Comment by exe34
6 hours ago
To be fair, twitter ended up useful for him when he used it to buy his way into the US government and close down all the departments that were investigating his companies for breaking all sorts of laws.
6 hours ago
To be fair, twitter ended up useful for him when he used it to buy his way into the US government and close down all the departments that were investigating his companies for breaking all sorts of laws.
As a business transaction: Twitters acquisition is among the worst deals in human history.
As means to buy an election an Presidency: highly efficient use of capital with an undeniable short and long-term ROI.
Too early to write closing arguments on this. A vengeful future administration might make us realize that the entire transaction was a huge mistake.
True. There is a “so far” on that.
I don't know where a vengeful future administration would come from. We only have Democrats or Republicans to choose from, and Democrats have made turning the other cheek their entire purpose and political mission. They slow-rolled the investigation of Trump so long he got elected again in the meantime. The idea that any major Democrat would go after a billionaire and not just any billionaire but the biggest billionaire of them all? Absurd thought.
> Twitters acquisition is among the worst deals in human history.
That he won't have to pay for. Shareholders will, as part of the SpaceX IPO.
If shareholders have to pay the debt, then the shares will be less valuable, and Musk (whose wealth is measured in shares) will be less wealthy, no?
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On the other hand, buying twitter was the turning point for his public image. Before that, he was Tony Stark. Now he's Lex Luthor.
Key word being public. People from the industries he operates in were screaming from the rooftops about him for years. Tech people chose to actively ignore their colleagues in automotive and space. I remember the circumstances that led to the creation of /r/realtesla.
> People from the industries he operates in were screaming from the rooftops about him for years. Tech people chose to actively ignore their colleagues in automotive and space.
The thing is... SpaceX and Tesla actually delivered something, in the case of Tesla at least until that damn rust bucket. They were (and, with the exception of the rust bucket, still are) miles ahead of the competition.
Back when Musk proposed buying Twitter, the site already was in the gutters, there's a reason that place was up for sale. Bugs littered everywhere, reliability issues, the disaster that was the universally hated 2019 redesign, sex spam bots, trolls and propaganda farms running the show, the "legitimate" bluecheck verification program being all but dead for new applicants. People actually hoped that Musk would turn the sinking ship around.
What even those critical of Musk didn't expect was that he'd open all the floodgates.
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Is he though? I find he still has a STRONG positive image among younger tech people..
There is clear empirical data
https://futurism.com/elon-musk-most-hated-person-america-gal...
> And the latest poll conducted by Gallup seems to confirm that Musk has become genuinely hated: a whopping 61 percent of 1,000 randomly selected adult American respondents said they had an unfavorable opinion of Musk, topping the list of most despised global figures.
> Even Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has widely been accused of genocide against Palestinians, couldn’t quite match Musk’s “strongly negative skew,” with just 52 percent of respondents saying they had an unfavorable opinion of the politician.
A lot of young people are coming of age with the worst imaginable role models to emulate, from politics to business. This is going to become obvious soon enough, I imagine.
I'm very glad I'm not responsible for raising children these days.
No by then his public image would have be damaged by the cave diver incident
Nah, too much hair to be Luthor. Bezos is Luthor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umBuxoLHV6M
Ironically, I'd say that Musk is still Stark, in a lot of bad ways: both show narcissism, overconfidence, impulsivity, ego-driven decision making, control issues, disregard for consequences, and volatility.
And all he really did was gut the censorship engine.
Is that what we're calling allowing CSAM and promoting white supremacist rhetoric?
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Did the total of fines the US gov't was looking to levy on Musk total up to more than the $44Billion he spent on Twitter?
$44B is peanuts for a soon to be trillionaire
Doesn't make it a good deal. Just means he can afford to make bad deals.
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When you are the richest man in the world, you can afford to do things out of spite. But we won't know - he got rid of the people who could have fined him.
It just seems highly unlikely the USG would issue a >$44Billion dollar set of fines to anybody.