Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[grumbler]

Tbf, Musk leveraging Tesla's stock price to buy himself another company before TSLA comes back to Earth is a smart move. Just not twitter.

Yeah. it's like leveraging your shares in RMS Titanic to buy control of Exxon Valdez.

[Barrister]

Tbf, Musk leveraging Tesla's stock price to buy himself another company before TSLA comes back to Earth is a smart move. Just not twitter.

Reminds me of the AOL-Time Warner merger (which was actually just structured as the purchase of Time Warner by AOL).

Within a year the former AOL stockholders still held shares in the successful Time Warner, while Time Warner shareholders saw the value of their stick decline precipitously.

[viper37]

Elon Musk Suggested a Gay Former Twitter Employee Sexualized Kids. He's Now in Hiding

On Saturday, Musk tweeted a brief, out-of-context excerpt from Roth's 300-page doctoral dissertation.

"Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis," he tweeted. Roth's 2016 thesis, which is titled Gay Data, analyzes the LGBTQ+ hookup app Grindr.

In the actual excerpt, Roth concludes that Grindr isn't "a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers," but because young queer people use the platform anyway, it "should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases."

Nowhere in the dissertation does Roth advocate for the sexualization of children, but spreading the false claim that LGBTQ+ people are sexual predators who are "grooming" children has become a popular smear tactic for right-wing hatemongers, particularly after Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law went into effect in August. This is the exact kind of misinformation that's led to devastating real-life instances of violence against queer and trans people throughout 2022.

CNN reports that Roth has recently had to flee his home due to an escalation in threats oagainst him.
Roth has been the target of attacks online since Musk began unveiling the "Twitter Files," a set supposed excerpts from internal communications that Musk has been releasing with the help of right-wing journalists Matt Taibibi and Bari Weiss. On Monday, Weiss tweeted a screenshots that appear to show internal Twitter communications in which Roth and others deliberate whether to ban Donald Trump's account. 

"Watching Elon launch a digital mob against his former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, an openly gay Jewish man, is one of the most vile and disgusting things I've ever seen," Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic, tweeted on Saturday. "He's putting Yoel's life in danger and he knows it. It's sick, twisted, and sociopathic."
Knowing the widespread discourse around grooming and that, as recently as one weekend ago, Proud Boys stormed a drag show accusing the queer people inside of grooming, it's no stretch to say that Musk was fully aware that he was putting this former employee's life in danger.

Musk even doubled down on his homophobic tweets on Sunday, when he tweeted that his pronouns were "Prosecute/Fauci." The billionaire once claimed that his acquisition of Twitter wouldn't turn the platform into a "free-for-all hellscape," but based on recent events, it's hard to believe.

You know, I'm not so sure we need 50 like him.  He may have brought money to Tesla and SpaceX, but at this point, he's harming a lot of people, and hurting investors' returns on Tesla.

[Josquius]

Oh, gay people are paedophiles. Is that a thing again? Are flairs back too?

[The Brain]

"Watching Elon launch a digital mob against his former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, an openly gay Jewish man, is one of the most vile and disgusting things I've ever seen," Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic, tweeted on Saturday. "He's putting Yoel's life in danger and he knows it. It's sick, twisted, and sociopathic."

"But not bad enough to make me stop using Twitter. Hell no."

[OttoVonBismarck]

A decent chunk of media accounts I follow have actually deplatformed since the Yoel Roth thing. It also looks like Musk has just started banning critical journalists--accounts from NYT and WaPo journalists that had been critical of Musk have been suspended or banned in the last day.

The thing is, I think for most people media accounts in general are one of the main value propositions of Twitter. Whether people use it to keep up with the news, sports etc--it is the media creating a lot of the highest visibility "content" on the platform, if he starts going after them I don't really see how Twitter doesn't enter a pretty severe decline. There's lots of platforms out there for right wing trolling, if that's all Musk wants Twitter to be, it boggles the mind why he paid $44bn for something that will decay down to 4chan's size / influence.

[Eddie Teach]

Is 44 billion really too much to destroy Twitter? 

This thought reminds me of the guy who wants to buy Friends to remove the laugh track.

[DGuller]

Let's assume for a moment that Twitter was a valuable service that is not worth destroying.  If that is the case, then I think the whole Twitter saga is revealing some flaws in the ideology of "the shareholder value is paramount".  The people running Twitter were put in a perverse position where they had to force Musk to vandalize their company, because the shareholders would get a bigger payoff for that than for any other outcome.  It's like lawyers sentenced to death appealing to the court to have their sentences carried out, for the sake of rule of law.

You don't always have absolute rights to do whatever you want to the property you own.  Musk can't just buy an Empire State building and demolish it because it gives him a boner.  Maybe the same concept should extend to other things that while privately owned, are nevertheless valuable to a whole lot of people.  It's not only shareholders that are the stakeholders.

[OttoVonBismarck]

CNN is saying if there isn't a satisfactory explanation for the random journalist bannings they will be pulling out of Twitter.

[DGuller]

I imagine all credible media outlets would order a boycott of Twitter, journalists seem pretty good about sticking up for each other regardless of affiliation.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Let's assume for a moment that Twitter was a valuable service that is not worth destroying.  If that is the case, then I think the whole Twitter saga is revealing some flaws in the ideology of "the shareholder value is paramount".  The people running Twitter were put in a perverse position where they had to force Musk to vandalize their company, because the shareholders would get a bigger payoff for that than for any other outcome.  It's like lawyers sentenced to death appealing to the court to have their sentences carried out, for the sake of rule of law.

You don't always have absolute rights to do whatever you want to the property you own.  Musk can't just buy an Empire State building and demolish it because it gives him a boner.  Maybe the same concept should extend to other things that while privately owned, are nevertheless valuable to a whole lot of people.  It's not only shareholders that are the stakeholders.

