A Timeline of Elon's Twitter Mistakes.
You know that scene in The Simpsons where Sideshow Bob steps on a bunch of rakes? That's wha tElon's handling of Twitter has been like so far. Except that he deliberately stepped on all the rakes, because he thought he'd be smart enough to not get hit by them. Starting around January, Elon Musk starts buying Twitter stock. Lots of it. He looks at this enormous, flailing company, which in the past 10 years has only posted an annual profit twice, and by March became the single largest shareholder. On April 4th musk discloses his stake in the company and Twitter's stock price jumps by 27 percent as a result. We can use this as a gauge of the
strength of his reputation at this point; Merely by being involved in Twitter, Twitter is perceived by the financial class as far more valuable. On April 5th Twitter announces Musk will join its board of directors. Internally, employees are freaking out that musk might come along and fuck up the whole company. We in the biz call that foreshadowing. Many are wondering if this is even real or just memes, which is not a typical thing to worry about in a multi-billion dollar corporate buyout.
The New York Times reports, "'Twitter has always suffered more than its fair share of dysfunction', said Jason Goldman who is on Twitter's founding team and served on its board of directors in the past. 'But at least we weren't being actively trolled by prospective board members using the product we created." On April 10th Twitter announced actually never mind, forget all that, Elon Musk is not going to join the board of directors. Turns out he didn't want to. So just... within five days he had reversed course on the thing he spent several billion dollars to do. To explain his reasoning,
Musk tweeted a meme that he was going Goblin mode. Epic. This tweet has since been deleted. This will become a pattern moving forward, Elon desperately wants the approval of Twitter shit-posters, so he throws together, like, 2005s impact-font memes, and he's just so XD random, and sometimes he just steals someone else's meme and crops out their username so they don't get any credit. It does seem like a great deal of his motivation stems from wanting to impress people on Twitter, which is quite literally the most pathetic motivation a human being can have. On April 14th Musk offers to buy Twitter for 43 billion dollars, roughly four times the projected annual cost to end Global hunger by 2030, according to a 2016 report from The International Institute for sustainable development. Musk's stated reasoning for buying the website are twofold: Firstly, he claims to want to protect free speech on the platform. He claims that he is a free speech absolutist, and as we will see, no he's not. For example later when he purchases Twitter, he will routinely fire
anyone who criticizes him, or just you know anyone he feels like. So his real issue is what he claims is a left-wing bias in Twitter moderation, which is you know, horseshit. Secondly he claims to want to remove the Bots and spam accounts from the website. I don't know why that would matter to him, or
anyone, because it seems all websites have spam and Bots, but Elon is very upset that Twitter has them for some specific reason. That same day, fellow parasite Jeff Bezos suggested that Elon convert a portion of Twitter San Francisco HQ into a homeless shelter. Elon tweeted a poll on Twitter asking his followers whether he should just make this whole thing a homeless shelter, because no one goes into the office anyway. Musk insisted he was being completely serious, and the Tweet has since been deleted. In case you attempted to think for even a second that musk gives even a single solitary shit about the unhoused, it seems this particular idea is motivated more by spite.
As we will see Elon seems to have a particular dislike for Twitter's work from home polic,y instated during the beginning of the enormous plague currently killing millions of people, he has routinely downplayed and tweeted misinformation about. Which shouldn't be surprising given that he vigorously campaigned to have a Tesla Factory reopened before it was legal for them to do so in Alameda County. Predictably this resulted in hundreds of cases of covid-19 being reported at that plant. He just fucking hates work from home policies in general, I'm not really sure why, I think just because it provides any sort of comfort to workers. On April 15th Twitter instituted a poison pill provision that would be triggered if any shareholder holds 15 percent or more of the shares. From what I understand, which is not a lot, that's business boy talk designed to make Elon put up or shut up. On April 25th, Twitter accepts Elon's bid, which is of course provisional on the basis
that he can actually raise the funds to do it. Also in the event that for whatever reason either party fails to complete the deal a one billion dollar cancellation fee is owed to the other party. Which would become relevant later, if say, one party tried to back out on really spurious grounds. We in the biz call that foreshadowing. Over the next few days, Musk sells 8.5 billion dollars of Tesla stock. Over the next few weeks, he acquires 46 billion in commitments from like... I don't know, random crypto
guys and hedge funds or whatever, and he does so by claiming he'll quintuple Twitter's Revenue by 2028. Using such cutting-edge business strategies as somehow getting 69 million people (epic) to subscribe to Twitter Blue by 2025 at a price point of three dollars a month. Twitter blue is a service that, at the time, allowed you to not get ads on Twitter and threw in some like subscriptions to newspapers and shit. He gets rid of both of those features when he takes over. He also planned to somehow bring Twitter's payment service (which I did not know existed) from a projected 12 million in 2023, to 1.3 billion in 2028. He also claims to want to reduce Twitter's Reliance on Advertising. As the story develops, we'll check back in on how these goals are progressing. On May 13th Musk tweets that his purchase of Twitter is on hold pending an investigation into the amount of bots and fake accounts on the site, which Twitter estimated at less than five percent.
