He meant to do that! (Update – I don’t want to do another Musk post, but I have 2 questions.)
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A great time to observe the way society reflexively assumes that Rich = Smart (which is tough to untangle from assumptions that white and male = smart in these United States) is when a rich person is publicly stumbling around in their own shit, complaining about the stink and then shitting some more in an attempt to cover up the smell.
The latest, funniest example is the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk, suuuper genius.
Here is a man who is clearly on the less enjoyable part of the fuck around/find out timeline because he’s a massive dickhead who also happens to have lots of money. And before I continue, it is vital to understand the fact he has shit tons of money doesn’t mean he is OK with losing money. Any money. At all. Yes, it seems weird. If a man has enough money to build a bridge of $10 bills from here to Mars, how can he care about money? That’s reasonable brain thinking, not greed brain thinking. How do you think rich assholes keep score and reinforce their sense of self-worth; By doing good works?
Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop people from insisting that the man staggering around in pants with a big brown stain on the seat of his pants shouting “Ew, what stinks?” is in complete control of the situation because his pants are very expensive and his underpants made of silk spun by left-handed monks from Switzerland. And by the way, those shit-filled pants? They are a mark a iconoclastic, disruptive, genius brain of someone who is not afraid to go around with his pants filled with poo, buster.
For example, this op-ed, which is so Heepian I thought the author would be named Knum Leos. (As an aside, I can’t confirm, but I strongly suspect the article is an attempt to rebut Nilay Patel. If so: LOL. If not, still LOL.)
Even though it is less than a week old it did not age well. In fact, it started out maggoty because the author describes racist scum blasting the N-word, the reinstatement of at least one notorious antisemite and personally participating in spreading homophobic lies about the attempt to attack Speaker Pelosi, as “looser moderation.” Fuck this guy.
The author is also such a wealth worshiper that he believed Zuckerberg when he said “Making money is a means to an end, not the end in itself.”
Really, if you believe that the wealthy aren’t obsessed with money and having more of it no matter how much they already have, please see me about a can’t fail, get rich plan that involves building a subway that runs the length and breadth of Florida.
The author who is not named Leon Kums begins.
Twitter is a crummy business. Always has been.
I have a lousy business, anyone want to give me $44 billion for it? (I don’t actually have a business right now, but I will if I can find a buyer.)
Elon Musk knows this. He’s a canny businessperson
Is he though?
who can read an earnings report.
Can he though?
Of course, Musk subsequently tried to terminate his purchase agreement before eventually relenting and avoiding a high-profile court battle.
The author has nothing more to say about the fact that canny business earnings report reader had to have his arm twisted hard to complete the purchase. I suspect the hand of an irritated editor because that paragraph runs counter to the main feces thesis: Everything is going to plan! Musk certainly isn’t standing athwart Twitter with his pants full of crap shouting “I’m not owned!”
For example, his super genius idea to charge $20/month for a check mark of verification that quickly became $8.99/month? If it doesn’t work, who cares? Just like the Tesla choo-choo death ride, I guess. Or self-driving cars. Or unbreakable car windows. Failure doesn’t matter because … because a rich guy is doing it so it becomes anti-fail. Or something.
It doesn’t really matter if the math adds up for his new plan to charge $8 a month for verification or Twitter Blue or whatever it ends up being called.
Apparently that’s the first thing canny businessfolk learn or maybe they know by spontaneous intuition: It doesn’t matter if the math adds up. Numbers, who need ’em? In which case, that’s good news because Bugs. System. Still in.
According to the author, who is not named Skul Enom, Musk will be able to spy on competitors who advertise on Twitter, which is a thing that sounds a bit illegal, but IANAL. And it may not matter anyway if his competitors stop advertising on Twitter because they’re stodgy old fuddy duddies who haven’t pooped their pants since they were four and who don’t want their brands to be associated with whatever happens under Musk’s policy of “looser moderation,” because that might endanger their boring old profits.
Whether he cuts 25% or 50% or 75% of the staff and how much money he saves from doing so isn’t that important.
Except see above about advertisers giving the bird the bird because Musk fired Twitter’s content and moderation team, and the sort of people he got all riled up with his promises to protect the more vicious types of speech and own the libs and so forth celebrated by being extremely ugly all over his new platform.
To make it easier for advertisers to decide to take a big step away, rather than exercise a level of control that we expect of a 10-year old and at least pretend to be removed from all the bullshit he stirred up, he personally, under his own account, repeated vile shit about Mr. Pelosi. In short, he deprived company execs of the layer of plausible deniability they’re used to when it comes to the crap that goes down on Twitter.
It’s hard to shrug condescendingly tell angry or disgusted customers that Twitter is hardly to blame for the words of a “random hothead” or whatever when the random hothead is the fucking owner.
As the owner of Twitter, Musk now controls a platform that has mounds of data about the connections among its users, their interactions, their interests and so on.
Christ. “The tech wizard will wave his magic laser wand and do techy stuff with the technology” irritates me and I’m not even a tech person. Yes, there are mounds of data, but data isn’t like gold nuggets. You can’t just take a bag of them to town and get cash in return. He has to have people who can extract and organize data and not fire them before they finish explaining it to him. Then he has to be able to do something with the information and have people who can help him figure out how to do that.
I mean, sure he might determine that users who have “cum” or “kum” in their account names usually like tentacle porn, but I’m not sure what good that would do him. Fresh viewing material between Twittertantrums?
And of course he has to not frighten and/or piss people off with whatever he does with the mounds of data, which means shutting up. Hahahaha. Ugh. Seriously, I assume the only reason there aren’t articles about Musk doxxing people who make fun of him is he fired the employees who could pull that information.
As for using Twitter data to gauge users’ interests. Twitter auto-curates interest lists for users and makes it nearly impossible to change them. The thought of Musk trying to sift through the garbage his company auto-created has a certain Bisson-esque je ne sais quoi.
Finally, the author whose name is nothing like Some Klun, comes up with Elon Musk, Emperor of The Discourse and Owner of a $44 bn Megaphone.
Most important, by owning Twitter, Musk expands his reach far beyond his own fanbase.
The assumption that Twitter users can’t and won’t stop using the app if the UX sux more than it already did is weird. To be clear, Twitter was not super great for marginalized users before Musk fired people in charge of what content moderation Twitter did conduct. If every trip to the platform means navigating around fascist assholes and dick pics, the user base will steadily decrease until it is nothing but white cishet dudes who don’t mind being called cuck. And bots.
He’ll be able to set principles that influence the entire flow of information through the platform.
Yeah, he did that all right. And a few days later he was crying over revenue and promising a thermonuclear name and shame if companies didn’t fork over the dough. Those aren’t the actions of a man who doesn’t care about money. Or a man who has a plan, a clue or a grip.
Courtesy of Nobdy: “Off topic commenters dream of taking an international flight with Musk in his personal plane where he spends the whole time explaining why his Twitter purchase was genius and there’s no food because he’s on some trendy intermittent fasting thing.”
Beautifully harsh and more than fair.
Update: Thanks to everyone who shared Tweets of Onks Mule’s laying down of the law on Twitter. The law being “You there, stop mocking your better at once! Stop it I say! I shall have the bailiffs kick over your chicken coops and beat your cow, I will!!”
To my questions
- Is it me, or is that curdled fuckwit spending way more time on Twitter than one would expect from the CEO of several companies? Or even one company. Or pretty much anyone except a Republican president. I know it is a tiny thing against all the other noise, but it seems very odd.
- That weird little prick is searching for his name, isn’t he?
