It’s not just lemmy that’s benefiting from Elon Musk.
I’m sure there were a huge swath of people who used Twitter and didn’t care at all about Musk one way or the other.
Then he rebranded and threw his ego and control in everyone’s face. And all the people who like Twitter IN SPITE of Elon were now forced to acknowledge that their Twitter is gone.
Just like over at reddit now, the latest move has alienated the people who really cared about the platform itself. If they rebranded to “Spez’s World”, though, a lot of the people who didn’t give a shit before would suddenly be ready to bail.
He has so thoroughly ruined Twitter that you can’t help but wonder if that was his goal from the outset.
Narcissists like him would never seek failure intentionally.
You’ve obviously never played a board game with a narcissist. Flipping over the table and calling everyone, including the game they themselves purchased, cheaters is a totally expected move.
They’re not doing that to lose. They’re doing that because they already lost.
I GUESS YOU’RE RIGHT, LIKE YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO BE!
- Knocks phone over -
Fucking cheaters
You’re not wrong but he bought it at an extremely overpriced amount so he did already kind of lose.
Musk ‘lost’ when he had to spend the $44 billion. I can totally believe that he’s burning Twitter out of spite from having to buy it.
That is quite fitting
It’s just like Michael from The Office. You see he isn’t doing things on purpose to sabotage everyone, but he can’t control itself, he needs the attention and the self worship.
Thanks for this analogy, it’s going to help me see the world in a funnier light.
To what end, though? The man blew 44b on a site that apparently was only worth 5-10b, and that was before he ran it into the ground. He also destroyed his reputation and the mystique as “genius entrepreneur” which the world can now clearly see he never was.
I can’t think of a single net positive. I think it’s an age old tale with people with too much money: he fell victim to an over inflated ego and too many yes men aiming to please. He started to believe he really was brilliant.
Sad thing is the man has so much money he still can’t fail, personally. He’ll have destroyed Twitter and even more people will lose their jobs. And autocrats around the world will be pleased. Musk will just shrug, tell himself it wasn’t his fault, “it was the libs” or something, and move on.
Eta: the only winners here, as per usual, are the shareholders.
44b sounds like a lot of money (it is!), but his net worth right now is 219b after this fiasco. At this point it’s just a score between rich assholes who got the bigger number.
You could take 200b away from his evaluation and he could still retire on a yacht and not work a single day in the next 100 years. Same for his children and his children’s children.
So yeah, “bad” financial investment, but it might be worth for him to kill one of the biggest platforms where he was called out for his bullshit.
To be fair, Elon doesn’t all have that money in cash. Also, like half of the Twitter buyout was made possible with a loan where he used his a Tesla stocks for like half of the operations as collateral.
Although I agree that he’s far from being broke, this can become a pretty bad financial decision to Elon.
Thing is, now ALL the platforms are calling out his BS. I don’t think he would have sold his golden boy reputation for any price, given the choice
Totally valid point.
Chop one head off…
That 44b had to be paid in real cash, not just the current theoretical value of the sum of his shares. He sold quite a lot of Tesla shares afaik to banks to give them a “small loan”.
Lol, “real cash”, look it up what he actually did. He took a loan in the name of Twitter, so he didn’t even use his own money. Pretty much financing half of the deal with the theoretical value of the company he just bought. And he took in extra money from Saudi investors, it’s not all his money.
There was never a 44b “real cash” transaction.
Foil hat time. Twitter was at one point a huge communications platform. People got news and opinions on daily happening almost immediately. He has successfully purchased that platform and destroyed the faith people had in it, in time for some of the most controversial events in recent history.
I mean, sure, assuming he doesn’t mind paying for that with 44 billion of his own dollar bucks, the devaluation of his other companies and the evaporation of his personal reputation.
Which is where my conspiracy theory falls apart. It mainly rests on fact that most of these decisions seem deliberate. Even an idiot by this point might start worrying about the loss of money. As much as he has, 40bil is considerable.
It’s not his money though, so your theory hasn’t really fallen apart. Some of it his money but he’s been hanging with the saudis and murdoch.
It is most definitely his money. He is using his real source of wealth, Tesla stock, as collateral to secure the loans. $44 billion worth of Tesla stock. And when you sell off a huge amount, as would happen in the case of the collateral being seized, it would tank the rest of his wealth which is mostly in non-collateralized (as far as we know, in relation to Twitter) Tesla stock. Investors knowing that $44 billion of Tesla stock will be liquidated–even if slowly–by creditors would make prices tank.
