Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[celedhring]

The thing with Tesla is that they entered the market when EVs were just a novelty for the rich and started launching progressively cheaper cars, while they built production capacity and scale. It's a very impressive industrial success story (they also benfited a lot from public policy, too).

[Admiral Yi]

I'm a Tesla shareholder.  I could conceivably get a proxy motion to shitcan Elon.  How would you vote in that situation?

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

In other news, it looks like Twitter is doing massive layoffs tomorrow.

Saw what was supposed to be the email circulated to staff, outlining the process: https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1588327845348093952

If the email is indeed real, I'm also going to take a moment to scoff at an email like that being signed "Twitter" rather than the name of whoever owns the decision - or at the very last, someone who's been delegated the responsibility to communicate it.

"Tomorrow"

They cut off my (and hundreds of others) internal access before you even posted this.   

[The Brain]

Hello there!

[Grey Fox]

I'm a Tesla shareholder.  I could conceivably get a proxy motion to shitcan Elon.  How would you vote in that situation?

Yes. CEOs are not heroes.

[The Larch]

Occam's razor. He's just not that bright.

Or, going by D&D logic ( ), he's smart, but unwise.

[mongers]

In other news, it looks like Twitter is doing massive layoffs tomorrow.

Saw what was supposed to be the email circulated to staff, outlining the process: https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1588327845348093952

If the email is indeed real, I'm also going to take a moment to scoff at an email like that being signed "Twitter" rather than the name of whoever owns the decision - or at the very last, someone who's been delegated the responsibility to communicate it.

"Tomorrow"

They cut off my (and hundreds of others) internal access before you even posted this.   

Hello vM.

Hope it goes well or you; but as you're a talented guy I'm sure that would be no sweat.

[Syt]

In other news, it looks like Twitter is doing massive layoffs tomorrow.

Saw what was supposed to be the email circulated to staff, outlining the process: https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1588327845348093952

If the email is indeed real, I'm also going to take a moment to scoff at an email like that being signed "Twitter" rather than the name of whoever owns the decision - or at the very last, someone who's been delegated the responsibility to communicate it.

"Tomorrow"

They cut off my (and hundreds of others) internal access before you even posted this.   

This wise man offers you sage advice:



(In case it wasn't clear, I'm being sarcastic )

[OttoVonBismarck]

The thing with Tesla is that they entered the market when EVs were just a novelty for the rich and started launching progressively cheaper cars, while they built production capacity and scale. It's a very impressive industrial success story (they also benfited a lot from public policy, too).

The main thing missed though is the only reason Tesla has been able to do that is not because they started luxury and scaled up, but because Musk is a modern day P.T. Barnum who was able to get investors to pour many billions of dollars into Tesla when all of its financials and other performance for like 8 years made it look like every other startup car maker--a manufacturing company losing tons of money every quarter.

That's his real superpower with Tesla, and no other company that has attempted to break into the car market has ever had that before, which is why they've all failed. He didn't find a magical way to break into the car market without operating at a loss for years--he did that part, what he found was a way to operate at a loss for years and not go out of business by convincing the open market to recapitalize him multiple times.

[Valmy]

Less so in real politics but as i have mentioned before in the real world and online I'm definitely spotting this.

They're switching over from climate change isn't real towards Evs as a direct one to one solution for climate change where we just swap out Ice for Evs and problem solved, no need to change anything around urban design or public transport.

Seems like progress to me! At least from that demographic...

[The Larch]

Less so in real politics but as i have mentioned before in the real world and online I'm definitely spotting this.

They're switching over from climate change isn't real towards Evs as a direct one to one solution for climate change where we just swap out Ice for Evs and problem solved, no need to change anything around urban design or public transport.

Seems like progress to me! At least from that demographic...

It's a bit of a sliding scale. It starts at "climate change is not real", then it evolves into "climate change exists but it's a natural phenomenon mankind has nothing to do with", then it turns into "climate change is happening, mankind is responsible but there's nothing that we can do about it" and then into "climate change is real and we can do something about it but it's not as urgent as it's claimed to be". If this demographic is now thinking that EVs are the golden bullet that will get rid of the problem (which I doubt) is a new step in that scale.

[OttoVonBismarck]

At this point I find the Twitter stuff more interesting as a business story than a culture / speech / social network story. I think the feared changes to Twitter that will somehow make the world worse for disinformation or hate speech are fairly exaggerated. Elon will want to at least not lose money on Twitter which will require advertisers. Twitter (and all other social media) was already contributing significantly to the spread of misinformation. I think Musk is unlikely to make these things worse, not out of trust in Musk but more out of a belief we were already rolling around at the bottom of the barrel. And that is because I think being incubators of misinformation is actually an innate trait of a large open social network, I think there are fairly limited things that can be done to stop that.

Facebook is already a lot more egregious in my mind because they promote a few things that create more powerful echo chambers. Twitter is more of an open discussion platform, unless you opt to be a private Tweeter, which few people do. On Facebook a lot of discussions happen in post comments which generally are friends only, Facebook Groups which are notorious incubators of extremism and misinformation, and in news article comments. All three of these things are algorithmically likely to be serving up ever more outrageous aka "engaging" content. Additionally, all of them tend to be insular; people largely stick to commenting on news articles from news sources they actually follow. People are insular with news now, groups are insular by design, and most people restrict most of their Facebook visibility to friends only so personal posts are communicated to a self-selected audience that are going to disproportionately likely be an echo chamber.

[The Larch]

BREAKING: Elon Musk has directed Twitter's teams to find over $1 billion in annual infrastructure cost savings by cutting cloud services and extra server space, per Reuters.

Back to 130 characters per tweet (unless you pay for a premium package)?

[Sheilbh]

If they went back to 140 characters that would be a very good thing

[DGuller]

Zero character limit would be even better.  You can still tweet a thread if you have a lot of wisdom to share.