Now this is strange for two reasons: Firstly, one of Elon Musk's stated motivations for buying the site in the first place was to get rid of the Bots and spam accounts, so it does seem like if there's more of them than he thought that would be all the more reason for him to buy it. And secondly, Twitter didn't hide the information from him at all. If indeed he had not known about this calculation, or truly had not believed it, the time to work out that understanding would have been before agreeing to buy it. Two hours later he reaffirmed his commitment to the acquisition in a follow-up tweet. On May 16, Twitter's CEO detailed a long Thread about Twitter's methodology with regards to spam and Bot accounts,. to which Musk responded with an epic poop emoji. On May 17th musk claims that Twitter most likely has at least 20% or more fake or spam accounts, which is pretty big if true.
I mean, that's four times the amount that Twitter claims! Elon arrived at this figure (and a number of other more outlandish figures depending on who he's talking to) using a tool called Botometer. A free public tool developed at Indiana University, which essentially plugs into Twitter's public API of available tweets, and attempts to determine how likely each account tweeting is to be a bot on a scale of one to five. According to one of Botometer's devs "The tool does not show whether an account is fake or spam, nor does it attempt to make any other judgment about the account's intent. Instead it shows how likely an account is to be automated, or managed using software, using various considerations such as the time of day it tweets, or whether itself declared to be a bot." Twitter responded that it would actually be impossible to calculate the amount of bots using this methodology, and without sufficient access to private Twitter data. Botometer for
example can only assess accounts that tweet, and not accounts which don't actively post anything. And also that Botometer had earlier that year designated musk himself to be likely a bot. It doesn't anymore, it's worth pointing out, but they say it did at one point. Essentially Elon is basing his attempt to back out of a 43 billion dollar business deal, contesting the internal findings of the company that he is attempting to buy, based on an estimate from a free tool he found online, and did not consult with anyone involved in the making of, who are quite clear that it should not be used to create these kind of estimates. As far as I can tell, that is the entire basis for his claim that Twitter's activity is most likely 20% or more generated by Bots or spam. An May 26th
Twitter shareholders brought forth a class action lawsuit against Musk, claiming that he had deliberately manipulated the company's stock prices. CNBC reports that during this period between Musk's acquisition bid and this lawsuit being launched, Twitter stock had dropped 12 percent. Note also that Tesla stock, which most of Elon musk's personal Fortune is tied up in, had dropped more than 40 percent. Some of that was due to just a general dip in the market, but a lot of
it was because he was acting like such a dipshit. The lawsuit alleged that Musk had broken several laws, including that quote "Musk had financially benefited by delaying required disclosures about his stake in Twitter, and by temporarily concealing his plan in early April to become a board member at The Social Network. ...Musk also snapped up shares in Twitter, the complaint says, while he knew Insider information about the company based on private conversations with board members and executives, including former CEO Jack Dorsey, a longtime friend of Musk's. The proposed lawsuit also contends that musk broke California laws by sowing doubt about whether he would complete the deal after signing the contract to buy it. The shareholders complaint added that his gripes
about Bots were part of his scheme to negotiate a better price or kill the deal. ...Musk proceeded to make statements, send tweets, and engage in conduct designed to create doubt about the deal and drive Twitter stock down substantially in order to create leverage that Musk could use to either back out of the purchase or to renegotiate the price." So essentially, they're arguing that Elon is deliberately sowing misinformation about the company in order to drive down its stock prices so that he can get a better price when he goes by the site. Which wouldn't be all that surprising, given that Elon has used Twitter specifically to deliberately deflate stock prices in the past.
