Feel free to ignore news you aren’t interested in. The sad reality is that Elon Musk is relevant and his actions have real effects on people. Bury your head in the sand if you like but don’t expect me to join you.
I’m pretty sure that’s how it goes for most wealthy people. It’s all tied up in assets, not liquid cash. Investing your money is always better for growth in the long term.
He’s in the news because he’s become a laughingstock. All news isn’t good news. I certainly don’t think he wants news that continues to convince people that he’s an utter idiot and waste of space.
tying up in assets such as property, land, etc. has real value though. you can sell a huge amount of land without the land losing value because of the sale, but you can’t sell a huge amount of stock without the value collapsing while selling it off.
any exposure is good exposure. investors don’t normally run away just because you earn yourself notoriety, they usually do the opposite - because the market is entirely made of make belief and fairy dust.
He’s so wealthy he could personally go to your neighborhood and “Mansa Musa” your place into inflation. He could just drop $10,000,000 per person to get up and leave whatever square mile surrounding your residence right now.
Assuming avg population density for a city in the US that’s only $2.8billion (~280 ppl/mile in cities). Not even a scratch to his total net worth.
A single person with that much wealth and power doesn’t require any attention to retain it. He’ll keep coming out on top because it’s nearly impossible not to when you reach a large enough number.
he doesn’t actually have his wealth. it’s estimated stock value; which would cascade to nothing the minute he tries to extract it. all he can do is borrow with stock as leverage; which would net him a lot of money sure; but there is no way they would approve billions in a loan unless he is very very specific on the investment goal.
Okay we’re done here. You’re contributing nothing to the conversation and I wasted enough time arguing with fools on reddit, I’m not going to do it here.
Imagine thinking this is still (or ever was) just about twitter, or that if you simply starve the richest fascist on the planet of attention he will just go away.. 🤦♀️
It occurs to me that I’ve never heard of an absolutist that wasn’t a hypocrite in some way. They can excuse white supremacy and Nazis, but they draw the line at either being personally attacked or held accountable.
For context, this all started Thursday when the ADL xeeted that is had a “frank and productive” conversation with X’s CEO. She replied with some warm and fuzzy PR bullshit about working together to improve the platform blah blah blah. But the right wing nutjobs weren’t happy with the implication that X was in anyway cooperating with the ADL and there was immediate backlash. “Ban the ADL” became a trending hashtag, because, according to the racist majority on X, the ADL is the actual hate group and they pressure advertisers who in turn pressure platforms to “ban free speech.” Musk, always quick to undermine the sad sack holding the title “CEO” jumped on that bandwagon and been xeeting about it all weekend, threatening to ban them, generally talking trash, and now threatening to sue.
I almost feel bad for the new “CEO”. It really seems like she’s doing her best to give the impression that Twitter is still a sane company with reasonable business practices, only for Elon to completely disregard her messaging and do the exact opposite.
I would feel bad if it wasn’t obvious that Musk would do this. It is impossible for him to control himself. He can’t help to put his dumbass opinion in the mix, no matter how much it hurts him personally and professionally. It’s the reason he was forced to buy Twitter in the first place.
Drop me in her seat for 7 figures with a nice kick-out clause (no stock, please) and I’ll pretend Xitter is a wholesome, thoughtful, productive corporate citizen, too.
It’s a shitty position to be in so I almost feel bad as well, except literally everyone knew this was going to happen when she joined. But I doubt she thought, “What’s the worst that could happen? I have a bland conversation with the ADL, and Musk spends the weekend retweeting self deacribed antisemites and threatening to ban/sue the ADL?”
She is scheduled to be at the Code Conference hosted by the Verge/Vox at the end of September. I’m really interested in how she answers when asked about being undermined, especially now that the undermining has taken the form of her boss just being an outright antisemite.
they pressure advertisers who in turn pressure platforms to “ban free speech.”
This argument of theirs is so strange. Don’t advertisers too have free speech? Is the right wing arguing that advertisers shouldn’t be allowed to choose to stop advertising with Twitter? What “pressure” can ADL put on them? Does the ADL have legal authority to force advertisers to exit Twitter? No. Is the ADL holding private information about the CEOs of advertisers and extorting the advertisers to leave? Not likely.
Is the ADL communicating a position that the majority of the advertiser’s customers find the racist, fascist, and misogynistic content now omnipresent on Twitter distasteful, and therefore harmful to the advertisers’ brands and with negative impacts to future sales? Likely yes, but those statements are themselves free speech on the part of the ADL.
