REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Is Elon Musk Nuts?

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Monday, April 15, 2024 17:54
SHORT URL:
VIEWED: 13494
PAGE 5 of 8

Tuesday, October 4, 2022 9:26 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
‘F— off,’ ambassador tells Elon Musk after unveiling Ukraine ‘peace’ plan

“F— off is my very diplomatic reply to you,” Ukraine’s Ambassador to Germany Andrij Melnyk wrote in response to Musk’s Twitter thread.

In a Twitter poll, Musk suggested a path to “Ukraine-Russia Peace”. A majority of respondents on Twitter voted “No” in response to Musk’s poll. In a follow-up tweet, Musk blamed these results on a “bot attack.” Musk is Nuts.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/03/tech/elon-musk-ukraine-russia-tweets/in
dex.html


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two





Well it was a bot attack, but not the type Musk is thinking.

You pro-war Democrats aren't human anymore.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Tuesday, October 4, 2022 7:52 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Well it was a bot attack, but not the type Musk is thinking.

You pro-war Democrats aren't human anymore.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

6ix, a thousand times you wrote "Trump will be fine." I tested my local Trumptards and "Trump_will_be_fine" is the password. Tests prove Trumptards are robots.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, October 26, 2022 10:26 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


Every country covered by Elon Musk's Starlink satellite Internet and those still waiting

https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1687990/elon-musk-starlink-sate
llite-internet-where-coverage-map-worldwide

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Friday, October 28, 2022 8:52 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Elon's purchase of Twitter is complete. He walked right in and fired the anti-1st-amendment CEO clown and Jack Dorsey's diversity hire lawyer that he brought along with him to tell lies for two straight hours on Joe Rogan's podcast debate with Tim Pool.

The Leftist lunatics on Twitter have never collectively REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE'd so hard.

It looks like Sulu is doing fine (relatively speaking), but where's Meathead?



These dumb fuckers that are screaming that they're leaving for not one but two different alternative platforms aren't going anywhere. Twitter spent years building up their fake followings. After two weeks of going to alternative platforms and not getting 1/1000th of the follower counts that they had on Twitter they'll come right back.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Friday, October 28, 2022 7:43 PM

JAYNEZTOWN


wow wasnt sure he would do it but yeah Musk took twitter

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Thursday, November 10, 2022 8:13 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


journalists pull strings on a puppet?

Elon Musk foreign ties worth being looked at, Joe Biden says

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63579775

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Monday, November 14, 2022 3:48 PM

JAYNEZTOWN

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Tuesday, November 15, 2022 7:56 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


NEWS

Stephen Colbert Isn’t Amused by Elon Musk’s Plan to Monetize Twitter

if someone wants to link an archive cool

NY Times but that garbage rag doesn't deserve a link, not a single click

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Tuesday, November 15, 2022 8:45 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Jesse von Doom @jessevondoom tweeted

I was skeptical before, but after seeing his management skills in action I think letting Elon Musk oversee the migration of Earth's wealthiest people to Mars is a great idea.

3:04 PM · Nov 14, 2022 ·Twitter Web App
https://twitter.com/jessevondoom/status/1592262105503502336

In a related tweet, Jeff Bezos was visited by the 3 ghosts from Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol:

Jeff Bezos pledges to donate the majority of his $124 billion fortune to fight climate change and unify humanity.

9:33 AM · Nov 14, 2022 ·Twitter for iPhone
https://twitter.com/PopBase/status/1592178858522218497

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, November 16, 2022 10:34 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


Elon Musk tells Twitter staff to work long hours or leave

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63648505

Jimmy Fallon urges Elon Musk to "fix" viral #RIPJimmyFallon hashtag

https://www.wbal.com/article/592329/116/jimmy-fallon-urges-elon-musk-t
o-fix-viral-ripjimmyfallon-hashtag

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Thursday, November 17, 2022 7:29 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


Coverage of FTX meltdown is incomparably faster *and* better quality on Twitter than old-school media

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593160857588232192

Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:


everything else he founded turned to shit:

SpaceX- A tail-fin-landing rocket. I believe I laughed my ass off over that already.



or is it ok to admit when you were wrong?

Op-ed | SpaceX fans should stand behind NASA and support Artemis
https://spacenews.com/op-ed-spacex-fans-should-stand-behind-nasa-and-s
upport-artemis
/

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Thursday, November 17, 2022 9:28 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


How has nobody put the Twitter Blue fiasco in here yet?

Eli Lilly lost Billions in Market Cap after somebody who was verified with an $8 blue checkmark changed their name to Eli Lilly and said "We are excited to announce insulin is free now."

Here's a best of compilation of people spoofing other accounts. Tesla got rocked by quite a few of them too.



Twitter Blue has been rolled back. My suggestion is that when you give somebody a Twitter Blue account, you force them to lock in an account name and don't allow them to change it. I've got to say this was a pretty huge oversight that I could have told you would have happened. Why don't you give me a job on the Twitter staff so I can save you from things like this in the future, Elon. I'll even work for $53k per year (half of the lowest current Twitter employee) if you let me work from home.

I'll need a better computer though, and you'll have to buy me a cell phone because I assume Twitter would require their employees to have one.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Friday, November 18, 2022 5:54 PM

JAYNEZTOWN


Salty is a Jones fan

Elon Musk Says "No" To Bringing Alex Jones Back To Twitter

https://www.bitchute.com/video/AOh3szW1jhHj/

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Friday, November 18, 2022 6:54 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I'd like to think that Elon will reconsider that once the dust settles. The last thing he needs right now is the Lefty fallout from giving Alex his tongue back.

I don't really know what he's doing, TBH. That Twitter Blue was a catastrophe for him.

I mean, if he wanted to spend 44 Billion just to destroy the platform, more power to him. Money well spent.


But if I was that dude who cost Eli Lilly billions of market cap with a single troll tweet, I'd get facial reconstruction surgery and get off the grid entirely. Probably move out of the country too.

