But for Tesla, it’s the typical “Elon acting like a total dipshit asshole” story.
Tesla was founded by 2 other people. He invested early, when the Tesla guys were trying to get venture capital. So he was the largest stakeholder and became Chairman of the Tesla Board. That said, he acted like an asshole about it, ousting the former CEO (and one of the actual co-founders) and trying to write that former CEO out of Tesla’s corporate history and include himself as a founder. He actually did succeed at getting his name attached as a co-founder, so there’s that.
Basically, he’s always been a self-aggrandizing ass and has always treated others like crap.
I agree Musk isn’t “all bad”, but he really is a spectacular asshole who is totally full of himself. As for why Maher didn’t push back, seemingly oblivious to all the missteps at Twitter, it’s because he really does admire Musk. And he’s even explained it in the past: he believes that we will need techno-geniuses to save our planet, and that Elmo is precisely the sort of genius we need.
Elmo was indeed the founder of SpaceX, although he founded it for the purpose of colonizing Mars. As with Hyperloop, there is a distinction between “thinking big” and “being an idiot”, and that distinction has so far eluded our Boy Genius. Not long ago Elmo predicted that the first people would set foot on Mars in 2024 (that’s next year, for those following along) and that one million hardy colonists would be living there by 2050 (with a 70% chance that one of those hardy colonists would be Elmo himself).
As for Tesla, it was founded in July 2003 by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Elmo bought his way in the following year. And, having taken the reins, the flurry of Nostradamus-like predictions continued. In 2014 Elmo predicted that Teslas would be fully self-driving “by next year”.
I’m not mocking FSD. A great deal of brilliant engineering has gone into it by multiple different organizations. And a lot more remains to be done. I’m mocking simplistic idiots like Elmo who can’t even grasp a conceptual notion of the magnitude of the problem.
Well, except for the part where you pre-emptively blamed all the potential problems with it on “regulatory issues” and “regulatory headaches” and “regulatory bureaucracies”. IOW, “there’s a great idea in there” whose practical unworkability is all down to “the regulators” and “the administration” whom Musk is “alienating”. Whatta bunch of vindictive party-poopers, eh?
That’s the classic libertarian shell game in operation, as usual: Whatever speculative theoretical advantages some imagined enterprise might conceivably provide, markets (and their deities, the “entrepreneurs”) automatically get all the credit for them. Whatever impractical unrealistic stupid assumptions make such an enterprise unworkable in any plausible real-world scenario, “government regulation” (and its villains, the “bureaucrats”) automatically get all the blame for them. Nah, no judgments whatsoever there, no sir.
As I was forwarding it to someone I was typing ‘Spacex,’ it made me think about the name for first time. I thought that sounds like a name a junior high kid would come up with.
Elno is making absolutely sure the speech on Twitter is not free (content restrictions) and also is not free (pay to post). He must be so tired of winning.
I keep seeing the term API in this thread. Since I don’t really use Twitter, I don’t really have any need to learn what API is, but it would be nice to know what the letters stand for.
It’s like Twitter for computer programs. Your human-focused version of Twitter uses words, buttons, and pictures for interaction. The API version says, “Send some data in this format to this URL and we’ll do X for you.”
If I have access to Twitter’s API I can write a program to post or read tweets (or other data) from Twitter. If you see a tweet bot, its using twitter’s API to auto-post.
For example: if you have a webpage (like those hosted by WordPress), maybe you want to have a little sidebar that displays your latest Twitter posts (or posts from people you follow).
Access to the API is what makes this kind of functionality possible.
It’s a no brainer - everybody wins: free advertising for Twitter and you get to share posts across platforms. But Musk is so very, very tired of winning, so he’s blowing it all up.
He’s trying to charge a subscription fee to the very product he’s trying to sell. It’s a very 19th century Robber Baron mindset, which is ironic considering how he views himself.
The API is the set of instructions that can be sent to Twitter and Twitter will respond with the appropriate response. As an analogy, the URL for this thread can be thought of as an API for the SDMB. For example, if you open a network connection to port 443 on the hostname “boards.straightdope.com” and send this text:
GET https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition/963442/4595
You will get back the HTML code for this thread. Twitter’s API is different, but the way it works is similar. You send a set of commands to a Twitter server and it sends back whatever you ask for. You could ask for the tweets for a particular user, the most recent tweets, the most popular tweets, etc. and Twitter will give back the appropriate data for your request.
Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient. Twitter is using it’s website as a front to distribute an addictive drug through the interwebs…that’s why people are “addicted to Twitter”. But sending it over twitter dilutes it, so people who are addicted want access to the pure API for a bigger hit. This also explains why Musk’s behaviour since purchasing Twitter is so erratic - he’s getting high on his on supply. Wake up sheeple!