He has plenty of people around him who have the knowledge. The problem is that he’s been huffing his own farts for so long, that he believes that he knows everything better than those who that might know more.
I think that he has made two good decisions. With SpaceX he backed the idea of landing reusable boosters. And he got into electric cars early. Of course over the long term he hasn’t managed either company particularly well. He basically hit the jackpot on the roulette wheel and convinced himself that he’s a genius.
That’s what happens, just like that, when someone makes the switch from being an asset to being a liability.
Rich idiot finds out that his sycophants’ opinions are somehow not representative of general society. Tale as old as time.
Why, yes, Your Majesty. Your new clothes are without doubt the most fashionable and of the finest quality!
It took Mark Zuckerberg around 15 years to realise he shouldn’t have untrammelled power over the speech of billions. It took Elon Musk about three days.
I don’t know if I have ever heard more undeserved credit in such a short space. “It took humanity years to work out the parachute. It took Elon Musk about three seconds to realize he should have had one after he had jumped.”
Meh. It’s pretty common for cisgendered white dudes who hail from wealth extracted via violent forms of labor… It’s the mainstay of empire.
Panel four: [shakes fist at sky] “Damn you, woke Coca-Cola company!”
Because he’s a narcissist whose ego has been bruised. He’s not that smart (with “that” turning out to be an increasingly low indicator of intelligence). He was always believing tha Twitter should unquestioningly accept his management solutions - that’s part of why he’s in this pickle to begin with.
Though from what I’m reading, what actually convinced the advertisers was meetings with Elon Musk himself.
Yep, from what I read, literally during the meeting, advertisers were pulling out of Twitter because they were so alarmed by what he said (and didn’t say). It’s really sounding like a 100% self-inflicted injury, so it’s extra rich that he doesn’t get it and is just making it worse with his continued response.
And he’s just beating himself up.
Like Trump, he seems to be pretty good at self-promotion. (In that, even people who “see through them,” tend to give them a lot more credit for things than they actually deserve.) Like Trump, he lucked into wealth to get it all started, too (in Elon’s case, not just the apartheid emeralds, but that dot com he got in on the ground floor before it got sold off at a wildly, wildly over-inflated price).
Or, you know, reality.
Have they really been that critical, though? I am sometimes left with the impression that it’s the people with the most vested interest in keeping Twitter going who are most loudly proclaiming that Twitter matters. It is somewhat reminiscent of how Second Life was endlessly ballyhooed.
There are plenty of sources that say things like, “Twitter has the smallest reach of all social media platforms in terms of advertising audience.” Maybe it’s just nice to imagine that if one company went away all the problems would be solved, or something – one of those cases where if it didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it?
Except that twitter has had a measurable impact on society in recent years, unlike second life. The fact that major political and culture figures use it, and not second life, bears that out. Just look at how Trump used twitter during his political career to not only become president, but to push radical ideas that caused a coup attempt on Jan. 6th. Twitter and it’s reach was a key aspect of his plan to install himself as dictator for life. The fact that he (so far) failed does not mean it’s unimportant.
I mean, maybe YOU have not personally been inconvenienced, but real shit has happened with the aid of twitter that has a real impact on the lives of millions of people.
Blame Canada!
I wasn’t talking about employees. I was talking about advertisers. Employees are expenses to him, not profit centers. Why would he ever do anything for them he doesn’t have to.
Thank you Papasan for my first real laugh of the day
So many marginalized groups have found ways to connect and organize for advocacy on Twitter-- people of color, LGBTQ+, Leftists, and workers’ rights advocates, among others-- and the deliberate dismantling of the platform they’ve harnessed to their needs will hurt their causes. Sure, they might be able to reunite on other spaces like Tumblr or Mastodon, but even the time it takes to regroup and reunify their efforts will cost momentum… and the splintering will likely offer less overall visibility for their posts.
I’m not much on conspiracy theories, but to be honest, I’m not surprised that an attempt to shut down voices on a major media platform is happening just days before what’s bound to be a highly contested election…
he’s shouting “stop resisting” as he tases himself
He’s shouting “stop resisting” as he tases himself, and in so doing electrocutes all the marginalised groups who thought they had a safe space to communicate with each other and with the wider world.
And it’s not even the faceless corporate behemoth deciding that Google+ wasn’t profitable or core business or whatever, and just closing it down and leaving all the marginalised communities there to scatter and die, most never to recover.
This is long and drawn out and painful and it’s all because one manchild would rather spend tens of billions of dollars than let anyone laugh at him.
Is he prepping for his own personal version of the Dolchstoßlegende? “We didn’t lose, we were betrayed!”
It’s very Trumpian: just as Trump started declaring that the election was rigged months before the first vote was cast, so that he could claim that he hasn’t lost, Musk seems to be preparing a version of events in which he has someone else to blame for whatever goes wrong at Twitter.
“It wasn’t that I totally fucked everything up from start to finish, it was Antifa.”
I think Musk should try to track down the guy who spent months telling the world that Twitter had a massive bot problem, that the company was horrendously run, that it was a hotbed of bias, etc. etc. If advertisers were paying attention to that guy, no wonder they left the platform in droves.
Are there organized boycotts of Twitter advertisers? My first guess is he made it up because advertisers decided independently to leave for greener pastures. New variation on the false flag: Musk shoots self in foot, thinks lefty activists did it.
