I think in this case the returns come in the form of underwriting Musk’s assault on norms.
Because that is what this is turning out to be - a replay of Trump’s assault on political norms, but flipped to a corporate angle
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Called it!
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They’re providing special incentives for buyers. The loser of the lottery has to have dinner with Elon.
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Paranoia strikes again.
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Brianna Wu nails it. And my first try at linking to a Mastodon post.
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Sorry to post again, but this article is a wonderful, insightful read as well.
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Also, sorry to Chuck Wendig, but I don’t think anyone should trust Hive Social.
Despite the massive growth, the social media site continued to be staffed by just two people, neither of whom had much of a background in security.
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Even more layoffs.
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Musk is next!
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First, that article’s link to The Information (which looks paywalled) contains a Yahoo! Shopping redirect.
By The Information’s estimate, Twitter’s headcount has shrunk by about 75 percent…
With the extra 100 employees who were fired by not committing to the email about NDAs, which was leaked, plus those who couldn’t commute to HQ instead of San Jose, my guess is 80%.
Additional casualties among the team responsible for keeping Twitter up and running are likely to add to fears about how unreliable the site may become in the near future.
There were some accounts replying to @bestofdyingtwit today that they, too, were seeing their timeline appear empty. Some said it had happened to them before Elon.
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oh yeah, that’ll go well. from the article:
According to The Information, Musk tapped Tesla engineer Sheen Austin to run the social media website’s infrastructure team following Abramson’s departure.
experience in the domain? who needs it!? /s
( it’d be doubly awesome if the person was a mechanical engineer )
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This video is quite interesting mostly because of what that Elon fanboy omits.
College students might continue to be Elon’s bane. Here’s a site by someone using a University of Waterloo email address, which claims it is dedicated to making a readable version of the messages released by the Delaware Court of Chancery on September 29th. I recognize some of the messages, but there’s way too much to confirm it right now.
From the Background on the site.
On Sept 29th 2022, Delaware’s Court of Chancery released hundreds of text messages to and from Elon Musk. However, Delaware’s Court of Chancery put all these text on a table that was printed, redacted and scanned - rendering them basically unreadable. I spent days scanning through these documents to build this website so that you can read these text messages like actual text messages.
Slate has a link to that document, too. It is 40 pages long. There are still some benefits to the PDF. Messages are listed chronologically and they all have timestamps. You can see when two conversations overlap. The website groups conversations by the other party and timestamps are only on the start of each batch; you don’t see how much time passed between replies. The “Unknown” group could be multiple people.
The site does have a search box. It doesn’t seem to be working for me, other than the labels on the conversation groups, but that could be a big help if that gets a good index later. Not sure how you would search emoji.
ETA: Spotted this on Newsie.
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I admit, I kinda skipped that bit. I just found his opinion of what is happening on Twitter with its idiot owner valuable. The only thing I knew about Hive was that it, like all other kinda-Twitters, was not prepared at all for the swarm of refugees.
I suspect the one thing Mastodon has going for it in the long run is that it isn’t so much a service as it is a protocol, a common API that services can use to talk to each other. It’s more like the old USENET for me, with the server you register with deciding which other servers it will talk to, which it won’t. A throwback in a way to the original Internet.
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Musk trying to find investors eager to pay just as much per share as he did even after he drove the already-overpriced company into the ground makes me wonder if he ever tried to resell that McLaren F1 for the $1 Million he paid for it just months before he did this:
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He tried to switch on the “autopilot”, didn’t he.
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The actual, eye-rollingly fitting story behind the crash is that Musk was trying to show off for another asshole billionaire:
Around this time, PayPal was in need of investors, and Musk was collaborating with Peter Thiel - co-founder of the financial business Confinity. Musk was behind the wheel of a McLaren F1 on a critical day in 2000, driving to a meeting with Thiel. When the two were cruising up Palo Alto’s Sand Hill Road, Thiel allegedly turned to Musk and inquired what the automobile could accomplish, uttering the words, “So what can this thing do?”
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Clearly one of those “what if” / “fate fucked up” moments in history.
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Curse those infernal airbags!
And also the safety systems in the car that allowed said airbags to walk away unharmed!
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