People pretending to be laid-off Twitter employees carrying boxes outside of HQ
theverge.com
theverge.com
This is the part that scares me. It feels like a lot of news media outlets will publish just about anything. It feels like they have no interest at all in whether or not what they're saying is true, or even likely to be true. That's the part that worries me.
While retracting and/or correcting the articles is a step towards journalistic integrity, it should be very troubling these articles were published in the first place.
After all, how many people bother to go back and review past articles just on the off chance some piece of information was corrected? None...
We need a system where it's dangerous to not thoroughly vet your story before throwing it over the fence.
Currently, they just say "oops" and move on like it never happened... but the damages caused to the public and it's discourse are permanent. The past decade has shown us that much at a minimum.
Years from now folks will still howl about Musk marching loyal twitter employees out the front door with boxes full of their belongings... despite it being completely untrue. Heck, there are still folks that feverishly assert the "OK" sign is racist...
The "OK" sign as a symbol of "white power" is a great example - nobody's reputation was tarnished directly by the reporting... but the entire story was made up and never true. Yet, there's folks today that insist it truly is a symbol of "white power".
Libel is also notoriously difficult to establish grounds for, and be successful with a lawsuit. Intent is difficult to prove - yet I would assert a journalist that does not thoroughly vet their story before publishing has a malicious intent, even if it was indirect.
This is strange - the OK symbol was definitely co-opted by white nationalists; it started as a "media troll", then people started to do it non-ironically. It served it's purpose and to say it was "never true" is at the very least controversial. I had personally seen it spread on /pol/ months before it got any mainstream coverage.
While I believe the story may have been overblown, I think it stands it would be very difficult to sue a journalist that this was libel or even untrue. At the very least the memes had to have started from somewhere and that posing with the ok symbol wasn't a particularly popular thing to do until after the memes were created.
Today, here you are asserting it actually has an alternate, nefarious meaning. It doesn't, and never did.
It became a meme because of how ridiculous of an idea it was.
I think you're proving my point. Retractions and corrections do not work. Published stories have enormous weight, yet modern journalists don't seem to be aware of, or do not care about, the potential harm they can do. It's just a race to publish first - truth be damned.
The disagreement then you and I have is that just because it was an "epic troll" doesn't make it any less serious. To me the fact that it's supposed to be a "joke on the media" is the point - it provides plausible deniability. That's the entire point of using the OK sign; Plausible deniability.
You could go on 4chan and found hundreds of pictures of guys posing with the ok sign, but you'd have to be really naive to think they didn't know what they were doing. A bunch of open white nationalists all adopted the same symbolism at the same time, but I'm supposed to pretend that the symbolism isn't being co-opted?
To be fair, I don't think it was ever the case that Trump or many high ranking officials used the OK symbol as some dogwhistle (Trump has always spoken with his hands), but to pretend it was never true is completely false. May journalists have blown the thing out of proportion? Sure, but that isn't libel and you can't sue someone for mistaking the growth of a trend.
>I think you're proving my point. Retractions and corrections do not work.
I am not someone who came to this conclusion from reading a New York Times article. I've spent a lot of time on 4chan in my teenage years and have kept the site at an arms distance. It was very clear to me what the gesture meant. I remember the threads, and I remember seeing the image the ADL now uses when it was first posted on there. To pretend that 4chan isn't full of white nationalists is bonkers. It's like saying the swatstika never meant anything other than spirituality. Their stated reasons for co-opting the symbol doesn't change the fact they co-opted it.
Bob says: It has been reported some people like to bathe in mayonnaise.
Is Bob wrong here? Yes, because Bob didn't verify the information as being factual. Bob might as well have just made it all up himself... it would be no worse. Quite a silly example, but I hope you see the point.
4Chan made up the "OK" symbol story. The media ran with it doing zero research or verification. Then, sometime later people starting meming the symbol because it's laughably absurd.
That does not make it a "co-opted" symbol and does not give it any additional meaning other than literally meaning "OK". It really does not matter if you can find some example of some full fledged level 47 paladin super dragon KKK guy in white robes that made that symbol once because it was funny - it still does not mean "white power" for crying out loud. There is no reality where there is a KKK meeting (or whatever) where they gather around and flash "OK" signs to one another. Real life isn't a corny 70's comedy.
You've been had, very badly, and are really hammering my point deeper and deeper. The media needs to be held accountable for publishing unverified and/or untrue stories because they are extremely damaging to the public.
