At this point, is there any doubt that destroying Twitter was the entire point?
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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He could've just shut it down at any time. I doubt he planned the destruction of his reputation. He's gone from tech boy wonder to being widely loathed. It's hurt his other companies as well but, more personally, it's so obvious from his posts that he's desperate to be loved and revered.
He just really sucks. Being surrounded by people who never criticize or challenge him unshockingly doesn't improve things either.
My understanding is that the SEC would have fucked him if he just shut it down, because it would indicate that he never intended to buy it in the first place and instead was just trying to manipulate the stock market (which is definitely what he was doing).
How is this benefiting him in any way? Even financially?
It's not. He never wanted to buy twitter, he just wanted to pump and dump the stock, but because he is stupid and the plan was obvious they sued him to make him honor the deal.
So if he just turned around and shut the company down, it would give the SEC legal grounds to argue that his intention all along was market manipulation.
This here is the real answer; Elon doesn’t want X now and he never wanted Twitter. Much like Trump falling arse-backwards into the US Presidency he never actually wanted, he’s now just manipulating the thing he didn’t actually want, but now has, to follow his ego and whims. Trump’s presidency and Elon’s ownership of Twitter share a lot of similarities. Far, far too many similarities.
For what purpose would he attach his baby of X to the Twitter he is intentionally trying to kill?
Trying to make the best of a bad situation, I guess?
He could have just done nothing with the company, hired someone to put in charge and say "you have a year to make Twitter profitable", and when that inevitably fails shut it down.
He didn't have to tank his reputation. All the time he's spending running Twitter into the ground he could have instead done nothing, and still shut it down in the same time frame for being "not-profitable". Enough time would have passed for him to get away with it, and would have lost less money in the process.
So even if his plan is to destroy Twitter, he's still an idiot doing it in the dumbest way possible.
If he were smarter and/or not a walking ego then yeah, that would have been the move. Though if he were smart he probably wouldn't be in this mess.
Taking something away from the woke journalists & tech activists and giving it to the Nazis? Yeah, if that wasn't the entire point, it certainly was a "nice to have" for Elon.
I think it was the point, and I think he assumed that doing so would make it much better, so he’d also enjoy business success in the doing.
He really is the guy who didn’t like the mods so he bought the fucking forum. I don’t know if it’s ever gone down that way before, but this was a public company + world’s richest man situation and boy howdy did it go down that way.
But the enormous sums of money involved don’t change the fact that he didn’t like the mods so he bought the forum, and he was gleeful to suddenly be “the admin” of his favorite forum.
Well, if by "destroying" you mean "turning into a haven for right wing hatespeech", he was pretty open about that. I don't know that he understood that connection though.
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He absolutely did not buy it to kill it, he just wanted something he could control after he entered into the “disgusting ultra rich fascist” stage, as previously he pretended to lean liberal. Also why the saudis donated so much of the purchase price
If that’s what you mean by “destroy”, then no, no doubt at all.
I don’t think so. The man is truly stupid.
I hate this meme it just so stupid, it gives him an out for being a shit business man.
Reality is he sucks and wants attention, he also owes money to people it would benefit to have Twitter sow seeds of shit in an election year.
There’s no question that he chose to end “Twitter as it was.”
Did he arrogantly think he could turn it into something better? Yeah he probably did.
Did he deliberately lead a billionaire’s club into a $46 billion boondoggle? Probably not.
Does he really hurt at all, in the end, if that’s what it turns out to be? Sadly, no.
So instead of buying Twitter, not touching it for a year, and then shutting it down because it's "not profitable" he would rather people think he's incompetent?
Either he's an idiot man-child who shouldn't be allowed to be put in charge of anything, or he wants people to think he's an idiot man-child who shouldn't be allowed to be put in charge of anything. Either way I'm happy to oblige.
Really? I think it was much simpler than this. Twitter suspended Elon's account because of his rants and so he decided to buy twitter to show them who is boss.
This is it. He's a fucking man child with obscene wealth. It isn't complicated.
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Good. Now the companies in question can object to being advertised alongside hate speech, drop their funding, and create pressure for Musk to clean up the hateful accounts and hashtags that are forming an ever-thickening layer of scum on the surface of the Twitter pond. Or, you know, just hasten the merciful demise of this shitty platform.
Either way, the problem is the hate speech being allowed in the first place, not the hamfisted advertising strategy being peddled alongside it.
Or it normalizes white supremacy. But I hope most of these huge companies know which side their worker bread is buttered on.
I mean, they had to know this was gonna happen eventually as soon as Elon took over.
Not for long me thinks.
And only Apple stood up to it..
To be fair, Apple also chortles China’s balls.
This would probably be blowing up more if you could see any of it without creating an account.
I absolutely think there are some things as a species we should not put up with, racial supremacy hate speech being one of them. At the same time, because there is other content out there which some people dislike but which is not harmful, I wish we could stop worrying so much about what content ads are sitting next to.
Problem is people don't have a lot of control over their subconscious perceptions. The subtle ways that they'll remember two things being side by side and associating the two. This is why brands are careful about what content their ads are shown on.
Yeah I know. I wish our brains were less dumb.
In this era of highly targeted advertising when companies charge more to put your ads in front of highly specific people groups and demographics, companies like X can easily keep your ads from being associated with white supremacists... they just don't want to.
X knows it's popular with these hate groups and they want to monetize them. They're making money by placing eyeballs on an ad. They're just hoping no one notices that they're including hate groups in the eyeballs they're charging you for. If they can't display ads to the hate groups then they might actually have to stop allowing the content and they really don't want to have to do that.
I don't care what ads appear where but I can understand why companies might not want their brand to be associated with this sort of thing in any way.
Twitter can't simultaneously be a safe space for racists, sexists, paedos, etc. and civil society.
Okay, but what about people on the fringes? People who want to be able to post about sex positivity, risque artwork, and other stuff that exists in civil society but some people would prefer to pretend didn't.
Can anyone link the actual tweets? Can only find articles about the tweets
There were screenshots at the article in the link.
Ah didn't scroll far enough thanks
But I don't see which one he specifically replied "truth" to or whatever
I believe this is the one you're referring to (screenshot because it won't let me see the actual post without an account?): https://twitter.com/DmitryOpines/status/1724918411438805153
Link to actual post he was replying to: https://twitter.com/breakingbaht/status/1724892505647296620
Thanks that's what I was lookin for
X is soon to be the biggest ad-free social media site! genius!