Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[The Larch]

He just decided to be an extremist alt-right guy? How do you go from "yeah I used to be a Democrat but some of them are little too wacky" to "now I am fully on team far-right" in two seconds? It seems a little...unlikely.

My guess would be that he was never a Democrat to begin with, and only said it to appear tolerable/be accepted, or something.

[grumbler]

He just decided to be an extremist alt-right guy? How do you go from "yeah I used to be a Democrat but some of them are little too wacky" to "now I am fully on team far-right" in two seconds? It seems a little...unlikely.

My guess would be that he was never a Democrat to begin with, and only said it to appear tolerable/be accepted, or something.

Yeah, it's looking like that was just a pose he adopted because he knew his Tesla/Powerwall etc customers skewed heavily left.  Now that he has a new toy he's forgetting his old toys and their needs.

[The Brain]

So Forbes has Musk dipping down to the world's second richest person. I can only hope that his companies keep imploding.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2022/12/12/elon-musk-starts-week-as-worlds-second-richest-person/?sh=4bfee4076a1c

[garbon]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/12/elon-musk-booed-dave-chappelle-san-francisco-show

Crowd boos Elon Musk after Dave Chappelle says to 'make some noise'

The polite version is that it didn't go quite according to plan when Elon Musk made his most recent stage appearance.

"Ladies and gentlemen, make some noise for the richest man in the world," the comedian Dave Chappelle roared on stage at the Chase Center in San Francisco as he invited the Twitter owner out to join him on Sunday night.

For the first couple of seconds Musk appeared ready to accept a euphoric welcome from the crowd of 18,000. He raised his arms high in the air and spun around as though he'd just scored a World Cup decider.

Then the booing started. And it continued. And it got louder. And louder. For the best part of 10 minutes Musk was given a real-time readout of his current popularity ratings.

"Controversy, buddy," was Chappelle's uncharacteristically diplomatic response to Musk as the booing echoed around the auditorium. "Weren't expecting this, were you?"

That summed up perhaps the strangest aspect of the mass booing Musk endured on Sunday – that both men on stage appeared to be genuinely taken aback by the reception. After all, this was San Francisco, where thousands of employees were fired by Musk after his $44bn takeover of Twitter in October, and even those who kept their jobs were told by him that they had to work "long hours at high intensity".

"It sounds like some of the people you fired are in the audience," Chappelle said, and this time he wasn't joking.

On top of that there was the fact that Musk had agreed to appear before one of the most progressive audiences – a comedy club – in arguably the most progressive city in America. All of which was perhaps ill-advised, given that he had spent much of the weekend spouting far-right tropes.

He had called for the pandemic health chief Anthony Fauci to be prosecuted, spread QAnon conspiracies and made transphobic remarks.

A normally irrepressible Musk seemed to be dumbstruck by the booing. He remained speechless, only opening his mouth to cry for help: "Dave, what shall I say?"

"Don't say nothing," Chappelle counseled. "You hear that sound, Elon? That's the sound of pending civil unrest."

At least there was alternative facts to fall back on. By Monday morning Musk had perked up and was busily rewriting history. The deafening noise, he reassured his Twitter followers, had in fact been "90% cheers & 10% boos".

Tell that to James Yu, a writer who was in the crowd on Sunday. "A good 80% of the stadium boos," he estimated, noting that once the jeering started Musk withered on stage and turned "into a corncob".

https://news.sky.com/story/elon-musk-booed-on-stage-at-dave-chappelle-gig-12766825

He has since insisted "it was 90% cheers" that greeted him at the gig, and said the "10% boos" were a result of having "offended San Francisco's unhinged leftists".

"But, still, that's a lot of boos, which is a first for me in real life (frequent on Twitter)," he added in a tweet.

[Tamas]

I guess this is bound to happen when you limit your fanbase to basement-dwelling incels.

[Syt]

https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-business-a9b795e8050de12319b82b5dd7118cd7

Musk's Twitter disbands its Trust and Safety advisory group

Elon Musk's Twitter has dissolved its Trust and Safety Council, the advisory group of around 100 independent civil, human rights and other organizations that the company formed in 2016 to address hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm and other problems on the platform.

The council had been scheduled to meet with Twitter representatives Monday night. But Twitter informed the group via email that it was disbanding it shortly before the meeting was to take place, according to multiple members.

The council members, who provided images of the email from Twitter to The Associated Press, spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation. The email said Twitter was "reevaluating how best to bring external insights" and the council is "not the best structure to do this."

"Our work to make Twitter a safe, informative place will be moving faster and more aggressively than ever before and we will continue to welcome your ideas going forward about how to achieve this goal," said the email, which was signed "Twitter."

The volunteer group provided expertise and guidance on how Twitter could better combat hate, harassment and other harms but didn't have any decision-making authority and didn't review specific content disputes. Shortly after buying Twitter for $44 billion in late October, Musk said he would form a new "content moderation council" to help make major decisions but later changed his mind.

"Twitter's Trust and Safety Council was a group of volunteers who over many years gave up their time when consulted by Twitter staff to offer advice on a wide range of online harms and safety issues," tweeted council member Alex Holmes. "At no point was it a governing body or decision making."

