I’m totally and completely unsurprised, I never thought he’d see the deal through to completion.
Also, I think he lost way more in the crypto crash than he’s letting on.
Maybe, but it doesn’t much matter. Since the announcement Tesla stock dropped 45% from its pre-announcement level back in April and has since recovered to a 35% drop from that level. That’s hundreds of billions of lost market cap in just 2 months. We’ll see next week if it rallies or not on the latest news.
He personally lost tens of billions in paper value (if not hundreds of billions) over whatever hare-brained scheme this was supposed to be. Maybe that value can be recovered over the next few months, but what he’s publicly lost has been plenty on its own.
There are true believers and crypto-bros who still think he’s some kind of unorthodox genius, but a lot of the shine has worn off for most everybody else.
He is undoubtedly a genius in certain narrow categories, but he’s also had a lot more luck than he would probably care to admit.
More luck–and a boatload of federal subsidies, too:
Is there any way I can cook this and inject it in my veins?
Bumping this because the sale seems to have finally gone through. There’s still plenty of time before the midterms for Musk to let Trump back onto Twitter. How will/could this swing things two Tuesdays from now, and/or how Trump fights DeSantis for the nomination in two years?
I doubt that any major changes will be implemented before the election. Sure he can reverse the bannings of Trump and some other disinformers, but it will take time to draft new posting policy guidelines and retrain moderation algorithms.
Let Trump back on Twitter and make a fool of himself and sink ‘Truth’ Social at the same time. Win, win.
Thousands of troll accounts have been reinstated already, and no doubt thousands more will be appearing in coming days.
Post anything along the lines of ‘Vote Democratic’ and—brand new as of today—you’ll get dozens of ‘you’re a moron’ (etc.) responses from accounts that pretty uniformly look like bots. Some could be individuals typing away, of course.
Meanwhile, lots of left-leaning accounts are getting banned for ‘curse words,’ according to what I see in my feed.
Of course both observations are anecdotal and neither constitutes proof.
But I think you’ll find that a lot of users would agree that Twitter WAS different in a major way on Elon’s first day. And we may expect the changes to continue.
It would take time to do it right.
That doesn’t mean that they will take any time to do it.
I think Twitter will become Truth Social now. All the normal Twitter users will leave, the place will become an un-moderated right-wing hate-hole, and everyone will just laugh at it, like has been going on for TS. The only difference will be that the ownership is a real billionare that can afford to keep it going. I think TS is dead on TFGs first tweet, so that part is good news.
I doubt it. Twitter is the place where all the journalists have accounts, where all the politicians and officials have accounts, where all major corporations have accounts, and so on and so forth. Despite what Musk has said before, and what moron conservatives popping up to troll Twitter right now think, changes in content moderation are going to take time and the effects will be monitored and Musk will backtrack. And the journalists, politicians and corporations will stay, because at this point what they value is the presence of each other, and no other network can offer that.
Perhaps if something shiny leads enough such core users to add another platform to their SoMe presence to create critical mass it will start sucking them away from Twitter, but for the foreseeable future they’ll stay right where they are.
It would take time to improve moderation, but just removing it as he plans won’t take any time at all.
I expect by Monday, the new rules will be posted, and it’ll be “No illegal content” and “No insulting Musk.”
Advertisers will be quick to jump ship and slow to come back.
Like, maybe if the founder of twitter starts a new social media platform?
That might happen. The choice to actually buy Twitter was after all the same kind of stupid. But he’s already publicly backtracking, stating it “won’t be a free for all”, announcing a “moderation council” and taking his time. So I think he’ll be slightly more careful, because a disaster will mean he’ll have to finance the loan payments entirely out of his own funds and angry investors will be loath to contribute to future ventures.
I doubt it. As I’ve said elsewhere, there’s a ton of stuff on Twitter, in fact the vast majority, that has nothing to do with politics. There is far more chat about sports on Twitter, say, then about politics.
I don’t know if this has been mentioned before, but CNN reports that Musk intends to set up a “content moderation council” at Twitter – which means banned users like Trump may not be back in the immediate future. But here’s the funny part, and I quote the article:
Twitter, however, already has a Trust and Safety Council, which is comprised of a “group of independent expert organizations from around the world” to “advocate for safety and advise us as we develop our products, programs, and rules.” It’s unclear if Musk was aware of that fact.
I think CNN was being excessively deferential. I think it’s quite likely that Musk – who is a genius in many technical areas but also a socially inept doofus – never had much meaningful contact with Twitter execs as he was going about his whimsical purchase of the company – which was in much the same way that normal mortals might whimsically buy a new shirt – and so there were a lot of important things he really didn’t know about the company.
OTOH, if it turns out that he did know about the existing content moderation council, then this signals his intent to fire them all and appoint his own stooges who would be much more amenable to allowing hate speech or, say, the promotion of insurrections.
So take your pick – the future of Twitter is in the hands of someone who is either an uninformed incompetent or a promoter of disinformation and incendiary hate speech.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/28/media/musk-twitter-content-moderation-council
I think that there will be moderation. Anyone that talks badly about Musk will be banned.
¿Porque no los dos?
Far too many Americans are inoculated against Trump playing the fool (mostly the same ones who weren’t inoculated against COVID-19) and Truth Social was always a joke. The social media ecosystem just takes a step backwards into greater toxicity, less civility and more violent polarization. There is genuinely zero upside or silver lining to Musk taking over Twitter. It is negative at every turn.
I’ve generally been in a decent mood this year, but I’m getting prepped to be a little gloomy again for a bit after potentially bad election results and the fallout from this nonsense.
Well, this is a promising start:
Now I wish I hadn’t deactivated my account so I could call him a “pedo guy”.