A lot of his responses constantly remind me of this:
One would think anyone with self-awareness wouldn’t call it the top story “on Earth” or constantly list his posts as coming ‘from Earth’ since it draws attention to his absurd Mars colony that was supposed to already have sent the first colonist on a one-way trip to die on Mars the other year.
But that’s just expecting too much from someone still dressed up as Ironman in their profile pic.
Good Lord. If SNL ever needs an Elon Musk guest star, they should call Paul Reubens. It’s uncanny.
Re: Massive attention.
He’s not completely wrong. One of the factors in Trump’s success is simply that people had heard of him. Familiarity. Name brand.
Musk is doing the same. I always think of McDonald’s as an example. Sure, we all know it’s crap, on so many levels, but it’s familiar and predictable crap that advertises relentlessly, and they do better than many places that serve better food in a nicer atmosphere for a reasonable price.
I’m not saying that this is a good strategy or that he’s anything other than an obnoxious asshole; just a warning not to underestimate the power of sheer repetition of a person / company’s name.
I’ve never heard anyone compare him to Pee-Wee Herman (though I bet if I Google it now, more than one person has), but when I was looking up a pic to go along with “I meant to do that”, that one popped out to me as looking a bit like Musk. I wondered whether it was just me. I guess not!
Twitter: Elon’s Playhouse
In this case, Elmo is completely wrong. Trump’s success is complicated, but a big part of it is that he’s not only famous, but all the negatives that he’s famous for and hated for are actually strong positives to many of his idiot misfit acolytes. There’s nothing positive about Elmo’s catastrophic failures at Twitter.
Bad analogy again. McDonald’s success isn’t based on being famous for crap that nobody wants. It’s based on making unhealthy low-grade food that many consumers find tasty because the unhealthiness is due to factors that trigger our base reward instincts, like fats, including trans fats, an overload of sodium, and excessive simple carbohydrates. It’s also helped by a well-executed corporate strategy to deliver consistency. IOW, the product may objectively be crap, but the business is characterized by well-executed competence. Very few things Elmo has done has been characterized by his personal competence, as we see at Twitter, except when he lets competent people run things. What Elmo mainly has is absolutely fierce drive and ambition, not much more.
It’s not even really crap. A lot of their competition really was crap back when McDonald’s started out (like barely edible or actual food safety risks). As a society, we’ve gotten massively better at food in the years since then so they end up looking worse by comparison.
It’s certainly not gourmet dining, but it’s cheap, consistent, and ubiquitous.
Twitter used to be all those things as well but with all the missteps of the last 6 months (barely half a year!), it’s no longer really the first 2, and at the rate Musk is going, it’ll only be ubiquitous among right wing reactionaries within a year.
Yeah–McDonald’s is kind of the opposite of Twitter and Trump. It’s actually closer to Biden: bland, not great, but at least you know what you’re getting.
If your Big Mac sometimes was made of dogshit, because the store thought that was funny, and if sometimes the cashier cussed you out or sexually assaulted you, and if McDonald’s was also in the business of mad-scientist inventions and was focusing on that instead of on making burgers, the analogy would be a lot closer.
There’s the McRib though…
I’m sure Sam will be back to correct our ignorant misperceptions on this.
More analysis from CNN. In short, hitching his campaign wagon to Elmo turned DeSantis into a three-time loser. First, the Twitterverse and Twitter Spaces was the wrong venue, and having Musk sitting there made it even more inappropriate; second, voice-only was the wrong medium; thirdly – the icing on the cake – the whole mess was a technical fiasco.
The discussion now isn’t about DeSantis’ campaign launch, it’s about whether or not he can recover from this self-inflicted disaster. I wonder if his opinion of Elmo’s genius has changed at all.
So, more like this:
I dunno. The Mercury program went on to a series of successful missions and follow-on programs that changed the world.
I doubt DeSantis’ campaign will work out that well. (And I sincerely hope not.)
You missed the point of the McDonald’s analogy. It’s that relentless advertising has an effect. I wasn’t trying to draw an analogy between the products.
Sure, the program did.
But that rocket didn’t.
Yes, but NASA was thrilled at how much attention the launch generated. It even got a mention in the movie “The Right Stuff”.
Imagine how much less interesting it would have been if the rocket went up into space.
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that much of the (supposed) growth in the Twitter audience has been made of largely pro trump republicans. With Elmo taking De Santis’s side, he is now alienating the very audience that he wanted to attract.
No, I didn’t miss the point. Others got what I was saying. McDonald’s isn’t successful only because of advertising, but for the substantive reasons that I mentioned. Relentless advertising without any substance is at best short-lived and unsustainable, and publicity with broadly negative connotations is even worse, equivalent to McD’s advertising that its burgers are made of dog shit. Unless you want to explain how a disaster that sunk DeSantis’ campaign launch so badly that he’s desperately trying to dig his way out of it is going to fulfill Elmo’s goals of attracting more paying clients and advertisers.
Elmo may be able to recover but now it’s an uphill battle. He can’t even claim that the servers were sunk by massive traffic, because the total audience was only slightly larger than the audience for watching AOC playing a video game via the streaming platform Twitch. The Twitch servers didn’t crash, and that was audio and HD video.
But there are different stages in brand reconition and the “all press is good press” really only applies to the early stages.
If the headline is “Ebola outbreak at Big Bobs Sushi”, a significant number of their customers will likely be turned off, but there will be a certain number of people who think, “Hey I didn’t realize there was a local Sushi place maybe I’ll try it out after they take care of that Ebola problem” If the restaurant isn’t well known this latter group might be larger than the former group and so even the bad press helps them.
But Twitter isn’t a new company clawing for recognition, its established social media that everyone already knows about, so this can’t do anything but hurt them.
It could theoretically help DeSantis since it the glich wasn’t his fault and the increased media attention might get more people to realize that he launched his campaign, but more likely the news of the glitches is going to overshadow his announcement, and he’ll get tarnished for the reasons outlined by @wolfpup.