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Auto companies cutting spending is just spite from competition which is understandable. What’s comical is the gall of General Mills, who has spent decades gett

Auto companies cutting spending is just spite from competition which is understandable. What’s comical is the gall of General Mills, who has spent decades getting kids (myself included) addicted to sugar with manipulative advertising. It’s genuinely amazing and saddening how many people want to see Musk fail. We are watching Atlas Shrugged play out.

CJefferson 4y ago
These companies don't personally care about Musk -- they just don't want to be associated with the fallout as he mananges to offend or annoy a significant proportion of people.
- acdha 4y ago
  I’d also add that Twitter is weird for being far more influential than its user size would suggest. People advertise there because it has a disproportionate impact, and many high-profile users are reconsidering how much content they create for the service for free.
- Angostura 4y ago
  Agreed. I work with a charity that uses Twitter to communicate with the public. They are keeping a close eye on whether it is still the kind of medium they want to be associated with.
AnonCoward42 4y ago
> What’s comical is the gall of General Mills, who has spent decades getting kids (myself included) addicted to sugar with manipulative advertising. Nature made everyone addicted to sugar. Of course not everyone is as prone to this as others, but sugar is energy and organisms (we included) need energy. Manipulative advertising is also a bit redundant. Advertisement is meant to be manipulative, which is maybe more obvious by a pejorative/synonym for advertisement: propaganda.
toomuchtodo 4y ago
If you don’t want to be ostracized financially, don’t embrace being this flavor of human. Actions have consequences. It is genuinely amazing and saddening how many people continue to make excuses for Musk’s actions and behavior. If that is what success is, yes, please, fail. No one told Elon to light a substantial amount of his wealth on fire with this effort; his character and emotional health led him here. Wealth amplifies who you already are. He could’ve just been the cool dude who made sexy electric cars and rockets that land themselves. He might still go back to that after the Twitter experiment, but the reputation will take Herculean efforts to recover. By no means a Musk hater by the way. Own multiple Teslas (acquired pre shenanigans), took my kid to see the first falcon heavy launch, and used to to drive to the cape all of the time to see earlier F9 launches at all hours. I respect the ambition, just not at the cost of being a decent human being, and I think that’s a fair position to hold: disappointment.
- acdha 4y ago
  > I respect the ambition, just not at the cost of being a decent human being, and I think that’s a fair position to hold: disappointment. This seems to be a very common position. I know Tesla owners who are perfectly satisfied with their cars but somewhat apologetic about being associated with the CEO. You know that the CEOs of GM or Toyota must have views they also disagree with but they aren’t constantly making the news for such stupid reasons.
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  - Workaccount2 4y ago
    The only reason musk gets so much hate is because he uses twitter without a PR. Give him a PR team and people would still be going on about him like in 2016.
    - 4y ago
lghh 4y ago
> It’s genuinely amazing and saddening how many people want to see Musk fail. Spite is surly not the reason this billion-dollar brands are pulling advertising from the company whose owner is using it to spread conspiracy theories about political violence. These companies have no compass beyond shareholder value. They just see the writing on the wall now that Musk has ownership of Twitter.
acdha 4y ago
> It’s genuinely amazing and saddening how many people want to see Musk fail. We are watching Atlas Shrugged play out. That’s certainly how Musk wants everyone to think about it but isn’t the more parsimonious explanation that humans love watching a good train wreck, and he’s showing every sign of delivering one? The plot in Atlas Shrugged was a fantasy around productive people being held back by society but none of Musk’s problems are anything like that. Instead of being held back by the government, he’s made billions from it at both Tesla and SpaceX. His problems are all self-created: advertisers voluntarily choosing where they see the most benefit to their business seems like something libertarians should wholeheartedly support.
- Spivak 4y ago
  Yeah, social media sites come and go. When one implodes another rises to fill its place. Not a one is special. But right here right now in 2022 I get to watch a thoroughly unpleasant person potentially lose 40 billion dollars in public. I’m sitting back and grabbing my popcorn in much the same way I imagine my ancestors would come out to watch a hanging.
HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
He is kind of an asshole.
AlexandrB 4y ago
> It’s genuinely amazing and saddening how many people want to see Musk fail. I think that among Musk's "haters" (I include myself in that group) are a lot of people who at one time or another had faith in the things Musk was saying but then saw him fail to deliver... again, and again, and again. If the average person did this for the better part of decade there would be consequences. However, Musk has been able to skate by on a Tony Stark-like perception of himself and continues to elicit an unreasonably credulous response from his fans and the media. So I think "wanting to see him fail" is a combination of skepticism - since he has a long track record of over promising and way under delivering - as well as perhaps a desire for Musk to reap some kind of consequences for talking out his ass for so long.
- UweSchmidt 4y ago
  "Musk" and "failed to deliver" in one sentence without negative qualifier? Regardless of what he claimed in those public brainstorming sessions, and what opinions he communicates, business-wise the man has accomplished more than probably any human in history. Without him internet payments would have come later, and we probably wouldn't really have electric cars, vertically landing rockets and saffordable global satellite internet. The nerve to take on any of these fields and build innovative companies on that level boggles the mind. I mean I might be missing someone. We have many whose life's work was to build one innovative major business. Some built a conglomerates, but usually on existing technologies. I think people are writing him off a little early with regards to Twitter. Turning it around and making it work according to his will and possibly leveraging it for something even bigger isn't too unlikely.
  - gamblor956 4y ago
    That's actually part of why their are so many Musk haters: he rewrites history to make himself appear successful, taking credit from those who actually did the work. Paypal was based on Thiel's startup, not Musk's. In fact, after Paypal merged with Musk's X.com, X.com shut down all of its pre-merger activities and focused exclusively on scaling Thiel's Paypal. Musk forced his original CEO out and took over the merged company, but was fired by the board months later for gross incompetence, and is a member of the Paypal Mafia solely because of the golden parachute his lawyers negotiated for him. (Note that Thiel and the other members of the Mafia absolutely hate Musk; go through media interviews of these guys and you'll notice how much they avoid talking about him.) Electric cars were a thing before Musk; hell they actually pre-date ICE vehicles. The issue was that batteries were very expensive; Tesla simply happened to come along when batteries started getting cheap enough to put into cars and artificially low interest rates made it feasible to invest billions in high-risk startups. Vertical landing rockets were invented by NASA in the 1970s, but they never had the budget to develop those into viable alternatives to the Space Shuttle program, because politicians had a vested interest in the Space Shuttle program and not in reusable rockets. The development of SpaceX's reusable rockets was entirely funded by NASA and the DoD. Affordable global satellite internet already exists. Iridium is actually cheaper than Starlink, and is close to profitability. Starlink currently runs at a massive deficit and by SpaceX's own admission will not be profitable if Starlink does not receive government internet access funding. Musk's life's work was not to innovate anything. It was to find innovative things being done by other people and to take all the credit for himself.
zach_garwood 4y ago
> It’s genuinely amazing and saddening how many people want to see Musk fail. We are watching Atlas Shrugged play out. When you watch a clown, you expect him to slip on a banana peel. Musk puts himself out there as an utterly unserious buffoon. This is what he wants.
mschuster91 4y ago
> It’s genuinely amazing and saddening how many people want to see Musk fail. Musk and his various companies have openly sharted on laws, regulations and legal orders and agreements many, many times (e.g. his SEC squabbles which should have led to someone checking over his tweets prior to sending them out, COVID-19 rule ignorance, workplace safety regulations, ...), and he's been a general arsehole way too often as well (the "pedo diver" incident, one of his own kids distancing themselves which led to Musk twittering anti-trans shit, ...). Of course people want to see that even the richest asshole on the planet is not fully immune from consequences for his actions.
alkonaut 4y ago
> It’s genuinely amazing and saddening how many people want to see Musk fail. People want to see bad behavior have bad consequences. Anything else would be amazing. And while this is by no means the lowest Musk has gone, it's definitely one of the times he has had most influence over a lot of people. Musk has in just recent time been peddling some conspiracy theories, made some astonishing remarks re: the status of Crimea in Ukraine and so on. It's more than enough already to make me never want to see him succeed in controlling anything related to media (social or not). > Auto companies cutting spending is just spite from competition which is understandable. That could be part of it. But unless there is a clear sign that auto companies do this to a larger extent than other megacorps I'd put it down to just being defensive. Twitter under Musk has controversy and turmoil written all over it, And if I were a large company I'd want no part in it. It's so easy to shift ad money to other places. I'm guessing advertisers will return once the storm settles. At that point, I also fully expect Musk to have gone full circle, realizing the only way to run Twitter was the old way. Whether it will survive that round trip is the question.
ethanbond 4y ago
IMO the same reason people have celebrity-like adoration for Musk is the same reason people have gut antipathy for him: norm destruction. Our society runs on norms more than explicit rules or laws. Musk has made a career out of breaking these norms, some of which have been very positive, but which are quickly veering away from that. These are things that a person might be able to get away with (no effective enforcement against them) but which if everyone engaged in them, it'd be extremely harmful to society. Norms that matter: Don't call rescue workers pedophiles for no reason. Don't impregnate your employee. Don't put software designated generously as beta in control of vehicles on public roads. Don't boisterously sign legal agreements, harass your business associates and thousands of innocent employees, and then strain the legal system in an attempt to undo your whoopsie. Don't lay people off in such a way designed to circumvent severance requirements. The list goes on and on. There's not a lot of effective enforcement against these things but it's important that they don't become the norm. So insofar as I'm "cheering for him to fail," it's because I'd prefer that we don't have an entire generation of business leaders thinking this behavior is admirable. The marginal improvements he can make to Twitter nowhere near outbalance the harms he can inflict on our society's norms. Also, frankly, I'd prefer he focused on cars and rockets because we need his attention (and more) on those big problems and he's made great progress so far. The Twitter sidequest is an addiction gone awry.
ryandvm 4y ago
> We are watching Atlas Shrugged play out. Atlas Shrugged my ass. There has never been a more effective government suckler than Elon Musk. Every business he's running exists entirely due to the largesse of the federal government. Except Twitter of course, and so far it's looking quite possible that he may end up incinerating his $44 billion dollar impulse purchase.

