Imagine if some rich asshole bought McDonald’s for no other reason than they could - or maybe they preferred Pepsi or didn’t like clowns - and got rid of the Golden Arches and changed the name to something stupid, like “Aunt Myrtle’s”, but did the rollout stupidly so the result was a mix of both the old and the new.
Well, imagine no more, that’s what we’ve gotten. Some overrated asshole whose ego is such that buying and flushing an iconic brand is a hobby. Couldn’t he have put that money to better use, even if it was for a selfish reason?
So far, the only changes I’ve seen him enact are allowing more hate speech. They still censor all sorts of political stuff from all spectrums of opinions, and Musk seems personally involved in exempting himself from the same types of attacks he allows on others. Say the wrong thing about him and you’ll be banned, anyone else is fair game.
I’m not surprised there’s a big crossover of Trump and Musk fans, they’re both bullshit artists. That’s their real talent.. it’s not real estate or technology, but the packaging and selling of bullshit. And there are many more buyers in this country than I ever imagined.
If the company thrives, Musk can say it was his brilliance. And if it fails, he can just say he wanted to kill Twitter, so mission accomplished. Meh, who cares. Someone else will fill the void.
IMO just because he's a gazzilionaire doesn't mean he deserves to have his privacy invaded like this. It's like the paparazzi developed an algorithm and are using it to extort celebrities. If I were Elon I would see what sort of legal avenues there are here and litigate this guy into the poorhouse.
I agree with you in principle. And I don’t like eye for an eye mentality. But Musk was on Twitter promoting conspiracies about Paul Pelosi after he was attacked with a hammer by a home intruder. He’s certainly worried about his own safety, yet he buys a social company and the only real change he’s enacted is to allow hate speech to flourish on the platform.
His vigilante, pro free-speech, anti-hero act seems to stop the moment he himself is personally affected. So I agree in principle, but I also see this as the other side of the free-speech coin… If you think calling someone the n-word on a public social media platform is “something I wouldn’t do, but should be allowed and not censored”, then I also think using publicly-obtainable info to post things like this falls into the same realm.
I prefer neither take place, Musk seems to think one is ok but not the other.
arstechnica.com