If it takes them 20 years, his life ends with a bag over his head.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Wednesday, November 23, 2022 8:07 PM

JAYNEZTOWN


Elon Musk: Spent $44 billion to bring back free speech

Sam Bankman-Fried: Scammed people of billions

Guess which one Democrats are more outraged by?

https://twitter.com/Lancegooden/status/1595256432147963904

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Thursday, November 24, 2022 12:37 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Everybody knows the answer to that one.

Democrats hate free speech, but they love billionaire crooks when they donate to the cause.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Thursday, November 24, 2022 1:31 PM

JAYNEZTOWN

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Friday, November 25, 2022 4:06 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


Electric vehicle makers burning cash, slammed by sky-high costs

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/electric-vehicle-makers-burning-cash-11
0713935.html

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Friday, November 25, 2022 10:26 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


As they should.

Fuck EVs.

They are not the future.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Saturday, November 26, 2022 5:13 PM

JAYNEZTOWN

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Sunday, November 27, 2022 11:47 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


Sleeping in the office is making a comeback? Elon Musk would approve – but what about having a life?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/27/sleeping-in-the-
office-is-making-a-comeback-elon-musk-would-approve-but-what-about-having-a-life

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Monday, November 28, 2022 6:22 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


Elon Musk says he’d support Ron DeSantis in 2024, wants someone ‘sensible and centrist’
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/nov/27/elon-musk-says-hed-su
pport-ron-desantis-2024-wants
/

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/doge-surges-speculation-elon-musk-ether
eum-vitalik-buterin-working-together-110407259.html


Crypto Currency Dogecoin surged over 27% in the past week

Doge surges over speculation of Elon Musk and Ethereum co-founder

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Tuesday, November 29, 2022 3:06 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Numberonecatwinner wrote:

I was an intern at SpaceX years ago, back it when it was a much smaller company — after Elon got hair plugs, but before his cult of personality was in full swing. I have some insight to offer here.

Back when I was at SpaceX, Elon was basically a child king. He was an important figurehead who provided the company with the money, power, and PR, but he didn’t have the knowledge or (frankly) maturity to handle day-to-day decision making and everyone knew that. He was surrounded by people whose job was, essentially, to manipulate him into making good decisions.

Managing Elon was a huge part of the company culture. Even I, as a lowly intern, would hear people talking about it openly in meetings. People knew how to present ideas in a way that would resonate with him, they knew how to creatively reinterpret (or ignore) his many insane demands, and they even knew how to “stage manage” parts of the physical office space so that it would appeal to Elon.

The funniest example of “stage management” I can remember is this dude on the IT security team. He had a script running in a terminal on one of his monitors that would output random garbage, Matrix-style, so that it always looked like he was doing Important Computer Things to anyone who walked by his desk. Second funniest was all the people I saw playing WoW at their desks after ~5pm, who did it in the office just to give the appearance that they were working late.

People were willing to do that at SpaceX because Elon was giving them the money (and hype) to get into outer space, a mission people cared deeply about. The company also grew with and around Elon. There were layers of management between individual employees and Elon, and those managers were experienced managers of Elon. Again, I cannot stress enough how much of the company culture was oriented around managing this one guy.

Twitter has neither of those things going for it. There is no company culture or internal structure around the problem of managing Elon Musk, and I think for the first time we’re seeing what happens when people actually take that man seriously and at face value. Worse, they’re doing this little experiment after this man has had decades of success at companies that dedicate significant resources to protecting themselves from him, and he’s too narcissistic to realize it.


This post is long so I’ll leave you with my favorite Elon story. One day at work, I got an all hands email telling me that it was Elon’s birthday and there was going to be a mandatory surprise party for him in the cafeteria. Presumably Elon also got this email, but whatever. We all marched down into the cafeteria, dimmed the lights, and waited. Elon was led out by his secretary (who he hadn’t fired yet) and made a big show of being fake surprised and touched that we were there. Then they wheeled out the cake.

OK, so, I want you to imagine the biggest penis cake you’ve ever seen. Like the king of novelty sex cakes. Only it’s frosted white, and the balls have been frosted to look like fire and smoke. This was Elon’s birthday “rocket” cake.

For as long as I live, I will never forget the look on everyone’s face — in that dark room of mostly-male engineers — when he made a wish and cut into the tip.

https://www.tumblr.com/numberonecatwinner/701567544684855296/elon-wyd

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, November 30, 2022 8:47 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Have you heard?

Alyssa Milano's vagina smells like cat piss.



--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Saturday, December 3, 2022 12:43 PM

JAYNEZTOWN

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Saturday, December 3, 2022 1:59 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Elon Musk is not a narcissist. He admits to being bipolar. Just as Trump isn't a narcissist. He has a galloping case of adult ADHD.

It's not bad being a bit manic. In fact, it's highly productive. But when it veers into full-on delusion it's problem.

The way I read the Twitter story- and I haven't been following it closely - acquiring Twitter was a Musk enthusiasm. Until he found out that they were cooking the books and it wasn't as profitable as they said.

So he tried to back out if the purchase at the promised stock price. Failing that, he promised to be such a PITA to TPTB that he was hoping his purchase would be blocked. But the courts frog-marched him into it anyway. A promise is a promise after all!

IDK what's going to happen with Twitter. Most of Musk's projects are attached to one government teat or another.

Solar City?
Panel subsidies, $3000/ install!

Tesla EVs?
Government subsidies $7000!

SpaceX?
Government contracts!

Hyperloop?
That would be govt contracts too!

The only two projects that I know of that weren't/aren't govt connected are PayPal and Neuralink, and it's possible I just haven't sussed out Neuralink's funding yet.

Possibly Musk is trying to make Twitter profitable by courting a previously derided market (conservatives, MAGA, and alt-thinkers). Or possibly he's just trying to make Twitter such a a PITA to TPTB that somebody will buy him out and remove him from the controls, which is how he made $$ with Paypal.


