As Elon Musk continues to decay before our very eyes, it's become something of a game to guess just what the buffoonish no-longer-world's-richest-person will do next to auger Twitter deeper into the ground than any of his secondhand tunnel-borers could manage. It's a very easy game, because the answer is always "all the things." There doesn't seem to be a single moment when Musk isn't coming up with a new way to turn one of the most favored social media sites for journalists and activists into an inescapable money pit swarming with for-profit hoax promoters and moist amateur Nazis.
RELATED STORY: Determined to burn Twitter to the ground, Elon Musk dissolves Trust and Safety Council
Here's the sad truth of things: Musk has quickly unraveled his years spent promoting himself as a visionary with a pattern of actions that shows him to be nothing more than an utterly run-of-the-mill wealthy asshole. Here's a line from a new New York Times report that pretty much sums up the man's alleged genius:
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Ah yes, the most effective method for rich snots with lawyers to "cut costs" turns out to be signing contracts, then refusing to pay when the bill comes due. If you are new to the ways of multimillionaires, this is bog-standard crookedness among even the moderately rich. Skipping out on bills has been a particular lifelong hobby for one particular seditionist rich twit named Donald Trump. These people didn't get rich by sharing the wealth. They got rich by screwing those around them as hard as they could screw them.
The Times story also reports that Musk and team are trying to skip out on nearly $200,000 worth of charter jet flights made during the Twitter takeover, have "instructed employees not to pay vendors," and are currently mulling the risks of refusing to pay severance payments to Twitter's many, many fired workers. That last one is an especially risky move in California, which has robust labor laws and state government agencies that take special glee in smacking deadbeat employers good and hard and often. Musk will be needing an entire army of lawyers.
Oh, but the Times also reports Musk has been firing Twitter's lawyers, and has also given the boot to his own installed legal head, Alex Spiro—the man he brought in to replace the legal team heads he first got rid of.
Once again, we can use some of that Donald Trump knowledge we were fed against our will for these past six years to read between the lines on Musk's thinking. Musk wants to cheat his way out of bills, and is rapidly running out of lawyers willing to back him as he climbs out onto thinner and thinner legal limbs. Not paying your vendors is a great way to renegotiate contracts up until the precise moment they tell you to pound sand and flip off an important switch; not paying the severance you promised in order to evade state employment protections sounds like a good idea only if you have no lawyers in the building at all.
And again: This man paid $44 billion for a money-losing company, saddling it with bills in excess of anything it could plausibly earn anytime soon. After paying $44 billion, he's nickel and diming on this? Musk has also disbanded Twitter's "Trust and Safety Council" completely, as he pivots the company toward paid videos, aka porn, and there's still no explanation as to how any of this squares with a Federal Trade Commission consent decree that barred the company from making any major product changes without informing government regulators beforehand.
So yes, things are going quite terribly. We've entered Total Fiasco mode.
There are other signs that whatever Musk once thought his "plan" to be, his current plan consists of flinging himself out various windows so that he can brag about disrupting the safety glass market. Musk is increasingly using his perch as Twitter owner to promote his own pandemic quackery and conspiracy theories, siding himself squarely with the sort of dangerous anti-science cranks Twitter tried to rid itself of before his arrival.
"They just kept calling different viruses C19, because that got more funding than if not," Musk tweeted on Tuesday. "That’s why I called it the ‘Virus of Theseus’: how many RNA changes are required before it’s not C19!?"
This is pseudo-scientific babble from Musk, and of the sort you would get from anti-mask, anti-vaxx cranks shouting at tired nurses and schoolteachers and grocery store clerks. Actual Science People can tell you precisely why each sub-variant of COVID-19 continues to be COVID-19, and you can either listen to them or to a billionaire factory owner who started spouting pandemic denialism the moment it became apparent that keeping his factory workers from spreading the disease was going to cost him money.
Musk fled California explicitly because of the state-enforced pandemic safety protocols that he, personally, didn't want his Tesla factory to have to abide by. The man has long been devoted to the notion that he knows everything better than anyone knows anything.
