Tortured_Genius wrote:Bearing in mind that Musk was essentially forced to buy Twitter, ...

no one forced him to sign that contract, but he was rightly forced to fulfill it.
Even then he didn’t have to buy Twitter, he could have coughed up the penalty agreed to in the contract.

Between the penalty clause and the damages he would have to pay for tanking the stock price, he'd have ended up shelling out tens of billions for nothing. Going through with the sale always looked like the more palatable option.

It would seem all banned Twatter accounts will be reinstated, including the likes of the Illinois fucking Nazis.

I have a feeling it's not really going to matter.

I don't use Twitter, so don't expect me to link to it, but Musk just publicly stated (i.e. on Twitter):

Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. Do they hate free speech in America?

Because 'free speech' entails an obligation to advertise on Twitter? Free speech is why Apple can choose where to advertise or not advertise.

It's not that America hates free speech, but rather that extreme political division has inculcated people to spit out inane buzzwords for political purposes without actually engaging their brains.

Also, since when was using the platform you wish a given company to pay you money to advertise on to berate and belittle that customer a sound, rational business practice?

And not just any old company, but the one that currently pays you the most in advertising by quite some margin amounting to (according to WashPost research) 4% of total revenues.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63751515

Tuesday, 17 January 2023 is the day analysts predict Elon Musk will become the number-one influencer on Twitter.

...

The social-media industry has never before seen a platform with a chief executive who is also its biggest personality.

I have to wonder, although it is an obvious stereotype drawing its conceptual roots from psychology masquerading as scientific, whether Elon Musk just has a very small penis.

He's certainly already had more influence on me than most so-called influencers. I am well persuaded to never buy a Tesla.

Thommo wrote:He's certainly already had more influence on me than most so-called influencers. I am well persuaded to never buy a Tesla.

just wait for a bit, when Twitter inevitably crashes to the point of FUBAR he might just have to sell his remaining Tesla stock.

Unless he doesn’t have to pay back the Arab money he borrowed to buy Twitter because he got it in order to crash Twitter.

Grimes must've fried Elon's brain. I don't know who snapped more, Musk or Ye. Just kidding, he's got a ways to catch up to Ye. At least Musk isn't openly racist...and running for president...again.

Ye asking Trump to be his running mate has almost reconciled me to Ye.

A genius level of humiliating Trump.

That was cool.

I'd be a bit more impressed if he'd managed to do it without seemingly going full fascist. That guy needs therapy and preferably of a different sort than a Presidential run is going to give him.

So far as Musk goes, he's still giving the impression of someone who wants to keep his overvalued business empire running, although I don't think we'd have to guess which part of the political spectrum he'd go all in on if it starts to crumble.

I'd be surprised if a certain Princess Bride meme hasn't been widely employed with regards to 'freedom of speech' on there.

Cant help but feel that naive idealism is slowly being obliged to abandon vacuous conspiracy claptrap and acknowledge the simple fact that abject arseholes want to use Twitter to be abject arseholes to other people, and if Twitter wants to have customers who aren't abject arseholes, it needs to decide which group is more important to its future.

How many swastikas from a public anti-semite will it take before permanent ban?

Musk is out of his element by a long shot. He lacks a basic understanding of the actual roots of his claimed “free speech”. No government entity has told twitter what or what not to publish on the internet. There has been no government censorship of speech there.

Poor dumb bastard has confused a private company (Twitter) with the gub’mint. Twitter can deny or allow anything they want on their platform, and it isn’t a violation of our first amendment to the Constitution.

And, of course, the masses eat that shit up.

at least he won’t immediately go bankrupt when he gets sued for spreading lies that lead to violence.

I had heard some people faced some sort of consequence for calling Mark Traitor Greene white trash. I felt like testing that and as yet it's still up. Some prominent liberals might have been quietly booted from there though.

Continuing the Musk soap opera (if anyone missed it), he tweeted that his pronouns are Fauci/prosecute. What a dildo.
Then he was booed after going onstage during a Chappelle act. I don't know what they were booing about, they got two assholes for the price of one!