It also seems like they're insinuating some insider trading here, which is very funny to me, because it implies this ruinous business deal was made with an unfair advantage on Elon Musk's part. They're saying he not only had Insider knowledge that he shouldn't have had, but also acted illegally and unethically to defraud the company of money, and given all of these things this is the result. This incredibly disastrous thing for him. Just a powerful business mind. On July 8th Elon announced that he was terminating the deal, claiming that Twitter had not agreed to his request to share information about user data, and had fired top executives in breach of a provision in their agreement. Twitter's chairman Brett Taylor responded that Twitter intended to enforce the deal at the agreed upon price. On July 12th, they did that, and they sued Elon to
force him to complete the purchase. On July 19th Judge Chancellor Kathleen Saint Jude McCormick... woof, okay, granted Twitter's request for an expediated trial. Musk's team had argued for a delayed trial, which you know, if the complaint is that they're trying to drive down the stock prices, it does seem like it would be in line with that, because the longer the trial goes the the more chaos there's going to be, the lower the stock price goes. AP news reports "Twitter argues that Musk's reasons for backing out are just a cover for buyer's remorse after agreeing to pay 38% above Twitter's stock price, shortly before the stock market stumbled and shares of the electric car maker Tesla where most of us personal wealth resides lost more than 100 billion dollars of their value."
Just a powerful business mind. After months of back and forth subpoenas, on October 4th Musk agreed to buy the site at the agreed upon price. Twitter didn't have to agree to shiiiiiit. So if these allegations are true, that he was attempting to sabotage Twitter stock prices (and given that he folded like a paper airplane in court, I'll leave that up to you to decide) what he has done here... Is agree to buy something for much more than it's worth, panic, illegally manipulate its value to negotiate for a better deal, only to be forced to buy the product he has made less valuable in the process. Which allegedly, would make him a profoundly bad businessman. On October 26th, Elon posted a frankly epic video on Twitter saying "Entering Twitter HQ, let that sink in!" and he was holding a sink! Fe's so fucking funny is the thing. He later said "Meeting a lot of cool
people at Twitter!" Just met a lot of cool people, that he likes, and I bet will treat very well. We in the biz call that foreshadowing. And finally, on October 28th, Musk closes the deal to buy Twitter. So everything we have seen so far, all of the ways he has already fucked this up, happened before he owned the goddamn website. Buckle up now, because from this point forward shit is about to go nuts. Elon's first act as "Chief twit", epic, was firing a bunch of top executives. Including the CEO.
Comedy is then made legal on Twitter, and at first I didn't know what he meant by that. Because you'd think it's some kind of statement about how PC culture wouldn't be censoring comedy anymore, but also he said the same day that Twitter wasn't going to make any changes to content moderation until they'd had time to build a diverse panel of experts to look it over. But to his credit, I have to admit, Twitter has been very funny ever since he took it over. It's been extremely funny! Take for example, the very next thing that he tweeted "Twitter's commitment to Brand safety is unchanged" You'll understand why that's funny later. Foreshadow- Within 12 hours of the purchase, use of the n-word on Twitter shot up 500 percent. In fairness, a follow-up report actually found that Twitter's response to this was better than it had been in the past, a damning indictment of Twitter's uneven history of dealing with these types of hate raids. So I guess... you could say... What Elon's Twitter
is doing is actually centering hate speech MORE aggressively. Pretty strange for a self-identified "free speech absolutist." It's almost like Twitter's content moderation was never actually ideologically motivated, but rather the inescapable result of trying to run a social media platform for profit. Huh. Wonder if that'll be relevant at all. A number of high-profile advertisers immediately pull ads from Twitter, including GM Pfizer, and Mondelez. In a roundabout kind of way, I suppose he has reduced Twitter's dependency on advertisers... He just hasn't replaced it with a new source of revenue at all. On October 29th, word gets out that Elon's new plan to get some revenue for
Twitter is to bump up the price of Twitter blue to $20 a month from $4.99 a month, and include Blue Tick verification with the subscription. The Blue Tick is meant to signify that the person holding it is a notable public figure. Having it means they've been verified to be who they claim to
be. It's meant to allow people like celebrities, and politicians, or brands to post on Twitter without the fear that they'll be impersonated and defamed. So the first question on everyone's mind is, well, how do you prevent people from being impersonated and defamed? Musk is cagey about the details, instead choosing to focus on how this will somehow act as some sort of power balancing effect, and how it will democratize journalism and empower people... provided that they pay him. Also that day, Elon has some Tesla Engineers review Twitter's code base, and um... this part is going to sound like I'm
