Who could of forseen brands not wanting to advertise over hate speech that would turn off half their customer base? I’d love screenshots of my companies products floating around next to seasticas and racism.

Also, I don’t think a narcissist would intentionally and publicly humiliate themselves the way Musk has done (Not a psychologist).

He’s being bankrolled to keep it up and running for the next election. It will be interesting to see if the money runs out.

I think a lot of “hardware” people underestimate software. Historically, hardware was way more complex but the hardware problems have kind of been solved. There’s only so many ways to design a phone or laptop. Software, meanwhile, has only become more complex and challenging.

No, you don’t throw away $44 billion just for shit and giggles

Why not? Elon Musk is famously on ketamine, ambien, and a whole slew of mind-altering substances.

Given how the contract was written, and given how much Elon Musk fought against the contract, it was obvious that he made a short-term decision (likely while high on some substance), and then quickly regretted buying Twitter. Within a week or two, he started a court case to NOT BUY TWITTER, despite signing an ironclad contract.

In my mind, its really fucking obvious what happened. Elon Musk partied a little bit too hard with some mixture of ketamine+ambien+alcohol, it mixed weirdly in his brain and he made a bad decision. A few days later, when he sobered up a bit, he realized how shitty of a decision he made but it was too late to roll things back.

Everything else Elon Musk has done is just… shitty reputation management. He’s trying to convince the world he’s still got it, despite making a bad (possibly drug-induced) decision

“He cannot be that self deluded.”

Narrator: He was.

I wonder if he ever had it.

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I don’t see the conspiracy.

My assumption is the investors immediately got what they wanted. They are not stupid.

Money men don’t hand over money to these front men based on promises. This isn’t a Hollywood movie. There was an immediate pay off.

They got SpaceX stock.

the only not-on-purpose piece was him having to buy it. idiot was forced to buy twitter, and then turned it into a “lets burn down a bastion of liberal speech” amongst his friends. he knows he wont suffer in any conceivable way, the saudis who fronted a huge chunk get what they want.

this was all setup shortly after he was forced to buy it. every step he has made since is in the playbook of “ruining your business”, including mistakes he has personally made before.

You’re saying the guy that has done nothing but look like a total fool for years could actually be a total fool? By the gods, I think you’re onto something!

Is it? He’s either a moron or he’s doing it on purpose. There is simply no other explanation.

At this point it’s just too many dumb decisions, if he had done absolutely nothing after taking over he’d be better off than he is now.

Not sure I agree. I think it would be totally in character for him to want to destroy Twitter just because they forced him to buy it. He’s a petty troll and can afford to lose that money just to show them.

He might call him self pro free speech, but he actually hates it (as long as it’s not his own free speech). Getting rid of Twitter is a massive blow to free speech. One less platform where he and his companies can get outed and criticized on.

Never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to stupidity.

Twitter was not the golden bastion to humanity you think it was.

You’ve got it back to front imo. Twitter was a useful tool for disseminating info, whether for protest movements, political movements, whatevs. Pre-Musk, there was a degree of control on twitter re disinfo, harassment, hatred etc. Now, it’s no longer a useful tool for leftwing people to gather and share their thoughts; it’s no longer a useful tool to disseminate information; it’s no longer a tool for rallying protestors.

Look at who invested (Saudi kingdom); look at when Musk took it over (mid-terms); it seems pretty obvious to me that the takeover was a very expensive purchase to make the actions of oligarchs & despots that much easier.

If he was destroying it for the good of humanity he would have to somehow destroy the concept of it rather than a single platform.

Probably best spending 40 billion on education in the harm social media can do lol.

I really do think he’s just delusional. I won’t call him an idiot because there is clearly intelligence and talent in his head, but he’s gone off the rails in some capacity whether it’s mental health issues or power crazed or who knows.

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What about Elon Musk makes you think he’d do anything for the good of humanity?

Hmm could be are all his kids invetro?

He has like 18000 children.

Plenty of awesome people are dick-free, and being dick-ful in no way suggests competence or any other positive trait.

Edit: ITT: omg tech bros are so toxic Also ITT: dick measuring

Guillotine noises intensify

Yeah. X makes various things named “Rockafeller” seem downright “not a dumpster fire” in contrast.

They may be using it in more productive ways than he ever would.

They use it to reinvest and hoard. Because that’s what the investor class does, which is why they’re useless.

broken window fallacy

You make a great point. Let’s spend hours and hours discussing it to death here. ;)

Money ain’t got no owners. Only spenders.

It doesn’t work that way. Almost all of the money in the world is debt owed to someone else. Very few things are bought with cash. It is really credit on credit on credit on credit. And all of that depends on trust. My company gets product from your company today with the promise to pay in a month, your company does the same…

When events like the Twitter buyout and burn happen it weakens trust. Which weakens credit. Which means the virtual money is gone.

It was losing money, but not much. They could have made some minor changes to make it profitable. However ~8000 people were making good salaries working for them, and tens of thousands of people and businesses benefited from the platform. Now it’s much smaller, less useful, and still not profitable.

It was barely profitable but had some one time write offs that pushed it down. It should have returned to barely profitable. But a barely profitable company can become ok profitable with small changes.