Elon’s rich. Like all rich people, he is inherently immoral and opportunistic, holding no allegiance to his species nor country of residence (“world citizens” are a blight yet most countries still let them buy citizenship–that’s true class solidarity while they get us fighting over stupid shit like transgender Chess Grandmasters). I have a feel that you are correct in that he’s been earning money from the Saudis and Murdochs and many others. But the main source of his wealth is still in the market. A source which he pumped up with market manipulation because the SEC is a captured entity run exclusively for the benefit of the parasites at the top.
But it feels like arguing around the edges a bit. Elon is just not good at this. He has failed upward his entire life which is why he had to buy his way into basically every successful enterprise he is credited for. Rich people, especially nepo babies like Elon, don’t succeed because they are better. They succeed because the upper class ensures that their class succeeds, because the alternative is the working class becoming their peers. And they can’t have that.
Considering that most of the market was stupidly overpriced, if you had 100b of worth in overpriced stock, and you had to choose between spending it or waiting for it to lose value over the next few months, what would you do?
I wouldn’t buy Twitter, fire everyone, chase off a lot of the good people and then change the name. If I felt like Twitter was the only plan, I would have negotiated a fair price, worked with the people on what was already working and wasn’t, kept everyone on until you knew how it ran, kept the worldwide, known name and probably paid my rent, lol. I’m not a “genius” in business, but I do know that this is probably the best I could have done.
To reduce the ability of the 99% to interact with each other on a basis that results in change of the 1% methodology.
The people running this nation and the rest of the world absolutely do not want us getting together and figuring out how to make change effectively. I’m pretty sure it’s why they keep ruining all of the social networks, we can’t unite if there’s not a platform for us to do so on…
Take any of the top 3 social platforms, then have a look at their total number of users. If we were going to go unite, that shit probably would have happened by now. Instead we post memes about billionaires.
Elon jet tracker has way less of a following now.
True, but it popped up on other platforms, effectively defederating. And you probably jest, but if not: 44b is a lot more than the 5k he initially offered the guy to take it down.
IMO Mush was trying to run a simple pump and dump scheme with Twitter stock. You know, make some statements about ho he’s going to buy it at a massively inflated price, sell all the stock during the uptick and then suddenly find some issue with the sale and leave. However, during the “make some statements” phase he managed to make some legally binding statements and Twitter and their lawyers held him to them.
So there’s no agenda or plan really, just a larger version of the Dogecoin pump and dumps that Mush has done in the past. It’s just this time rather than some crypto rubes he tried running it on a company with lots of lawyers and it blew up in his face.
Agreed, very plausible scenario. It played out that way as well, right up to the part where his lawyers told him “you legally can’t actually walk away from this deal”.
Actually the number of Twitter users increased
Really?!? That’s surprising.
If it’s active users increased I’d be surprised, but if it’s not I wouldn’t be, most people probably don’t delete accounts when they stop using them
Those are all the flies attracted to shit.
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Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Elon is a narcissistic idiot, but that’s all he is. He bought the same crap his own PR team was peddling a few years ago, figured he didn’t need his PR team because he was so great (according to propaganda they spread), and went on to confidently make idiotic decisions because of course the real life Tony Stark can make no mistakes
Honestly even if the executive wanted to crash Twitter on purpose I’m not sure they could have done as good as Musk.
He’s carefully destroying the brand, the infrastructure, the finances and the credibility of Twitter.
You can’t be too quick because then people would take about for maybe a month and move over.
No it had to be slow and painful so everyone start to really hate it.
I wonder if his goal isn’t for Twitter to be successful. I’m wondering if political influence will help to get cushty deals or legislative changes favourable to Tesla or SpaceX.
Why worry about losing $30bn from one hand when you gain $100bn in another?
Is this migration already called xit? Because it should…
tweXit
tweXit does have a nice ring to it. Made me laugh 😂
Not sure which I like more. I think I’ll use both.
Xodus
Xitting the Xitter (shit-ter)
Xatter (shat-ter)
There’s like 300 active users here. Just don’t talk about piracy. Weaks
Why are people so fucking addicted to Twitter? It’s just people posting a few sentences about shit I see on the Internet already. But what do I know, I’ve gone my entire life without using the stupid shit. Maybe I’m not taking into account how many people want to be internet celebrities with their parroted tweets and recycled jokes. Why is it so hard to make another site where dumbass celebrities can feed 2 lines to the drooling masses?