making it up, like I'm making a joke about him, but this is true... He requested that some of Twitter's engineers print off code they had written in the last two months for him to read... on paper. And there are many reasons why that request makes no sense, that's just not how computers work. Anyone who is remotely familiar with modern computer programming would know that you could just log onto GitHub for that information, but even if you stopped programming decades ago (like Musk did probably), printing computer code to read on paper is gibberish. That would be like trying to read a novel with all of the words in alphabetical order. It just... it's nonsense. That doesn't mean anything! On October 31st, Musk responds to Stephen King complaining about the proposed cost of Twitter Blue by suggesting a new price point of eight dollars a month, and that becomes the new price point going forward, seemingly arbitrarily. Mashable calculated that at this price point, to meet his
goal of half of Twitter's Revenue coming from Twitter blue subscriptions, Musk would need 26 million users a month to sign up for the service. Which is 10 percent of Twitter's user base. Just a genius business mind is the thing. On November 4th, Twitter laid off roughly half of the very cool people that Elon had met when he visited Twitter. As a result, several employees file a class action lawsuit accusing Twitter of violating federal labor law for not giving them the required 60 days notice. Musk disputes this, claiming the employees were given three months of severance in lieu of notice, and that Twitter had to lay people off because it was hemorrhaging four million dollars a day. A thing nobody made him admit! He placed the blame squarely on advertisers fleeing
the site en masse, due to fears about changes to Twitter's content moderation policy. It should be noted that among the thousands of people laid off were most of, if not the entire content moderation team. Leaving only 15 people with access to content moderation tools. And when I say that, I don't mean 15 dedicated moderators, I mean 15 people who can even access the tools to moderate a quarter of a billion people. Also, the entire team responsible for verifying users, something that advertisers are becoming increasingly concerned about. He then threatened to name and shame advertisers who have pulled out of Twitter, so that they'd get in trouble with his conservative fan base, and that ought to convince people to do more business with you in the future. On November 6th several employees who were laid off two days prior are asked to come
back, and told that their firing was in error, and rehired. Boy what a happy ending after all! Musk finally explained how he intended to deal with people taking advantage of the new verification system to impersonate people or brands. His plan... was to let them do that... And then ban them and keep the money. And that answer was not reassuring to advertisers, as you can imagine. Especially since Twitter's reduced staff would have a great deal of difficulty
moderating the site to ban fake accounts. So Musk pivoted, and said anyone impersonating anyone without saying directly that they were a parody account will be suspended. I remind you, Musk refers to himself as a free speech absolutist. This solution has the same problem of enforceability,
but even more so because Musk doesn't specify how or where people are to label themselves parody accounts. Meaning before you can ban someone for impersonation, you'd need to not only verify that they are impersonating someone, but also check their entire post history and bio to see whether or not they had specified that they are parody. So on November 9th, Twitter launched the new "Official tag", a tag which would serve the same purpose as the old verified tag, but wouldn't be purchasable. Which would make the verified tag mean nothing except that you spent eight dollars to get it. Thereby making the thing which he has staked the company's entire financial future on, completely pointless, and undoing all of his populist rhetoric about Twitter's serfs and peasant system... and just
it just doesn't make any sense. So the same day it launched, Elon removed the official tag. Personally. Then verified badges start to appear on Twitter Blue subscribers handles, and I now present a montage of brands, celebrities, and politicians being impersonated by verified accounts. [Music] And also here's a montage of a whole lot of verified users impersonating Elon Musk and his companies specifically! Now, if you're the CEO of a company currently facing a crisis (or several crises) most of which are the direct results of your personal Behavior, it's very important to reassure your customer base that you're not only taking the problem seriously, but doing everything in your power to fix it. Elon chose instead to laugh about it, and thank the fake accounts for the money. Now that'd be ballin' if he was making enough money through these fake accounts that he no longer needed advertisers, right? Because it's like what are they going to do about it? Haha! But that's not the case, because during the two days the feature was available (Spoiler alert: they take the feature down on the 11th to re-tool it, and it is yet to come back online) it reportedly made less than half a million dollars.
