4 ms·

This is hilarious, it assumes Saudi investors would value silencing dissenters at $44BN. It also requires believing that these machiavellian Saudi investors ar

by gochi 3y ago

This is hilarious, it assumes Saudi investors would value silencing dissenters at $44BN. It also requires believing that these machiavellian Saudi investors are so dumb they can't tell how much power they would have by keeping Twitter growing so they can more effectively silence dissenters before it becomes news.

lamontcg 3y ago
People can't accept that Elon could do something this stupid, so they assert that he has to be playing some kind of 4D chess.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  Just an hour ago on some news show from a US TV channel, NBC or Fox or what was it, the host said (about the X rebrand) "it doesn't make sense, so there should be a bigger plan here". And that indeed sums up so much of the mentality of Elon's supporters. The more stupid things it does, the grander the delusion becomes.
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    Common falsehood that people believe is that smart people simply can't do stupid shit.
    - kamel3d 3y ago
      I agree with you even the saudi investors are also stupid just look at to that line city project
      - hef19898 3y ago
        Also, SoftBank.
    - hnbad 3y ago
      Common falsehood that people believe is that rich people are smart. The biggest early factor to Elon Musk's wealth was lucking into Peter Thiel merging X.com into Confinity/PayPal. Thiel likely anticipated that Musk would have tanked X.com eventually but it would have been much worse for Confinity if it had done so given its market share and the rippling affect that could have caused in the market and user trust. X.com largely operated on hot air, riding the Dot Com bubble. The massive jumps after that directly stem from his Tesla shares, which are massively overvalued. Basically he bought an EV company right when greenwashing and solar/electric was the new hotness and founded SpaceX mid-way to the tail end of a space optimism/tourism and "nerd-cool" (i.e. rise of super hero movies in mainstream media, widespread enthusiasm for "tech gadgets", etc) trend. He used SpaceX to make grandiose claims about technological developments which in turn fed into a hype cycle of vaporware projects like the Hyperloop, eventually allowing him to position himself as "real-life Tony Stark" further boosting his credibility with no actual qualifications. I'm not saying his success isn't real, but his success doesn't come down to him being a clever business person but more to being a meme. He turned himself into a brand and that brand carried Tesla stock to absurd heights but with Twitter's failure that brand is becoming increasingly toxic and he's stuck turning dials and checking if people are still cheering while also trying to relive his young adulthood high of X.com, except we're no longer in the Dot-Com bubble and he doesn't understand PayPal did him a favor by kicking him out.
      - mavhc 3y ago
        And now all he has is the best space company and the best car company, poor bastard. It was so easy everyone else also did it
        hnbad 3y ago
        By what measure is Tesla "the best car company"? According to every metric I could find the company is clearly overvalued and stock price is the only measure it seems to truly excel in. Elon Musk is listed as the CEO of Neuralink, SpaceX and Tesla. Do you genuinely think Elon Musk is so good at being a CEO that he can run three vastly different companies (4 including X Corp which he formally ceded his position as CEO) at the same time? Or do you think that his primary function was founding/buying the companies? Most of his interference in his companies (especially Tesla) seems to have been detrimental: from an atrocious workplace accident rate in Tesla factories because he "doesn't like yellow" to laying off most of Twitter before establishing any persistence/transfer of knowledge. If you listen to him talk about any subject you're professionally familiar with, it's evident he knows how to mix in buzzwords but doesn't understand the underlying technology or how any of it actually works. His Twitter Spaces interview was a perfect example for software developers, his recent interview about Twitter/X as an "everything app" was an example for anyone working in (or remotely informed about) fintech. His wealth is almost entirely tied to Tesla's share price and Tesla's share price is tied to his public perception as "real-life Tony Stark". SpaceX mostly runs on government contracts - incidentally most of Tesla's actual revenue also stems from public funds in the form of emissions trading.
- ljm 3y ago
  I imagine it's like turning to religion to make the universe feel less chaotic and random, but the reality is that most people are repeatedly playing the bongcloud opening and simply getting lucky. That doesn't feel quite as fair as having earned success, so 4D chess it is.
mschuster91 3y ago
> it assumes Saudi investors would value silencing dissenters at $44BN. Why not? For the Saudis it's pocket money. > It also requires believing that these machiavellian Saudi investors are so dumb they can't tell how much power they would have by keeping Twitter growing so they can more effectively silence dissenters before it becomes news. The thing is, reach-wise there is no replacement for Twitter: - Meta's platforms forbid sharing of non family friendly content and enforce that ban through rigorous moderation, which means reports from violent protests have a very hard time there; on top of that the user base of Facebook has declined to mostly Boomers and people using it for the messenger only. - Telegram has no problem with violence or unrest, see the coverage of the Russian invasion, but people need to already be in the groups that share such information - it's a good tool for organizing protests, but less so for spreading the word to the general public. - Reddit has a similar problem, unless you make the post rise in one of the default subs, no one will care, and Reddit's format doesn't lend itself to real-time updates. - Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse suffer from a lack of cross-instance content discoverability. The "trends" on most of the Mastodon servers are completely broken, disabled or useless and the platform doesn't have a concept of geotagging to make it easier to discover regional content - the best it can do is language, but Arabic or English is spoken worldwide. And search isn't fediverse-wide, just the toots that the server the user is active on has gotten into their global feed view. The USP of Twitter was that everyone could connect with everyone, worldwide, and get their issue trending in a matter of minutes if need be.
- ffhhttt 3y ago
  > it's pocket money It’s not.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    The Saudis are making a billion dollars a day from oil [1], the personal wealth of the dictator clan is estimated at 1.4 trillion dollars [2] and the real value is likely significantly higher than that, especially if you include assets owned nominally by the government or national companies, but factually under clan control. So yes, this is absolutely pocket money, particularly if it makes sure that they can't be toppled from the money spigot or that their neighborhood gets destabilized in a second Arabian Spring again. Smaller Qatar spent four times than that on the World Cup infrastructure that was nothing more than a couple weeks worth of sports whitewashing. We can't apply Western values of "worth it" to people who can sink billions of dollars on a whim in European soccer clubs just because they can. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-26/saudi-arabia-s-oil-exports-hit-the-highest-level-since-2016 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-26/saudi-ara... [2] https://www.trtworld.com/middle-east/saudi-royal-familys-dollar14-trillion-wealth-and-lavish-spending-12794015 https://www.trtworld.com/middle-east/saudi-royal-familys-dol... [3] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/10/influence-game-qatar-world-cup-investments/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/10/influence-game-...
devnullbrain 3y ago
Yesterday they valued a football player playing 34 games for them at 1 billion.
wkat4242 3y ago
That's a good point. Chopping them into little pieces is bound to be a lot cheaper.