CJefferson 4y ago

These companies don't personally care about Musk -- they just don't want to be associated with the fallout as he mananges to offend or annoy a significant proportion of people.

acdha 4y ago
I’d also add that Twitter is weird for being far more influential than its user size would suggest. People advertise there because it has a disproportionate impact, and many high-profile users are reconsidering how much content they create for the service for free.
Angostura 4y ago
Agreed. I work with a charity that uses Twitter to communicate with the public. They are keeping a close eye on whether it is still the kind of medium they want to be associated with.

AnonCoward42 4y ago

> What’s comical is the gall of General Mills, who has spent decades getting kids (myself included) addicted to sugar with manipulative advertising. Nature made everyone addicted to sugar. Of course not everyone is as prone to this as others, but sugar is energy and organisms (we included) need energy. Manipulative advertising is also a bit redundant. Advertisement is meant to be manipulative, which is maybe more obvious by a pejorative/synonym for advertisement: propaganda.

toomuchtodo 4y ago

If you don’t want to be ostracized financially, don’t embrace being this flavor of human. Actions have consequences. It is genuinely amazing and saddening how many people continue to make excuses for Musk’s actions and behavior. If that is what success is, yes, please, fail. No one told Elon to light a substantial amount of his wealth on fire with this effort; his character and emotional health led him here. Wealth amplifies who you already are. He could’ve just been the cool dude who made sexy electric cars and rockets that land themselves. He might still go back to that after the Twitter experiment, but the reputation will take Herculean efforts to recover. By no means a Musk hater by the way. Own multiple Teslas (acquired pre shenanigans), took my kid to see the first falcon heavy launch, and used to to drive to the cape all of the time to see earlier F9 launches at all hours. I respect the ambition, just not at the cost of being a decent human being, and I think that’s a fair position to hold: disappointment.

