Sure, make fun of it, but sails are not the same as kites.
With modern tech they might be able to make kites that are truly enormous, way bigger than the sails that are limited by the size of the mast. In addition, the kites can be raised into different winds than the ones at the surface.
My theory is that he’s not. Imo what happened was:
Buy a shitton of twitter shares secretly
announce that you are buying all available twitter shares for a total $44B, significantly pricier than what you bought
share price shoots up to whatever you’re offering as a price, because in theory by buying a twitter share you are now guaranteed that price at some point in the future.
go “lol actually I’m not doing that” and sell all your shares for profit (keep in mind this would be blatant market manipulation but he already had Elon money to defend himself in court that “well you see there was many bots”)
at this point Elon and Twitter go their separate ways, Elon having defrauded many investors.
but Elon is a jackass and didn’t read the contract he signed properly and actually has to go through with it
spend $44B of mostly loaned money for a website worth significantly less
your best bet is now to run twitter into the ground, sell it to whoever wants at a massive loss, and write off the purchase as “failed investment”, which is that much taxes your company has to pay next fiscal year. Since his company would have have at least that much tax to pay, this effectively means the purchase was free and you can reimburse loaners with the money you saved doing that.
Ultimately, you still lose money, but in the meantime you: removed the jet-tracking account, destroyed twitter (priceless), got to have an extreme amount of publicity now and forever (articles will still say “Elon’s previous Endeavour” or whatever once he sells it).
Obviously the part where you make a large amount of money would have been more ideal but this is damage control for his stock fraud scheme that failed.
How Elon didn’t get jailed for market manipulation when he first did it with crypto is beyond me.
At least this time it didn’t work out… Probably because when you proclaim intent publicly like that you actually have to follow through, it’s a verbal contract effectively. And I suspect that they told him he’s either buying it or they’re nailing him for manipulation.
He had to buy it because to be able to make these claims the company has to be ok with it, and you sign a contract. These contracts often have provisions that say that if the company is lying about its users, it’s revenue etc then the deal doesn’t go through. Musk tried to say that twitter lied about how many bots there were, and not go through with it, but the contract he signed said basically “I have decides to buy it regardless, so I waive my right to due diligence” and bob’s your uncle.
There wasn’t a verbal contract, very much a written one (but you’re right that even if not he’d probably have been nailed for fraud anyway)
Lemmy, KBin and Mastodon fullfil all the needs for online news outside of dedicated news sites for me by now, Twitter is something I haven't used directly for months now.
I have been using Twitter in the past especially for breaking news, and I have not found a good replacement yet. Perhaps I have not been following the right sources yet
This is beautiful to see - I understand Reddit is a company that needs to make a profit, but the way they have treated their users and unpaid staff is shocking (but not unexpected). The fact it also heavily impacts users with additional accessibility requirements is terrible.
Will be fun in a way to watch Reddit try to claw back what has happened.
Give it 12 months it will likely be a wreck along with the current CEO who will probably be given the boot.
I’m old enough to have seen many services go through this: AOL, MSN, MySpace, Fark, Slashdot, Digg, Something Awful, etc. Reddit (and maybe Twitter) are just next in line to realise they are not too big to fail. Hopefully followed by Meta.
It’s quite a way back now, so my memory is a bit fuzzy! I think there were redesigns and the site was sold to a company who mismanaged a few elements. I seem to remember a lot of noise on the site at the time, people complaining etc and then a large number moved away. I’m sure someone can fill in the details in a more reliable way haha.
I remember Digg used to be great too - between that and Stumble Upon you could find so much awesome stuff!
I suspect Reddit will die a much slower death, as it is just so big and widely used and the exodus of users doesn’t feel as huge. It will be interesting to see how everything unfolds.
If I recall correctly, Digg made some weirdo policy about officially recognized channels had priority over community posts?
Claiming they were trying to improve the quality and trustworthiness of their content.
They also made a redesign, so frontpage became 90% pictures, more suitable for people with zero attention span.
As I recall it, Digg “died” super fast after that. Of course technically Digg still exist, but it’s nothing compared to when at its height, it became an internet buzzword much like “to Google it” still is to day.
Yes! Digg was pretty dramatic in how it fell from grace I think, whereas some other platforms have limped along slowly for quite a while after their prime, a bit like me.
Yes the problem was that they changed the concept entirely, and the change was to a concept that simply didn’t work. The idea of “approved” content, was so lame everybody left.
Personally I had already left for reddit at that time, but the original idea with Digg was pretty cute though, they had a little icon of a spade, and you could digg up or down. Same as up/down vote on reddit.
Somehow reddit was just better, with it’s way more text based design, maybe because it looked a bit like a colorcoding editor for programmers. for whatever reason reddit quickly had way better content than Digg, despite Digg was more famous and had a clear head start.
Yes the problem was that they changed the concept entirely, and the change was to a concept that simply didn’t work. The idea of “approved” content, was so lame everybody left.
Personally I had already left for reddit at that time, but the original idea with Digg was pretty cute though, they had a little icon of a spade, and you could digg up or down. Same as up/down vote on reddit.
Somehow reddit was just better, with it’s way more text based design, maybe because it looked a bit like a colorcoding editor for programmers. for whatever reason reddit quickly had way better content than Digg, despite Digg was more famous and had a clear head start.
Yes the problem was that they changed the concept entirely, and the change was to a concept that simply didn’t work. The idea of “approved” content, was so lame everybody left.
Personally I had already left for reddit at that time, but the original idea with Digg was pretty cute though, they had a little icon of a spade, and you could digg up or down. Same as up/down vote on reddit.
Somehow reddit was just better, with it’s way more text based design, maybe because it looked a bit like a colorcoding editor for programmers. for whatever reason reddit quickly had way better content than Digg, despite Digg was more famous and had a clear head start.
I’m old enough to remember when this sort of thing was a regular thing, especially with bulletin boards popping up and burning down with regularity. Apart from crowd sourced troubleshooting and the like, reddit hasn’t really done much for me.
the thing is just like how people thought r/antiwork would be gone, turns out after some time it regained it users and activities, so I guess lets see if reddit users would be back, especially the amount of people browse from pc is not a small number either, I believe big subreddit will still alive or retained its user just like usual
I remember surfing chans back in the day. I’ve missed it, but life gets busy. I hated reddit for a long told, but it had so much good information on there and such good third party apps that I caved and it became my favorite thing to do while shitting. I just found out about Lemmy and it feels like I slipped on an old broken-in glove. Thanks for the welcome. After the toxicity of reddit, this is nice.
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