You and I just have very different levels of tolerance when it comes to in-group signifiers. You can are carry water for these white nationalists, but the whole "it's just little joke" cover is on purpose. It provides a cover of plausible deniability. Wikipedia has a list of white nationalists using the symbol while shooting up mosques but I assume the bullets were made up by 4chan as well. How many white nationalists have to use the symbol while committing hate crimes before it's no longer media sensation?
>There is no reality where there is a KKK meeting (or whatever) where they gather around and flash "OK" signs to one another. Real life isn't a corny 70's comedy.
I never implied this and you trying to reduce racism to cartoony levels of seriousness that you might see in a film.
Touch grass, my friend.
I went from pharma research (my degree) to tech to the restaurant world. We use lots of hand gestures because the environment is loud. The hispanic guys I work with give me the bird all the time (kitchen crew), and nobody takes offense.
You want to believe, and that is clear.
They have no special protection.
> need a system where it's dangerous
You want to destroy free speech, then. Any policy covering journalists would equally apply to everyone.
> assert the "OK" sign is racist
Are you asserting it wasn't used by trolling white nationalists? Or do you mean that the intent was trolling, rather than something "sincere"? Or something else?
Yes they do. How often are journalists successfully sued for damaging stories that turned out to be untrue and unverified?
> You want to destroy free speech, then
It has never been ok to harm someone else with your speech. People lose careers, lives and more over unverified stories.
> Are you asserting it wasn't used by trolling white nationalists? Or do you mean that the intent was trolling, rather than something "sincere"? Or something else?
There is no assertion, it is fact. This story was made up by 4Chan to provoke the exact response they got... and then young folks started meming with the sign because of how ridiculous it is.
There are still folks, however, that truly believe there were troves of actual white supremist roaming the streets flashing "secret" symbols to each other and giggling... Come on, say it out loud and try not to laugh.
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-37-02-01...
Who thinks there is a tape of Donald Trump pissing on a prostitute, or that he was caught communicating with Alfa Bank, or
The Internet and ubiquitous cameras really have revolutionized our ability to see what’s actually going on.
For what is essentially a pop culture scoop, three hours seems like a fine trade-off between accuracy and timeliness.
It's not good enough to print a retraction which no one sees and pretend it's solved the problem of spreading lies.
Because they got caught. How long would those articles have remained up if nobody else had done the journalists' investigation jobs for them and then reported the incorrect story? Would the journalists who "broke" the story ever have bothered to verify it themselves? Would they have issued a correction at all if it didn't quickly become public knowledge that the story was fake?
I understand news outlets are all in a rush to be among the first to cover these trending stories, but in my opinion that is not a valid excuse for failing to verify basic facts prior to publication.
It was obvious the guys were trolling. Last names "Ligma" and "Johnson" very over the top statement holding a Michelle Obama book.
The journalists were either too focused on getting the scoop and fooled themselves into believing what is clearly a ruse or they knew and went along with it because it generated views/clicks.
The best outcome for society is for people to stop blindly trusting, or at least be much more skeptical of, what they read on the Internet. This is probably unlikely to happen.
The lesson I continue to learn is that mainstream media is not worth my time.
Commenters are calling this "scary" and "illuminating". Some outlets report some pretty scarily big falsehoods, for sure, but this is not one of them. Another commenter even went so far as to imply that not knowing the word "ligma" is a joke counts as bad journalism. The tone is uncharitable, to put it lightly.
Once 'news' sources started publishing anything that pushes their own agenda, a great amount of democracy was lost.
Remember the Covington High fiasco and the Kavanaugh hearings.
These seem like fabulously hilarious trolls
https://twitter.com/wealthycfo/status/1586053744269340672?s=...
[0] https://twitter.com/WealthyCFO/status/1586053744269340672
Edit: changed from https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/28/departing-twitter-employees-... to a more accurate report now.
(Actually, I don't know what the title says because I see two different titles. In Feedly it says "CNBC reporting that..." but here on this page it says "Departing Twitter employees...". If the title was updated to be correct, I'd expect the Feedly copy to be old and this copy to be current. I'd also generally expect an aggregator (Feedly) to be less authoritative and less current than the source (HNn), yet in this case the Feedly title is correct and what I see right here in my browser on a phone is incorrect, or rather, not updated anyway. So, thanks to the existence of editing and unknown caching in unknown places/layers, I have no way to say what the title even is, and so no way to say if it's correct or not.)
There is literally zero other backing for "layoffs have started"; not anonymous sources, not official sources, not CNBC investigations. The entire basis for this was that hoax. @dang should delete this. The entire article is false and will need to be retracted.
