Elol Musk knows nothing about Software. I think all that money and power left him with only two real friends: Dunning and Kruger.
The one thing I am not sure about is if he is destroying Twitter in purpose? Is this the new hyperloop?
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Tesla has only been profitable because itâs been selling electric-vehicle production credits to other car makers. That particular regulation is changing. And Musk went ahead with this very expensive acquisition anywayâŚ
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This article about crypto nonsense has the juicy tidbit that a âcrypto bodyâ is advising the UK government about the exchange collapse. Do less technical ponzi schemes also have trade bodies to represent their interests to the UK government?
Also hedge funds collapsing due to their crypto investments going bad is bitterly entertaining living in an overly financialised country which mainly seems to result in egregious house price inflation. The schadenfreude is strong with this story for me.
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While Iâm being entertained by this arrogant man destroying twitter, does he know nothing about softaware? I looked up where his wealth came from and it seems like he got a big jump from early dotcom boom stuff that he built. So does he not understand modern web stuff or is it a case of the money has fluffed up his origin story?
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I think that some of it is learning from experience: I did a thing which everyone else said couldnât work, and it did work and made me very rich, therefore I am a genius and people who say Iâm wrong are stupid. (As opposed to âI got luckyâ.)
(Hanging around with the likes of Peter Thiel also clearly doesnât do much for oneâs ability to regard oneself as imperfect.)
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I donât think Elon Musk has ever been a dev himselfâokay Wikipedia corrects me apparently he âcodedâ the website for his first company zip2 in the early 00s. I think he was what we call âgefährliches Halbwissenâ (dangerous half knowledge). He knows just enough to convince him he knows way more than he actually does. And so he writes up shit like that statement with the RPC calls ⌠he does not realize whatever knowledge he has from coding some stuff 20 years ago is mostly not relevant now and probably never was.
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Why the fuck is he running his new acquisition in public?
Is this still him having a brain (and possibly a motive) or is he just drunk on his own greatness?
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Itâs really not clear!
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So I guess Elon Musk has just purchased Twitter or something?
And he fired an employee via social media?
(Who has business discussions on a social media site?!)
I donât understand whatâs happening here, and Iâm thoroughly glad thatâs the case.
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You got it right.
He âpurchasedâ Twitter for 44 Billion $$$$ (not all of it his own money weirdly), made himself CEO and then walked into HQ with a sink in his arms, later tweeting âlet that sink in.â
(note: the latest meme captions read more like âhow fast can I sink itâ).
Then he promptly fired the upper echelons of management and a moment later about half of Twitterâs employees. Apparently the metric for devs was âthose who write the most lines of code get to stay.â (a day later Twitter desperately tried to get some of those devs to come back)
Then he tweeted âpower to the peopleâ, ditched the work from home policy and declared the remaining devs had to implement his plan within 2 weeks or else⌠his plan being that the âblue checkmarksâ which were showing that people were tweeting from a âverifiedâ accountâwhich was reserved for well-known personalities, brands and et al and mostly used by celebrities, journalists, politicians and American fast-food chains with a snarky social media department. Musk wanted instead that everyone could just purchase a blue checkmark for an $8 subscription service (Twitter is running red after all).
He also ditched any semblance of moderation (as in content moderation) in favor of âfree speech absolutismâ⌠tweeting âcomedy is now allowed on twitter.â
This lasted about one minute until the first person made an Elon Musk parody account and promptly got banned.
It took a moment for the new $8 checkmarks to appear. Seemingly the moment it went live, tons of people decided this was the cheapest way to have some fun and made all kinds of fake accounts and posting wild stuff posing as celebrities, brands or corporations.
Here is a good collection of those tweets: https://www.reddit.com/r/RealTwitterAccounts/
The most notable is probably the one by one US based pharma company that (fake-)tweeted that âinsulin was now freeâ and their stock promptly lost a few billion in value (I checked the loss was something of 6-7% of their previous stock prices the following day) however that may also have had a second source: they apparently lost some kind of lawsuit the same day⌠so as usual: read with caution.
All in all the fake tweets from the fake accounts were going crazy and people fell for them and if not the originals were thoroughly annoyed. So the subscription service went dead a few days after its inception.
Since then Elon Musk has been seen tweeting about the internal runnings of the software that is twitter in public (see his tweets posted in this thread).