by gochi 3y ago

lamontcg 3y ago

People can't accept that Elon could do something this stupid, so they assert that he has to be playing some kind of 4D chess.

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
Just an hour ago on some news show from a US TV channel, NBC or Fox or what was it, the host said (about the X rebrand) "it doesn't make sense, so there should be a bigger plan here". And that indeed sums up so much of the mentality of Elon's supporters. The more stupid things it does, the grander the delusion becomes.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  Common falsehood that people believe is that smart people simply can't do stupid shit.
  - kamel3d 3y ago
    I agree with you even the saudi investors are also stupid just look at to that line city project
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Also, SoftBank.
  - hnbad 3y ago
    Common falsehood that people believe is that rich people are smart. The biggest early factor to Elon Musk's wealth was lucking into Peter Thiel merging X.com into Confinity/PayPal. Thiel likely anticipated that Musk would have tanked X.com eventually but it would have been much worse for Confinity if it had done so given its market share and the rippling affect that could have caused in the market and user trust. X.com largely operated on hot air, riding the Dot Com bubble. The massive jumps after that directly stem from his Tesla shares, which are massively overvalued. Basically he bought an EV company right when greenwashing and solar/electric was the new hotness and founded SpaceX mid-way to the tail end of a space optimism/tourism and "nerd-cool" (i.e. rise of super hero movies in mainstream media, widespread enthusiasm for "tech gadgets", etc) trend. He used SpaceX to make grandiose claims about technological developments which in turn fed into a hype cycle of vaporware projects like the Hyperloop, eventually allowing him to position himself as "real-life Tony Stark" further boosting his credibility with no actual qualifications. I'm not saying his success isn't real, but his success doesn't come down to him being a clever business person but more to being a meme. He turned himself into a brand and that brand carried Tesla stock to absurd heights but with Twitter's failure that brand is becoming increasingly toxic and he's stuck turning dials and checking if people are still cheering while also trying to relive his young adulthood high of X.com, except we're no longer in the Dot-Com bubble and he doesn't understand PayPal did him a favor by kicking him out.
    - mavhc 3y ago
      And now all he has is the best space company and the best car company, poor bastard. It was so easy everyone else also did it
      - hnbad 3y ago
        By what measure is Tesla "the best car company"? According to every metric I could find the company is clearly overvalued and stock price is the only measure it seems to truly excel in. Elon Musk is listed as the CEO of Neuralink, SpaceX and Tesla. Do you genuinely think Elon Musk is so good at being a CEO that he can run three vastly different companies (4 including X Corp which he formally ceded his position as CEO) at the same time? Or do you think that his primary function was founding/buying the companies? Most of his interference in his companies (especially Tesla) seems to have been detrimental: from an atrocious workplace accident rate in Tesla factories because he "doesn't like yellow" to laying off most of Twitter before establishing any persistence/transfer of knowledge. If you listen to him talk about any subject you're professionally familiar with, it's evident he knows how to mix in buzzwords but doesn't understand the underlying technology or how any of it actually works. His Twitter Spaces interview was a perfect example for software developers, his recent interview about Twitter/X as an "everything app" was an example for anyone working in (or remotely informed about) fintech. His wealth is almost entirely tied to Tesla's share price and Tesla's share price is tied to his public perception as "real-life Tony Stark". SpaceX mostly runs on government contracts - incidentally most of Tesla's actual revenue also stems from public funds in the form of emissions trading.
ljm 3y ago
I imagine it's like turning to religion to make the universe feel less chaotic and random, but the reality is that most people are repeatedly playing the bongcloud opening and simply getting lucky. That doesn't feel quite as fair as having earned success, so 4D chess it is.