What the right wing seems to be arguing is that the definition of free speech should be the right to say whatever racist, fascist, and misogynistic comments they like without anyone making choices of their own to dissociate with the right wing. That’s not free speech that’s…fascism!
Perhaps ironically it is the ADLs free speech that allows them to show advertisers what is posted on elons website. Further irony can be found in the fact that a screenshot of elsons website showing bigoted posts is an example of fact and not of feelings. Moreover: crying about your lost ad revenue is feelings and blaming the ADL for it is not facts.
It’s never ok to hurt somebody’s business just because you disagree with them giving free speech to everybody. The ADL should pay Elon for the damage they did to his business
No, that’s not free speech. Free speech is supposed to be for protecting businesses, not for hurting them. If you hurt somebody’s business, you gotta pay for that. Freedom isn’t free.
I remember around 2020, a lot of freethinkers began spouting something about how Twitter is “a platform not a publisher” and therefore users are entitled to treat the website like a public meeting place and protected by first amendment rights, etc.
It was basically a Soverign Citizen argument about how Section 230 means websites don’t have the authority to moderate content at all, and it died down after Trump stopped preaching it after he launched Truth
I remember around 2020, a lot of freethinkers began spouting something about how Twitter is “a platform not a publisher” and therefore users are entitled to treat the website like a public meeting place and protected by first amendment rights, etc.
I think you’re taking that quote of mine with an unintended meaning. I didn’t mean to suggest advertisers have right to post what they want, rather they have the choice to NOT post if they don’t want to. The right-wing argument appears to suggest that advertisers should be powerless to choose or not choose to advertise. Suggesting they are wheat to be harvested. A resource owned by the company they are purchasing advertising from; its a bizarre notion.
I'm actually surprised he's not crossed that bridge. I do find it interesting to have a billionaire that doesn't even bother to pay lip service to being a civil human being but is just a massive racist tool.
But you know what if he met these people irl he'd get along fine with them I bet and there wouldn't be these unhinged outbursts. He's a complete paper tiger suffering a case of being terminally online because he thinks it's his job (it isn't).
Maybe he's taking something either prescribed or recreationally that has him perpetually on a knife edge like this.
That’s because he’s not and never was a businessman. He’s a tech guy who got super lucky and became filthy rich. Musk builds and designs shit, he doesn’t know squat about running a company. He should stick to playing with his rockets and making new roadsters. This whole CEO foray has turned out real bad.
He’s not even a tech guy. He inherited his money, and then lucked into a couple jobs with actual tech guys that he could take the credit for. His entire career has been built around buying other tech companies that were just taking off, pushing the original founders out, and then taking credit for everything everyone else did.
He’s a tech guy who got super lucky and became filthy rich.
Not even that…
He was (at best) an average coder decades ago who used family money to buy lots of startups and a few made a lot of money.
He was a gambler, not a businessman. It’s just when you start out wealthy you can keep buying lottery tickets till you win. It doesn’t even mean he was good at picking lottery numbers, he could just afford to buy more tickets than other people.
Not mine but… Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something. Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about “meritocracy” and the salutary effects of hard work.
Poor kids aren’t visiting the carnival. They’re the ones working it.
Also, we are all looking at this backwards. The very definition of survivorship bias.
We always only see the luckiest people. All the richest people have been super lucky, because if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be the richest. And also the most ruthless for the same reasons.
If you look at all the lottery winners, then by definition you will see people who gambled and won. Because someone has to win. That doesn’t mean the lottery winners have some better skillets or are smarter at picking numbers than those who didn’t win.
What’s crazy is that he had fooled a lot of people into thinking he was a tech guy with a very carefully crafted image, but he threw it all away to help the alt right
Lucky timing is: being a white guy growing up in the 70s/80s America.
Besides that, if you look at the company he started. It started selling books, but he always wanted to sell other stuff. His shareholder letters describe his vision from the very first one and it is consistent. It didn’t change over time. They company got lucky, they talk about prime being a fluke all the time. But on the other hand, the culture in the company was something that supported a fluke like that to bubble up through the idea pond.
Any who, yea. I don’t care for the person that the media portrays him as today. But for his initial years I absolutely give him a lot of credit.
I haven’t heard off Amazon being built on stolen ideas or usurping someone else’s company or being born with a silver spoon.
Yes he was a white male in America in the 70s and has all the privilege associated with that, but there were like another 50 million in that category.
It’s more about launching a company right when internet purchases took off. People tried before, but the timing wasn’t right. He had the right skill set, at the right time, and it took off.
