Elon's Stale Playbook | Hacker News Reader

Elon's Stale Playbook

businessinsider.com

7 pointswpietri7 comments

One of the most insightful analyses I've seen of how Musk's history relates to the mess at Twitter.

What's interesting is that even though all this is fairly obvious at this point Musk still doesn't seem to be acting on it. No matter who is at the helm, as long as he's the owner he will not be able to distance himself from it and if he sells then he'll have to absorb a massive loss, possibly larger than he can sustain. He's painted himself into a very nasty little corner with the Twitter acquisition, it has absorbed all of the margin for error that he still had. No wonder he was trying to get out of it.

Yeah, I agree. I could imagine ways out of this, but none that I think Musk is capable of sustaining. He can certainly try to hire a CEO, but is there anyone who would take it that wouldn't just be a toady to him? And if he does place a minion as CEO, then I think he'll keep getting drawn back into the drama.

Maybe the Saudis could keep him in line here? They take on more of the cost and insist that he stay away? His behavior with regards to China suggests that Musk is capable of shutting up when he has to. But more Saudi involvement would invite all sorts of public and regulatory scrutiny, given their behavior: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/15/politics/ahmad-abouammo-sente...

It would be a very sad day in history indeed if the West ended up being dependent on a bunch of authoritarians and misogynists to keep Twitter up and running. Personally I'm all for absolutely forbidding that kind of money from funding anything related to press, politics, media and communications.

> It would be a very sad day in history indeed if the West ended up being dependent on a bunch of authoritarians and misogynists to keep Twitter up and running.

... as opposed to the authoritarians and misogynists already running everything else?

Twitter's just a microblogging platform. Now that Orangemanbad is gone we can stop pretending it matters. Who cares if the Saudis run Twitter? What's the actual threat, there? Trolls? Anti-semitism? Homophobia? Rampant misinformation? State sponsored surveillance? That's already just another Tuesday.

Death. The actual threat is death for people who oppose the Saudi regime. Just as Jamal Khashoggi.

I get that things are bad, but they've always been bad, and the past was often worse than now. The old Twitter, for all its flaws, used to care about their responsibility to users and improved dramatically over the years in terms of preventing harm. (That's part of why Musk and his sycophants are so mad at it.) Twitter may not matter to you, and that's fine. But it mattered to a lot of people, and you dismissing that for all of humanity is of a piece with how the authoritarians and misogynists treat people.

There is bad and then there is bad. If you think that the Saudi's and Trump are equivalent then I'm going to have to disagree, they're both bad but - and it is difficult to write this - I would prefer Trump by a very large margin.

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