Itâs an on-going, vaguely disquieting but highly entertaining shit-show. It would be solely entertaining if twitter wasnât also an important tool for activists all over the world and home to a huge variety of informal communities that will have a hard time finding themselves a new place if twitter goes down (f.e. SFF short fiction). Some communities have started exiting towards Mastodon (a distributed service based on OSS software that copied a lot of ideas from twitter and added the decentralized aspect). Others may be moving elsewhere as well. The last I saw of the writerâs community they were either ignoring the whole debacle or lamenting it without solution in sight.
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Nice summary. Itâs hilarious watching this
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Well that was much worse than I expected.
And how much money?! As someone who has only looked at Twitter on rare occasions when someone linked to it, and never understood it as a platform, that is so far beyond my comprehension that I donât know where to start. (I guess thatâs why I donât have 44 billion dollars to spend.)
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Also as an addendum: Advertisers are leaving Twitter ⌠I want to say âin drovesâ but I have no idea how many or how large a percentage but this is what is truly sinking Twitter that has no actual business case except selling advertisement. IMO we as a (global) society need to think about what we want from the internet and how we want it organized and ⌠payed for (but thatâs veering into politics)
I always liked Twitter as a platform. It has its beautiful moments and I like the open and permeable structure of the communities that are distinctly there but also not there because twitter has no such structures. But this same openness also has terrible aspects that have long been lamented by those who have been the victims of the hate it spews.
I have had times when I used it a lot to read about politics, news, writing, games all in the same place. But Twitter as much as Facebook has also enforced the trend of people only reading headlines and getting enraged and then rage-tweeting. All advertisement based, algorithmic social media companies want the same thing: engagement and nothing is quite as angaging as getting mad at something or someone it seems.
I used to follow around 200 people on Twitter which in turn would expose me to all the interesting stuff they would re-tweet from the people who they followedâkind of a pyramid scheme of ânewsyâ stuff. I curated that list of follows carefully so I would get a good cross-section of my interests. And that works great. I sometimes even posted stuff myself or interacted with others within those communities that i had âinformallyâ joined by following a bunch of people and reading their thoughts. But if you followed very popular people you had better not go beyond what they said because the commenting system on Twitter is abhorrent. And because people follow even those they hate⌠you can imagine where this goes. And even influential people, politicians who struggled to get a semblance of moderation done had lots of trouble escaping the hate they would draw.
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@yashima One thing you might have missed is that Musk tried to back away from this acquisition. But the courts enforced it.
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I left out the whole âhow did he get there in the first placeâ which is just as much of a saga as what happened since then. Maybe me or someone else will write up the Prequels 
And who knows maybe there is a sequel trilogy already in the makingâŚ
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This started to happen after the initial offer, when it was clear in a meeting with advertisers that Musk had no plan. Itâs been suggested that this was why he tried to back out of the deal.
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He offered too much money (probably twice or even three times what the going concern was worth, Iâm pretty bearish about twitter). the decline in stock prices across tech shortly after the offer made it look worse, and the rise in interest rates made it more expensive. His debt costs more in interest than Twitterâs pre-acquistion free cash flow. Iâm sure post acquistion, income has gone down, though weâre not going to get good numbers, until they end up in bankruptcy.
He also signed a contract that waived all the usual merger and acquisition protections for the buyer (including lots of due dilegence about buying what you think youâre buying), and included a clause allowing twitter to sue for specific performance. (meaning: buy at the terms of the contract, with the court pointing a gun at him to make it happen). Twitterâs lawyers get a gold star for the contract, Muskâs lawyers screamed and shouted at musk, but they did what he told them to.
If anyone harbored doubts about Musk being an idiot, the contract should have gotten rid of them. His performance at the company since he took it over has been even stupider than I expected. I expected it to crash and burn, I didnât expect him to aim at a mountain and set the plane on fire before he got there.
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Technical question from a non-techie.
I used to use a laptop and it ended up (for reasons) running so slowly, I bought a desktop and am very happy with it.
My question is how best to restore the laptop to speedy operating. I was going to just do a factory reset but wasnât sure if I might face issues with Windows licences etc that came with it, pre-iinstalled.
I only want to use it for casual browsing, the odd work trip, kidâs homework etc. Do you think it will be ok just to reset the thing?
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