The thing is the added complexity that the plaintiff is adding is just going to extend out the entire process. The filing indicates something like a 60% loss of ad revenue. Even if the case runs smooth as butter, there's no way Musk can get access to the money he's seeking in time to cover the massive loss plus the huge debt obligations he's sacked the company with already.
There's zero ways restitution from this case would ever give the company enough head above water quick enough to prevent drowning in debt.
He may not know much, but he knows the difference between a taped performance where the producers are trying to make him look good, and a live performance where he’ll be seen exactly as he is.
Yep. For all the people saying “but trump is great on camera”. You’ve been suckered too. When he can’t control the narrative or immediately discredit the evidence against him he is largely powerless and looks like the common crook he is.
Considering he can’t keep his mouth shut I think there’s a very real chance we see him slapped with contempt and tossed in the clink.
Oh how glorious it would be to see him in an orange jumpsuit.
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Elon Musk said Monday that X, formerly known as Twitter, has “no choice” but to file a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League amid an ongoing slump in advertising revenue.
“Based on what we’ve heard from advertisers, ADL seems to be responsible for most of our revenue loss,” Musk wrote on Monday. “Giving them maximum benefit of the doubt, I don’t see any scenario where they’re responsible for less than 10% of the value destruction, so ~$4 billion.”
How to avoid being antisemitic, step one: Don’t blame your incompetence and piss poor judgement on “the Jews.”
I’m no accountant, but I have to imagine when he’s talking about “value” it’s not exact loss of sales, but something more like “projected sales for the next 10 years” or something.
There’s no way Twitter, a company that was overvalued at $43 billion, was also making $40billion a year in advertising sales.
He seems to be saying that the market value of Twitter is $40B less than what it was before stuff happened. "Value destruction" tends to be applied to "stock" (like market cap) rather than "flow" (like revenues).
He's basically saying Twitter is worth $4B, given that he paid $44B and seems to be saying $40B of values was destroyed.
Losing $40B in less than a year is, uh, remarkable.
The kind of gymnastics that apparently develop when you’re stupid rich and think you know better than everybody because you “made” some really smart-sounding companies.
What kind of mental gymnastics do you have to do to wind up there?
Remember, he grew up a rich white boy in full apartheid South Africa, and never matured beyond that. He has no ability for self-reflection or introspection. Which means he's never wrong, so someone else must be to blame. So far, that's included religious, racial, and sexual minorities. He's only going to grow more deranged as time goes on.
Twitter stockholders collectively received $44B from Musk on October 27. So, yes, Twitter was worth $44B at that moment. And, yes, it's also true that Musk grossly overpaid for a company probably worth around $10B because he made the most costly "420" joke in history. Both statements are simultaneously true.
This is probably bad data, but the conclusion at the bottom really caught my eye.
48,000 people die from guns each year. The extremely optimistic number of 49 instances of an active shooter being stopped by a civilian annually is not a good argument for keeping or increasing the amount of guns around.
Everyone comfortable with and able to be responsible for their own protection should take that responsibility. We should not be forced to rely on police who consistently prove they dont give a shit about us.
That’s an argument but I disagree that the person themselves should be in charge of the decision of whether or not they have the qualifications to control a deadly weapon. Have a certification test and a license you need to renew every once in a while, or heck just restrict private gun ownership to military veterans and people who have been trained in the public sector, and you minimize the number of people with guns and thus gun deaths (and thus overall deaths because they don’t transfer to other methods 1:1) while not relying on police.
Or take guns away from the police too, there are countries that do that.
Or maybe we should decide that it’s not the government’s job to be a nanny-state and protect people from themselves; because someone might misuse a tool and hurt themself with it isn’t a good reason to deny everybody the use of that tool.
Cuba is the sole example of a functional Communist Government. Their entire economy is based on tourism. Their citizens have more rights than anyone from Florida for example. The nation fully supports the LGBTQ community, it has free Healthcare and has a strong relationship with the European Union with job programs.
It still needs serious work in regards to human rights as it jails those who oppose the government.
From a United States perspective they would make a better ally than an enemy so we should continue to work on increasing diplomacy with Cuba.
No they were the people or ancestors of those who would not benefit from Marxism and/or those who escaped fir various reasons as people always seem to want to escape.
If I wanted to see what the “ground truth” looked like in Cuba, I’d look at Cuba rather than making dopey assumptions based on the people that chose to leave Cuba’s system in favour of the US.
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