Twitter, which is based in San Francisco, had confirmed the meeting with the council Thursday in an email in which it promised an "open conversation and Q&A" with Twitter staff, including the new head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin.

That came on the same day that three council members announced they were resigning in a public statement posted on Twitter that said that "contrary to claims by Elon Musk, the safety and wellbeing of Twitter's users are on the decline."

Those former council members soon became the target of online attacks after Musk amplified criticism of them and Twitter's past leadership for allegedly not doing enough to stop child sexual exploitation on the platform.

"It is a crime that they refused to take action on child exploitation for years!" Musk tweeted.

A growing number of attacks on the council led to concerns from some remaining members who sent an email to Twitter earlier on Monday demanding the company stop misrepresenting the council's role.

Those false accusations by Twitter leaders were "endangering current and former Council members," the email said.

The Trust and Safety Council, in fact, had as one of its advisory groups one that focused on child exploitation. This included the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the Rati Foundation and YAKIN, or Youth Adult Survivors & Kin in Need.

Former Twitter employee Patricia Cartes, whose job it was to form the council in 2016, said Monday its dissolution "means there's no more checks and balances." Cartes said the company sought to bring a global outlook to the council, with experts from around the world who could relay concerns about how new Twitter policies or products might affect their communities.

She contrasted that with Musk's current practice of surveying his Twitter followers before making a policy change affecting how content gets moderated.

"He doesn't really care as much about what experts think," she said.

[Zanza]

He is now talking about the woke mind virus and following outright Nazis. By Christmas he will post about adenochrom and lizard people.

[Josquius]

I guess the rise in insanity tracks well with the decline in his wealth- the richest people in the planet being the lizard people rather than those shouting about them.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I don't want to try too much to "analyze" Musk because I lack the capacity to psychoanalyze anyone very well, let alone someone I haven't met. I don't think Musk is a full MAGA righty, but I also think when you are behaving as a right-wing troll with a big megaphone primarily advancing the interests of full MAGA righties--the distinction is one without a difference.

I think he is more troll than ideologue, and I think he has that common "mind virus", where he is so annoyed by "wokeism" that it overrides his reasonability and good sense in all other ways politically. In part because politics has a self-reinforcing element. You shit on woke stuff, and then more people on your side start saying mean things about you. This makes you want to make them angrier (especially if you have a troll's personality), and after a few cycles of that everyone hates you, so now you want to embrace the right wing because they are now "your people", even if you've never done much of an analysis of their policies and core ideology, and even if you are opposed to much of that.

Note that this is a guy whose car company would have literally never gotten off the ground without left wing subsidy programs for electric vehicles.

On top of that I think he has garden variety Asperger's spectrum personality issues, and an intolerance of dissent. This leads to more reinforcement of this bad behavior because anyone close to him who would help steer him in a better direction doesn't exist--he likely fires anyone from his inner circle that disagrees with him, and eventually that insures none of them will dare do so.

[grumbler]

(snip)
On top of that I think he has garden variety Asperger's spectrum personality issues, and an intolerance of dissent. This leads to more reinforcement of this bad behavior because anyone close to him who would help steer him in a better direction doesn't exist--he likely fires anyone from his inner circle that disagrees with him, and eventually that insures none of them will dare do so.

That seems likely.  The question then becomes: do we watch Musk today to see what Putin will be tomorrow, or vice-versa?

[HVC]

Guess selling off furniture and odds and ends is a way to make money for Twitter now.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/13/twitter-hq-office-auction-items

[viper37]

There's a wave of piracy on Twitter, lots of accounts reported as being hijacked.  Celebrities, local or not so local, as well as nobodies.

Well, before that happens to a nobody like me, I decided it was time to flush my Twitter account.  Done.

[PJL]

Perhaps it should be rebranded as Twatter.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Twitter's declining ops security might worry me, but as I mentioned a while back I have nothing "real" linked to my Twitter. Pseudonym account, no real life data on it at all, a throwaway email and password, if my account gets hacked I'll just let the hacker have it and move on.

[grumbler]

Boeing/ULA was carrying people to space for many years--remember the shuttle program?

(snip)

It's worth noting Boeing built the space shuttle (specifically the orbiting space plane which was developed by Rockwell and Boeing) in the 1970s and it remains significantly more complicated and capable of advanced missions than anything SpaceX has, 40 years later.

Designing the Space Shuttle doesn't show technical brilliance, it shows the opposite.  One in twenty-six people who flew in the Shuttle died in the Shuttle. One in sixty-two launches resulted in the loss of the vehicle.  Forty percent of the fleet was lost on missions.  Payload costs per weight were more than 30 times what had been promised.  Cost per launch was more than three times the initial estimate.  The launch rate was one-sixth the number required to meet the technical and budgetary requirements.

The Space Shuttle is the classic example of the failure of the US space program prior to SpaceX, and reflects shame on ULA, not pride.  It was gold-plated beyond the tolerance of the technology.

ULA violated what I call "the Feynman Rule:"

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.