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Musk’s Twitter Buy Makes No Sense – Unless It’s Part of Something Bigger
- chatterhead 4y ago
- HomePhone 4y ago>speech realist What is that?
- bandyaboot 4y agoThe thing you call someone when it becomes clear that the thing that he actually calls himself is a lie.
- chatterhead 4y agoSpeech realist is someone who believe in the tenants of free speech within the confines of laws.
- bandyaboot 4y agoWhich law makes it illegal to impersonate Elon Musk on Twitter dot com? * the word is tenets, fyi.
- chatterhead 4y agoImpersonating people can very much be illegal, but it can also expose you to libel. Please, do your spell check thing and get back to me.
- bandyaboot 4y agoCan be yes, but in these cases, not even close, get real. My apologies, many people actually like to know when they’re using the wrong word so they can, you know, use the correct one in the future.
- lapcat 4y agoThe bigger thing is obvious and already happening: Musk wants to influence and control politics. Use Twitter to become a kingmaker. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589639376186724354 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589639376186724354
- loceng 4y agoI'm not sure how essentially being a referee to make the playing field fair fits under "influence and control politics" description.
- lapcat 4y agoA referee doesn't say "I recommend that the home team wins", otherwise they'd be tossed out of the game.
- yunwal 4y agoThis could just be a narrative he’s pushing because he’s trying to curry favor with Republicans right now. If he needed a favor from Dems he’d probably be talking about how congress is too slow to act and we need a united legislature.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- shostack 4y agoWhen he is in the position of power he's in, and posts things like this[1] it is hard not to assume he has ulterior political motives. [1] https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/twitter-reacts-elon-musk-tweet-183512860.html https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/twitter-reacts-elon-musk...
- georgeg23 4y agoThis article doesn't seem to have much evidence to back it's theory about displacing the dollar. Elon's primary motivation is quite well documented, a massive DoD program*, which requires Republicans to fund. Twitter helps him curry favors to earn these (potentially ~$500B) Republican-backed contracts. Mike Griffin is the ringleader but he's only useful when Republicans are in power (see parts about Elon and Space Development Agency / SDI). https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career * The DoD program is a space constellation of ballistic missile defense satellites for tracking and targeting nuclear ballistic missiles, including HGVs and hypersonic cruise missiles".[110] " However, (UCS) warns developments could escalate tensions with Russia and China and called the project "fundamentally destabilizing".[111] They later called for a treaty halting development to prevent an arms race in space.[112] The Biden administration has largely agreed to slow it down and has been stiffing Elon (e.g. ignoring Tesla) for his involvement. Starlink's military satellite development is overseen internally at SpaceX by retired four-star general Terrence J. O'Shaughnessy.[113][114] O'Shaughnessy advocated before the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services for a layered space capability with lethal follow-on that incorporates machine learning and artificial intelligence to gather and act upon sensor data quickly.[115] It is based on Starlink platforms and requires heavy lift (Starship) for actual orbital weapon deployment. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilities Also see: Strategic Defense Initiative. It's a big project, the recent establishment of the Space Force under Trump is built around this new program.
- danny_codes 4y agoSpace weapons is a pandoras box I don't think we want to open.
- petre 4y agoChina and Russia will do it, just like with the hypersonic missiles and that nuclear torpedo/UUV designed to take out coastal cities.
- 4y ago
- BryantD 4y agoTroy has a strong tendency to confuse “these two powerful people are expressing similar goals” with “these two powerful people are conspiring.” He’s doing the same thing here with Putin and Musk. Extraordinary claims require stronger evidence. What if Musk’s Twitter purchase was a somewhat frivolous whim that he failed to back out of? That’d also explain the current situation, but Troy doesn’t even examine it. Note that if Musk’s purchase was part of a sinister plan it makes absolutely no sense to risk it for the possibility of saving a few billion. Troy keeps papering over that whole flaw.
- LarsDu88 4y agoWhen he originally announced it, it was the perfect excuse to sell off heavily overvalued Tesla stock. At the same time, as one of the top 10 tweeters in the world, Elon Musk + Twitter is a big part of why Tesla doesn't need to run ads. Twitter is also one of the main ways Elon gets with the ladies. Elon may have fumbled this acquisition severely IMO. Twitter stock would've crashed more than Tesla stock did over the same period, but Elon was legally obligated to go through with it. He's now the bagholder for some overpriced shit.
- postalrat 4y agoWell he is still rich AF. So what did he lose?
- bamboozled 4y agoMoney, free time, face, sanity and the ability to remain unbiased , now every right wing nut wants and expects a favour from him. The right to “free speech” ha
- pencilguin 4y agoYou mean he expects a favor from every right-wing nut.