acdha 4y ago
> I respect the ambition, just not at the cost of being a decent human being, and I think that’s a fair position to hold: disappointment. This seems to be a very common position. I know Tesla owners who are perfectly satisfied with their cars but somewhat apologetic about being associated with the CEO. You know that the CEOs of GM or Toyota must have views they also disagree with but they aren’t constantly making the news for such stupid reasons.
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- Workaccount2 4y ago
  The only reason musk gets so much hate is because he uses twitter without a PR. Give him a PR team and people would still be going on about him like in 2016.
  - 4y ago

lghh 4y ago

> It’s genuinely amazing and saddening how many people want to see Musk fail. Spite is surly not the reason this billion-dollar brands are pulling advertising from the company whose owner is using it to spread conspiracy theories about political violence. These companies have no compass beyond shareholder value. They just see the writing on the wall now that Musk has ownership of Twitter.

acdha 4y ago

> It’s genuinely amazing and saddening how many people want to see Musk fail. We are watching Atlas Shrugged play out. That’s certainly how Musk wants everyone to think about it but isn’t the more parsimonious explanation that humans love watching a good train wreck, and he’s showing every sign of delivering one? The plot in Atlas Shrugged was a fantasy around productive people being held back by society but none of Musk’s problems are anything like that. Instead of being held back by the government, he’s made billions from it at both Tesla and SpaceX. His problems are all self-created: advertisers voluntarily choosing where they see the most benefit to their business seems like something libertarians should wholeheartedly support.

Spivak 4y ago
Yeah, social media sites come and go. When one implodes another rises to fill its place. Not a one is special. But right here right now in 2022 I get to watch a thoroughly unpleasant person potentially lose 40 billion dollars in public. I’m sitting back and grabbing my popcorn in much the same way I imagine my ancestors would come out to watch a hanging.

HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago

He is kind of an asshole.

AlexandrB 4y ago

> It’s genuinely amazing and saddening how many people want to see Musk fail. I think that among Musk's "haters" (I include myself in that group) are a lot of people who at one time or another had faith in the things Musk was saying but then saw him fail to deliver... again, and again, and again. If the average person did this for the better part of decade there would be consequences. However, Musk has been able to skate by on a Tony Stark-like perception of himself and continues to elicit an unreasonably credulous response from his fans and the media. So I think "wanting to see him fail" is a combination of skepticism - since he has a long track record of over promising and way under delivering - as well as perhaps a desire for Musk to reap some kind of consequences for talking out his ass for so long.

UweSchmidt 4y ago
"Musk" and "failed to deliver" in one sentence without negative qualifier? Regardless of what he claimed in those public brainstorming sessions, and what opinions he communicates, business-wise the man has accomplished more than probably any human in history. Without him internet payments would have come later, and we probably wouldn't really have electric cars, vertically landing rockets and saffordable global satellite internet. The nerve to take on any of these fields and build innovative companies on that level boggles the mind. I mean I might be missing someone. We have many whose life's work was to build one innovative major business. Some built a conglomerates, but usually on existing technologies. I think people are writing him off a little early with regards to Twitter. Turning it around and making it work according to his will and possibly leveraging it for something even bigger isn't too unlikely.
- gamblor956 4y ago
  That's actually part of why their are so many Musk haters: he rewrites history to make himself appear successful, taking credit from those who actually did the work. Paypal was based on Thiel's startup, not Musk's. In fact, after Paypal merged with Musk's X.com, X.com shut down all of its pre-merger activities and focused exclusively on scaling Thiel's Paypal. Musk forced his original CEO out and took over the merged company, but was fired by the board months later for gross incompetence, and is a member of the Paypal Mafia solely because of the golden parachute his lawyers negotiated for him. (Note that Thiel and the other members of the Mafia absolutely hate Musk; go through media interviews of these guys and you'll notice how much they avoid talking about him.) Electric cars were a thing before Musk; hell they actually pre-date ICE vehicles. The issue was that batteries were very expensive; Tesla simply happened to come along when batteries started getting cheap enough to put into cars and artificially low interest rates made it feasible to invest billions in high-risk startups. Vertical landing rockets were invented by NASA in the 1970s, but they never had the budget to develop those into viable alternatives to the Space Shuttle program, because politicians had a vested interest in the Space Shuttle program and not in reusable rockets. The development of SpaceX's reusable rockets was entirely funded by NASA and the DoD. Affordable global satellite internet already exists. Iridium is actually cheaper than Starlink, and is close to profitability. Starlink currently runs at a massive deficit and by SpaceX's own admission will not be profitable if Starlink does not receive government internet access funding. Musk's life's work was not to innovate anything. It was to find innovative things being done by other people and to take all the credit for himself.