-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake


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Sunday, December 4, 2022 9:17 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


Elon Musk went to war — then made up — with Apple. Here's what happened.

https://sports.yahoo.com/elon-musk-went-war-then-123000085.html

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Monday, December 5, 2022 10:09 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


Elon Musk suggests Sam Bankman-Fried should go to prison, saying he needs an 'adult timeout in the big house'

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-sam-bankman-fried-prison-ftx
-2022-12

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Sunday, December 11, 2022 11:07 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
He has a galloping case of adult ADHD.

It's not bad being a bit manic. In fact, it's highly productive. But when it veers into full-on delusion it's problem.

Tesla is being sued because Musk made maniacal promises, predictions, and forecasts.

Dec. 8, 2022 1:25 PM PT

Tesla’s Full Self-Driving technology may be a failure, Tesla lawyers admit — but it’s not a fraud. Ha-Ha!

The electric car company is facing a class-action lawsuit from Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology customers. They claim they were ripped off, duped by statements from co-founder and Chief Executive Elon Musk and marketing materials from Tesla over the last six years suggesting full-fledged autonomous driving was imminent. No Tesla on the road today is capable of full self-driving, and yet Tesla sells what it calls a Full Self-Driving Capability for $15,000.

In its defense, Tesla lawyers said that “mere failure to realize a long-term, aspirational goal is not fraud.” That argument is contained in a motion to dismiss the case that was filed last week in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

The main plaintiff is Briggs Matsko, a resident of Rancho Murieta, Calif. If the case goes forward, it could lead to deposition of Tesla employees who helped develop the technology and reveal what Musk knew and didn’t know about its true capabilities when he made numerous forecasts over the years — including the prediction that there would be a million Tesla robotaxis on the road by the end of 2020, that customers could make $30,000 a year hiring them out, and that their cars would appreciate in value.

Tesla lawyers are attempting to prevent that information from going public. The motion to dismiss the case rests mainly on Tesla’s contention that the papers customers signed when they bought their cars obligate them to individually file claims through the private arbitration system.

A public trial allows for customers to file as a large group, known as a class; arbitration means each customer would be on his or her own. While a public trial could reveal testimony from current or former Tesla employees on the state of Tesla’s automated technology development at any given time, arbitration would keep that testimony secret.

The FSD fraud suit runs through a litany of claims and promises made by Musk and Tesla about automated technology that will be familiar to anyone who closely follows Musk.

They include a 2016 video that purports to show a Tesla driving itself through the streets of Palo Alto with complete autonomy. Before the video rolls, with the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” as background music, a message reads, “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not driving anything. The car is driving itself.”

Tesla workers later revealed that the video was fabricated, done in multiple takes, with the driving system’s failures removed, including a crash into a fence. The video remains on Tesla’s website.

The lawsuit highlights the multiple revisions of Musk’s statements over the years that full autonomy would be achieved in three months, or six months, or the end of the year (in any given year) or the next year.


In its motion to dismiss, Tesla lawyers note that Musk often has said regulatory approval will be necessary before actual autonomy can be deployed. But neither Musk nor the lawyers say which regulators they’re talking about.

“Tesla would need no federal approval to deploy an automated driving system in its current vehicles,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor who specializes in autonomous vehicles at the University of South Carolina. “Tesla would need state approval in California and a small number of other states, but it has not sought that approval. Tesla would need approval in Europe, but it has not sought that approval.

California DMV regulations on autonomous vehicles include rules that bar a company from marketing a vehicle as autonomous when it’s not. The DMV began a “review” of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Capability under that rule in May 2021. That led to a preliminary complaint filed against Tesla last July. The agency says the case has been in the “discovery” phase for the last four months, and declines to state how long that phase will last.

DMV director Steve Gordon has refused to speak with The Times or any other media outlet on the subject of autonomous vehicle regulation for the last two years. Tesla lawyers did not respond to a request for comment. Musk did not answer a tweet seeking comment. Tesla disbanded its media relations team several years ago.

More at https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-08/tesla-lawsuit-full-s
elf-driving-technology-failure-not-fraud


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, December 11, 2022 11:32 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I remember when the Leftoids hailed Elon Musk as a hero.

So does Julian Assange.

Get fucked, worms. No matter how much you hate it, Twitter is now a platform for free speech.



--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Monday, December 12, 2022 8:04 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I remember when the Leftoids hailed Elon Musk as a hero.

So does Julian Assange.

Get fucked, worms. No matter how much you hate it, Twitter is now a platform for free speech.

Free speech for Trumptards is what Twitter does.

If there’s one tweet that will tell you everything you need to know about Elon Musk, it’s this one from early this morning:

Elon Musk @elonmusk
My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci
4:58 AM · Dec 11, 2022
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1601894132573605888

In five words, Musk manages to mock transgender and nonbinary people, signal his disdain for public-health officials, and send up a flare to far-right shitposters and trolls. The tweet is a cruel and senseless play on pronouns that also invokes the right’s fury toward Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, for what they believe is a government overreach in public-health policy throughout the pandemic and an obfuscation of the coronavirus’s origins. (Fauci, for his part, has said he would cooperate with any possible investigations and has nothing to hide.)

Beyond its stark cruelty, this tweet is incredibly thirsty. As right-wing troll memes go, it is Dad-level, 4chan–Clark Griswold stuff, which is to say it’s desperate engagement bait in the hopes of attracting kudos from the only influencers who give Musk the time of day anymore: right-wing shock jocks. But that is the proper company for the billionaire, because whether or not he wants to admit it, Musk is actively aiding the far right’s political project. He is a right-wing activist.

Currently, Musk’s politics are a subject of debate in the press. On Saturday, The New York Times’ Jeremy W. Peters attempted to offer a nuanced portrait of the Twitter owner’s ideologies, arguing that Musk “continues to defy easy political categorization.” But Peters’ laundry list of Musk’s recent lib-trolling and “woke” scolding—such as Musk’s November recommendation to his millions of followers to vote Republican—undermines the very thesis of the article. The nuance Peters is looking for does not exist: Musk’s actions and associations make a clear case that he is a right-wing reactionary.

