A cunning plan indeed, sir! I tip my hat on admiration.
One tiny aside, though: Twitter never actually made any money. At least nowhere near anything Tesla made. And Tesla and making money from anything other than selling carbon emission offsets and a grotesk overvaluation based on hot air is another interesting story. Some might be tempted to call it Enronesk.
(Resident Googlers, feel free to chime in with statistcs to show that Twitter actually turned a profit in quarter x in year y, how Tesla made money from making cars in year z. The overall point still stands if you look at the entire tineline, the capital that was poured in over time, and factor in the clever financial engineering.)
I could see people giving restored Twitter another chance, but not with him there. And since he already tried putting in a puppet CEO to cover for him that’s not going to help. He’s stuck with the fact that he is toxic.
But it didn’t lose boatloads of money at anything like it’s current rate so returning to the former business model would still look like a win by comparison.
It also had real “brand energy”, people imagined it was a force for good and for discovery of interesting things. Brands wanted to be, and paid to be, associated with it. Celebrities in every field gave their content and engagement for free to be part of that discourse, it allowed ordinary people to imagine they were communicating as peers with our betters.
They are not getting that back any time soon. Or, being honest, any time at all. It’s over.
Just before or just after Tesla fully autonomous self driving?
It’s the most technology he’s ever seen, and you know, he’s seen a lot of technology and recognised that, yes, it is technology. So he really knows what he’s talking about.
It will take EM at least that long to lobotomise all the woke data out of his AIs. Yes, his “smart” AIs will be completely useless to anyone who isn’t fash, but they will agree with him and being a yes bot is the only definition of smart that matters to EM.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is very principled about free speech — except when he’s making money from authoritarians.
How the fuck can anyone claim that EM is principled about free speech? It’s always been about conditional speech, the freedom to be far-right but not to be anything else.
He is very much for unconditional free speech. For himself. For all the peons, they are free to agree with him, support him or parrot him, whichever they choose. See? Free speech!
