Elon Musk

wonder what hes up to with all this, for a guy who relies so heavily on a a fawning media becoming admin of the media message board seems like a pretty dicey proposition, lot of potential negative exposure there with im not sure what the upside is

maybe its all a pump and dump to keep whatever major account fraud hes running at tesla going

man, if Musk buys Twitter it's going to full of guys making claims they can't back up

Nazis running amok.

Seems like he wants to make it more like Telegram, ie. less interference in people posting whatever they want?

maybe its all a pump and dump to keep whatever major account fraud hes running at tesla going

I guess it's pump and dump that he's got planned to keep tunnels open during a hurricane.

Seems like he wants to make it more like Telegram, ie. less interference in people posting whatever they want?

― o. nate, Monday, April 25, 2022 10:26 AM (thirty-seven seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

i mean you couldnt come up with a better way to get bad press, is he going to reinstate trump whats going on here, this man is supposed to be selling cars

twitter would become unusable and worth nothing overnight if they really went "free speech", even if they just do some minor tinkering around the edges its gonna be a media firestorm, maybe he really thinks he can ride with his meme stock people to... somewhere? idk

my assumption was that it was a pump and dump, no one would actually let him buy it, and he’d unload all the shares he bought as soon as that became clear to him but before the public caught on

we already know the SEC barely slaps him on the wrist, it’d be just slightly more blatant than his last few grifts

yeah thats what i was thinking too but it seems like hes going through with it

not like he’ll be out any cash either way, it’s all borrowing against his tesla shares

there are also policies & laws restricting speech in countries outside the US (I think the EU just announced more today?) that a Musk-owned twitter can't just ignore, so it seems like pure vanity right now

Apparently he has some other ideas too: A crack-down on bots (supposedly this is easier to do as a private company because it will initially impact user-engagement metrics in a negative way, which would cause stock volatility), an option to pay a nominal fee for a blue-check, more transparency around the algorithms. At least you can say one thing for Musk as an owner, he is also a customer, and he seems to have some strong opinions on ways Twitter could be improved. Like those old TV ads: I liked this shaver so much I bought the company!

wld be funny if he came in and just improved the user experience i guess

and yeah its true that sort of stuff is much easier when you dont have to watch the stock price

however! the concerns of a user with 83m followers are not those of the average poster

i would like a big heart button, bigger than the current small heart

Will be cool when twitter has lots of pricing tiers. Sovereign Individual level the highest, of course.

is he going to reinstate trump

I assume this would be one of his first acts. I'm not sure it will be quite the seismic event people seem to think though, I think it's possible Trump has benefited from not being out there looking like a complete idiot every day.

Beyond thinking nobody should have as much money as Musk has, with the ability to singlehandedly purchase powerful media platforms, I have a hard time getting too worked up about him and Twitter specifically. Twitter already sucks, he'll still have to do a fair amount of moderation just to keep the most obviously noxious stuff off. I guess he'll let people post unlimited anti-vaxx shit, but I feel like that ship has sailed anyway.

I'm kind of secretly hoping he ruins twitter just so I spend less time there

also it would be funny

I guess when you're as rich as Musk there's not much left that you can spend money on that will put any appreciable dent in your net worth. The only things one can buy with a price tag that runs into the tens of billions is a successful company or maybe a top-tier prestige sports team. He already runs a rocket-ship company, so that rules out another popular vanity billionaire project.

lets not forget the ape murdering brain implant company

Someone tell him about Chelsea

remember when our parasitic capitalist overlords used to at least feel compelled to assuage their unadmitted guilt by endowing scholarships, research laboratories, local libraries, orchestras and opera companies, etc.? not that i really want to line up for tickets at the Elon Musk Theater, mind you. but still.

elon musk is not a good role model

I guess it was inevitable the world would be run by Heinlein characters

twitter is so bad already, and the people i know who use it the most are often the ones who complain loudest & most frequently about how terrible it is, its hard to for me to imagine how Elon could ruin it in such a way that a substantial number of people actually stop using it, short of intentionally removing the addictive elements of the design

hmm. Well, if blues checks are for sale, conservative billionaires will buy them for every idiot troll, rendering them meaningless. Not too bad.

I guess there's a chance Trump wouldn't come back even if invited. It would pretty much mean acknowledging defeat for his Truth Social app, although OTOH it could be a face-saving off-ramp for him to shut it down.

not that i really want to line up for tickets at the Elon Musk Theater, mind you. but still.

im persuaded

stoked for the madness tbh

When's he gonna buy ilxor.com?

As soon as he meets our asking price of $60,000

you sell us short karl

think of all the CONTENT he'd have control over! 14,786,235 messages and counting! including thousands of posts by celebrities like ned and nabisco

getting ready to post hourly photos of him photoshopped eating poop

Another possible motivation is that this gives Musk a good excuse to diversify $20B or so out of wildly expensive TSLA stock.

Thanks Dave.

This exchange continues to haunt me pic.twitter.com/W06oSqx0MR

— Dave Smith (@redletterdave) April 25, 2022

he should have married it instead

well.

the "free speech absolutist" thing is so incredibly stupid. I remember an era where there really was "free speech" online and it fucking sucked. you couldn't look at anything in a public setting because people would spam goatse everywhere. decent message boards would get brigaded and become unusable. like, look at the YouTube live comment boxes whenever there's a political event going on (at least, back when there actually was live chat) - just an endless parade of racial slurs and swastikas. Elon himself has been known to retaliate against anyone who speaks up against him so it's blindingly obvious that his "free speech" charge is just replacing one type of moderation with another. idk how this is gonna work out for him but I can't imagine it will be good!!

It would kinda dope if Musk bought Twitter and just shut it off…. Lol

— ICE T (@FINALLEVEL) April 25, 2022

didn't he promise an edit button for twitter? can't wait for an endless parade of people getting 100K retweets on "jack in the box hit different at 1AM" and editing it to say something like "hitler was cool and the age of consent should be 9"

frogbs otm

and joestork

and ice-t tbh

Maybe Pierre Omidyar could buy Truth Social

Making Twitter not suck is a simple matter of curating one's feed. I have the former president's name muted, I have Kanye West's name muted, and I don't follow any political accounts unless they have something else to offer, so basically my Twitter feed is a stream of people talking about jazz and metal and art (and pro wrestling, but whaddya gonna do).