Musk, for his part, has maintained that he is a centrist, that his politics have remained unchanged, and that it is the Democratic Party that has veered dramatically leftward. (Musk and Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) Musk’s logic—that wayward leftism has given a lifelong moderate liberal no choice but to support right-wing causes—is a common trope among far-right activists. It has been employed by many in the so-called Intellectual Dark Web and influencers such as Dave Rubin, Joe Rogan, Glenn Greenwald, and others. The argument stretches far back in American politics. The neoconservative movement in the United States was originated by liberals who grew disillusioned with the Democratic Party, especially in relation to the left’s Vietnam protests.

Publicly, Musk appears deeply committed to the right’s culture war against progressivism in most forms. His purchase of Twitter was an explicitly political act couched in the notion of preserving free speech. But Musk’s notion of free speech is a broad course correction that involves amplifying and advancing the interests of right-wing reactionaries while trolling the left. Musk might argue that this is restoring balance to the system, but if we are judging based only on actions and outcomes, it is very hard to see his tenure at Twitter as anything other than a series of policies intended to benefit a particular ideology.

Twitter has suspended accounts that have mocked Musk or expressed left-leaning views. Whether intentionally or not, Musk has, in effect, been governing Twitter using the classic Frank Wilhoit maxim: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Put differently, the billionaire has been advancing a long-running right-wing political project described recently by my colleague Adam Serwer as a “belief in a new constitutional right. Most important, this new right supersedes the free-speech rights of everyone else: the conservative right to post.”

More at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/elon-musk-twitt
er-far-right-activist/672436
/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, December 12, 2022 8:33 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Among the many grievances people harbor toward Elon Musk, add one more: animal cruelty.

Neuralink, a startup co-founded by Musk in 2016, aims to develop a brain chip implant. But to do that, the company has first been testing its technology on animals, killing some 1,500 since 2018 — and employee whistleblowers recently told Reuters the experiments are going horribly wrong.

Current and former employees told Reuters that Musk put staff under immense pressure to speed up animal trials in order to begin human trials, telling them that they had to imagine a bomb was strapped to their head as motivation to work harder and faster.

That may have contributed to botched experiments: Through documents and interviews with Neuralink staff, Reuters identified four experiments with 86 pigs and two monkeys that went awry due to employee mistakes. As a result, the experiments had to be repeated.

Much more at https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/12/11/23500157/neuralink-anima
l-testing-elon-musk-usda-probe


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, December 12, 2022 8:49 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I remember when the Leftoids hailed Elon Musk as a hero.

So does Julian Assange.

Get fucked, worms. No matter how much you hate it, Twitter is now a platform for free speech.

Free speech for Trumptards is what Twitter does.

If there’s one tweet that will tell you everything you need to know about Elon Musk, it’s this one from early this morning:

Elon Musk @elonmusk
My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci



That's a great tweet.

Fauci's fucked, and fuck your pronouns.


Why do you think Fauci hightailed it out of there after being silent for half a year?

Preserve your documents.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Monday, December 12, 2022 9:01 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Among the many grievances people harbor toward Elon Musk, add one more: animal cruelty.



Fuck off. You people used to blow Elon all day, every day.

The last 3/4 of that article isn't even about Musk, and the first 1/4 of it states that the USDA found nothing wrong with the operation.


I know you love getting jabbed up with experimental substances, but sane people don't.

--------------------------------------------------

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Monday, December 12, 2022 9:21 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Among the many grievances people harbor toward Elon Musk, add one more: animal cruelty.



Fuck off. You people used to blow Elon all day, every day.

The last 3/4 of that article isn't even about Musk, and the first 1/4 of it states that the USDA found nothing wrong with the operation.


I know you love getting jabbed up with experimental substances, but sane people don't.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

The USDA can't find animal cruelty, but Musk's employees described the cruelty to the news reporters. It is the same kind of story with Musk and the self-driving cars. The government agencies in charge are not stopping Musk from lying about his self-driving cars, but his customers are suing him because they paid an extra $15,000 for self-driving sensors, which would be activated in a few months, once the software was perfected. It just so happens the few months have gone into the past and the customers are slowly realizing that Musk is a liar who stole their money.

The total value of Tesla stock in 2021 was more than the value of the next 10 largest auto makers. Once the stockmarket realizes Musk has cheated them, the value of Tesla will drop and Musk won't be nearly as wealthy.
https://wolfstreet.com/2021/10/26/teslas-market-cap-gigantic-v-next-10
-automakers-v-teslas-global-market-share-minuscule
/


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, December 12, 2022 9:58 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Among the many grievances people harbor toward Elon Musk, add one more: animal cruelty.



Fuck off. You people used to blow Elon all day, every day.

The last 3/4 of that article isn't even about Musk, and the first 1/4 of it states that the USDA found nothing wrong with the operation.


I know you love getting jabbed up with experimental substances, but sane people don't.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

The USDA can't find animal cruelty, but Musk's employees described the cruelty to the news reporters. It is the same kind of story with Musk and the self-driving cars. The government agencies in charge are not stopping Musk from lying about his self-driving cars, but his customers are suing him because they paid an extra $15,000 for self-driving sensors, which would be activated in a few months, once the software was perfected. It just so happens the few months have gone into the past and the customers are slowly realizing that Musk is a liar who stole their money.

The total value of Tesla stock in 2021 was more than the value of the next 10 largest auto makers. Once the stockmarket realizes Musk has cheated them, the value of Tesla will drop and Musk won't be nearly as wealthy.
https://wolfstreet.com/2021/10/26/teslas-market-cap-gigantic-v-next-10
-automakers-v-teslas-global-market-share-minuscule
/


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two




The point is that you only care because you don't like what Elon is doing right now.

He's the only Billionaire you hate (now) and want to see fail (now), since the rest of them are pushing agendas that you live by.




And unless there is video proof of any allegations his "employees" are throwing at him, anybody with half a brain isn't buying it because none of these employees are showing themselves, so who knows if they even exist.

