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Hopefully, yes.
If there is a god/goddess it certainly will.
I honestly think that he doesn’t have to face consequences like normal people because he has enough money to make problems go away. He can be an awful person in interviews, and mean his words too, then even bankrupt his company, and you know what? He will continue being excessively rich.
His money could be used to fix so many issues en masse. It’s disgusting that he chooses not to do so every day.
His money could be used to fix so many issues en masse. It’s disgusting that he chooses not to do so every day.
One of my biggest gripes is that anyone can have this much money to begin with. We should never have to rely on the ultra-wealthy to fix our problems by making it their pet project, and no one should be able to squirrel away that much money to begin with. All the money that could fix those issues en masse instead pads some sociopath’s portfolio.
Personally, I’m okay with a small set of folks being rich as long as they pay taxes. I’m this case, a hell of a lot of taxes. You know, the taxes they should be paying, not what they manage to get away with now.
Let the legal system enforce that they give back to society in a meaningful way. Close the stupid loopholes. I want to see a meaningful improvement in society from their contributions. Everyone else is worse off unless they contribute.
Right with you! Guess I have nothing to add. 🤷🏻♂️
He has wealth, he has to dip into selling stock to have “money.”
I don’t disagree otherwise, but when your wealth is in the companies you own, you pretty much have to sell the whole shebang in one go (what Musk reportedly tried to do with Apple, offering to sell them Tesla as a whole) or selling it piecemeal, by selling off portions of stock (which he does fairly regularly for cash infusions).
His wealth will surely insulate him for quite a long time. However, it is not a permanent insulator, and he has made a series of, let’s say, questionable decisions. It’s very likely that it will either take decades for it to really hurt him, or that it just may make him far less wealthy, but still wealthy enough to be annoying.
We’re also at a precipice, because the kinds of things that he is saying were the kinds of things that used to get you shitcanned from the business community as a whole. Nobody would do business with a virulent anti-semite. It’s one of the reasons Musk bought Twitter, really, because they are busy normalizing positions like anti-semitism.
The normalizing of his hate will actually get him farther, longer, than his wealth.
If the guy has his money “tired up in assets,” and this is your way of saying that he shouldn’t pay taxes, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Literally don’t know why you’d take that away from my comment. We need a wealth tax.
His money could be used to fix so many issues en masse. It’s disgusting that he chooses not to do so every day.
Pretty sure he posted on twitter a couple years ago about how if someone credible provided a plan to solve world hunger for 6 billion dollars, he would sell Tesla stock and just do it, to which the UN responded with a detailed plan. However, Musk pretty much ignored them, no acknowledgment (as far as I know) and no money donated.
Using the money to fix issues in the world and making it a better place is not a part of his politics.
Life without is better. I left over a year ago. No drama, no loss, no issues. Twitter is not family
I never really understood the interest even from day 1 back in 2009 out wherever. I only used it to shame companies when their support teams wouldn’t help and that only lasted a few years.
yeah same. it always seemed really self-absorbed. I never even touched Twitter until 2020, when I was surprised to hear about all this great political discourse going on. I was… disappointed. No good dialog can happen in 140 characters. rarely bothered to post, read, or log on. it’s just this obnoxious self-promoting slam-dunking virtue-signaling dance.
People will cry “but but but the news and emergency information. We absolutely need this”
No, tweets aren’t news and any municipality that used Twitter as an exclusive means of spreading emergency information was run by morons.
“I don’t have any theories that make sense,” Paskalis says. “There is a revenue model in his head that eludes me.”
You don’t need a complex business model for this to make sense. The man has had “fuck you money” his entire life. Things are finally not going his way and he only has one way to respond… by saying “fuck you” to the people he doesn’t like.
Pretty much. I understand the impulse to think he has to have some secret plan, some rational explanation for his behavior. I used to think the same thing, that there was some way he would actually make money from destroying the company, but no. No, he’s just an impetuous, impulsive idiot who tricked himself into having to buy the company at meme stock prices, and is going to burn the whole thing to the ground purely because he is, in fact, a dumbass.
