He has so much wealth that, like Hughes, he could alienate every business contact and still spend the rest of his life making leftfield investments and watching movies naked in a dark hotel room. (Well, replace watching movies with tweeting, I suppose.)
It’s both possible that Musk is a genius and that he’s cracked as many geniuses do.
His embarrassment in no way erases his accomplishments of the past decade and warrant a “he was never smart”.
But his downright pathetic demeanor the past few months do eclipse and ruin what could’ve been an incredible legacy.
Then after a few weeks of this, you start seeing funny comment threads like this. Where there’s this sort of this tactic to take control of the narrative, and make it seem like everyone agrees that X is bad.
It works really well because of course even if only a few people leave Twitter in rage, now we can share that as proof of status quo and keep building the narrative.
Just a reminder - this is only a view shared by the extremely online / tech / liberal bubble.
As an example, on more conservative discussions boards you see the same thing happening on the opposite side. Until threads are literally fully premised on the fact that everyone agrees that someone or some org is “speedrunning Y” or whatever.
My feedback is this: don’t write like this. It makes you look daft, because it shows ether you don’t realize you’re in an opinion bubble, or you’re a willing participant in gaslighting for the only purpose of back patting / narrative control. I see this stuff all the damn time and usually ignore, but nice to have a chance to clarify this.
They’d all be a lot more convincing by even just acknowledging it’s a hypothetical before leaping into crazy territory.
> Will Elon ever have a "coming to jesus moment" and realize that he's alienated so many of his peers that he is, in fact, in the wrong? Or is he so delusional that he really does believe he has the answers?
I mean read this… do I have it spell out why this reads ridiculously / assumes facts that are clearly untrue?
I think Elon acted impulsively. He realized it but it was too late. A lot of the Twitter Files stuff is an attempt at revenge against the executive team that forced him to close. The problem is going full red pill is not smart tech business. He’s reaching MyPillow levels of conspiracy mongering.
I dont know if he does drugs, but sure he seems to behave strange.
But overall yes agree a great achiever (never sure about that genius tag) who has lost the plot.
He is running Twitter like an autocratic dictator. He is restoring extremist right wing accounts. He is banning open conversation and dissent. He is peddling QAnon conspiracy theories. He was against all covid measures and called for Fauci's arrest. He has cozied up to China and middle eastern dictatorships while putting up the "free speech" charade against democrats in the US. He was most recently hanging out with Jared Kushner in a private box at the world cup final.
Why are people still doubting who he really is?
They're already asking Musk to stop lefties from being able to even block them; it's the same phenomeon as incels. Free speech was never enough; they want an audience guaranteed, too. https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1604052966839062528
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...
> At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL…
The idea that HN is some sort of libertarian paradise is ridiculous. This is definitely a liberal haven.
Musk, on the other hand, needs the audience.
Elon apparently bet on the fact that the establishment could not stomach the idea of reconstructing that high visibility platform elsewhere. Everyone knows it is not simply about technology. Twitter remains "the clown car that fell into a gold mine". He will probe on how far he can go but will promptly retreat (ex: EU).
My guess is that his strategy is to prolong this period of uncertainty. Things like PG's decision may signal a consensus that they need to reconstruct humpty dumpty elsewhere.
Watch for trends in use of twitter as a news source in establishment press. If that significantly declines, the political class will follow.
p.s. It is upsetting to think that one of the immediate beneficiaries of Twitter itself being 'deplatformed from polite society' is the relief it offers regimes like Islamic Republic. They are happy, that much is fairly certain.
Give it a while.
He simply unbanned accounts which were wrongfully banned. Accounts which simply communicated legal to hold opinions. There is nothing wrong or morally objectionable about this. I’d rather say it commendable.
If Twitter is becoming a right-wing echo-chamber it’s because left-wing accounts are leaving and nothing else.
So why are they? Are they afraid of having an argument where they can’t have the opposing view banned?
Cmon! You can do better than this.
Depends on the opinion. "We must kill all the [insert ethnic group]" is a legal-to-hold opinion. But I'd say it's both wrong and morally objectionable to provide a platform for transmitting that opinion. Which is why Twitter banned people like that.
And even for those without a moral sense, I should point out that it was also bad for business. Twitter had a business choice to make: they could keep all the blatant racists or they could keep the non-white audience they targeted plus the white people that don't like open racism. Even if you're a-ok with open bigotry, it's pretty obvious that the right financial choice is to boot most of the open bigots, so that the platform feels safe enough to everybody else.
To be fair, that has always been allowed to say on Twitter as long as the target is either white, men or both.
The only news is now you’re (equally) allowed to spread that kind of toxic hate towards other groups as well.
Is that a good thing? Possibly not, but at least it is objectively more fair than it used to be.
David Roth did a good job looking at the dynamic: https://defector.com/the-eternal-mystery-of-a-rich-mans-poli...
And Adam Serwer has a useful take as well: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/legal-righ...
It's not clear to me that he had a fully formed intent when he made a bid for it. And a big piece of evidence there was that he tried to weasel out and was forced to buy it. Another bit of evidence is the way he has obviously been impulsively half-assing pretty much everything he's done since he took it over. He does not look like a man with a plan.
But to the extent that he had clear intent, I think it was more about hubris. There's this phenomenon in the food industry where a rich person will basically say, "I have eaten at a lot of restaurants, so I'd be really good at running one!" So they will spend a bunch of money on launching and unless they hired competent industry experts and deferred to them, they'll create a clusterfuck. I think it's a similar deal with Musk: He was a dedicated and successful Twitter user, and he thought he could run it better. Turned out it was harder than it looks.
It's funny how "Twitter is a private company they can kick who they want from their platform" is suddenly not so popular over the crowd that used to parrot it. Hypocrites from every side, unsurprisingly.
Anyway, I can't believe his grand idea for Twitter was the botched "Twitter Blue", and the next version doesn't seem to make sense either.