On launch. During the time when most people should in theory be most excited to get it. Remember, by Musk's own calculations, Twitter is losing 4 million dollars a day. But he thinks it's going fine! Just needs a few tweaks! November 10th, the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly loses billions in stock prices after a verified impersonator claimed they would be giving away insulin for free. Similarly, Lockheed Martin lost billions when a verified impersonator claimed they would halt sales to the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel due to their respect of human rights records.
This may be the funniest single moment in human history. When two random Twitter users paid eight dollars each to cost these enormous monolithic corporations astronomical sums of money, because an unrelated monolithic corporation allowed them to pretend that they might do something kind. The layers of indictment of capitalism here boggle the mind. It's worth noting that it's not just impersonators getting verified at this point! There's also some Nazis! Including some big names you might have heard of, like Richard Spencer, Amy Meck, and apparently, big get, the real Adolf Hitler.
These fine folks used Twitter to buy some credibility. Can you imagine these activist advertiser snowflakes having some problem with their brand being associated with Hitler? Now at this point, I pause to ask, does it seem to you as though Twitter's commitment to brand safety has remained unchanged? Also this day, Twitter's CISO, Chief privacy officer, and chief compliance officer all resign. Which not only puts all of Twitter's users at risk of data breaches (which may have already happened at time of recording) and other security threats, but also potentially violates an agreement Twitter made with the Federal Trade Commission. Which could result in billions of
dollars in fines. The FTC might also name Elon Musk personally liable. Also on November 10th, Musk tells Twitter staff that the company's financial situation is so dire, that bankruptcy is likely. You know, the company he just spent 43 billion dollars to buy. Just a business genius is the thing about him. On November 11th, as I alluded to earlier, Twitter suspends all Twitter blue subscriptions, and also announces that the official tag will come back at some point in some unspecified capacity, but only for advertisers. We are now at two weeks since Elon took over, how do you think he's doing so far? November 14th, Elon tweets that he'll be shutting down Twitter microservices which he deems "bloatware." Microservices are like little bits of software that run independently, and contribute to a larger software ecosystem, so they're like little things that run and they do some service for Twitter, right? Essentially. More or less. I don't know. Computer nerds, don't @ me.
The important part here, is that among the "bloatware" that is disabled is the ability for users with two-factor authorization to log in. So if you log out, you just can't log back in, because there's no way for it to send like a text message to your phone or whatever. Messages from an internal Twitter slack Channel show Twitter senior director of engineering admitting that employees who had been rehired after being fired on November 6, were not in fact fired in error, and that they should be thought of as temporary staff who would need to be removed once it was possible to do so. So I guess that wasn't really a happy ending for them. Oops! That feels weirdly cruel. November 15th, Elon announced that the relaunch of Twitter blue would be pushed back to November 29th. When asked how we would prevent the same problem of rampant impersonation, Elon responded, "Eh... it's hard to say, you know? So I figure we got to know who everybody is, that's the thing we should do, so we'll do that." November 16th, Musk sends out an ominous email to all Twitter staff titled "A fork
in the road", in which he demands that they commit to quote "high intensity work" for quote "long hours" and be quote "extremely hardcore", potentially working 24/7 in order to bring to life Elon's vision of Twitter 2.0. He offers an ultimatum, in which employees have until 5 PM the next day to accept the new working conditions, or de facto resign. Some disabled workers immediately launch ANOTHER class action lawsuit, claiming that the demand to work overtime, and also his ending of remote work policies is discriminatory and violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. It's worth stopping here and examining this offer. The right-wing media had a kind of take on it, which is like, he just asked engineers to work harder and they had a meltdown because they just want to drink lattes. Imagine you're in a situation where your company is bought by by a new
boss, and that boss fires half of the employees, and then asks you to continue working twice as hard for the same amount of money, and also that the company might go bankrupt pretty soon, so if you do decide to stay you might just lose your job anyway, and also if you leave he he has to give you three months severance. Which of these options do you take? The next day, at least a thousand people resign. It's unclear how many people remain, and Twitter hasn't commented on it publicly... because their entire Communications team resigned. But according to polls in the company slack before the deadline hit, only seven percent of remaining employees reported intending to stay.