You think I'm kidding, but I'm not. We'll attach our third Lesson From Trump here, which is that narcissists tend to double waaaaaaay down when they're doing poorly. It's not that Elon Musk got absolutely fleeced when he spent $44 billion to own the social media site he has obsessively used for his own self-promotions. Elon Musk is saving all of civilization by bringing back anti-vaxxer hoax accounts and white supremacist leaders.
"Social media in general, especially Twitter, were eroding civilization. If civilization collapses before Mars becomes self-sustaining, then nothing else matters," Musk tweeted in response to a post begging him to focus on rocket stuff rather than daily shitposting. "Human consciousness is gone."
Now, I don't know why Donald Trump getting banned from Twitter for an act of violent sedition was the thing that was going to cause civilization to collapse, and it's not clear why anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists whose utterly false claims have led to tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of preventable pandemic deaths are so necessary for future Mars colonization that Musk needed to hand over a vast chunk of his fortune in order to protect them. It is possible the man is absolutely full of poo on this one. It is also possible that he's suffering from the same delusions of grandeur that made Trump believe the United States government needed to be sacrificed to his own personal ego.
It's a common affliction among the rich. A great many of them are quite certain that people making them feel bad is an existential threat to all of humanity.
This might be the reason Musk got caught in another lie today, as Twitter banned the account that kept track of the travels of Elon Musk's private jet, a month and change after Musk specifically tweeted that his "commitment to free speech extends even to" not doing that.
It turns out that using Twitter to coordinate an orchestrated attack on the seat of American government is an act that Musk is quite certain the rest of you need to live with, if civilization is to be saved, but using Twitter to track where Elon Musk's jet is currently parked is a "safety" risk that you peons must absolutely never do. It checks out!
Also not necessary for civilization, apparently: actually voting.
Just remember, as you're reading this: This man has his own space program. This man can turn satellites on or off at a whim. And he's convinced that people who don't want to hear from seditionists and neo-Nazi types are now the real threat to humanity.
RELATED STORIES:
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Determined to burn Twitter to the ground, Elon Musk dissolves Trust and Safety Council
Elon Musk promotes COVID-19 conspiracies, blames Trump's post-coup ban on 'activist employees'
Musk leaks Twitter documents to pursue his own agenda, making Twitter a more dangerous platform
RELATED STORY: Determined to burn Twitter to the ground, Elon Musk dissolves Trust and Safety Council
Here's the sad truth of things: Musk has quickly unraveled his years spent promoting himself as a visionary with a pattern of actions that shows him to be nothing more than an utterly run-of-the-mill wealthy asshole. Here's a line from a new New York Times report that pretty much sums up the man's alleged genius:
Campaign Action
Ah yes, the most effective method for rich snots with lawyers to "cut costs" turns out to be signing contracts, then refusing to pay when the bill comes due. If you are new to the ways of multimillionaires, this is bog-standard crookedness among even the moderately rich. Skipping out on bills has been a particular lifelong hobby for one particular seditionist rich twit named Donald Trump. These people didn't get rich by sharing the wealth. They got rich by screwing those around them as hard as they could screw them.
The Times story also reports that Musk and team are trying to skip out on nearly $200,000 worth of charter jet flights made during the Twitter takeover, have "instructed employees not to pay vendors," and are currently mulling the risks of refusing to pay severance payments to Twitter's many, many fired workers. That last one is an especially risky move in California, which has robust labor laws and state government agencies that take special glee in smacking deadbeat employers good and hard and often. Musk will be needing an entire army of lawyers.
Oh, but the Times also reports Musk has been firing Twitter's lawyers, and has also given the boot to his own installed legal head, Alex Spiro—the man he brought in to replace the legal team heads he first got rid of.
Once again, we can use some of that Donald Trump knowledge we were fed against our will for these past six years to read between the lines on Musk's thinking. Musk wants to cheat his way out of bills, and is rapidly running out of lawyers willing to back him as he climbs out onto thinner and thinner legal limbs. Not paying your vendors is a great way to renegotiate contracts up until the precise moment they tell you to pound sand and flip off an important switch; not paying the severance you promised in order to evade state employment protections sounds like a good idea only if you have no lawyers in the building at all.
