I love that it looks identical to Twitter but is orange.
I love that it's going to enrage Elon. He's going to realize that he paid 44 billion for something that's going to lose users to Substack's side project.
I love that it's going to enrage Elon. He's going to realize that he paid 44 billion for something that's going to lose users to Substack's side project.
Not to mention that old Twitter never hamfistedly censored people by straight up shadowbanning users for using the words 'mastodon' or 'substack' in their tweets.
I guess by now he probably appreciates people going off the deep end for/against him.
The people that see this differently are typically the same people who believe that 'the Twitter files' were revelatory, when in fact they weren't. Strong overlap there with eternal Trump supporters and various complot theory proponents, I'm not sure what degree of evidence would be able to convince people like that.
Where one cannot love, one should – pass by. - Nietzsche
He upset and tore down the military-industrial complex launch monopoly saving the collective US tax payers billions through starting SpaceX (and could soon revolutionize access to space for the average person within the next decade). (Also note that without SpaceX, we'd still be paying money to Russia to send US astronauts to space, which wouldn't be a good look during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.)
He created an electrical vehicle revolution that's taking the world by storm, changing industries and pushing us much faster toward ending global warming than would have happened without. It's hard to imagine a few misguided political opinions could offset all of that. Let's be realistic here.
(Yes you can't attribute all that to him solely, as Elon himself says commonly, the praise should be given to the workers at SpaceX and Tesla, not him. But at the same time, without him, they would have never happened.)
None of those good things magically disappear if Elon fails in his Twitter purchase or changes. Those past gains have already happened.
If your argument was forward looking it would make more sense to me (if he fails with this Twitter program, he won’t be able to deliver Starship which would be bad because XYZ; or it would impact his ability to continue Tesla forward because ABC). I don’t know that I agree with the forward looking argument, but it seems more sound to me than the backward looking argument.
I actually suspect that many people hate him not in spite of what he has done, but because of it:
They think if they acknowledge what people like Elon Musk have done in their lives, they'd have to loathe themselves, their own choices, values and weaknesses.
Which is, of course, quite silly. Each human being has their own path in life. Comparing yourself to anyone, no matter who, is going to cause misery. But with people like Elon, the threat to the ego is particularly great.
So, hate and schadenfreude are the easy way out. "He, too, makes mistakes. So I'm not that worthless after all".
(The irony being that many of these people say that Elon Musk is self-centered. Though the question he is asking is "What do I believe is greatest good to humanity as a species", whereas they, by their very act of comparing themselves to him, are asking "How can I be greater than and more right than Elon Musk".)
(By the way, I don't actually agree with any of what I wrote above. It's just another example of a bad-faith argument like the one I'm responding to.)
Before, almost all the techies here were dreaming and begging to work for Elon Musk. Then the blue bird happened, got bought out and gave them 'emotional distress' and Elon immediately became public enemy number 1.
> So, hate and schadenfreude are the easy way out. "He, too, makes mistakes. So I'm not that worthless after all".
Hence that, the same techies who loved him are now eternally desperate for Twitter to be Elon's biggest failure as much as possible, giving 24/7 over-coverage about Twitter schadenfreude.
The manipulation of human psychology due to over-coverage and creating villains every month or year is just too easy to create a story out of that is guaranteed to attract eyeballs and clicks. It is an symptom of obsession.
> I think people think these things are generally more salacious than they are.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/style/elon-musk-maureen-d...
> About the contention that he had a threesome with Ms. Heard and her friend Cara Delevingne, Mr. Musk said, laughing, “We did not have the threesome, you know. So I think people think these things are generally more salacious than they are.”
He's laughing at the reporter for even proposing the idea, followed by downplaying it in a way that makes it clear that this was the media being sensationalist for clicks again.
Unfortunately I haven't reached that level of enlightenment yet.
I root for Elon to fail in the same ways I root for Donald Trump to fail. He's destructive, self-serving, thinks he's above the law, and hasn't faced real consequences for his actions.
I'm rooting for him to fail because he constantly lies, about big and small things. An example: He claimed Substack is downloading Twitter user data to power their competitor. There's no evidence of this. He said this before backtracking because he knew he was looking bad.
I'm rooting for him to fail so folks, like the ones in this very comment chain, can come back to reality and see that he's a flawed human like the rest of us and stop the blind worship.
In this specific case, I'm rooting for him to fail because he's proven over and over he's unfit to lead Twitter and make it a better product.