Former Twitter Engineers start warning that there are no longer enough staff to maintain critical infrastructure, and that Twitter is likely to stop working relatively soon, but as of this writing Twitter's still up and running. So we'll see, I suppose. Panicked, and seemingly surprised at the mass resignation, Elon closes all Twitter offices and revokes key card access to all staff. Disgruntled former employees set up a projector at Twitter headquarters, which scrolls through a bunch of nasty messages about Elon, calling him an "apartheid profiteer" among other accurate insults. Side note, not really related to the Twitter thing, but funny story. That same day, Elon is on trial for a lawsuit about whether he his compensation at Tesla constituted unjust enrichment, essentially whether or not he ripped off shareholders (and you know, haven't really looked into it, and I don't know much about the law, but seems like there's a precedent there) Musk objected to a question about how in 2018 he had signed a consent degree with the SEC, after that they had found he was lying about having secured the funding to take Tesla private at 420 a share, epic. Musk argued that the decree was invalid because it was quote "signed under duress"... because if he had not signed it,
the company would have lost money. Opposing council explained that actually Musk's lawyer had the right to object to this question, but he personally did not, and when Musk refused to shut up they then asked if Musk had any legal training and Elon Musk responded... And again, this is a direct quote, I'm not making this up as a joke to make fun of him... "If you're in enough lawsuits, you pick up a few things along the way." Yeah man, you're basically a lawyer. You basically went to law school, because of how many times you've been sued. November 17th, #RIPTwitter is trending, Elon acts
quickly to quell fears of the company's demise by... bragging about having killed the company. November 18th, Elon elaborates his vision for Twitter's new moderation policy. Hate speech will be permitted on Twitter, but suppressed by the algorithm. He calls this "freedom of speech but not freedom of reach." And it's the exact policy that conservatives have been complaining about for years. It's literally shadow banning. That's what shadow banning is. Speaking of bans, he reverses bans on a number
of controversial figures, like alleged human trafficker and open misogynist Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson (who wasn't actually banned, just suspended for violating the rules against hate speech), The Babylon Bee, and I guess... Kathy Griffin? A token liberal to fake neutrality. And of course, Yee. Yeah? Ye? I've never because it's KanYE but it's YEezy I've never said it out loud before. I don't know. Anyway, he unbans that guy, and he responds "Shalom," as if to signal that his anti-semitic statements on the platform will continue. Elon then runs a poll to see if he should unban president Trump, despite previously stating many times he would wait for the advice of a diverse panel of experts on the subject, and yes narrowly wins, marking the first and probably last time that President Trump would ever win the popular vote. Trump would go on to claim that he won't be coming back to Twitter, making the whole thing pointless, but frankly I don't believe him about that for even one goddamn second.
People started asking Musk to unban Alex Jones, which he refused to do. He took a principled stance, that having watched his own child die in his arms he didn't approve of what Alex Jones had said about Sandy Hook victims. Which I think is is totally the right call, but does kind of call into question his commitment to free speech absolutism. I don't think you should unban Alex
Jones, good job! But that is... you know, seems like it's arbitrary and personal given the people you did choose to unban. On November 23rd, the day before American Thanksgiving, Elon demonstrated his gratitude to a number of engineers who had chosen to stay after his ultimatum with further layoffs. And it's worth noting at this point, that many of the remaining Engineers are H-1B visa holders, who could potentially now be at risk of deportation. All of whom chose to stay after his egregious ultimatum, many of whom had been fired and then rehired, told to comeback and did, and there's speculation that now they might actually get less severance... And look... Like, I gotta cut it off here. I'm sure some extremely funny stuff has happened in between me writing this and posting it. I know that
that has happened. But I can't wait forever, so I just I don't know, I'll do a follow-up at some point if there's interest. But I want to address the elephant in the room here, because obviously Elon Musk is going to be fine. He's too rich to ever suffer the type of consequences a human being might face from a bad business deal. He's not going to be in the poor house ever. That being said , there is a tendency to assign to Musk, and people like him a sort of Machiavellian genius.
