this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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So, for a long time I've believed Elon is actually pretty dumb. He's impulsive, was bad at programming, and frequently gets facts/figures absurdly wrong
But then there's that chat log between him and other billionaires... It circled around the idea of private companies bring free to shape social media being an existential threat
He's tanked Twitter and publicly boasts about how he turned it around and made it profitable through actions that drove people away from the platform. There's no way the numbers work from what we knew before it went private, and they've stopped paying their bills - his claims are almost certainly false
And yet, social media companies are listening - frankly, they probably don't care if it's true. If rich shareholders believe it, then by copying his methods their stock price will jump. Reddit and discord have started new initiatives that piss off their users since then... None of the methods will immediately collapse a network, but they're generally targeted towards driving away both power users and rockstar employees. It will starve the networks of content over time, leading to a tower of babble moment where the platform disperses-leaving smaller and fewer locuses of control on pubic discourse
So I keep coming back to this idea - is he a doing a zero-requiem and becoming the villain to inoculate us as a species against control by billionaires?
But then I think back to his ego, and think he's probably just blundering a role he's unqualified for.
But then, he does something else so dumb it seems like an intentional fumble, and it gets me thinking again
It's pretty easy. He's been lucky with the work he did (stole/claimed) once or twice in the past and ever since everyone is eating the BS he says. Twitter is only one thing. Hyperloop, SpaceX etc. are all Ideas a 9 year old would come up with and are so out of reality it isn't even funny anymore. Or remeber when he was reinventing the Metro, but worse?
He has be so rich so early in his life, that he never had to grow up. He then surrounded himself by yes-sayers and was lucky with how Tesla turned out (in that it got evaluated like a tech company, rather than a car company). Ever since he can't fathom the idea that someone might know something he doesn't. He also can't grasp the idea that money can't solve certain problems. His twitter posts show how little self control he has and most of it reads like things my 5 year old nephew would say. It's insanity.
as a sex worker rights supporter (plus, my best friend is a sex worker) it's honestly kind of scary to see both Twitter and Reddit destroy themselves (at the same time). Mostly because Twitter and Reddit (especially Twitter) are the only places left on the Internet for sex workers to simply exist in the post-FOSTA world that we live in (thanks Kamala Harris!)
Saudi Prince/hacksaw foreman.