- kelseyfrog 4y agoThe article is a decent example of what I'm labeling as the hyper-rational hermenutic in the domain of postmodern exegesis for the purpose of discussion. Postmodern exegesis in this form is a form of social narrative building facilitated by the internet. One of its hermenutics is hyper-rationalization especially the hyper-rationalization of great men beyond the realm of realism. This is facilitated by the narrative bias and is most embodied in the 4D-chess meta-narrative, but we also see it along with other interpretative mechanisms in QAnon and others. One should at least be familiar with this framing as it's one of the most powerful forms of inoculation against it. In a mental landscape that's more turbulent than in the past, it's natural to want to attribute a narrative to it. What's insidious about some of these narratives is that they are a trojan horse for ridiculous assumptions - like the one the author makes. ie: Musk's hyper-rationality is beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. It's not. 1. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/trump-is-playing-4d-chess https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/trump-is-playing-4d-chess
- whutt 4y agowhut
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoThey said its hard to believe how dumb some very rich, succesful people are. But they do be that dumb.
- CamperBob2 4y agoThis is going to get so much worse...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- johnwheeler 4y agoFrom buying twitter to displacing the dollar. Talk about your slippery slopes…
- mradek 4y agoTFW you’re debating what to order at Panera bread while thinking about some bug you found. Meanwhile ppl be out here plotting and playing out world domination.
- WeylandYutani 4y agoWasn't he forced to buy Twitter? I mean he wanted out of the deal because 40 billion acquisition will never pay itself back.
- nocoiner 4y agoI mean, he was “forced” to buy Twitter after he signed a binding agreement to buy Twitter. So if he didn’t want it, the time to figure that out was before signing on the dotted line.
- Ekaros 4y agoI believe he didn't want to do it in the end. But he was too arrogant and thought that he would get out of the singed deal in any case. Maybe he did want to force some info out of Twitter. But he ended up playing himself.
- itsoktocry 4y ago>I mean he wanted out of the deal because 40 billion acquisition will never pay itself back. Exactly. But every fan is out here trying to explain to us normies how he's playing 5D chess.
- yunwal 4y agoIt’s still interesting to consider why he wanted to buy Twitter in the first place. It clearly wasn’t because he thought the company was thriving.
- moogly 4y agoI always saw it as an Ambien-induced impulse buy.
- SilverBirch 4y agoI think one of the very common errors surrounding Musk is ascribing him too much credit. Musk does something dumb and people shout "he's playing 4d chess!". I think there is a heuristic at play here - which is that he's a billionaire and therefore a genius. But it goes against another heuristic - when people tell you who they are, believe them. Musk just has a very simplistic approach to this problem, he doesn't understand the issues and hasn't shown any interest in learning. So yeah, he can run a company employing smart people who use massive government subsidies to build rocket ships and he can also be a silly petulaent child. Both those things can be true. It doesn't need to be part of something bigger. Listen to an hour of the All-In podcast and you'll very quickly understand the dumb, lazy thinking that went into this acquisition.
- Ekaros 4y agoAlso people seem to forget SolarCity that essentially had to be bailed out with Tesla money... If he was actual business mastermind, wouldn't that company also be successful? I much more subscribe that he got lucky and hired the right people. And managed to exploit VC and retail investors.
- wilg 4y agoWell you could argue he wasn't running SolarCity until it was acquired by Tesla.
- ispo 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- licebmi__at__ 4y agoWell of course buying twitter is not only about twitter. Twitter being capable of shape politics and society should not be regarded as a revolutionary idea, I bet everyday Joe can come into it in a pot trip. Will Musk be able to do such because he's "playing 5d chess" or will he run twitter to the ground because "he's just a rich idiot" which seem to be the postures in the comment section is totally unrelated.
- oliwarner 4y agoTrying to make sense of one person in a position so atypical isn't going to work unless you know them personally. It could be a master plan for world domination. It could be a bluff that backfired. What he does with it is what matters.
- incomingpain 4y agoThe obvious answer is in plain sight but the author's ideology makes him blind to it. Musk is a new billionaire. Virtually none of this wealth has converted to tangible usable wealth. It mostly sits in the floating number of tesla's stock price. If Tesla fails, he loses practically everything. Tesla practically can't fail anymore by itself. But more importantly, he has global sprawl. Factories in China and USA. He is incentivized around not having anything cause the failure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_American_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_American_Civil_War This is the primary threat which concerns him. His intention with Twitter is to prevent this from happening.