Elon Musk says advertising boycott will kill X | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk says advertising boycott will kill X

bbc.com

26 pointsjrflowers20 comments

When the president and prime minister both told him in Israel that his site is the cause of this year's increase in anti-Semitism, he needs to hold back on blaming advertisers and take what everyone other than a few of his favourite distasteful MAGA fans have been telling him.

The Israeli government is not a trustworthy source.

He was having a face to face chat with Netanyahu like 2 weeks before war...

How is this relevant? Once I had an appointment with a mechanic for regular maintenance but my oil pump started causing issues after the appointment was confirmed but before the appointment date so I got my oil pump fixed too. Is my oil pump not fixed because I had a face to face confirmed with my mechanic a week before the oil pump issues?

Staying curious is so important for a realistic worldview.

While it was obvious to everybody Elon, would kill twitter with his actions. Elon's world view is that the advertisers will kill the company.

I've seen this behaviour over and over with leaders. They tend to turn the facts upside down and present it asif it's true without any doubt.

Unfortunately we fall for the claims of narcissists and psychopaths, and raise them to be our leaders. That’s why this keeps happening. In a bad moment, a narcissist is incapable of accepting blame. And a psychopath is never honest in accepting it. Confidence men and grifters have a very long finger and they’re constantly pointing it at someone, deflecting blame.

A childish but effective strategy is when someone accuses you of X, you accuse them of the same. A naive listener then can be easily misled. But more importantly if you say X, that gives your followers permission to say X as well. They don't then look crazy to their peers because they say something crazy, because a well-known public figure is also saying the same crazy thing.

That’s called projection, otherwise known as “Every Accusation is a Confession”, and it’s ubiquitous.

It's also the third step of DARVO:

> DARVO (an acronym for "deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender") is a reaction that perpetrators of wrongdoing, such as sexual offenders may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior. Some researchers indicate that it is a common manipulation strategy of psychological abusers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO

Good link. Some politicians really use it and seem to get away with it. It is amazing how many people fall for it. If they knew about DARVO maybe they wouldn't.

In this case, at least, Musk leads Twitter only because he bought it, not because people were fooled by him. Everyone knew that it was a really bad idea. Even Musk himself knew: he tried to back out of the purchase at the last minute, but he did not have the legal grounds to do so.

His Tesla wealth from which he sold shares in order to buy Twitter, his $13B lenders, and his co-investors at Twitter (which have /almost/ half the company) are already a mighty long list of people he fooled, and which enabled this purchase.

Harsh, but true. He was warned by the IDF well ahead of the attack but he allowed it to happen as a pretext to commit genocide. Better Israel than Hamas amiright? Oh, wait. You were frothing at the fingertips about Musk, not Netenyahoo. Carry on. /s

as long as there are users there will be advertisers.

i’d gladly take a bargain for cheap advertising on X

they just need to keep costs low enough.

There are plenty of ads on Twitter and thus plenty of advertisers. The problem from Twitters point of view is partially that those advertisers don't pay enough, and more importantly that in many cases they aren't the sort of company Twitter wants to be associated with. Even ignoring the money, Twitter would much rather have Disney as an advertiser than 1000 different drop shippers.

You're technically correct (the best kind of correct).

There will be advertisers. But...

1. You can't drop prices too much or you're just adding advertisers, while not adding revenue. You may even start losing revenue. As the joke goes "we're selling below cost, but we'll make it up in volume".

2. If you also drive more ads and drop prices users also suffer. That's more ads per users, we realize this, right? Imagine over half your timeline being ads.

2. Big advertisers are way over half the total ad revenue. You can try to compensate for it with drop-shipping companies, crypto scam ads, onlyfans ads and so on garbage, but it drags your entire user experience down, it start looking like a ghetto, and people will leave.

So, not that simple.

To be fair? Musk did tell the big ad spenders "go f**k yourself", in WORDS. And I'm sure it was very cathartic for like 10 seconds. But the big spenders told Musk "go f**k yourself" in CASH. And that'll last months, probably as long as he's leading and managing the company and posting there. And that... is the true leverage.

Twitter does not have to rely on the market (that evidently does not want it) for income when there is an alternative income model available:

A patron, or patrons, could pay twitter to operate at a loss. There are many wealthy authoritarian states that would welcome additional surveillance tools for identifying and targeting undesirables (to enable torturing and/or killing) and obtaining technical staff for such a business pivot would not be that difficult. The only problem is the negative reputation twitter has with policy makers at this time. The likes of Edelman, BAE Systems Inc., Academi and RANE are able to enjoy their niches in this growing international industry and operate in the USA at the same time by cultivating friends in the Beltway and it's unclear whether Yaccarino and Musk have the right mindset to even hire the people who can make Twitter corporate enough to fit in around there.

What do you think that will do for the rest of Musk's biz?

It depends on how willing he is to acquire leadership teams and/or reputation massaging teams to work on his image for him. High self esteem can however lead to thinking such things are unnecessary which can have very poor outcomes.

So freedom of choice under a capitalist system that has supported him immensely is now something to be judged by "earth".

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