That impulse is similar to the impulse I see in conservatives when they claim Trump has to have a plan. “he’s eluded prison time his whole life!” “He managed to become president!” Etc. Like. They insist there’s a method to the madness. That method is that he shouts down anyone who tells him he’s wrong and sells everyone else bravado. That’s it.
It turns out that the most unrealistic part of “The Emperor has no clothes” was the crowd realizing after the child points it out that they’ve all been fooled.
The crowd will chastise the child and throw the child out of society for asking such a stupid question, or for making the emperor look foolish.
No shade, and I mean it. But I wonder if you could explain what it was that convinced you that he was smart originally?
Yeah. Most people, especially in the establishment press, don’t know or pretend to not know that this is the first time he’s actually shaping how a company is run rather than pay someone else and then take credit for their work like he’s always done.
Everything went well when he pretended to be Tony Stark inventing and designing every part of his companies while others did it all much better than he ever could.
Now that he’s publicly making actually meaningful (as in they have a big impact, not as in them making sense) decisions, he’s showing the world that he’s just an extremely impulsive malignant narcissist 52 year old manchild who desperately craves to be seen as cool and edgy by young people.
I liked Twitter. I know it’s a cesspit, but as a software engineer it was always the top company I wanted to work at. It didn’t work out (for several funny reasons), but for that selfish reason I’ll never forgive Musk.
IMO, Musk needs help. If he were a normal person, someone would have pushed him to leave work and find help. As the owner of three companies, responsible for tens of thousands of employees, no chance is he getting that help. He’s constantly baited and prodded by his fan boys, people like Rogan and Chappelle who can deal with that kind of fame, and the press that get content from his antics.
As for Twitter, I don’t see it dying, until it fails to have a use for Musk. My initial belief was that his “everything app” would use Twitter’s account system to get all of its users, and then he’d sell Twitter and continue with the users - but that app isn’t ever happening. It’s just something he’s desperate to ditch, but his vanity and poor mental health won’t let him do it. For that reason, it’ll just be a zombie app.
If he were a normal person, he’d be drug addicted and homeless.
If he were a normal person, he would have learned the value of real work (out of necessity) and probably would be a much more grounded person.
I’ll assume that by normal, we’re referring to him not being wealthy. In that regard, I’d disagree. I think he’s a real narcissist, and even if he didn’t have all his wealth he’d still have similar issues, just on a much smaller scale. He wouldn’t have the large audience he currently enjoys, nor all the attention he gets without his money.
In other words, without his money we would just view him as another kook espousing whatever idea he happens to find interesting that day.
I’m with you on this one. The money only feeds his narcissism, but that condition has always been with him.
I dont think an “everything app” will ever work.
You can make one thing that does one thing very well and better than the competition, and you will get users. Or you can do one thing that will try to do 10 things half assed, and it will fail to impress users. This happens because you have to divert your resources (time, money, people) for development, maintenance, new ideas, design etc. across all your “everythings”. The more everythings you have, the less resources each one gets, however the costs for maintenance, bugfixes, updates etc. stay the same.
This happened to Yahoo in the early 2000s, where it tried to be Search, News portal, Email, Web directory, Weather, games and whathaveyou, however it failed because none of it’s parts was better than the competition.
The better approach for an app would be to do it’s own thing it is supposed to do, but support other apps that can enhance your product by allowing it to interact with outside data, and also give his data back out to other apps: use mailto:links/email instead of inventing your own messaging protocoll, support exporting to standard calendar files instead of implementing your own calendar that is oblivious to the schedule on the users phone. Support exporting datasets into common formats the user knows from his everyday tasks (excel, csv) so he can run his own data analysis on it, instead of baking some half-assed “analytics” module that only has 10% of the features the user needs.
Of course it works. See WeChat in China.
But I doubt it’ll be X that will make it work in the rest of the world.