@DanG please change ink, the real story is about mainstream media being hoaxed.
The disturbing part is how the retweet chain between the reporters on Twitter changed the story: The original Tweet was "Entire team of data engineers let go." That became "Twitter data engineering team..." That became "Twitter's entire data engineering team let go"
Needless to say "Entire team of data engineers" is much smaller in scope than "Twitter's entire data engineering team." The WSJ reporter who posted this tweet made an egregious error (even before the hoax was revealed).
[1] https://twitter.com/stinky_teddy/status/1586056205075521536?...
Submitted URL was https://twitter.com/anthony/status/1586047790341398534
When that was deleted, we switched to https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/28/departing-twitter-employees-.... Both the title and content of the page have since changed.
Once an article appeared that reported the hoax more accurately, we switched to that. Commenters were pointing out the hoax before that, of course.
> fyi -some questions being raised about whether these are really twitter employees.
> Still trying to verify
He bought because it is his favorite place to be, he said he would as a joke, decided why not and made an offer right before a massive valuation drop, and then was forced to by the courts if he wanted to avoid disclosing a lot of personal information. I don't think that he actually fantasizes about it making money.
Whether you pay "above market price" or not has nothing to do with the value employees provide, but with how friendly or hostile the board and shareholders may be, or how willing to sell they are.
Employees don't suddenly become less productive because the stock market has a bad day.
Maybe his plan is to automate it all? Full self data engineering within 5 years?
Perhaps he bought it because he's interested its capacity to shape (dare I say manipulate) public discourse, which he's utilized heavily, and may have taken umbrage when that was limited in any way.
Now, perhaps, he plans to manipulate it further, in the way a singularly-minded owner can. One possible problem with that plan is if internal staff see what's happening, don't like it, and tell the world.
Data engineering is the staff likely in the best position to see what's really happening on the platform and potentially tell others. So an owner motivated by wanting to manipulate the platform without pesky whistleblowers might want to fire them all and replace them with people selected for loyalty and/or buy-in on the motivations for manipulating twitter as a platform.
So interested he tried to get out of it multiple times.
Certainly no one forced him to do that.
"He didn't really want it" just doesn't fly given that context. We don't know why he indicated at some points he wanted to back out. Maybe he just thought he could renegotiate a better deal. Maybe he really did have second thoughts about whatever his reasons were for making the offer in the first place.
But he was, at some point, at least $44B or on the order of "one fifth his net worth" interested. Which seems pretty interested to me.
I got the impression that it was a relatively small team, but someone close to Twitter could tell me I'm 100% wrong about that, and I wouldn't be shocked.
Edit: Article is likely fake https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1586058607585812481
My guess is there's a plan. You don't spend $44B or whatever it was without a plan. Or... well, I wouldn't. But with Musk, anything's possible.
I honestly hope he ends up killing Twitter. Maybe we can convince him to buy the next social platform and then lather, rinse, repeat until he becomes the savior we didn't want but the savior we needed in eliminating the cancer that social has become.
Some of us have more memory than a goldfish ya know? It wasn't even a month ago that Elon Musk was 100% full tilt "too many bots on Twitter / Twitter not worth this money".
We get that Musk has to _pretend_ that he likes the company now. But we all know its the judge who forced him to do this.
2012: $79MM loss
2013: $645MM loss
2014: $577MM loss
2015: $521MM loss
2016: $456MM loss
2017: $108MM loss
2018: $1206MM gain
2019: $1466MM gain
2020: $1136MM loss
2021: $221MM loss
Given billions in accumulated losses, where else did you think twitter was, other than in the ground? It certainly wasn't in the sky.
Six months from now he will announce that the fake account problem is solved. His supporters will laud him as a genius. Did he actually remove bots? No one will know, and no one will care.
I'd look at it more that he's trying to limit losses than make a profit.
Interesting that you think the entire data team is double & triple redundant.
It's almost as if you're the one lacking knowledge.
Speaking as someone who previously worked at a company blatantly committing fraud, the CEO hand-picking the entire data team was instrumental to said fraud.
Maybe that's just my past causing the suspicion. If he laid off 75% of the data team, I'd be less skeptical. Maybe he thinks they're double and triple redundant, as you say. 100% is extremely suspect, though.
As someone who runs Tesla, which has a large data eng team, he knows the entire team isn't useless.
Similarly, Musk at Twitter is beholden to the big boys that actually put up the majority financing for this absurd purchase. He cannot just do whatever he wants, only what his consortium will be on board with.
