Apple pulls its ads from X after Musk's antisemitic posts

He's been known to be a piece of shit for years - recall that he did not found Tesla, he just out lawyered the actual founders and kicked them out of the company. He was already known to have abandoned his kids. All of his companies have had problems with sexism and racism.

The difference is now a large enough number of people are willing to publicly support this trash that he gets people telling him he's awesome for doing so, so he's happy to keep doing so on increasingly public platforms. He's essentially what happens if a reddit edgelord was a billionaire.

There's always been a healthy amount of people who knew he was evil and criticized him as such, especially in anti-capitalism circles. From the other side of the fence it seems like him being seen as a piece of shit has been steadily growing for years, and this one incident just happened to provide a nice boost.

He's always been abusive, exploitative, and manipulative. His entire success is one long story of taking credit for other people's work, and just generally being an "I'm in charge" kind of POS.

We're so close to collectively learning the lesson that being a piece of shit on the way up shouldn't be ignored until they're on the way down, and there's a connection between that and being deserving of role model status.

More money in the bank account changes everything.

Except for the ones who still like him, the change mostly came as individuals became more aware of him. People knew his name and he owned companies but not much about him. Like if you worked in autonomous vehicles that came earlier than the big chunk who got to know him better from the Thailand cave sub.

Remember the time those kids were trapped in a flooded cave, and when people pointed out that Elon's mini-sub idea was stupid, he responded by calling the guy who actually rescued them a child molester? He's been kind of a piece of shit for a while, it's just that more people are noticing now.

Maybe he read a Henry Ford biography recently and is intent on making every one of the same mistakes…

Bipolar disease?

One mans demigod is another mans role model.

More exposure?

Absolute power corrupts absolutely

People weren’t paying attention. Like, everyone should’ve realised with that Thailand thing, if not before. But with the Twitter stuff, he’s _so_ noisy with his stupid, distasteful opinions that it’s increasingly difficult to ignore.

Because controversy increases engagement and ad revenue. Discussing “the latest outrageous thing X did” is good for G business.

Here's an archive of the thread in question: https://web.archive.org/web/20231117022239/https://nitter.ne...

I don't know how anyone can 'report' on a tweet without quoting said tweet with a straight face.

I agree with you, but Apple benefits from inserting as much ambiguity as possible.

For example they previously unpaused X ads, but their ad spend has to be much smaller than previously. After yet again applying the pause stick, later as a carrot to X they can publicly “unpause” again but privately buy only $10K of monthly ads. They don’t get the opprobrium of looking like they have an animus against Musk with consumers who buy iDevices and also like Musk’s culture war issues.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.