Yeah, it's hard because with a building like the Empire State building you have tenants with tenancy rights, and it is also a historic landmark. There are well established areas of law protecting those vested interests that are specific limits to the rights of the property owner. We really have no legal standards like that for social media. Should we? I think that's a real thorny issue.

Something Musk has said is that he bought Twitter because he wanted to "protect" the public square, and that the public square is important.

But Twitter was never the public square. The metaphor doesn't work. Public squares are physical, community owned places, that were what they were because no one owned them and because they were central to the communities in which they served. Public squares also were not intrinsically good--like Ezra Klein pointed out recently, they simply reflected their local community. Some public squares were the meeting place for important movements. Other public squares were the venues for lynchings.

Some time ago I had said a federated, decentralized service like Mastodon could never replace Twitter, and I think I was right--but since then I've moved into Mastodon and started using it, and I find it...pretty good? One of my big concerns is the nature of Mastodon instances is some random open source enthusiast nerd owns your instance, and they can randomly get bored and shut it down or impose weird rules. So I found that the small Norwegian company that runs the Vivaldi browser are also running their own Mastodon instance, using their existing enterprise servers (a big issue some Mastodon operators are running into is they are just throwing them up on cloudhosts like AWS or Azure, and quickly getting hit with unsustainable bandwidth charges.) I think finding a nice, organization controlled Mastodon instance is the way to go.

I stand by it won't replace Twitter, but I get most major news on Mastodon, and a large % of my law/legal/policy follows on Twitter have migrated to Mastodon. My big loss is Sports, which has minimal presence on Mastodon. I'm fine to keep using Twitter for sports, if something better comes along for sports I'd also be fine just having two services / apps.

I had a blocker in my mind that you can't replace Twitter with something smaller / more decentralized, and you can't--but that could be fine, right? Like we're all people who were big internet nerds in the 90s before it turned into what it is today. Communities like Languish used to be just how the internet was...and it was...fine? This idea that we need these giant social media platforms controlled by billionaires...that design them to drive engagement and angst...I'm just not sure that's true. I think there is actually real value in seeing something like Twitter (and even moreso Facebook, which I have always thought is a much worse actor but just isn't in the crosshairs right now) decay off. Like I've said, "die" is too strong a word, remember even MySpace is still alive. But decline in importance / userbase? That's a good thing.

[Valmy]

So Musk's big effort to secure free speech on twitter is to ban critics?

That doesn't make any sense.

This is going to create a huge hole in the market and some competitor will pop up and all the journalists will just go there. It's not like it is going to seriously inconvenience anybody it is just going to hurt himself.

This is clearly personal for him and not business. It is like he just hated twitter, the company and a lot of the customers and just decided to take it down. Nothing of value is really lost because people will just elsewhere. I don't get this, even as a personal vendetta and I certainly don't get it as a business move. There is not even some moral crusade against banning people on social media since he himself is doing it.

A whole bunch of money wasted and sturm und drang for no particular reason.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Nah, he loved the fuck out of Twitter. He loved that he had 70-80 million followers (his #s before the purchase) and he loved shitposting and trolling, sometimes to the tune of hundreds of replies a day. The dude was a serial Tweeter.

I think he just hated that a) other people could troll him, b) there were rules on Twitter that some people he liked kept breaking and being suspended for and....in his mind that justified spending $44bn to buy it and run Twitter as a personal clubhouse where he'd abuse his authority like a second rate reddit mod of a random subreddit.

It's his money and he can do what he wants with it but it is crazily wasteful on a pretty unprecedented scale. He has destroyed any genuine "societal value" Twitter had (I'm skeptical it really had much--I'm just repeating Elon's claims as to why he bought Twitter.) I don't think he was making a business decision when he purchased it, but it is obviously a terrible business decision. The worst thing for Musk is I think it's clearly going to massively tank his reputation (in fact I think it already has), and I think his biggest other business is actually at real risk of reputational harm.

[viper37]

So Musk's big effort to secure free speech on twitter is to ban critics?

That doesn't make any sense.

This is going to create a huge hole in the market and some competitor will pop up and all the journalists will just go there. It's not like it is going to seriously inconvenience anybody it is just going to hurt himself.

This is clearly personal for him and not business. It is like he just hated twitter, the company and a lot of the customers and just decided to take it down. Nothing of value is really lost because people will just elsewhere. I don't get this, even as a personal vendetta and I certainly don't get it as a business move. There is not even some moral crusade against banning people on social media since he himself is doing it.

A whole bunch of money wasted and sturm und drang for no particular reason.

I once heard the tale of a telecom CEO, back then, local to Quebec, since then, sold to an Albertan company, who went to a bar and wanted a drink after the last call. 

Since the waitress refused to serve him, he asked to speak to the boss.  The boss obviously refused to serve him.  So he asked how much for the bar and he bought it on the spot and then got his drink.

Probably partly untrue, but he did end up with a small bar.  But it gives you an idea of what rich people will do to get what they want.  It's not always about business when you have money.

[Syt]

The banning of the journalists - is it related to the account Musk banned that tweeted the whereabouts of his private jet (and also jets of other people of note)? I saw him posting something that he was ok with people criticizing him ( ) but that doxxing was off limits.

Now, I'm general in favor of protection of privacy, but I feel he may be barking up the wrong tree. From what I understand the guy who had the twitter accounts for tracking famous peoples' private planes made use of publicly available data, i.e. he didn't access any info that wasn't readily available to pretty much anyone in the world.

Instead of blocking such an account, the better question would be whether such data should be out in the public domain or not in the first place (which is definitely a matter worth discussing IMHO).