There was a day where "anon" was used judiciously. That day is long gone. Now all the Legacy Media does in every article is site anonymous sources and pedal them as facts to the low IQ people who read their propaganda rags.



--------------------------------------------------

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Monday, December 12, 2022 10:24 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

The point is that you only care because you don't like what Elon is doing right now.

He's the only Billionaire you hate (now) and want to see fail (now), since the rest of them are pushing agendas that you live by.

And unless there is video proof of any allegations his "employees" are throwing at him, anybody with half a brain isn't buying it because none of these employees are showing themselves, so who knows if they even exist.

There was a day where "anon" was used judiciously. That day is long gone. Now all the Legacy Media does in every article is site anonymous sources and pedal them as facts to the low IQ people who read their propaganda rags.

Tesla stock is down 57% for YTD. One of these days, the stock market will realize Musk is no genius, but only a fraud same as Trump. When that happens, Tesla shares will have an even bigger drop to the same low price matching what other car companies are worth. It is his engineers who are the real geniuses, not Musk. https://www.google.com/finance/quote/TSLA:NASDAQ?authuser=0&window
=YTD


Musk's saving grace was letting his engineers make the real decisions for his companies. But when Musk pushes aside his engineers and, instead, personally makes decisions, he shows how stupid and ignorant he is, same as Trump has shown. When things go well for his engineers, Musk takes the credit and makes the money.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, December 12, 2022 12:11 PM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Kelley Blue Book: Tesla’s approval rating sinks into negative territory, survey finds
December 12, 2022

A survey that tests consumer perceptions of prominent brands indicates that more consumers now have a negative view of the EV maker than a positive view.

There appears to be a political connection.

YouGov found a political divide in the numbers. The Wall Street Journal explains, “self-described liberals now view Tesla more negatively than conservatives, though conservatives also have a negative view of the brand on average.”

What changed to influence opinions so radically? Tesla CEO Elon Musk famously bought the social network Twitter at the end of October and has been a prominent figure in the news for reshaping its operations.

The company has also come under criminal investigation over a series of accidents that may have involved its driver assistance software, according to Reuters.

Morning Consult’s numbers also reinforce the political divide. Among self-described Democrats, 24.8% saw Tesla positively in October. Just 10.4% said the same at the end of November. Self-described Republicans saw their opinion of the company rise, from a favorable 20% to 26.5%, over the same period.

“It seems like Tesla is on its way to becoming a partisan brand,” Morning Consult’s Jordan Marlatt told the Wall Street Journal.

https://www.kbb.com/car-news/teslas-approval-rating-goes-negative-surv
ey-finds
/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, December 13, 2022 9:29 AM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Remember how Elon Musk demolished California High-Speed Rail projects, babbling about his single-lane car tunnels and hyperloop? Well, the possible reasons are many. Him being an insane, overfed monstrosity, perhaps.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Elon+Musk+California+High+Speed+Rail

When someone says “high-speed rail isn’t profitable,” what they’re saying is “HSR doesn’t lend itself well to value capture. It keeps money in the pockets of the users instead of extracting it and funneling it into the hands of a few private individuals.” And they’re right
https://twitter.com/buttpraxis/status/1579873283885109248

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, December 14, 2022 12:43 PM

JAYNEZTOWN

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Wednesday, December 14, 2022 12:48 PM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Since the launch of the so-called “Twitter Files” — Elon Musk’s self-styled exposé of the alleged excesses of the “woke” managers of Twitter before he bought it — there’s been a lively debate over what exactly Musk is trying to accomplish.

His statements clearly indicate that he sees himself as being engaged in some kind of culture war — “The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters,” as he tweeted on Monday morning. But what does the highly public censure of Twitter’s previous management team have to do with fighting the “woke mind virus”?

To understand how Musk sees the connection, it’s helpful to look at a recent tweet from Antonio García Martínez, a writer who’s very plugged into the world of right-leaning Silicon Valley founders. García Martínez describes a project that looks something like reverse class warfare: the revenge of the capitalist class against uppity woke managers at their companies.

“What Elon is doing is a revolt by entrepreneurial capital against the professional-managerial class regime that otherwise everywhere dominates (including and especially large tech companies),” García Martínez writes.

On the face of it, this seems absurd: Why would billionaires who own entire companies need to “revolt” against anything, let alone their own employees? To explain, García Martínez cites a book by conservative political theorist James Burnham: The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World.

Published in 1941, Burnham’s book predicted that capitalism had reached a terminal stage; the capitalist class’s power would soon decline, giving way to the rise of the “managerial class” — people who direct industry and the complex operations of the state. His examples of this new state were Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, which Burnham believed to be rooted in a more efficient economic model than liberal capitalism. For this reason, he predicted a Nazi victory in World War II was all but inevitable.

Burnham’s predictions were wildly wrong, in ways that should cast significant doubt on the viability of his entire theory of “the managerial revolution.” But his conceptualization of an unaccountable managerial class has nonetheless been extremely influential in the right-leaning tech world and in the broader conservative intellectual firmament.

Marc Andreessen, a leading tech venture capitalist, called Burnham’s work “the best explanation for the current structure of our society and politics.” Julius Krein, a leading conservative policy intellectual, wrote that Burnham was “enjoying something of a revival” because “David Brooks, Ross Douthat, and Matthew Continetti, among others, have recently pointed to his work as essential to understanding the current political moment.”

So, while Burnham’s work got some big things wrong, it’s still worth taking seriously. In many ways, he’s the progenitor of the right’s current cultural obsessions with so-called “woke managers” — and the godfather of the approach to politics that Musk has spent $44 billion advancing.

More at https://www.vox.com/23505311/elon-musk-twitter-managerial-woke-james-b
urnham


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, December 14, 2022 1:58 PM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Twitter Suspends @ElonJet, Even Though Elon Musk Said He Wouldn't Ban It

“My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, [@ElonJet] even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” Musk tweeted on Nov. 7. 