What seems to you like they're losing, because you don't understand the genius of the move he's making. i Four-dimensional chess baby, he's going to come out on top! This is somewhat because we have trouble accepting that someone with so many resources could be foolish enough to make so many mistakes. That nobody who works for him would point out the problems he is creating for himself, or advise a wiser course of action. We would all prefer that there are evil masterminds at the wheel. than dummies at the wheel. And no matter how he tries to spin this in the future, this has been personally disastrous for Elon Musk. He's lost at least 100 billion dollars of his personal Fortune. To put that number in perspective, think of a dollar. A hundred billion dollars would be a hundred billion
of those. Not only has he tanked the stock price of his most valuable asset, Tesla, he's also done irreparable harm to his greatest intangible asset, his reputation. He's become a laughing stock, and it's not likely he'll be able to sucker investors like he has in the past. They've already grown more skeptical of the tech industry in the past few months, and he's fallen on his ass harder than any of these Tech Giants. I think to assume that there's some secret master plan is to buy into his myth-making. That he's some renegade genius who sees things at such a high level, that the average
person could never understand the mysteries he grapples with. I think the reality is pretty clear though, he just assumed he could do this. He assumed he could run Twitter, just like he assumes he could be a lawyer despite not knowing anything about the law, or assumes he can judge people's coding by reading it on a piece of paper. He is a petty tyrant who refuses to listen to the legions of people more capable than him in every regard, because the enormous wealth he pilfered through quasi-legal schemes and unethical cons means that he doesn't have to. Ever. Ever again in his life.
He can just bully everyone around him, and there's nothing they can do to get back at him, because he has more money than it should be possible to have. There is no greater logic to his actions, there is no secret master plan. The emperor has no clothes. Even if it later turns out that he bounces back and makes a shitload of money, it's not because he's a secret genius, it's because when you have billions of dollars you can't do anything to fail. You will just remain rich forever. These people, these ultra rich jackoffs, who own more wealth than some nations, they're not smarter than you. They don't provide benefits to these companies in proportion to their compensation,
to justify the obscene hordes they possess. All of these companies would be better off if they were prevented from making any major decisions. They would literally be better off if a rock with googly eyes were made CEO. Elon Musk is a buffoon, and I think I've demonstrated that quite conclusively. I could personally do a better job as CEO of Twitter, despite knowing absolutely nothing about business or Tech because, all I'd have to do is not do anything. Doing nothing, and
letting Twitter employees just do whatever the fuck they want, would be a significant Improvement in management. In fact, I can prove that. I have been more successful than Elon Musk in business this year. My fair trade, union made t-shirts from thoughtslimeshop.com have, at this point, not lost a hundred billion dollars. Let that sink in. Hello and welcome to the Eyeball Zone! Here in the Eyeball Zone we're a microblogging social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as "eyeballs." To put that another way, we help at small leftist creators put eyeballs on their work. Here's a dirty little secret, I have a lot of warm feelings about Top Gear, the television program, and I don't just mean anger. Despite the fact that the hosts are pretty fucking
terrible dudes, I just can't help it ,I grew up watching the show with my parents, and I have a lot of good memories. Luckily for me, Edmund Hyde is here to explain away this cognitive dissonance, by carefully demonstrating the ways in which Top Gear has begun to more and more continue the tradition of soft imperialist control in a surprising number of ways. Like seriously, there's... there's just so much to criticize about Jeremy Clarkson that you'd assume nobody would be able to think of something new, but it's actually patently obvious how much later seasons of Top Gear reproduce imperialist ideology... And when I say that, I don't just mean in, like, the kind of soft wishy-washy way that everything kind of does within former imperialist nations. You know, just the unspoken presumption of of superiority, I mean the actual idea that we should be out there colonizing other countries. Or, I guess the British should be, but you know, same difference. You wouldn't think that there'd be this much evidence that a comedy show about
automobiles was advocating this, but it is actually shocking to see when Ed lays it all out. Do you have a small leftist project on which the eyeballs might feast? Send no more than one email to thoughtslimeeditor@gmail.com, with pertinent details such as your pronouns, and perhaps you too shall face the wrath of the eyeball Zone! Thank you for watching my video, I would ask now that you like it, like the video, and also subscribe to this YouTube channel for more videos just like it. Uh hey also patreon me. Please patreon me some dollars, to me, thought slime. Buy a t-shirt also, is um, would be good. Mastodon seems like a bad website, I'm not going to learn to use it.
2022-12-05 14:14