Narrator: We actually have a lot authority in saying what's good or bad via laws we've codified concerning this exact thing.
So the question is, can Mr. Musk and his new staffers do any worse than Twitter's former leadership and staff?
I doubt it.
Elon maintains he purchased Twitter to preserve free and open communication, indicating this wouldn’t have been possible with the now previous leadership. Maybe he also purchased it because, at one time, he thought it was undervalued. Either way, the solutions to realize either goals would be like any other LBO, downsizing and restructuring. This scale of layoffs shouldn't be a surprise.
And they were taken seriously by the assembled press.
Hook, line and sinker.
However, the real damage is done. How many people saw the headlines and now will forever assume this event actually transpired?
The clip I saw was about a minute and ended with one of the two saying he "needs to go check on his husband and wife"... while there are throuple relationships, I don't yet think they are possible in a legal marriage.
Also the tweet doesn't say if it was just the data engineering team, more than that, or a subset of people and the people fired think it's the entire team.
Having gone through a layoff before, you're generally not told what subset of people were let go, just that you have been.
Edit:
The linked tweet in question has also been deleted...
The alternative approach is to do what CNN is doing by announcing significant structural changes are coming and let employees spend the next 6 months wondering if they will have a job. The psychological toll of this approach seems horrible to me.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/10/26/media/cnn-employees-relia...
Is there any evidence that this was his investment thesis from the beginning as opposed to something he only just started talking about?
There's no way Twitter laid off two people on Elon's first day; layoffs take planning. It's just two guys with mostly empty boxes. I doubt most employees would even be in the office on a Friday. I dislike Elon and am pretty sure big layoffs are coming, but they won't be reported by two guys on a sidewalk claiming to be "data engineers".
EDIT: It's confirmed these two people didn't work at Twitter. One went by "Rahul Ligma", which is a joke setup ("lick my ...").
His profile quotes Elon, and here he is tweeting at him: https://twitter.com/0interestrates/status/158614939873129267...
The "joke" is that they're trolling "liberal snowflakes" who dislike Elon taking over and now are afraid of losing their jobs. The empty box had a copy of Michelle Obama's book, for example, is a good indication of this.
Elon clearly thinks it makes him look good (or, at least, is a funny joke), because he tweeted about it: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586108809772089345
Side note... imagine having thousands of people who are afraid of losing their jobs, and the new boss tweets jokes about it.
Without Musk’s reasoning, and full disclosure I am not a data engineer, but as a role it strikes me as unnecessarily distinct (as in everyone should have these skills to pull and analyze data)
Second, just musing here, but I have noticed data engineers are a more diverse crowd than software engineers. Perhaps it has less of a stigma that keeps people away from software engineering
From an engineering point of view I can think of a few things I would like to play with if I worked for Twitter, Elixir Liveview being one of them. There is a lot of nice tech that would suit Twitter 2.0 and simply didn't exist at old Twitter's peak.
This should be one of the biggest pieces of news all year on this site.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33366830
I think it might be all the people seething in the comment section, 90% of the comments here are snark, quips and generally information-less.
> They are visibly shaken. Daniel tells us he owns a Tesla and doesn’t know how he’s going to make payments.
> fyi -some questions being raised about whether these are really twitter employees.
> Still trying to verify
The definition of financial irresponsibility is not being poor.
But nowadays the recruiters would probably also be scammers...
Note that this is a leveraged buyout, where Twitter has taken on $13,000,000,000 in debt to support the buyout. A lot of this debt (at least $3 Billion) is unsecured-loans expected to be rated CCC or worse... a rating that yields 16% APY.
Overall, the debt is estimated to cost 10% and getting worse (as interest rates rise), suggesting a ~$1.3 Billion/year hole in Twitters finances right now.
---------
For better or worse, Elon Musk's only sane financial option is to fire huge swaths of the company. He's gotta find $1.3 Billion/year in costs and fix that. Firing thousands of engineers will get him... partially there.
Of course, Elon should have been trying to grow the company, but that seems a lot harder than just firing a ton of people.
I'm sure Elon is also a vindictive asshole, so he also probably wants to get back at the team who brought up Twitter's arguments for mDAU numbers in court. It doesn't matter if the team was right or wrong, they were against Elon and therefore are to be terminated. IMO anyway, that's my read on his psyche right now.
The fact that Elon can also "rationalize" it as a good business move is icing on the cake. He's really gotta cut costs to have any hopes of making this work.
No he isn't. Its a leveraged buyout.