That commitment didn’t last long.

The incident underscores how quickly Twitter’s new owner can change his mind when it comes to content moderation. In late October, for example, Musk said Twitter would only unban accounts after the company established a content moderation council. But in November, Musk reinstated former President Trump’s account after polling Twitter users about what he should do.

This past week, Musk also abruptly dissolved a Trust and Safety Council that Twitter had originally established in 2016.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/twitter-suspends-at-elonjet-even-though-elo
n-musk-said-he-wouldnt-ban-it


Elon’s jet: A drama in three or four acts
Much weirdness is detailed at https://jabberwocking.com/elons-jet-a-drama-in-three-acts/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, December 14, 2022 2:48 PM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


I don't think there's much question that Elon Musk's turn to the dark side started with his annoyance over wokeism at his Bay Area Tesla plant. But in reality it was never about wokeism except in his own mind. He was mostly annoyed by unions; by the state of California actually expecting him to obey the law; and by employees wanting to put a stop to garden variety racism. At the same time, he developed a cult of admirers who validated his every utterance and egged him on against the critics.

So he moved Tesla's headquarters — i.e., its highest paid executives — to Texas, which doesn't have a personal income tax. Ka-ching! There he stewed and stewed over how California had treated him — him! the richest man in the world! — and eventually fell down the rabbit hole of anti-wokeism. This isn't really surprising. He was primed and ready, and there's no better place in the world to hate California and wokeism than Texas.

He's pretty far down the rabbit hole now, and who knows how it will turn out? Will Twitter be his greatest victory or the final leap down the rabbit hole? At the moment it looks like Musk's resentments have gotten the best of him and he's hurtling down the rabbit hole at maximum warp. Teaming up with the MAGAnauts is incomprehensibly stupid from a business perspective, but I guess he can't help himself anymore. I recommend a nice big prescription of Zoloft for Musk.

https://jabberwocking.com/weird-musings-about-california-and-elon-musk/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, December 24, 2022 7:38 AM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Elon Musk is on his way to becoming the next Henry Ford.

That is not a compliment.

In his early entrepreneurial years, Ford was a revolutionary: an innovative genius who transformed the way Americans traveled, worked, and lived. Following in Ford’s footsteps, Musk has become the leading innovator in the 21st-century auto industry.

Elon Musk now seems grimly determined to walk Henry Ford’s path much further than he should, for after his spectacular early success, Ford turned very dark, very quickly. The consequences of his hateful actions continue to poison the world today.

After he had accumulated massive wealth and achieved global fame, Ford allowed bigotry and paranoia to dominate his life. Deeply anti-union, he created a network of company spies who surveilled his employees and tried to control their lives. He also bought a newspaper that disseminated lies and antisemitic conspiracy theories. He followed that up by publishing a series of antisemitic books that were influential among Nazis and other European fascists between the First and Second World Wars.

Ford became a favorite of Adolf Hitler, who kept a photo of the automaker in his office. “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration,” Hitler told the Detroit News in 1931.

The Ford Motor Company eventually began to decline as a result of its owner’s hateful and erratic behavior; it was saved only when Ford was forced to turn over control to his grandson.

Musk seems to be on the same trajectory that led Ford into the abyss. Tesla investigators hired by Musk allegedly hacked an employee’s phone and spied on his messages, and the stridently anti-union Musk reportedly hired a public relations firm to investigate an employee Facebook group just as Tesla workers were trying to unionize.

Earlier this year, SpaceX, another firm that Musk controls, fired employees who had written a letter calling on SpaceX to condemn Musk’s tweets, in which he’d ridiculed reports that SpaceX had settled a sexual harassment complaint against him. After Musk acquired Twitter in October, he began slashing the company’s workforce — including firing employees who had dared to criticize him.

Now, like Ford, Musk is going further, enabling right-wing hate on a massive scale.

After buying a social media platform whose reach far exceeds the newspapers of Henry Ford’s era, Musk is rapidly turning Twitter into his personal plaything, making a series of arbitrary moves to showcase his right-wing political agenda. He has unblocked the Twitter accounts of Donald Trump and other right-wing extremists, and ended enforcement of the site’s Covid misinformation policy. QAnon accounts are now returning to Twitter too.

Musk has also looted the platform’s internal files to further his political goals. Last week, he suspended the Twitter accounts of journalists at The Intercept and elsewhere who have criticized him, and then tried to make demands on the journalists in return for lifting the suspensions. Over the weekend, he briefly suspended the account of Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz after she tried to contact him for a story.

“Elon Musk has demonstrated to the entire world in the space of a few weeks that his management of Twitter is a disaster for the right to information,” Reporters Without Borders said in a statement after Musk suspended the reporters’ accounts. Officials from the European Union have also warned that Twitter may face sanctions for failing to live up to the EU’s standards for press freedom.

Musk has embraced Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and in October showed his willingness to become Putin’s de facto messenger to the West by laying out specific pro-Russian terms for a settlement of the war in Ukraine. On Sunday, Musk was photographed at the World Cup in Qatar, standing in what appeared to be a stadium suite with Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

If Henry Ford’s life is any guide, the hate Musk is now unleashing will continue to spread long after he’s gone. A century after it was published, references to Ford’s book, “The International Jew,” can still be found on white nationalist, pro-Nazi and antisemitic websites.

Like Ford, Musk is playing with right-wing fire just as his auto company is about to come under siege. Automotive experts now predict that Tesla will see its share of the electric vehicle market drop from 70 percent to 11 percent by 2025 as a result of increased competition from the world’s major carmakers. General Motors, Ford, Volkswagen, and other big firms are set to enter the electric vehicle market with a combined total of 135 new models, and to begin large-scale production over the next two to three years.

Even Ford Motor Company — which survived Henry Ford — plans to produce two million electric vehicles a year by 2026.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221223170446/https://theintercept.com/20
22/12/20/elon-musk-henry-ford-extremism
/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, December 24, 2022 10:22 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Looks like the Intercept and the Atlantic have just gone crazy.

