Oh, so it is. I thought Trump was older and Musk younger for some reason. Trump looks like he’s got a lot of city miles on him
Everyone who complains about not having Free Speech on Twitter or anywhere online isn’t really complaining about not having Free Speech, they’re complaining about their speech not being carried to an audience. We all have free speech online, we’re all able to spout whatever stupid opinion we like, but we shouldn’t be surprised when nobody wants to listen, and nobody wants to carry that speech to others.
As the saying used to be pre-Internet
Freedom of the press attaches to the man who owns one.
We’re about to see what happens when one man owns an internet “printing press” for his personal use.
Seen it before.
It is called the Washington “Moonie” Times. Not very important nowadays, but still influential paper/website among the right wingers (especially the unhinged ones). I can picture Twitter still being there many years from now, but smaller and kept alive thanks to a lot of money tossed at it from a crazy cultist authoritarian maniac.
Yeah. It’s hardly unprecedented for a fat-cat to own a mouthpiece.
Part of my point was that Twitter is bigger, with a larger reach, than the e.g. Washington Times ever thought about being. Another point was that understanding Musk’s approach to Twitter “management” makes a lot more sense as a personal megaphone than it does as a profit-making business.
On another thread I pointed out that the comparison to the Washington Times is about that paper in the USA when compared to Twitter worldwide. Yes, Twitter is bigger, but the way it is going, it will become the Washington Times of the world. Annoyingly influential, but with most people aware of how lousy it will be as a source.
We both certainly hope so. I do think Musk will discover, as Twuth Social discovered, that having the adulation of the dumbest most easily misled 5% of humanity is not really a very edifying feeling.
Elon has been calling CEOs and yelling at them for not givong him money, and the companies that do want to advertise can’t find anyone to talk to because he fired them all.
Meanwhile, in what I’m sure is completely unrelated to his struggles with keeping advertisers, he’s decided that covid misinformation is OK now.
That’s been one of his pet bugaboos for a while now, so it may actually be unrelated to his current struggles. Or it might not be. Hard to really determine with certainty when you have an irrational man-child in the middle of throwing a tantrum:
I got a good chuckle from a link in the article to a tweet by Musk from Mar 2020 downplaying the disease and predicting there’d be close to zero new COVID cases by Apr 2020. More evidence of his genius, I suppose.
18D chess. 18D chess. Clearly.
Sometimes they’re also complaining about people disagreeing with what they freely spoke.
1D Candyland, maybe.
He just needs to look up.
I just found out that Sears still exists. 17 years after it started circling the drain.
This is what is going to happen to Twitter. It will still exist as a shell of it’s former self. Elon and his fan-boys will use it to talk to each other… nobody else though.
Not in Canada, though. They ceased to exist here some years ago, after being a dominant retailer for a long time.
The story of Target moving into Canada is also a fascinating case study. They totally ignored advice about how they should approach the Canadian retail market. They were, after all, a giant US retailer with a market cap at the time of about $50 billion and weren’t about to take the advice of local yokels about how to run their business. Yeah. They slunk out less than two years later with over $5.4 billion in losses and were never seen again. Meanwhile, Walmart continues to be the most successful retailer in Canada ever, because they did understand the market.
With regard to Twitter, Musk’s experiment is globally the equivalent of the Target venture into Canada. Huge financial backing doesn’t make up for gross incompetence. It only gives you a lifeline – breathing space to change course. But Musk is going full-on Nazi, and doing an amazing job of shedding the best employees. Maybe the best description is full-on kamikaze. It’s a fascinating thing to watch.
ETA: I visited a Target during the period of their venture into Canada, and I think it’s a really fitting allegory of Musk’s takeover of Twitter. The store was poorly staffed, the merchandise totally disorganized, many empty shelves – just a complete mess. Sound familiar?
Interestingly, Walmart has taken over the old Sears store near me.
Ha! I did the same with Target. I was curious to see what the store would be like - I’ve never been in a US version. They spent 18 months and tons of dollars re-doing one of their stores in a large mall. Huge freakin’ deal. I went in about a month after the Grand Opening. It was pathetic. It was just sad. I went in to look for socks. Found the department. Rack where socks should be. In a rack where there was room for maybe 200 pairs there were 4. 4 pairs of socks to choose from. The whole store looked like 1960’s Russia. There was simply Nothing. There. No. Stock. At. All. Dozens of sad looking employees just wandering around like zombies.
It was at that moment I knew that Target in Canada was dead. I never went back inside. One and done.
Twitter will still be around in a decade. 4chan is still in existence, right? I just looked, and AOL is still a thing. Really, it is. Twitter is destined to be the AOL/4chan of social media sites.
Sears was pretty comprehensively converted from an ailing retailer into a real estate scam for the personal benefit of the owner of the Sears name bought out of bankruptcy court. Extracting max value from the RE holdings of the old Sears is what led the new owner/CEO to keep it alive as long as he did. And once he’d wrung the real estate holdings dry, the husk of the dead retailer was unceremoniously dropped on the ash heap of history. And on the balance sheets of the retailer’s creditors.
I don’t see that Twitter has an embedded asset base as Sears did that can be plundered at leisure. What is physical Twitter, but some rented servers and a few rented office campuses around the world?
We don’t want him back, thanks. He’s yours now.
Interestingly that has been my experience with Walmart here in the states, while Targets have always been clean well organized and well staffed. I wonder what caused the Canadian subsidiaries to be so poorly run.
Would Mars be an acceptable compromise?