I would think that many of the technical workers in the San Francisco area will easily be able to find other jobs elsewhere, and replacing them will be expensive, especially since they can’t even offer stock options as an incentive.
That’s what I meant. No one is going to buy Twitter shares based on what Elon says alone - they want a competent firm to audit them first.
Just gonna toss this out there and see what happens.
Well they can, but the recipients wouldn’t be able to sell them until a liquidity event. It’s a lot harder to attract talent with shares that can’t be sold, but it’s used frequently in startups, and the understanding is that you get paid when there’s a round of venture capital funding or they go public. It’s a little different with a formerly-public company though, certainly.
I’m concerned specifically about what he’s going to do with Twitter. I don’t care about the rest of his businesses.
Unlike most of you, apparently, I use Twitter a lot. For my purposes it’s the perfect social media platform. It does exactly what I want, nothing more. I’m seriously afraid that Musk is going to ruin it.
That’s why Musk needs to jack up net revenues.
I’m not saying it’s a good plan. I’m saying it’s the plan. He has a white elephant. He needs to sell some of the meat.
Always touchy to do without killing the elephant 
.
The UN is lecturing Musk, urging him to “ensure human rights are central to the management of Twitter.”
WTF does Twitter, of all things, have to do with human rights???
22-11-05_Letter_HC_to_Mr_Elon_Musk.pdf (ohchr.org)
There is no human right to a ‘safe space’ on the internet.
It is like you knew what the next post would be.
I’m glad you took the time to do this. It seems like in the early days the SDMB was more concerned about truth rather than just repeating stuff you read on the internet or heard on a podcast. I’m a bit shocked at the misinformation repeated here regarding Musk. I think there are plenty of true things that would allow one to not like the guy or think he’s an asshole, there’s no need to embellish. He did completely disrupt the auto market and the space industry. That is truth. What he does outside of that doesn’t give a license to dispute that.
I personally think he’s made a huge mistake with buying twitter. And for professing his controversial viewpoints on a public platform. Why the hell would someone who is selling something think it’s a good idea to post shit that pisses off half the country and even the half that agrees with you doesn’t want your car company to succeed. It’s just bizarre.
Musk’s huge mistake in buying Twitter, and the resulting fiasco, is the central point of this thread. There is naturally also speculation in this thread about his motivations and about the future of Twitter, but I’m curious about your point regarding “misinformation” being posted here about Musk. Not disagreeing but in a casual perusal nothing particularly stands out for me in that regard.
On this general topic, if you’re curious, you can find some pro-Musk cheerleading being thoroughly dismantled by an actual working aerospace engineer here.
In my view, the fact that someone with as little talent as Musk is the richest person in the world is the largest indictment of how broken the current system is. Now, I’m not an engineer but I can say a few things with certainty:
- Musk doesn’t know jack about artificial intelligence. (I say this as an expert in artificial intelligence)
- Building a submarine too big to fit into a hole is pretty dumb for a visionary engineering genius.
- The idea of colonizing Mars right now is dumb.
- The idea of solving traffic with a tunnel is hella-f*cking dumb. Like it is SO dumb, that right there should tell you Musk is no visionary engineering genius (as if #2 wasn’t enough). And make no mistake, people are going to die in those tunnels. One of those cars is going to explode and the result is going to be a disaster.
- The Tesla 3 has been successful, but only because the gov’t has not forced a recall until phantom braking is definitely solved, which they should because those cars are a menace. And this is directly attributable to engineering genius Musk who (according to his own hype) decided to remove the radar systems to make the car more affordable (I suspect the idea actually came from someone else and he approved it).
Space X has been successful, but how much of that is really Musk? Does anybody really believe he is helping to solve the engineering problems?
Musk should absolutely go to Mars. There’s a bunch of other billionaires he can bring with him. Thiel, Trump, Koch, DeVos, Ken Griffon. Probably some others. We’ll get that exact list down later.
Congratulations; I think you agree with just about everyone else here, and most people who have looked at the purchase rationally, including Elon Musk himself, once he was no longer stoned. (I think it’s not a coincidence that the purchase price was $54.20 per share.)
You seem to think that he’s been an effective leader of Tesla and SpaceX, so you may actually be unhappy that he’s created this enormous distraction.
Mastodon is currently really flying. I set up an account a couple of years ago, but didn’t find a way to use it that kept me coming back. I made more of an effort when Twitter accepted Musk’s offer and it helped that I was going cold turkey from Twitter at the same time, but it was still a very different experience from how I was using Twitter.
The current bump in Mastodon users though is qualitatively different. There are more big names, there are journalists setting up their own instances and organizing lists of fellow journalists, there are groups of people who built small communities on Twitter jointly abandoning it. It’s still a drop in the bucket compared to Twitter’s user volume, but it could potentially hurt Twitter badly. It could get Mastodon to critical mass for being an experience that captivates new general users. And if the journalist exodus gains sufficient momentum it could reduce Twitter as a thing journalists think is representative of public debate despite it being a biased selection of opinions and people.
I have no opinion of Musk one way or another. But Starlink has been a HUGE bonus for people like myself. I will be quite screwed without it. So I’m a bit nervous.
Social media is sometimes used to push and amplify misinformation that is very dangerous to persecuted minorities. Here’s an example (gifted link).
Thanks to both of you. I’d forgotten that Nate was the poster whose ardent, persistent, and factually incorrect attempts to defend Musk totally derailed that other thread. I will not engage with him here so he doesn’t derail this one, too.