They look like Alex Jones, if Alex Jones wrote for Legacy Media instead of being a performer.

--------------------------------------------------

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Monday, December 26, 2022 1:33 PM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Rod Hilton @rodhilton@mastodon.social

He talked about electric cars. I don't know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

Then he talked about rockets. I don't know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I've ever heard anyone say, so when people say he's a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets.

Dec 24, 2022, 23:32
https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/109572674700288958

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, December 28, 2022 1:02 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


Elon Musk Goes Nuclear: ‘*Every* Social Media Company Is Engaged in Heavy Censorship’ at the ‘Explicit Direction of the Government’ . . . Google ‘Makes Links Disappear’

https://theamericantribune.com/elon-musk-drops-bomb-on-big-tech-claims
-this-woke-company-makes-links-disappear
/

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Tuesday, January 3, 2023 1:30 PM

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What Elon Musk Is Teaching Us About Billionaires

It’s hard to find much to say about Elon Musk except for this: He was once the richest man in the world and widely hailed as a genius, or at least respected as an innovator, and he found that inadequate to his emotional needs.

How did it happen? Perhaps he found the role of “Thought Leader” too sedate and constricting. To the extent that noblesse oblige still exists among modern-day oligarchs, I suppose it could feel repressive; the Gateses and Buffets of the world perform good manners and good intentions and end up offering a retiring, cultivated blankness.

Or—billionaires being subject to experiential distortions most of us will never know—it may be that he found infinite wealth uninteresting. When you grew up rich already and have only grown richer, maybe it’s appealing to operate in an atmosphere of stringent artificial scarcity. If his pleasure lies not in largesse but in the capitalist jouissance of screwing others, it makes sense that the richest man in the world might seek out situations that would endanger his backers, saddle assets with debt, and justify him nickel-and-diming Twitter users while he strip-mines the company, auctioning off chairs and coffee makers and firing janitorial staff such that employees must bring toilet paper from home. This behavior can perhaps best be understood as playing the game on hard mode—ignoring the ease of keeping one’s sycophants happy by attempting to gain new converts despite constantly taking actions guaranteed to piss almost everyone off. Plenty of stand-up comics like losing the room on purpose just to try to win it back.

Musk is on the record as liking a challenge. He dislikes chess, for instance, for being too egalitarian and insufficiently chaotic: “too simple to be useful in real life: a mere 8 by 8 grid, no fog of war, no technology tree, no random map or spawn position, only 2 players, both sides exact same pieces, etc.” Sure, this declaration was uttered while seeking to downplay the achievements of World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov (who had accused Musk on television of “moral idiocy”; Musk responded by claiming his iPhone could play better chess than Kasparov).

What is clear is that being bound by rules does not read as fun to Elon Musk. Making up rules, though, and arbitrarily enforcing them? That seems to be another story. Musk in his professional capacity appears to have enjoyed (for example) demanding that employees who work from home return to the office immediately—and sleep at work—only to stop paying rent and shut a number of offices down, such that employees (like those in Seattle) are now forced to work from home. There is joy in this, too—in using your power to make others do humiliating things while refusing to abide by any constraints yourself. Musk isn’t bothering to honor rental agreements or employment contracts. He’s looking for ways to avoid paying severance that is owed. He wants to withhold payments from companies he’s in business with until they renegotiate. The model is familiar, Trumpian: No demand others make on you is legitimate, and no demand you make of others is anything less than fair.

But the thing I can’t stop thinking about is that all this could have been achieved with relative privacy. That’s been his way up until now, anyway; Musk has a long, long record of being a terrible employer, but you might not have heard much about it until recently. Because now, Musk wants attention. He has rebranded as an extremely public troll. That is noteworthy.

The public move is what makes speculating about a billionaire’s motives, however dreary the exercise, worth doing. Because billionaires are usually private, it is more than a little disorienting to watch one dispense with all that and behave with absolutely no constraints on his conduct. Forget playing the game on “hard” mode. What’s clear is that Musk is simply playing. This is all a game to him—and he wants his obviously despotic conduct (which affects the lives of real people in his employ) to be celebrated. He wants it to be defended as principled, reasonable, and freedom-loving. He also wants it to be funny.

My colleague Laura Miller argued that there is one simple way to handle all of this: Musk ought to be ignored on the grounds that Twitter is—despite its outsize influence in media and some other areas—so niche in the large scheme of things that owning it amounts to becoming the king of, say, Luxembourg.

And yet the spectacle, and specifically Musk’s desire to star in it, all feels more sinister to me than I’m quite comfortable admitting. Not because of how much Twitter matters (its importance is surely overblown) but because of the behavior itself and what it suggests is true right now about power and the complete lack of any coherent check on it. This is particularly clear in the “polls” Musk likes to conduct, while promising to “abide” by their results and then repeatedly breaking that promise.

It’s discomfiting because we know that we have a growing problem with obscenely wealthy mega-oligarchs who have so much power that they don’t have to bear real public scrutiny. They have for the most part honored their end of things by remaining tactfully behind the scenes, moving in rarefied circles, so we don’t have to grapple with what their existence really means.

But that fragile truce is dissolving. It started with Trump, of course. But Trump’s wealth is nothing compared to Musk’s, and at least Trump was somewhat legible: He was an ego-mad con artist, mainly interested in bilking his supporters and enriching himself and his family. What’s more, Trump is and has long been worried about prosecution; we’ve traveled a pretty long road toward impunity for Trumpish malefactors in this country, but there are a few residual lights of institutional health still flashing that make his law-breaking at least potentially punishable, someday.

It’s not clear that Musk feels any such concern. Watching Musk tank Tesla’s stock to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars while seeming not to care at all is sobering not because I lose sleep over Tesla stock prices, but because it was comforting to imagine that Musk would—that, as a businessman, he responds to predictable pressures. That is not evident here. In Musk, we see a man with resources so extraordinary he can act as if he’s beyond the reach even of capital and its self-serving systems of accountability.