Twitter owns the debt. Elon owns Twitter, but can let Twitter go bankrupt on its own and cut his losses.
As far as I can tell, Elon Musk is just invested at "getting back" at everyone who forced him to buy this company at way overpriced values. He's fired the CEO, CFO, Legal Team, and now the data-engineers who supported the legal team's arguments.
Its... like... actually really straightforward.
This assumption of bad faith is just terrible for HN, and the fact that you can't substantiate your argument doesn't breed much confidence in your assertions.
Musk's reputation is on the line without a doubt, and we can all point and say, "ha ha" if he fails. Otherwise...
Musk doing the full heel turn from "just let me work" engineer to the cost cutting MBA bro.
Clearly you don't know anyone at Twitter. This company is known for having the least productive workforce of any major techco. We're talking people pulling 10 hour work weeks. Additionally, cost cutting isn't the sole province of MBA bros. It's a basic reality of operating a company. Silicon Valley has really lost its mind during the free money era. Some of us don't even understand the basic realities of a business anymore.
A twitter super app - LOL.
But is it real?
Let it play out.
I hope people take some time to reflect on their personal bias here.
Society follows the demands of a minority of wealth holders. Science minded engineers who prattle on about doing for science not “story mode”.
There is no science that suggests the leaders we have are infallible. It’s all politically correct story-mode based drivel to follow these “leaders”.
The technology changes but human agency has not moved on from being captured by high minded empty promises of forced expansion and growth for humanity; we’ll be long dead and never able to verify.
Their past success is leveraged to prop up caricature of who we should aspire to. Meanwhile their success is traditional political corruption.
Twitter was public and is now private. That's a huge difference.
It's not just any billionaire. It's literally the richest person in the world. That also makes a difference.
The idea that the only reason this is in front page news is changes in censorship policy does not seem to follow considering nearly every other major purchase makes it to the front news. Michael Dell taking Dell private was heavily in the front page news. There were no censorship policy concerns there.
I really don’t get the general public deflating the value of their self agency for dedication to Elon and Co todo list. We’ll except the copious amounts of government backed nation state scrip they command. But government bad too mmmk
Public talks a game about freedom and democracy while reciting a curated set of acceptable language regarding business, and bending their agency to the idea using the environment like an open sewer is optimizing for self.
But yeah flippant sarcasm about space man covers if. Yer so smert
Do you really believe that Elon Musk's role in the U.S. is akin to people like Roman Abramovich or Mikhail Prokhorov who literally robbed Russia of state owned assets during the market reform period? Does he compare to China's princelings, whose insane power over 1 billion+ people is derived almost solely from their being born to the Chinese communist political elite?
Those are examples of real oligarchy. Musk is an example of an outsized success story in a free country. He bought Twitter using the assets he gained in the building of Tesla and SpaceX–two companies of crazy high importance and utility to society.
The people fired are in an at-will employment arrangement in the most lavishly compensated industry in the world, at a company that has dramatically underperformed against its potential and (former) peers for years.
Twitter has long been seen as the worst example of unproductive, entitled employees that has become emblematic of the rot-from-riches that is rife within tech.
These people will be just fine, and they will (freely) find other jobs.
Twitter users contribute to Twitter's capital by virtue of reified social relations(capital) and the content they create. Yet, the users who create this capital have no say in the handling of the value they create. Instead it's a single person. Any analysis that doesn't take this into account is fundamentally flawed and willfully neglectful to the point of absurdity.
I can only hope it's a joke.
Do you expect this kind of "capital" from all businesses you patronize? Do you think you should help decide strategy at McDonald's if you buy an Egg McMuffin?
You can come up with a novel idea like radically defining capital, but that doesn't mean you're correct or that anyone will agree with you.
We're already engaged in dialog which respects content as capital. Consider Ben Lee (legal counsel to Twitter) who said, "Twitter users own their Tweets." How is it that a tweet is ontologically capable of being owned? Well, it's intellectual property and as such an object capable being owned. Moreoever, it's owned by author, not Twitter. If you answered in the affirmative above, then it's even participating in the circuit of value creation. Yet, the production of tweets contributing to Twitter's value happens largely for free. It's quite simply benefiting on the backs of free labor.
Anticipating your next point, yes, Twitter users willfully choose to participate, but this doesn't negate the process that's taking place. Free labor creates capital.
This process is markedly different from your McDonald's example. It would be akin to people voluntarily supplying McD with beef patties for free. Happy to discuss that though. I'm fairly certain it would be a fruitful discussion.