mschuster91 3y ago

> it assumes Saudi investors would value silencing dissenters at $44BN. Why not? For the Saudis it's pocket money. > It also requires believing that these machiavellian Saudi investors are so dumb they can't tell how much power they would have by keeping Twitter growing so they can more effectively silence dissenters before it becomes news. The thing is, reach-wise there is no replacement for Twitter: - Meta's platforms forbid sharing of non family friendly content and enforce that ban through rigorous moderation, which means reports from violent protests have a very hard time there; on top of that the user base of Facebook has declined to mostly Boomers and people using it for the messenger only. - Telegram has no problem with violence or unrest, see the coverage of the Russian invasion, but people need to already be in the groups that share such information - it's a good tool for organizing protests, but less so for spreading the word to the general public. - Reddit has a similar problem, unless you make the post rise in one of the default subs, no one will care, and Reddit's format doesn't lend itself to real-time updates. - Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse suffer from a lack of cross-instance content discoverability. The "trends" on most of the Mastodon servers are completely broken, disabled or useless and the platform doesn't have a concept of geotagging to make it easier to discover regional content - the best it can do is language, but Arabic or English is spoken worldwide. And search isn't fediverse-wide, just the toots that the server the user is active on has gotten into their global feed view. The USP of Twitter was that everyone could connect with everyone, worldwide, and get their issue trending in a matter of minutes if need be.

ffhhttt 3y ago
> it's pocket money It’s not.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  The Saudis are making a billion dollars a day from oil [1], the personal wealth of the dictator clan is estimated at 1.4 trillion dollars [2] and the real value is likely significantly higher than that, especially if you include assets owned nominally by the government or national companies, but factually under clan control. So yes, this is absolutely pocket money, particularly if it makes sure that they can't be toppled from the money spigot or that their neighborhood gets destabilized in a second Arabian Spring again. Smaller Qatar spent four times than that on the World Cup infrastructure that was nothing more than a couple weeks worth of sports whitewashing. We can't apply Western values of "worth it" to people who can sink billions of dollars on a whim in European soccer clubs just because they can. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-26/saudi-arabia-s-oil-exports-hit-the-highest-level-since-2016 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-26/saudi-ara... [2] https://www.trtworld.com/middle-east/saudi-royal-familys-dollar14-trillion-wealth-and-lavish-spending-12794015 https://www.trtworld.com/middle-east/saudi-royal-familys-dol... [3] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/10/influence-game-qatar-world-cup-investments/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/10/influence-game-...

devnullbrain 3y ago

Yesterday they valued a football player playing 34 games for them at 1 billion.

wkat4242 3y ago

That's a good point. Chopping them into little pieces is bound to be a lot cheaper.