Twitter culture (depending on what parts of twitter you were on) was really hard to explain. Unless you used it and really knew how to, you don’t really get the benefit from it. Its feed structure combine with post length and algorith meant that it was really easy for you to know what other people were saying about things going on right now (reality shows, football matches etc). It also made searching for news so easy (due to its Trending feature), so you were kept in the loop about things.
The meme culture of Twitter was also very unique. I can say with absolute confidence that Twitter memes were bomb (before Musk ruined it). Way better than any memes I’d come across on Reddit or Lemmy so far.
The only problem is you had to take Twitter in small doses. Stan culture and cyber-bullying culture were real negatives of Twitter. Certain people on that app were unhinged and that went unchecked because of how echo-chambers were set by the algorithm. You really had to check yoursel to make sure you weren’t being corrupted, especially because cyber-bullying was so normalised there (at least in my experience).
I’ve never used it either, but it’s a fact that 90% of the memes on twitter used to come from Reddit, then end up on twitter, then be reposted back on Reddit a week later when someone “found it on twitter”
Well that’s not true because most memes on Twitter were made directly on the platform. Reddit memes were extremely dry in comparison to Twitter’s.
I’m there for the artists. A ton of artists share their artwork on Twitter because of the enshittification of deviantART. I am not sure where they will end up now.
It was really good for artists and entertainers (streamers included) to gain a following
Wouldn’t you have to care about nfts though? I feel like I’d rather have their art on a T-shirt.
Thank you Elon ❤️ 🤣🤣
IMO X is shorter, easier to say and cooler. I like it!
I root for Mastodon like everyone else but as long as there is some very good improvement in discoverability and intelligent feeds, it will never be the same in function as Twitter (not X, Twitter). Especially when it currently has a fraction of the creators Twitter had.
Discoverabily is like crack. It’s what hooks you, and it’s what drags you into hell.
For real, I just want to open an app and scroll. I’m not going to put effort into reading funny microblog posts. It’s why tiktok is so successful, the app is really really good at delivering relevant content.
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They definitely exist - quite a lot of them in fact - it’s just after the big migrations in 2022, the kind of people who tend to get popular on Mastodon are the more “serious” posters, as they’ve eclipsed the memers in popularity. (Eternal September kind of thing)
If you check out the explore and local feeds of instances such as Wet Dry World or Beige Party, you’ll find the meme posters, who you can then follow.
What doesn’t help either is that meme posters never use hashtags, even though they’re the primary way to be discovered on Mastodon. On the other hand, people who are posting “serious” takes tend to use hashtags a lot - this also helps skew the meme posters away from people. Unfortunately, hashtags have gone completely out of vogue and just aren’t used by most people.
Mastodon is implementing full text search soon though, most likely with 4.2.0 (the next version), which should hopefully make things easier.
That’s my problem too. Weird Twitter just doesn’t seem to be a thing on mastodon , or if it is the lack of an algorithm makes it hard to find the right kind of accounts to follow
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Fuck FedEx. Whenever a signature is required, they won’t let me have the package held for pickup anywhere, so I get door tags… even if I’m sitting on the couch watching TV. Called them and they said they don’t require the drivers to knock or ring. I only figured out after a ton of aggravation that if you get three door tags, they will hold the package for pickup for a few days anyway (even though they say they can’t due to “shipper restrictions”).
Is there a place on mastadon I can bitch about FedEx?
#fuckfedex #fedex
Nice
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The more i see and recognize the use of the term “Federation”, the more my inner geek hopes this is how IRL Star Trek starts.
“The federation started as a group of loosely associated social media and information hubs where people would share ideas, porn and memes. The ideals and social structure would eventually spread to a much larger and more dynamic series of instances that built up to and even greater federation of the human online colonies. As it grew, first contact was made and the inter galactic trade federation was established to trade porn and memes, would eventually go onto to much more larger, important, totally not porn related causes. To explore strange new worlds, and seek out new…”
“…to seek out new porn and new positions. To boldly jerk off to something no one has seen before…”
I can’t wait to charge aliens 5.99 intergalactic glonches to see my butthole every month.
There is a whole star trek instance conveniently enough: startrek.website
I love the fact that you can now have a website that ends in
.website
. It’s like havingusername@email.com
as your address.
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Threads is deliberately limiting its growth. Just this morning I saw a guy I know talk about how he really likes Threads despite the smaller number of users. He still doesn’t have any invite codes to give out.
Circles made that mistake also.
Good, Twitter is a disgrace to humanity
There were stories that Tesla had a team in place to distract Elon any time he showed up to the office, and I absolutely believe that. Now that Elon has Twitter to distract him, I wonder what that team is up to.