this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Why do I get the feeling the next stop on this journey is for Reddit to be brought up by someone like Elon musk.
So, for a long time I've believed Elon is actually pretty dumb. He's impulsive, was bad at programming, and frequently gets facts/figures absurdly wrong
But then there's that chat log between him and other billionaires... It circled around the idea of private companies bring free to shape social media being an existential threat
He's tanked Twitter and publicly boasts about how he turned it around and made it profitable through actions that drove people away from the platform. There's no way the numbers work from what we knew before it went private, and they've stopped paying their bills - his claims are almost certainly false
And yet, social media companies are listening - frankly, they probably don't care if it's true. If rich shareholders believe it, then by copying his methods their stock price will jump. Reddit and discord have started new initiatives that piss off their users since then... None of the methods will immediately collapse a network, but they're generally targeted towards driving away both power users and rockstar employees. It will starve the networks of content over time, leading to a tower of babble moment where the platform disperses-leaving smaller and fewer locuses of control on pubic discourse
So I keep coming back to this idea - is he a doing a zero-requiem and becoming the villain to inoculate us as a species against control by billionaires?
But then I think back to his ego, and think he's probably just blundering a role he's unqualified for.
But then, he does something else so dumb it seems like an intentional fumble, and it gets me thinking again
It's pretty easy. He's been lucky with the work he did (stole/claimed) once or twice in the past and ever since everyone is eating the BS he says. Twitter is only one thing. Hyperloop, SpaceX etc. are all Ideas a 9 year old would come up with and are so out of reality it isn't even funny anymore. Or remeber when he was reinventing the Metro, but worse?
He has be so rich so early in his life, that he never had to grow up. He then surrounded himself by yes-sayers and was lucky with how Tesla turned out (in that it got evaluated like a tech company, rather than a car company). Ever since he can't fathom the idea that someone might know something he doesn't. He also can't grasp the idea that money can't solve certain problems. His twitter posts show how little self control he has and most of it reads like things my 5 year old nephew would say. It's insanity.
So there's plenty you're leaving out there, like the fact he didn't start spaceX or Tesla (although he sued the founders to not mention that publicly), and the Hyperloop is a great sci-fi idea that the math just doesn't work out on (at least not in Earth's atmosphere)
It totally supports what you're saying, the only credit he deserves is as a hype man and for securing government assistance. Nothing he says or does convinces me he's a smart or even slightly self-aware person, but...
Not a day after I posted, musk announced he wanted to remove blocking people on Twitter. That's an idea a 7 year old could tell you is dumb.
Sure, the presence of the mute makes the platform worse rather than unusual, but still, holy hell Batman...
I agree with what you said, and the evidence supports you. But here's where a very small part of me drifts to...
Let's say he's been trying a zero requiem since the beginning. He's measurably advanced key technologies. He's positioned himself to have the ear of very powerful people. He's gained the respect of many of them for growing his wealth to become one of the richest people in existence. They listen to his methods if nothing else.
Now he tanks Twitter in a very public, blundering way. He expressed privately (in now public text exchanges) an interest in getting together a bunch of rich people to buy out social media, because it's an possibly existential risk.
For those watching critically, it certainly looks like he plans to use Twitter to turn money into influence over the population. He keeps insisting moves that are killing Twitter have actually made them profitable. Other social media, like Reddit and discord, took notice and started flirting with these user-hostile ideas.
The most likely result is social media platforms splintering their user bases as they flee elsewhere, while the billionaire held up as an example of why billionaires are actually a good thing becomes hated by large portions of the population (particularly on the left, the side more critical of billionaires and capitalism)
Again, I think you're probably right. I believe he's just a spoiled asshole who read sci-fi and dreamed of being Tony Stark. I'm also deeply concerned about how he started getting political after meeting Trump.
But if he's actually doing it all on purpose to become the symbol of a billionaire that needs to be reigned in, it would probably look a lot like what we're seeing
So many questions.
How is twitter and Reddit enabling sex workers?
What’s is FOSTA?
What did Kamala Harris do?
That would actually be kind of funny. Have him burn more money.
Saudi Prince/hacksaw forman.