Twitter’s success wasn’t monetary. The success came in allowing ordinary people their soapbox at a global town square.

Look at what happened to the price of insulin with a single tweet made back when all the blue checks were in complete free-for-all. A single tweet, made by a random person, thoroughly changed the shape of that one industry. Twitter gave “power” to the people, and those like Musk weren’t comfortable with that.

i was no fan of twitter, but it was on a path to achieve some financial stability. It had plenty of value as a mechanism to distribute emergency (or other) information quickly. was and had being the operative words here.

…I guess it was indeed a disaster because I can’t remember even hearing that name before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bebo

originally operated from 2005 until its bankruptcy in 2013

It was announced in January 2021 that it would be returning as a new social media site the month after. By May 2022, it had once again been shut down, without having ever left beta testing.

Facebook tried with Threads but overcoming ecosystem inertia is hard.

For a product the logo and brand recognition are not minor. Twitter was so well known and ubiquitous that the word “tweet” was included in dictionaries around the world. He threw that away and replaced it with a generic X, and no one can figure out how to call posts on that platform now.

But other than that, he has a very particular stance on moderation and free speech. He thinks hateful comments are just fine, as long as they aren’t strictly against the law. But he also doesn’t apply the same standards to himself, removing stuff he doesn’t like even though it would be ok according to his own rules. He also gutted the Twitter/X staff, particularly the tech departements, leading to numerous outages and technical problems. All this has made it an even worse platform for civil public discourse, and it wasn’t all that great before he took over imo.

I myself haven’t noticed any changes

So you haven’t noticed the 80% reduction in staff leading to incredible amounts of Twitter Downtime, the rise in hate-speech due to the firing of the moderators, the loss of mainstream advertisements, and the replacement with ridiculous low-quality advertising because the mainstream advertisers have grown concerned about the hate-speech?

And you haven’t noticed the increase in downtime as the website continuously crashes? The loss of the blocking feature? The inability to block Elon Musk specifically? (and how he keeps appearing on everyone’s feed even when you try to get rid of it?). The loss of API access?

Comment quality and overall quality of discussion has declined significantly on Twitter as well, as Twitter has fallen from top10 on the App/Play store to #55 or later, because it turns out that Americans are too stupid to search for “X” rather than “Twitter”. There has been a precipitous decline in the already crappy quality discussion.

Finally, Threads and Mastodon have sucked out many high-quality posters and sub-communities.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and this weekend a new bug has cause all media from all tweets older than 2014 to disappear.

The “blue check” system which was previously used to denote verified users were who they claimed to be suddenly became a complete cash grab for $8 a month, even more for companies to have verified checks or sets of them? Then when not everyone was buying in those users were pushed to the top of replies to users posts. This of course caused tons of people to just get blocked outright because of their checks.

Additionally i believe he has threatened to remove some companies handles because they stopped using them most notably NPR.

Now he has floated the idea of removing the blocking feature because reasons? Who knows what he thinks. So the functionality has not changed a ton, for now, the quality of what you get has gone down.

Oh also he made a specific exception and unbanned some user who posted literal child porn

If you don’t notice the changes, you were part of the people he bumped up at all costs that turned it into a terrible service

there’s only been about 7,000 articles every week about it

He had to inject his own persona into the platform by making inflammatory, discriminatory tweets and being a general troll on his platform, and then making unpopular decisions like forcing people to pay for a blue checkmark, increasing API costs, not banning Nazi posters, and of course, the nonsensical rebranding. It drove away people and advertisers who didn’t want to be on the same platform as literal Nazis and bigoted TERF people, and companies who couldn’t afford the ridiculous API pricing.

Honestly if he had simply not used his own platform as his own bullhorn, he could have enacted some of the more unpopular changes to become profitable.

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I’m sorry but if you didn’t get mad at every reply on any decently large post being filled with NPC- ass boomer tier memes and replies and attempts at self promo, you might be a boomer NPC.

Wtf?

Control is the game for people with money and power whether it is graceful or not. Some of what Elon has done seems like he wants to control the narrative around his jet. Some of what Elon is doing seems like he just wants to keep testing the waters to see how many people still use twitter after crippling the system. Like some sort of “I slap them in the face and they ask to be hit harder- that’s how much power I have over them. People are obsessed with me”.

I don’t think his goal was to kill twitter. His goal was to remain on everyone’s lips without his jet being mentioned. And if that’s at the cost of organizational tools being destroyed, so be it- in fact, destroying twitter has had more people taking about him than ever.

Not to mention that the 1% already owned it.

Though if anyone is thinking of spending close to fifty billion to destoy a social network then call me - I’ll do it for a billion, or two.

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i implied no intent, you just filled in the obvious gaps and are upset about it.

Musk, surely, did buy Twitter for the power and attention he thought it would give him.

DIsagree. He was trying to do one of his many pump-and-dumps and he fucked around and got found out.

@dril

Very much agree. I read that the Netherlands already did this!

TwiX is unfortunately already taken.

Exitter is also a valid prononciation

daaaaaaamn. That’s brilliant.

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Uh, no. Autopilot was not enabled during that crash.

It disabled itself 0.25s before impact

Nailed it.