Musk has Ken Paxton working for him now as Texas sucks up to their new darling business owner.
Fortunately, there’s nothing more pressing going on in Texas these days than counting Twitter bots to protect Texans one specific billionaire Texan.
Nice gig, getting paid by the taxpayers of Texas while working a second job for somebody else.
I can’t possibly see how Musk could get louder or dumber than he already is, or that his cult of weird nerds could possibly get any more devoted and gullible.
The lot of them are already well into meltdown territory as it becomes increasingly evident that Musk is either going to sell Tesla low to buy Twitter high, or pay a billion bucks with nothing to show but a few fun months of shitposting and attention-seeking.
I don’t think Twitter wants to give Elon a billion either, so no party in this fucked up situation has an incentive to call off the deal and so each party has a big incentive to negotiate. Musk knows he’d be a fool to pay his initial offer now, so seeing what kind of maneuvers each side plays is golden entertainment.
Twitter shouldn’t have thrown themselves at him.
What I find especially interesting is how all these shenanigans are torching Musk’s public reputation in a way that all of his previous nonsense hasn’t managed to achieve.
I use my wife as a barometer for things like this. She is a quintessential Ordinary Person when it comes to media and news consumption. (On a one-to-one level, she’s the single best human being I’ve ever met, so don’t think that’s a weird backhanded knock. She’s just the apotheosis of Mainstream Taste in news and entertainment.) Her perception, up to this point, is that Musk was “that electric-car billionaire who also has a space-exploration business of some kind, and he’s got lots of fans and he gets a lot of media coverage, so I guess he’s doing something right.” If you don’t read in-depth analyses on specialty sites, if you don’t dig past the headlines, that’s a perfectly reasonable conclusion. And whenever I would screw up my face at any mention of his name, she would handwave me off, chuckling that my extreme distaste for his character was just one of my strange little obsessive idiosyncrasies.
But over the last few weeks, as he’s thrashing around in this Twitter debacle and laying off workers and engaging in gleeful political trolling and being revealed as a weirdo serial sexual harasser, she’s finally starting to realize: “I think you were right, he really is kind of a stupid jackass, isn’t he?”
His cult is utterly devoted and will never be reachable by reason, but if I go by my wife’s attitude, the really positive development here is that the average person is starting to wake up to the reality of his bullshit.
Dude, Ken Paxton is reportedly available at basically Wal-Mart prices. Going rate is $25k. There was a while deal where he fired half his office after they mentioned this. You don’t have to be Musk to buy Ken Paxton.
Twitter is only liable if the board votes to break the deal or if they tell shareholders to vote to break the deal. Neither of which was a factor in “too many bots”
There was a time when Ted Turner was similar to Musk. Very successful, but let it go to his head. I’m not recalling which business Ted loudly purchased for a ridiculously overvalued price back in the 1980s/90s, but it was later revealed the bad price was all about his ego getting ahead of his accounting. He spent a billion extra just to prove to the other billionaires he could.
Switching gears …
ISTM Musk is now a full-on Bond Villain. Has a weird appearance, wears a monomaniacal expression on his face, owns exotic lairs equipped with henchmen, has nearly unlimited dictatorial business power that he now wants to translate into political power, etc.
Mixing metaphors madly, he’s jumped his own shark and will only be stopped by a 007 or by hubris.
Here’s a fun thought … He might have watched Trump incompetently play at being President-for-Life and figured he’d like to do the same himself. Cheering legions of readily misled fans will do that to a man.
It was Twitter’s fault for wearing a miniskirt and revealing halter top. If they hadn’t dressed so sexy Elon wouldn’t have been driven to attempt a hostile takeover.
Elon Musk has always aspired to be a Bond villain; it is just until now he’s just been one of the forgettable ones with a shitty plan like Dominic Greene from Quantum of Solace or Hugo Drax from Moonraker. He’s now working his way up the rankings, although with this Twitter debacle he is clearly aping Christophe Waltz’s rendition of Ernst Stavro Blofeld from the terminally dumb Spectre, May the gods help us if he watches Goldfinger or buys Piz Gloria in Switzerland and actually turns it into an “allergy research institute”.
Stranger
He purchased the Warner Brothers film catalog. While his efforts at colorization did not go over well, his dedication to preserving these films in a way which could also be monetized (this is America, after all) by a viewing audience is quite laudable.
Will Twitter never learn?
The way he’s going he’s going to end up more Jimmy Bond from the 1967 Casino Royale.
Lol:
Next up: Watch Elon weasel his way out of paying his US$1B obligation by claiming that he has no money.
Stranger
Another source.
Musk has ten kids. Don’t you need a big white cat and swivel chair to be a proper Bond nemesis?
It’ll be more than $1 billion. He would need to convince the court (and you know there’s a lawsuit coming) that Twitter committed fraud with regard to the number of bots. Even if there are 2 or 3 times as many bots as they thought, it’s a very high bar to clear to convince anybody they were being fradulent about it.
In the immortal words of Kramer, on Seinfeld: