Originally published at: One of the lawyers who won a $49 million judgment against Alex Jones has now filed suit for client in defamation suit against Elon Musk | Boing Boing
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My heartiest well-wishes to the plaintiffs, but if damages were awarded in this case equalling $49 million, that would be around .02% of Musk’s personal wealth.
By comparison, if you had $500,000 is assets, that would be the equivalent of being fined $100.
This is why it seems highly likely to me that no one and nothing is going to be able to ever constrain Musk, and we’re stuck with him for the rest of his natural life. It’s literally extremely difficult to even imagine what it would be like to have that much money.
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always erring in favor of a right-wing narrative, of course.
Add to the list his mocking Zelensky for wanting more Western aid against the invasion of far-right hero Putin.
If he stops servicing his debt for the Twitter purchase we’ll see some constraints put on him by the banks and by the Bonesaw clan. It won’t stop him from spouting fascist talking points, but losing billions will help demolish the myth he’s some kind of super-genius.
That’s already started to an extent. Before 2022, any article here would bring out a bunch of his fanbois, some of them regulars. They’re long gone now.
“Every billionaire is a policy failure.”
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Juanita Jean’s boy, Mark, is the lawyer bringing the suit. Go git 'em, Mark!
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There are two purposes of a defamation suit. The secondary one is to punish the defamer. The primary purpose is to compensate the person who was defamed for the damages they suffered. So the fact that this won’t really hurt Musk very much doesn’t mean the suit is pointless. Plus, Musk’s tweets are still up. At the very least, hopefully this suit will force him to take them down so when potential employers of this young man Google his name, that tweet isn’t the first thing they see. Maybe the first thing they’ll see is that he took on Elon Musk and won.
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Is there something about how this particular college guy was Jewish, and was labeled a neo-nazi and part of a false-flag operation? I know that in these sorts of ‘something is seen on social media and misinterpreted’ situations, there can be these immediate mistakes, like I seem to recall happening with the Boston Marathon bombing. However this one seems too… on the nose. Or is it that the disappointment from Musk is that this supposed neo-nazi was really a government plant instead of a real neo-nazi (and it’s just ironic the person is Jewish?)
I think it has more to do with all of the harassment that Brody had to endure for no reason whatsoever. Everything else is rather tangential, and who needs more tangents in an already messed up situation.
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That’s what punitive damages (vs. actual damages) were invented for. Just as someone as wealthy as Alex Jones would be on the hook for a larger monetary punishment than some random middle-class internet hobgoblin, someone as rich as Elon Musk would be on the hook for a larger monetary punishment than Alex Jones.
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Not a coincidence. Bigots love to promote “false flag” narratives which blame minorities for their own oppression.
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Um…
Dude isn’t immortal, and money only goes so far.
His ‘natural life’ could be a whole lot shorter, if the damage that he’s trying to inflict on the world ever comes to fruition.
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Dude has managed to piss off a lot of people, including nation-states. Good odds his cause of death will be something other than natural…
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Excellent point; he is in hoc to Prince Bonesaw…
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And his meddling with Starlink access has pissed off powerful people in Ukraine.
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Bingo. The Connecticut verdicts against Jones came close to $1 billion in compensatory and $473 million in punitives. Even though the jury was not supposed to consider Jones’ odiousness on the compensatory verdict, it inevitably creeps in leading to large compensatory awards whether or not punitives are on the table.
Plus, the defendant is just a paper billionaire. Adding a large liability to his balance sheet could have far more damaging effects than just the dollar amount of the verdict.
Arrgh. I read the article and it said the suit was filed in Texas because the defendant lives there. But I understand punitives are severely capped in Texas. Hopefully the jury can hit him hard on the non-economic damages.
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Another excellent point.
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Yeah, there’s the people he owes money to, the people/countries he’s in competition with (over rockets, cars), there’s the issues arising from his control over Twitter… so many reasons, so many people.
Worse than that, with Starlink he’s put himself in between Ukraine and Putin. If he stops pleasing Putin, well… it wouldn’t be the first time a billionaire “fell out a window,” shall we say.
Likewise, with Twitter, he’s put himself, very personally, in the middle of a lot of things. He’s been caving pretty hard to authoritarian governments looking to censor (or spread disinformation on, or dox users of) Twitter (Russia, China, India, Turkey, etc.), who have usually used Twitter employees around the world as hostages for their demands, but now that Twitter very much has a central figure, he’s a target. A target for both the authoritarians and those who were harmed or had friends/family killed as a result of Musk’s personal actions. Given how Musk is running Twitter purely on arbitrary whims, he can’t hide behind “policy” or the actions of his employees as cover when something happens - even when he isn’t personally responsible for that thing in particular.
I would honestly not be surprised if there was a quite substantial list of various groups that would like to do away with him.
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Possibly enough so that even Mars wouldn’t be safe for Musk. 
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