WeChat is an anomaly and not proof of anything. It only works in China because the Chinese government controls who can and can’t operate, and thus can pick winners and losers.
If suddenly everyone with a better take on a service that a theoretical X “everything app” offered couldn’t operate without applying for a license and possibly never getting it or having to find a domestic partner to operate in every country they want to do business in, then yeah this X app would take off, because it would be essentially the only option.
Since that will never happen, then an everything app will never exist outside of countries that exercise end-to-end control. This is also why American tech companies outside of entrenched operating system vendors and hardware companies (think Apple & Microsoft) have a hard time making inroads there. Because if you get too popular and it’s something they can copy, then suddenly the Chinese copy gets all the market advantage and boatloads of funding, and you get shut out.
That is a good example, but as the other commenter pointed out I dont think you can compare weChat with Twitter. Twitter is a startup trying to make money from it’s service. WeChat is a tool for the chinese goverment to track each persons chats, money transactions and purchases, and as such will pretty much receive all the funding it needs. Being profitable is not the main objective of WeChat.
The Chinese government can track any app in their country. Their laws just give them acces to the data if they want it (the same as the usa basically). They don’t give a shit about WeChat.
Sure, but withg wechat you can link each user to the real person, bank account, phone number and find his friend circle on we chat. This might not work so well on other apps where any user can sign up via vpn and a random email address…
They give a shit about banning competitors
I think it can definitely “work”, in that there will be a small number of people that use it. It won’t dominate any market, but it will exist, and it might even make some money. It’s ultimately a power play, by having an app in every market (video, social, maps, etc) he becomes more entrenched in tech.
It’s not an uncommon model, especially in smaller businesses that do a lot of things with a tiny bit of profit everywhere. With that being said, it requires competent leadership and an aligned team - and with Musk’s visible problems that won’t happen.
I think the idea (I don’t say plan, because I think it’s more of a seat-of-the-pants situation) was to first destroy Twitter as a platform for any kind of left wing activism.
Next, make it profitable as a subscription based right wing social media app.
The shit last week was just a rich, fragile narcissist lashing out at his perceived enemies.
The sooner the better.
I long for the headline “self driving Tesla runs over musk”.
Self driving teslas only run over kids and POC
Point of contacts?
People of Colour
I do like the idea of an address book based hitcar though.
Lots of folks are killed by their own baby. The fellow behind the Segway died while “touring his estate” on his. Bump over a root and into the drink and drowned.
We’re scheduled to find out.
The fact it hasn’t imploded a long time ago is proof that digital platforms need to be regulated to enforce interoperability.
Since this shitshow started, I have not heard from anyone that wanted to be on Twitter. In anything resembling a free market, these customers (both advertisers and users) could freely go to a competitor.
But due to the way platforms work, no one can compete, once a dominant platform emerges. A platform has a monopoly on all the things people built on top of the platform (content, software etc.). This monopoly kills the free market. Enforced interoperability would reduce this platform effect and help out competitors.
The EU is starting to tackle that, with the Digital Markets Act, but very few companies are targeted so far, even though the whole industry is plagued by quasi-monopolistic platforms that are universally agreed upon to be trash.
That’s a seriously interesting idea. For context, I’m a middle-aged, Southern, American white guy. “FREE speech! CAPITALISM!”
“That how dad did it, that’s how I do it, and it’s worked out pretty well so far.” ~Tony Stark.
High time to start looking at ideas like yours. If Europe and California have to impose these things? So fucking be it.
Might make me uncomfortable, might not understand it completely, too bad for me. I will vote for the world I want my children to live in. They’re 8 and 10, I’m 52. Done my time, coasting out. Y’all’s turn.
And if you want to hold forth on the notion of “enforced interoperability”, I’m listening.
That’s called regulation, and is supposed to happen.
We have a problem of regulatory capture, plus these platforms acting like both publisher and platform with no courts taking them to task for it (applying the regulation).