And again: This man paid $44 billion for a money-losing company, saddling it with bills in excess of anything it could plausibly earn anytime soon. After paying $44 billion, he's nickel and diming on this? Musk has also disbanded Twitter's "Trust and Safety Council" completely, as he pivots the company toward paid videos, aka porn, and there's still no explanation as to how any of this squares with a Federal Trade Commission consent decree that barred the company from making any major product changes without informing government regulators beforehand.
So yes, things are going quite terribly. We've entered Total Fiasco mode.
There are other signs that whatever Musk once thought his "plan" to be, his current plan consists of flinging himself out various windows so that he can brag about disrupting the safety glass market. Musk is increasingly using his perch as Twitter owner to promote his own pandemic quackery and conspiracy theories, siding himself squarely with the sort of dangerous anti-science cranks Twitter tried to rid itself of before his arrival.
"They just kept calling different viruses C19, because that got more funding than if not," Musk tweeted on Tuesday. "That’s why I called it the ‘Virus of Theseus’: how many RNA changes are required before it’s not C19!?"
This is pseudo-scientific babble from Musk, and of the sort you would get from anti-mask, anti-vaxx cranks shouting at tired nurses and schoolteachers and grocery store clerks. Actual Science People can tell you precisely why each sub-variant of COVID-19 continues to be COVID-19, and you can either listen to them or to a billionaire factory owner who started spouting pandemic denialism the moment it became apparent that keeping his factory workers from spreading the disease was going to cost him money.
Musk fled California explicitly because of the state-enforced pandemic safety protocols that he, personally, didn't want his Tesla factory to have to abide by. The man has long been devoted to the notion that he knows everything better than anyone knows anything.
You think I'm kidding, but I'm not. We'll attach our third Lesson From Trump here, which is that narcissists tend to double waaaaaaay down when they're doing poorly. It's not that Elon Musk got absolutely fleeced when he spent $44 billion to own the social media site he has obsessively used for his own self-promotions. Elon Musk is saving all of civilization by bringing back anti-vaxxer hoax accounts and white supremacist leaders.
"Social media in general, especially Twitter, were eroding civilization. If civilization collapses before Mars becomes self-sustaining, then nothing else matters," Musk tweeted in response to a post begging him to focus on rocket stuff rather than daily shitposting. "Human consciousness is gone."
Now, I don't know why Donald Trump getting banned from Twitter for an act of violent sedition was the thing that was going to cause civilization to collapse, and it's not clear why anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists whose utterly false claims have led to tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of preventable pandemic deaths are so necessary for future Mars colonization that Musk needed to hand over a vast chunk of his fortune in order to protect them. It is possible the man is absolutely full of poo on this one. It is also possible that he's suffering from the same delusions of grandeur that made Trump believe the United States government needed to be sacrificed to his own personal ego.
It's a common affliction among the rich. A great many of them are quite certain that people making them feel bad is an existential threat to all of humanity.
This might be the reason Musk got caught in another lie today, as Twitter banned the account that kept track of the travels of Elon Musk's private jet, a month and change after Musk specifically tweeted that his "commitment to free speech extends even to" not doing that.
It turns out that using Twitter to coordinate an orchestrated attack on the seat of American government is an act that Musk is quite certain the rest of you need to live with, if civilization is to be saved, but using Twitter to track where Elon Musk's jet is currently parked is a "safety" risk that you peons must absolutely never do. It checks out!
Also not necessary for civilization, apparently: actually voting.
Just remember, as you're reading this: This man has his own space program. This man can turn satellites on or off at a whim. And he's convinced that people who don't want to hear from seditionists and neo-Nazi types are now the real threat to humanity.
RELATED STORIES:
Elon Musk is about to learn that liberals—not his new deplorable pals—buy Teslas
Determined to burn Twitter to the ground, Elon Musk dissolves Trust and Safety Council
Elon Musk promotes COVID-19 conspiracies, blames Trump's post-coup ban on 'activist employees'
Musk leaks Twitter documents to pursue his own agenda, making Twitter a more dangerous platform