into a bank and saying "my partner there has a gun and he will start shooting unless you give me money" is also abusing free speech - it's not about speech, it's about actions in the real world.
> If you allow all speech, some speakers will use that tool to restrict others' speech, which means not all speech is actually allowed
Nobody uses speech on its own to restrict others' speech.
> "Free speech" is a paradox.
I'm not convinced, see above explanations.
We haven't moved anywhere, because it's not speech that's illegal, it's the intention to do harm. You could perfectly well communicate your intentions to do harm with no speech at all, e.g. by pointing a gun to a bank teller without saying a word. If you use speech to offer to sell drugs to somebody, and a cop arrests you for it, that's not an issue of free speech, that's an issue of drug dealing.
The fact that you aren't allowed to commit crimes by using your speech doesn't make free speech itself a paradox - otherwise any use of the word "free" in the context of humans in society might as well be paradoxical. "We're not free to commit a murder, therefore individual freedom is a paradox" - that'd be quite a naive take on the matter.
In case of free speech as an ideal, it's still a bullshit argument. You cannot suppress speech with speech alone. Go on any anonymous internet forum and try to suppress someone's speech by e.g. threatening to doxx/harm them - you will be laughed at, because on the internet there is no real threat of harm. It's always the threat of harm that actually suppresses speech, not speech itself.
That fact that you use speech to deliver the threat doesn't in itself create a paradox.
In context of freedom of movement, that argument would be akin to "free movement is a paradox because you can suppress someone's movement by holding them down". Yes, you use free movement to walk up to a person, but it's not your movement that holds them down.
Because everybody has a point where they don't want free speech anymore. If I gathered your home address and told everyone you were a pedophile that needed to be killed, you'd probably be less stoked about free speech.
There is some irony now seeing those that didn't believe the banning of accounts arbitrarily was an issue under previous management decrying this move by Elon.
No, the irony is not that the site under both owners is trying to remove bad/harmful content (just defining it differently).
The irony is that Musk thought he wasn’t going to have to do it at all: “absolute free speech”, “public square”, “comedy is legal”, etc.
One of the banned journalists went on Mastodon and said (paraphrasing): “It’s his site and he can ban whoever he wants”
And to be fair, under both owners, accounts were banned for violating ToS policies. The policies are just different, but they’re still the rules you agree to when you use the site.
I just don’t think anyone thought “free speech” meant no parodying, no republishing public FAA info, etc.
Their entire argument is about the prevention of the exact sort of thing that Musk alleges happened to a car carrying his child - real world harm from online activity. So why exactly are they upset about this change in policy that while clearly motivated by self-interest rather than any principle, technically aligns with some of their goals? It's because they want to be able to doxx people they think deserve it. Because when they doxx it's journalism, but when their enemies doxx it's stochastic terrorism.
This is probably true, but it also describes Twitter prior to the takeover.
If anything is clear to me, it's that it seems impossible to have a completely neutral/fair public forum. Or perhaps it is possible, but people dislike the opposition so much they aren't interested in using it.
Less terroristy but still super shitty: https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axmy3/far-right-attacked-dr...
If Musk wants to demonstrate a newly sensitive attitude towards doxxing and its dangers, he’s welcome to ban Libs of TikTok.
Our company had already stopped spending on Twitter ads back when the first (possibly false) reports about increased hatespeech on Twitter came out, where I was one of a few protesting the decision, since it seemed like giving in to the hysteria and just trying not to become the target of activist journalists. But now it's clear even to me that staying on Twitter is a brand safety issue.
We don't do ads on twitter (politics). but no brand I know would want to be associated with the crazy-ness and tons of negative press.
Maybe good opportunity for click arbitragers and bottom barrel DTC though! low competition!
twitter is already showing me taboola level ads lmfao
I just can't with hn anymore. came back to specifically read this thread.
at least reddit is fun and has shit posting.
a significant chunk of active commenters on hn have gone off the deep end. a stew of insane, mean, and flat out wrong comments that have nothing to do with tech or cool nerd stuff. and everything to do with mean-spirited (often right wing) politics
uhhhh, no. Doesn't seem like they're having a reckoning. Will check back with next shoe drop.
Edit: I see 2 on this comment. Good for them.
Automation gone crazy. I'm likely to believe this explanation rather than Musk personally hitting the "suspend" button on stuff he doesn't like.
> Same doxxing rules apply to “journalists” as to everyone else
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603573725978275841
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...
Damn, couldn't even follow his own policy for 24 hours since the accounts seemed to have been banned with no warning.