But, for the sake of argument, let's take your notion of "Free labor creates capital". This implies a one-way exchange/robbery. That is not factual. People use Twitter and are not required to pay for it. This is an app requiring huge costs to build and maintain at scale. Again, they are using it for free. Users are getting the tools for creation and the (mass) distribution of the created objects for free. Moreover, users agree to TOS as part of that. Nowhere in the TOS will you find the notion of "owning your tweet" or being a capital creator/owner.
Again, you're radically redefining terms in a hand wavy, because-this-is-what-I-believe manner while also overlooking the basic facts of the situation and 100s of years of convention. Which is fine. Just don't expect the rest of us to get on board.
As far as re-definining terms, you can guess I'm not in agreement. But also know that my analysis isn't some idiosyncratic redefinition. In fact, my analysis sits staunchly after the historical development of Ricardianism, but prior to the marginal revolution. To claim that it isn't based in fact is a nod to the implicit assumption of the orthodoxy of marginal-realism. It's funny. HN will claim that the world could use more heterodox thinkers, but when it's presented with them fiercely holds to orthodoxy.
You’re not actually making any kind of new point. Just expressing your deference to old ones. Point taken.
He’s riding on the coattails of his family’s mining business with a suspect ethical history.
I love these “don’t punch down the people who started at the top.” Why do you hate yourself so much you would deflate your own worth by idly idolizing the idea Musk is “with billions.”
It’s word of mouth mathematical inference. We’ve been influenced and conditioned to believe their success is real: https://singularityhub.com/2022/10/25/could-consciousness-be...
We live in a carefully managed memory that deifies the figurative identity of a minority and aims our agency at protecting it.
It isn’t just Twitter; what of real human value has IBM offered to the masses except hype? Oracle?
The entire tech industry is an agency capturing religion, spouting the equivalent of catechisms. It’s not lost on me their leaders were raised in a far more religious era. They probably are true believes in the “greater good” gibberish despite being normal humans by all scientific measures.
These normal human engineers will freely go work for another “outsized” winner in order to maintain their grift.
There is no good source for how much money Elon got from his family, but it's fair to assume it was probably 7 digits. Turning a few million dollars into being the most wealthy man on the planet is riding his family's coattails? He founded Zip2 in 1995 with $200k in funding and sold it for $300 million in 1999. Even if he had millions of dollars to start with, he made more for himself than his family ever did by the age of 28.
But making a lot of money in a market that’s organically interested in tech the last few decades still does not make Musk literally the most valuable person alive except when measuring in politically correct fiat currency terms.
He’s literally one man in a society with a history of teaching idle idolatry.
Personally I’m interested to see if he starts claiming he’s a founder of Twitter like he does with Tesla
Musk clearly didn’t buy Twitter to aquhire their data engineering department, so cleaning the slate and bringing on a new team might Be the fastest way to get where he wants to go.
Regardless, things aren't going to be fun for tech workers anytime soon.
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-managers-are-warnin...
I think your right, I'll look more at sources vs sensational articles going forward.
That's of course assuming the bank asked for any of this when negotiating financing.
You can see this in his recent statements walking back the whole "free speech extremist" thing. Putting aside the fact that Elon does not practice what he preaches, and my personal belief that free speech should not be afforded to censorious political ideologies[1], you simply cannot run a 100% unrestricted free-for-all and expect to make money off of it. Users don't want to use a platform full of spam, advertisers do not want to be on the same platform as Nazis, etc.
If Elon had self-financed everything then none of the above would apply and he could do anything he wants with it. Unban everyone, ban everyone, shut the whole thing down, etc.
[0] Repay the loan immediately to compensate for the loss in value of the property - in this case, Twitter's potential sale value.
[1] Nazis and tankies[2]. No freedom for dictators.
[2] Authoritarian-left on the political compass. The people who deny the holodomor, cheered for the Soviet Union crushing Yugoslavia in the 70s, think Ukraine is actually run by neo-Nazis (it's not), etc.
The morale-meter at the company must be negative at this point.
- Calling hero divers pedophiles
- Covid will be over by summer
- Twitter poll Ukrainian peace
- FSD is coming in ~2015~ ~2016~ ~2017~ ~2018~ ~2019~ ~2020~ ~2021~ 2022
- Cybertruck coming in ~2020~ ~2021~ ~2022~ 2023
- Freight Truck coming in ~2019~ ~2020~ ~2021~ 2022
- Roadster v2 coming in ~2020~ ~2021~ 2022
Where won't his brilliance take us next