This isn’t, somehow, and despite being a pessimist, a future I was prepared for. The contours of the dystopias in speculative fiction and thought experiments I consumed were (roughly) that corporations would increase in power and influence until they outgrew and subordinated the nation-state. The mechanics of democracy (or governance) would accordingly come to be pro forma exercises. Sure, you can vote for a president or whatever, but the brands no one has voted for—and their mandate to serve the shareholder—would be the forces actually determining policy and the future of the world.

In fiction, these companies are typically efficient and logical, even if it is only to serve their own ends. They are also, for the most part, frustratingly anonymous, presided over by hazy boards of directors. Their monstrousness is linked to that corporate facelessness. And even though corporations are, according to the law, “persons,” with all the rights but few of the responsibilities that persons receive, they are actually more like robots. They cannot starve, but they’re also not supposed to do anything for fun.

My old visions of corporate hell were grim. But it hadn’t occurred to me that the more frightening possibility might be a corporation that is the opposite of anonymous—that is, in fact, helmed by, and subordinate to, a single man with unmet psychological needs for whom the corporation itself barely counts. It is beyond strange to watch the tech companies whose evils one has long read about be not just dwarfed but treated like baubles of no consequence in one rich man’s game.


I’m discomfited, in short, by the Muskian spectacle. Not because of Twitter mattering but because of what Musk’s mask-off rebrand suggests about where billionaires stand as income inequality has ballooned and institutions have weakened.

One thing I have clocked is how Musk’s evolution into an alt-right shitposter has dovetailed nicely with the conservative fetish for anti-governance. This was more or less Trump’s promise too. It’s a familiar conservative vision that basically fantasizes about breaking things: eliminating the Department of Education, dispensing with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, defanging regulatory agencies, slashing taxes, etc. This idea of freedom defines itself as being against anything that might limit a man’s freedom to do what he wishes, particularly if it interposes protections of any kind between those he wishes to cheat or abuse or exploit. A Wild West, as it were. The point is that an implied but distinct subset of people are noble citizen-agents who deserve freedom (from regulation), and everyone else’s suffering is irrelevant. Bureaucracies and red tape must be slashed through to benefit the former; the latter will have their conduct not just regulated but criminalized to the degree that most enriches and protects the former.

Anyone who’s been on the internet knows that the Wild West approach favors abusive conduct. Incentivizing antisocial behavior, or at least failing to disincentivize it, tends to help it proliferate. Musk knows this; the self-described free speech absolutist has responded to speech he doesn’t care for on the platform with weird, whack-a-mole-ish inefficiency on the one hand and vengeful arbitrariness on the other. Rules are announced, retroactively enforced, changed, rescinded. There is no principled posture, not even a nod to internal consistency. Musk’s solution to the two-tier system on Twitter that he described as unfair and elitist—the so-called “blue checks” which are sometimes assigned to verified accounts—was not to dispense with them altogether or give them to everyone. No, instead he made them available for purchase with no verification at all. Supposedly doing so adhered to some kind of principle of profit, but ultimately it only brought the most predictable kind of chaos. Indeed, it was an idea so breathtakingly stupid it was almost thrilling to watch thousands of accounts at once pay $8 to impersonate celebrities, politicians, emergency agencies, and brands.

Musk deploys this same energy when he posts his Twitter polls, promising he will “abide” by them, and then failing to do so. As my colleague Nitish Pahwa wrote back in November, voting in Musk’s polls is both entirely useless and the only way to provide feedback to a man whose money has insulated him from reality. If he loses a poll, he’ll at the very least, as Pahwa puts it, “lose the democratic cover of his decision and further clarify what’s obvious—that he’s an erratic, likely unreliable leader.” Pahwa is absolutely correct and yet this feels … terrible. As bad or worse than voting in a state where your vote doesn’t matter even the little bit that votes sometimes do.

Musk tweeted a poll earlier this month asking whether he should resign as CEO. When the “yes” option pulled ahead, I found myself becoming the worst kind of online spoilsport: While people on Twitter who were sick of him celebrated that he was no doubt pouting at discovering how unpopular he plainly is, I started pedantically pointing out that there is actually no humiliating this guy who owns the company doing the “polling” and who has strategically framed the poll such that the “yes” option could describe what he’d already announced he was doing anyway. I typed this into the abyss—Musk’s poll was, it seemed to me, not even a fake poll but a Trumpy way to hijack a particularly bad news cycle for Twitter (Musk had created an enormous amount of bad press by suspending several journalists, citing strange and convoluted rules that were obviously created after the fact, since they weren’t uniformly applied, and then “unsuspending” them).

But that was wrong too, I think. There’s very little evidence that Musk cares about bad news cycles enough to interrupt them. He doesn’t need to.

Twitter is a private company whose best qualities can hopefully be replicated elsewhere, but Musk’s conduct as its biggest troll matters. To the extent that his stint as CEO reveals how much a disaffected billionaire can lose without caring—and how exuberantly he feels he can perform that carelessness—and how unafraid he is of any regulatory entity, including the FCC and even the EU, this is a chilling little military exercise demonstrating what billionaires can do. The results aren’t encouraging.

In the dystopian novel I wish I’d read to prepare for this moment, Musk’s antics aren’t strategic moves in a battle for hearts and minds, because those are wars he no longer needs to bother fighting. This is all a game to him, and it’s one he’s already won. What his fans vote for matters as little as what his critics do; the Muskian assertion that polls are binding, which he makes often, is laced with real irony. And so we’re reduced to psychologizing the man and trying to figure out what he does care about—and what private incentives, if any, he responds to. Because those, in the end, are the ugly and unbalanced rules of power: The less a billionaire cares about anything, the more we have to care about him.

https://slate.com/technology/2023/01/elon-musk-new-billionaire-rule.ht
ml


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, January 3, 2023 2:10 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


LOL @ Slate.

Nobody there is able to learn anything, so no... Nobody cares what they think that somebody is teaching them.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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