> Sharing private or live location information:
> The first time you violate this policy by sharing private information (such as home address, identity documents etc.), we will require you to remove this content. We will also temporarily lock you out of your account before you can Tweet again. If you violate this policy by posting private information again after your first warning, your account will be permanently suspended.
> If your account is dedicated to sharing someone’s live location, your account will be automatically suspended.
(Ridiculousness does not justify censorship, of course! Elon's actions and hypocrisy are indefensible)
It’s amazing to me that despite despite several data points showing Musk would be capable of doing this, people are still giving him the benefit of the doubt.
That’s the power of personal branding.
Do wealthy people not have assistants?
"Smithers, ban those guys making fun of me!"
It's not because of branding, it's because he could do it himself. It's just unnecessarily complex. It's annoying to be accused of falling for branding if you do anything but automatically assume the absolute worst at all times. That kind of rhetoric makes any discussions about musk thoroughly annoying
> Twitter took action against Mastodon after the account linked to the Mastodon page of @ElonJet, a student-made bot that tracks the whereabouts of Musk’s private jet.
Nothing like free speech!
No one’s saying he can’t do this. They’re saying he promised not to. Including, specifically, banning the @elonjet account.
It's one thing to see a random celebrity or business person lose their marbles, but there was (and continues to be) high hopes for Elon at least with Tesla and Space X.
I absolutely understand someone trying to shake things up for PR, but I can't see how he's winning here.
Seems like a bad deal, get paid less and have to "manage" your founder.
We know he's competent on some level, and a BS-er on some level given his bombastic announcements.
But bombast about literally going to Mars are different than bombast about QAnon in terms of credibility and inspiration.
Trump warned Europeans about Russian encroachment but he's cried wolf so many times he has no credibility.
Elon was nothing without the koolaid - I think he's a bit of an imposter - he's 'Iron Man' because they said that in a movie, and, SpaceX was able to stick the landing which gives him insane cred. He could make a million gallons of free koolaid for his staffers.
Smoking dope on YouTube is fully on brand.
Even calling out people on 'free speech' - fair enough.
But he's crossing a lot of lines and it's going to affect his ability to put people on Mars.
I have never had any aspiration to work for him, because I think he's glib - but - I would probably enjoy a tour at either organization, because hey that'd be fun. But now - I wouldn't really want to spend time there.
The Hero->Super Villain story is starting to become a meme.
Nearly all the dudes in the Valley I used to look up to are starting to act like like are a 2-pack-a-day smoker, 3 days after going 'cold turkey': thin skinned, short sighted, angry, arrogant, crude, conspiratorial, cynical, greedy, needlessly cold.
Some of the things they say make me believe they stopped reading books (other than business books) or travelling at age 19 to focus 100% on 'the game', and it's cost them deeply in terms of personal development and perspective.
They are not making the leap to 'Wise Sage Leaders' very well.
I wonder if regular corporate personal development is a better preparation for leading large, mature organizations.
I don't agree with Tim Cook on a lot of things but he definitely seems a league ahead in terms of social maturity than some of the Alpha Dogs of the Valley. Ditto for so many others.
A law was needed that made sure to personally hold twitter management liable just to make sure that twitter would actually suspend open Nazis (the kind that actually posts swastikas).
[See: Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz]
How is that a progressive haven, wtf?
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/feb/01/facebook-youtu...
> “There is no evidence to support the claim that the major social media companies are suppressing, censoring or otherwise discriminating against conservatives on their platforms,” Barrett said. “In fact, it is often conservatives who gain the most in terms of engagement and online attention, thanks to the platforms’ systems of algorithmic promotion of content.”
The only way Twitter will die is if the network effect is killed, or somehow used against Twitter to create a competing platform.
I think parts of Twitter may be easy to build in isolation, but the entire platform as a whole is certainly not easy by any means and would be very expensive to construct.
The closest profession to 'journalist' is probably 'historian', but the former reports on current events, while the latter synthesizes past events.
https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1
The problem is reporters have lowered the bar and the less aware bought in. Mediocrity has been normalized. That's ironic. But it's not journalism.
Our latest batch of nazis seem to think that people objecting to things like inciting violence, encouraging hate of minorities, white supremacism and all the anti-science nonsense they use to recruit new cult members should be protected speech in safe spaces. A very different idea to free speech.
Let Elon set fire to Twitter, it is a hard rule of the internet that any forum invaded by nazis is doomed to failure.
https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1
Me: What's software architecture?
Booch: Software architecture is what a software architect creates.
That's why I had hoped you had your own definition.
I was present during the blog era. As an activist who tried to blog, I had some skin in the "are bloggers journalists?" slap fight.
