Originally published at: Twitter the only platform not "bought and paid for," says man who bought and paid for Twitter | Boing Boing
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Well he certainly paid for it didn’t he?
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There’s the start of the “THEY don’t want you to see it” gambit for when he shuts it down and/or it gets banned in the EU
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ah, stratospheric business-speak. Did you know that “Non-Profits” make a helluva lot of profit? (“Calling these hospitals nonprofits can be confusing. It doesn’t mean they can’t make money”)
so, really hating to attempt at being a billionaire whisperer but one suspects that “bought and paid for” in this musky context is supposed to mean other than …‘bought and paid for’ yet instead something more like with a singular established agenda. Of course Xitter does have a singular agenda, and its name is musk. -sigh-
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Is it paid for? Let’s ask his creditors if he’s paid them yet.
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A case could be made that he’s now deliberately running the platform he paid $44-billiion for with borrowed money as a non-profit. But once again the incompetence on display here is that he doesn’t understand how Xitter’s business model works.
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He should double down and invest another $44 billion into Xitter.
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So he’s using the phrase “bought and paid for” idiomatically to tell us the site is somehow unbiased and not in the pocket of some mega-corporation like Newscorp or Disney.
Which implies the content is not censored based on corporate interests.
(ahem) “lol.”
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Most non-profits (or at least the couple I worked for, anyway) had to disclose in their filings what they did with the leftover revenue from the expenses. one (a credit union) used it as a buffer against unexpected expanses, IIRC*, the convention I worked for used the extra money to ‘seed’ next years convention**, and the third was a church, and a year with leftover money was a rare year indeed.
(* that was 20+ years ago, and the rules have probably changed since I worked for them.
(** at least the money that the treasurer didn’t embezzle- the rest of the board was pretty certain that was occurring, but couldn’t easily prove it, nor could the board expell them due to the way the bylaws were written.)
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Not only did Elon buy and pay for Twitter, he’s also requiring that people buy a blue check mark in order for their “free speech” to be seen by more people. 
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I imagine that’s not the “they” he’s going to use.
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Sure, it’s unbiased. Its content is unbiased from Elon’s perspective.
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This seems like the plutocrat’s equivalent of the standard “what I stand for is common sense; what you stand for is ‘political’” formulation that crops up a lot.
Musk enjoying economic influence is just natural law at work; anyone else doing so is evidence of a conspiracy; increasingly frequently one he’s willing to identify as either a woke or a jew conspiracy.
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Is telling people you’re the only one they can trust a cult move, an abusive relationship move, or both? 
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…and paid for with money from massive corporate interests to whom he is now beholden.
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I have questions…
What will cause Xitter to ultimately die?
A. When it reaches a point where Y advertising revenue cant sustain Z debt?
Or
B. When users fall to a minimum threshold of X million?
Or…
C. Some other reason?
Cos we must be close to situation A now, and it seems to me that B is further off, but is inevitable.
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Or, when he blames George Soros, both.
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That’s a major problem with capitalism, these types of situations can carry on forever, or it can evaporate in an instant… Because it’s really all just… made up shit (with regards to profit, debt, and what have you). Smaller businesses could never operate in this manner, but if you’re a massive tech company, you can spin enough shit to keep going…
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“X is the only platform you can trust for honest information.
All the others are bought and paid for.”
Says the man* who spends all his time actively spreading disinformation on Twitter (and creating dynamics which encourage spreading disinformation), after having bought and paid for it. Zero self-awareness. Zero.
*Specifically anti-worker billionaire corporatist. You know, a man of the people.
Also he is a massive corporate interest.
Yeah, I keep wondering this. It’s all a bunch of uncertainties and fuzzy numbers and decisions being made based on feelings rather than numbers anyways… Elno’s got a bunch of debt he can’t pay back now and he’s losing his remaining advertisers and users, yet it limps along, even though it makes no sense.
This alone is really fuzzy - what’s a “user” in Twitter terms? An account that still exists, but is completely inactive? One that’s used, but only to post once a year or even just read, not post at all? One where they only log in rarely, and don’t even read 90% of what’s in their Twitter feed? A bot account? There seems to be substantial evidence that Twitter is already a shell of what it once was, with a huge number of completely inactive or barely active accounts (where at best someone might glance at their account every so often) and follower numbers don’t mean anything because most of the users never see the posts they follow. The answer to what a “user” is seems to be “whatever is most advantageous to Twitter at this particular time.” Elno’s been working hard to obfuscate the reality, using specific metrics that don’t mean anything, and even those numbers seem to be highly inaccurate. So we’ll never know what the actual numbers are, nor what they mean.
Seemingly doubly so when it comes to (advertiser-supported, “free”) social media. Even the numbers aren’t real. How many people are viewing Facebook videos? Let’s make up some numbers, no one can hold us to account!
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