- Elon Musk purchased shares of Twitter after unsuccessfully petitioning the CEO to remove a Twitter account tracking his private jet.
- Musk’s personal gripes played a key role in his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.
- Musk banned the account after promising not to, highlighting his prioritization of getting his way over free speech.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/ttBv9
LOL. There’s a silicon valley bigwig jet tracker that I see pop up on my Reddit account, and I’m not even that interested in it.
What a snowflake
A visionary snowflake.
How is he visionary, exactly?
I mean, I didn’t think it needed an /s because does anyone take the term “visionary” seriously anymore?
My bad
Or really, he wanted to talk shit and pump and dump, and he got caught by some savvy lawyers at twitter.
Then he tried to turn it into a political tool sprinkled with his narcissism, hoping foreign governments would pay him to manipulate narratives. But now nobody gives a shit, he has lawsuits left and right and is likely going to go broke, and he’s scared away all the advertisers who were his life blood.
He tried to pull a trump but nobody actually backed him up, and they’re likely going to let him fall.
Incidentally… https://mastodon.social/@elonjet is still going strong.
If Musk saw this carbon would literally be shooting out of his ears like an old bugs bunny cartoon
Does that also get posted to Threads or now Bluesky?
Since Threads is federated, it should be accessible from there.
Threads isn’t federated yet. It’ll be a while before fediverse accounts can be seen on threads
So, lawsuit against Bloomberg incoming?
Called it! 100% called it!
Yep. I called that too. Talk about burning money…
Elon is first and foremost a con man.
He gives them the old razzle dazzle, and even tech investors get so impressed with his confidence and his technobabble and his statements like “This is ready to ship today” that they’ve just lined up to give him money.
I think what’s happening now is that the blush is coming off the rose. Elon first got his money because he was involved as a founder in a company that he was fired from because of incompetence, but kept a large enough founder equity stake that he cashed out a billionaire. Then, because money was cheap and because you hit a tipping point where it’s easier to make money than lose money, he failed upwards.
Now reality is starting to catch up with him, and he’s in a panic. He’s psyched himself out enough that he’s turned pure Trump, doubling down and becoming more outrageous instead of taking his responsibility to his companies into account.
The only thing of his that is ever ready to ship today is his
crowdfundingpre-orders and investment opportunities.The rest of it is just bullshit, smoke and mirrors, inevitable delays, and gaslighting his cult into thinking he never previously promised something “ready within 3 years” would be completed last year.
I truly hope we eventually pass the tipping point where it becomes more widespread knowledge that he’s an incompetent “idea guy” instead of a visionary inventor.
So Taylor Swift is going to buy it next?
Pretty sure ended up buying Twitter because the courts made him.
What a fucking glorious waste of fucking money. YOU CAN FLY COMMERCIAL YOU ASSHAT.
Even when he wins he does it like such a loser. Fuck this guy.
Jesus Christ this is low point even for him.
Yeah, no. Musk bought Twitter because he HAD to. He very publicly made comments about buying Twitter at absolute meme-stock prices, but didn’t disclose that he already owned a LOT of Twitter stock. So, when his comments predictably increased the price of Twitter stock, he had two choices: Either it was just talk, and he was BLATANTLY guilty of stock manipulation and the Feds put a target on his back, or he acts like he totally meant it.
So he went with option two, acted like he was serious and wanted to buy twitter. Then he tried everything he could think of to kill the deal, accusing Twitter of all sorts of wrongdoing and lies, but Twitter was more careful than that. They got their shit right, and Musk couldn’t back out. So he bought Twitter, rather than go to prison.
The fact that he could also kill the tracking twitter account was completely incidental. Musk is an idiot, but even he isn’t that stupid. Musk initially offered $5,000 to the account holder to stop, and then balked at the return offer for $50,000. Now, I may not be a billionaire tech-bro, but I’m pretty sure that spending $50,000 to achieve a goal is preferable to spending $44,000,000,000. He’s dumb, but he’s not that dumb.
Yes AND he’s desperate for approval from those he sees as peers. Twitter enabled things like the Arab spring and was a useful tool for protest organizing and shining a light on horrific things - it was a lot of bullshit too, but it was also that.
The Saudis and other authoritative, fascistic dickheads with billions all over the world benefit from a useless Twitter and the decreased threat that it can be a tool used to coordinate where the guillotines get set up. And long story short, we now have a useless joke of a Twitter.
It was win win for him and the people propping him up, either his delusions that he would be successful with Twitter came true (they didn’t) or his likely failure makes all those ghouls happy and he sees indirect benefit from unrelated investment/contracts and someone telling him, “you’re the coolest, bro” and him replying, “watch, hey look, are you looking? Look how fast I can run, are you looking? I’m probably the fastest dinner ever actually” [Proceeds to run slow, trip and fall on his face]
50k is a rounding error for Musk, true. I suspect his ego/feelings stopped him from doing the smart thing and taking that kid up on the offer
This
Also the part where Twitter has invested in s tier lawyers and brought and iron clad contract that heavily favored them. Which being an entitled idiot he agreed to. So when he tried to back out he literally couldn’t afford the penalties because he didn’t have enough cash and getting it would loose him control of his companies.
Definitely not him being dumb and entitled. Surely it was a petty $50k grudge.
I don’t think he would have gone to jail, he’s too rich for that and that’s not how justice works apparently but I thought there was a heap of stuff that was going to come out in discovery during the trial that was so embarrassing and damning that he preferred to pay the money
IIRC he was fighting “tooth & nail” to get out of the deal…until they made a request for some of his e-mails.
Suddenly he’s done fighting and carried through with the purchase.
(Sorry but I’m going into an appointment so no time to look up this new event…)
I thought it was more than emails, it was all communication around it?
Really wish he’d kept fighting do we’d see that.
Yeah whatever the reason given as to why he bought it will never not be stupid or funny.
Likely story. Rich people don’t go to prison, you think I was born yesterday?
Considering that…
- The Republicans encouraged him multiple times to buy it
- He quickly stopped blocking (mainly Russian) state-sponsored social manipulation campaigns
- He allowed right wing agitators back on the platform
- He almost immediately banned droves of journalists that weren’t blindly Pro-Russia and Pro-GOP.
- He censored / banned all kinds of activists that pushed back against authoritarian (Russia-backed) regimes in other countries
…I have a hunch that he also served the interests of certain political actors with the acquisition. Public town square my lower backside.
Didn’t they hang dissenters in public squares back in the old days?
He just didn’t clarify when!
I think he was trying to get out of Twitter and wanted to do a real life version of his Dogecoin pump and dumps. You know, talk a big game, hype up how the stock is gonna go to the moon after he brings his genius to bare on the company, then dump the stock and pull out of the deal. However, during the hype phase he managed to say some legally binding things and suddenly found himself forced to honor what he thought was going to be empty hype.
I’m also convinced the entire purchase was an accident but I think he was doing the usual far-right “try and shame people for standing up to nazis”.
He did more than say legally binding things. He signed a contract. That had a clause in it to prevent him from backing out, because the management at Twitter fully expected him to try it. I think he had made several gestures at buying before to try and get some kind of influence over how it was being run, so they drew up the contract to make him put up or shut up.
Makes you wonder what the og twitters guys are doing now besides drinking mai tais on the beach
I think he got talked into thinking the Twitter files were real.