I eventually settled on an expansive, explicit, actionable working definition:
Tada! You're a journalist.Bonus points for errata, retractions, updates.
Note that my criteria excludes most of the pundits, influencers, trolls, and infotainment spokesmodels.
Truly, there aren't very many journalists left. And we're the poorer for their absence.
Journalist* isn't a title.
- It's a verb. It's not what your self-proclaim. It's your actions. It's what you do.
- It's not where you're employed. It's your dedication to your responsibility as a member of The Fourth Estate.
* much like Leader.
Your framing neatly resolves the blog era slap fight. It was about access, what became known as "access journalism".
Traditional journalists didn't support mere bloggers having a seat at the table (gatekeeping). And the elite would only deign to talk to established journalists.
For my part, I've always felt the elite were accountable to the public. I was just a constituent who shared my experience and thoughts online. I didn't care what any one called (labeled) me, except when the purpose was to dismiss or exclude me.
Anyhoo... Thanks! Journalism is a verb. I love it.
It's great that the internet allows for access. It's a tool for all. It's not great that anyone who strings two words together and "prints" them (on the internet) is now considered deserving of the title: Journalist. There's more to it. Just like giving me a scalpel and a pad for scripts doesn't make me a surgeon.
What I believe happen is that as the internet disrupted tradional media, Journalism panicked. It needed revenue. It need to cut costs. So it cut corners. The Standards were abandoned. They were too costly and couldn't produce sufficient results for a biz model based on clicks, views, etc. As a CYA they shamelessly continued to call it Journalism even if it was a lie. Fake Journalism if you will.
Since they were all doing it, since they were all fearing for their jobs few stepped up and said, "No, this is not Journalism."
And here we are, gasping for the air of Truth.
https://tubitv.com/movies/682467/fit-to-print
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2721376/
The first section about the importance of investigative journalism is quite good. And ends on an unexpectedly positive note.
The rest of the movie is a true crime story. How perfidy and obstinance sacrificed journalism on the alter of corporate greed, beginning in the 50s. The rise of the internet was just the final blow.
Your definition of journalist needs some work.
Wordle.
Don't get angry with me. I don't make the news. I simply report it. Now if only self-proclaimed journalists would do the same. Orwell would not be pleased with the current state of things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pulitzer_Prizes_awarde...
Don't get distracted by the glitter of such prizes, Don't worry about the past. Worry about who is holding down The Fourth Estate fort. It ain't The Times.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603573725978275841
I'm confused on why he thinks posting public information falls under doxxing. Doxxing someone usually requires you to share private information about someone that they themselves aren't willing to share.
How can he say this is doxxing, but he's completely for people posting about Hunter Biden's laptop which actually contained private information not meant to be shared publicly.
Seems like he just changing the rules that effect him and ignoring the rest.
Essentially making Twitter the same as it was before he bought it lol.
The hastily written new policy from yesterday carves out an explicit exemption for reporters that's being ignored today. https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...
> For media, the following are not in violation of our policy:
> * the media is publicly available or is being covered by mainstream media;
> * the media and the accompanying tweet text add value to the public discourse or are shared in public interest;
> * contains eyewitness accounts or on the ground reports from developing events;
> * the subject of the media is a public figure.
The tweets didn't include any "doxxing" materials even under Elon's new definition.
So you are completely right about him making stuff up as he goes along lol.
What billionaires do with the public square matters to our future.
If there's a Twitter exodus, the public square will survive it, just as well as we survived the Myspace and Digg and Tumblr and Friendster and Livejournal exodii. Hopefully most communities will relocate to sites with healthier engagement models.
That's a pretty twitter-centric view of things
See this https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
I have no clue where the hell people get this "public square" analogy from because the numbers don't back it
Twitter seems to me more like an open free-for-all where any text can get amplified and publicly interacted with and very little is behind private accounts/groups/silos and anyone can easily contribute.
It is fascinating to watch a slow motion disaster. The man is burning billions for seemingly no logical reason. That's gonna draw my eyeballs just due to the absurdity.
Here's yet another savvy take by Eve Fairbanks:
We’re in Denial About the True Cost of a Twitter Implosion [2022-12-02]
https://www.wired.com/story/musk-denial-true-cost-twitter-im...
"But if we judge Twitter’s influence by its active users, we underestimate it massively. It has no peer as a forge of public opinion. In political analysis, publishing, public health, foreign policy, economics, history, the study of race, even in business and finance, Twitter has come to drive who gets quoted in the press. Who opines on TV. Who gets a podcast. In foreign affairs and political analysis, especially, it often determines whom we consider an authority. Almost every academic and journalist I know has come to read Twitter, even if they don’t have accounts."