Sure, yeah. The way I imagine this would work out best for humanity, is if companies are forced to open up platforms they provide, when they have e.g. more than 40% market saturation with that.
Most small platforms will want to strive for interoperability with the dominant platforms anyways, so this threshold is just to keep the burden of regulation low.
In practice, this might mean that Twitter would be forced to allow federation with Mastodon.
Or that Microsoft is forced to open-source the code for the Windows API.
Or that Reddit is blocked from closing up their third-party API.Ultimately, I don’t think, it even needs to be as concrete. I feel like even a law stating that if you’re providing a platform, you need to take special care to keep competition alive (along with some detailing what this entails), and then leaving it up to a judge to decide, would work.
The GDPR is implemented like that and while most larger companies are IMHO in violation of the GDPR, I also feel like most larger companies actually did go from atrocious privacy handling to merely bad privacy handling, which is an incredible success.
That’s effectively all I’m hoping for, too. That dominant platforms can’t just stagnate for multiple decades anymore. That they do have to put in at least a small bit more effort to stay in that dominant position.
Morally or financially?
Both, right?
Go F Yourself meltdown is probably the final nail in the coffin. It does seem like space nazi knows it’s doomed. Anyone know what happens when bankruptcy happens? Does creditors take over the company? Does he get sued for negligence? Does it get sold to a highest bidder for pennies on the dollar? I’m hoping someone can enlighten us.
The first kind of bankruptcy, Elon & his Saudi bros keep the company, and the banks lose like 50-90% of their loans.
The second kind of bankruptcy, the banks get all the servers and office chairs and sell them to either a new data-mining company or a recycler. This isn’t very likely, because most of the value of Xitter is all the people who keep visiting, regardless of whether Elon knows how to monetize them.
Go F Yourself meltdown is probably the final nail in the coffin.
I’ll believe it once they’re actually bankrupt. So many things have been predicted as “killing” the company in the last year yet somehow they’re still going and millions and millions of morons/addicts are still using it.
It doesn’t matter how many people use the service, what matters is how many advertisers are left vs how much debt twitter has to service.
Those two numbers seem to be heavily on the side of the debt now.
Yeah. About 47% of all internet traffic is bots and that number seems to be growing year over year. Twitter does still need people to serve advertisements too. So the number of people who continue to use the service does matter. But because it’s directly correlated to the amount of advertisers who will continue to support the platform by paying Twitter to run the ads. But I do think you’re correct. The debt is what will cause problems if advertisers keep bailing. Twitter hasn’t been paying any of its bills.
This was a hit job and news outlets are trying to pretend it’s an accident.
Does it even matter? Twitter is a cesspool! It only has 1500 employees. In the grand scheme of things there will be negligible economic backlash from this company going under.
Nobody really cares if Elon loses all that money and the 1500 employees will be able to find employment elsewhere.
It’s not the economic side of twitter that matters, but the informational aspects of the network which are now lost, that is the sad thing. It was used by many journalists and other important peer groups as a live news source for which there is currently no equivalent replacement.
I completely agree. Thanks to Elon it would be better to take this horse out to pasture at this point.
Pretty sure it’s an inevitability at this point and Musk knows it, which is precisely why he’s fueling the flames of the whole ad situation. Since the whole controversy are both about the Jews (as in antisemitism) and advertisers, they can be blamed for the death of the platform instead of business decisions by Musk.
There’s also the possibility that some right-wing billionaires who really love to spread their propaganda using twitter are going to buy the company or bail it out or whatever, but that remains to be seen
Yes
Was it ever profitable? I always thought twitter was always in the red and the only time it made money was when it sued Elon to buy it due to his arrogance and coz it minupilated the stock prices on twitter.
Twitter made some profit in 2018 and 2019: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
They claim to be on track to make another profit year in 2024. Remains to be seen. In a way, now that Elon owns it alone, it’s not as vulnerable to quarterly economics that public companies are.
They claim to be on track to make another profit year in 2024.
I’d give better odds to me becoming the king of Thailand in 2024.