zach_garwood 4y ago

> It’s genuinely amazing and saddening how many people want to see Musk fail. We are watching Atlas Shrugged play out. When you watch a clown, you expect him to slip on a banana peel. Musk puts himself out there as an utterly unserious buffoon. This is what he wants.

mschuster91 4y ago

> It’s genuinely amazing and saddening how many people want to see Musk fail. Musk and his various companies have openly sharted on laws, regulations and legal orders and agreements many, many times (e.g. his SEC squabbles which should have led to someone checking over his tweets prior to sending them out, COVID-19 rule ignorance, workplace safety regulations, ...), and he's been a general arsehole way too often as well (the "pedo diver" incident, one of his own kids distancing themselves which led to Musk twittering anti-trans shit, ...). Of course people want to see that even the richest asshole on the planet is not fully immune from consequences for his actions.

alkonaut 4y ago

> It’s genuinely amazing and saddening how many people want to see Musk fail. People want to see bad behavior have bad consequences. Anything else would be amazing. And while this is by no means the lowest Musk has gone, it's definitely one of the times he has had most influence over a lot of people. Musk has in just recent time been peddling some conspiracy theories, made some astonishing remarks re: the status of Crimea in Ukraine and so on. It's more than enough already to make me never want to see him succeed in controlling anything related to media (social or not). > Auto companies cutting spending is just spite from competition which is understandable. That could be part of it. But unless there is a clear sign that auto companies do this to a larger extent than other megacorps I'd put it down to just being defensive. Twitter under Musk has controversy and turmoil written all over it, And if I were a large company I'd want no part in it. It's so easy to shift ad money to other places. I'm guessing advertisers will return once the storm settles. At that point, I also fully expect Musk to have gone full circle, realizing the only way to run Twitter was the old way. Whether it will survive that round trip is the question.

ethanbond 4y ago

IMO the same reason people have celebrity-like adoration for Musk is the same reason people have gut antipathy for him: norm destruction. Our society runs on norms more than explicit rules or laws. Musk has made a career out of breaking these norms, some of which have been very positive, but which are quickly veering away from that. These are things that a person might be able to get away with (no effective enforcement against them) but which if everyone engaged in them, it'd be extremely harmful to society. Norms that matter: Don't call rescue workers pedophiles for no reason. Don't impregnate your employee. Don't put software designated generously as beta in control of vehicles on public roads. Don't boisterously sign legal agreements, harass your business associates and thousands of innocent employees, and then strain the legal system in an attempt to undo your whoopsie. Don't lay people off in such a way designed to circumvent severance requirements. The list goes on and on. There's not a lot of effective enforcement against these things but it's important that they don't become the norm. So insofar as I'm "cheering for him to fail," it's because I'd prefer that we don't have an entire generation of business leaders thinking this behavior is admirable. The marginal improvements he can make to Twitter nowhere near outbalance the harms he can inflict on our society's norms. Also, frankly, I'd prefer he focused on cars and rockets because we need his attention (and more) on those big problems and he's made great progress so far. The Twitter sidequest is an addiction gone awry.

ryandvm 4y ago

> We are watching Atlas Shrugged play out. Atlas Shrugged my ass. There has never been a more effective government suckler than Elon Musk. Every business he's running exists entirely due to the largesse of the federal government. Except Twitter of course, and so far it's looking quite possible that he may end up incinerating his $44 billion dollar impulse purchase.