These are my resident parasites.
They take what isn't theirs, make a mess of the place, scare away the legit garden animals & spend most of the day screaming nonsense in the hopes of getting a handout.
…
I named them "Eric" & "Junior"#Vaticats pic.twitter.com/vK4QbOYW87
— Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ (@padresj) November 3, 2022
Musk: I don't sleep
Me: I get why teens brag about that, but doesn't that impact your judgement
Musk: LEEROY JENKINS!— ProofOfBurden (@ProofofBurden) November 4, 2022
Take away his money & nobody would pretend to be his friend. https://t.co/hLUnavV6fO
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) November 4, 2022
I mean, shit, all it takes is ten seconds in the account edit function and a copy paste of a publicly available image, there’s NO WAY anyone would be able to match that level of technological sophistication. Trust me, I invented the world’s shittiest subway, I should know! https://t.co/wadn0IgRF2
— Elon Musk (@ChrisWarcraft) November 4, 2022
— Millard Fillmore's porcelain zither (@agraybee) November 4, 2022
“The richest man in the world just got his ass handed to him.” @emptywheel https://t.co/DtGrqFyyYU
— David Dark's Dramatic Comeback (@DavidDark) November 3, 2022
there is a kernel of truth in elon musk’s assertion that left of center people hate him and want him to fail. i’m not sure what that has to do with advertisers running away because he is an unstable five year old man baby, but there is probably some overlap.
— world famous art thief (@CalmSporting) November 5, 2022
the colossal blunder at the core of it all is not understanding thay what makes twitter run is a userbase actively rooting for someone to destroy it hilariously so they can drag a main character to shreds on the way out the door as a grand finale https://t.co/2Pg46CRTJZ
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) November 4, 2022
War for Ukraine Day 254: Well You Don’t See That Every Day!
NobodySpecial
Yes, left of center people like (checks notes) the guys who run GM, Pfizer, and Audi want him to fail. Raging commies all, and likely snowflakes of uncertain gender using their ads to fill your kids with The Gay Agenda.
How did this guy even luck into any of his big investments? He’s such a manbaby any decent conman should have scammed him out of his money AND his subway card long before we got here.
zzyzx
I’m getting pretty sad about Twitter. I have a good group there and I don’t think we’d reassemble the same if we started over.
Llelldorin
If I didn’t work in this industry, I’d probably find watching a billionaire use the GDP of Nova Scotia as a sort of projectile weapon a whole lot funnier.
sab
emptywheel has opened a mastodon account.
SpaceUnit
If NASA just offered to sell Elon Musk the moon and all their UFO secrets for 300 billion dollars we could be done with this bozo once and for all.
Ruckus
People like SFB and EM, they both started with a fair bit of money, inherited or stolen from family. They have both been, for the most part selling crap their entire lives. Has SFB ever, even once done anything other than sell crap? Elon is maybe better than that, because for all it’s faults, a Tesla is at least acceptable. Too expensive, yes. Could be better, yes. Could be a lot worse, yes. But they both know how to sell crap. Because they have been selling themselves their entire lives. Elon could have lived very well just with Tesla, but no his inflated, hyped, and oversized ego won’t let him. SFB is on that same path, he’s just not as good at it. Or anything else. Both of them have a vision of themselves as the best human possible. And I ask, is anyone but the 2 of them in any way whatsoever convinced?
Hangö Kex
re mastodon: This looks like it might be a replacement as far as the tech side goes. Also seems it is paid by user contributions so the users are closer being the customers instead of the product (not unlike here, if I have understood correctly?). With this sort of thing though the network effect* tends to create and sustain monopolies like Twitter and Facebook (Meta)’s services. :( Then again, maybe it doesn’t need world+dog there, but enough participants to keep it interesting. Also, subgroups of the general population might actually find it better outside the monopoly and the network effect might actually work for them.
* the general idea being that users attract more users so a newcomer is screwed from the get-go
prostratedragon
A little downhome slapstick: I know this is apparently Charlie Hunter’s youtube channel, but on the dvd it says
“Swamba Redux”.
oatler
@prostratedragon:
“Fine Corinthian Leather”
Frankensteinbeck
Firing half the staff will destroy Twitter even if no one leaves. I don’t know what those people did, but I guarantee most of them did something Twitter needs to operate. I’m sure Musk believes the conspiracy theories that those people exist only to oppress conservatives and not to, say, deal with maintenance on a cross-platform app in a world where computer technology constantly changes.
I wonder what he did when he demanded the Secret Bot Numbers and was told Twitter was being honest and can’t calculate better numbers. Fire someone, apparently.
@NobodySpecial:
Musk is a con man in the phase where he falls for his own hype and his narcissistic traits take over completely. He has a clear history of being a good hype man, good at getting government handouts, good at buying impressive sounding companies until he gets lucky, and good at stock inflation. Those skills are dissolving as his narcissism takes over.
Martin
I follow investing news pretty carefully – especially tech, and I cannot recall a week as remotely fucked up as this one. Not even the height of the financial crisis. At least there you had a sense that competent people were doing beneficial things to right the ship. That didn’t excuse that the ship capsized in the first place, mind you.
But here you have a ship which by all indications was doing okay and in a week got completely wrecked by the actions of one person, who every few hours steadily managed to make things worse. I think the only thing that he did that made the situation marginally better was only firing 50% of employees instead of 75%.
I think this fiasco is so bad that major advertisers may pull out of social media entirely, given the likelihood that Musk will rally the crazies to launch congressional investigations against them and GOP governors expand their demands to eliminate content moderation. Things really started turning south for Meta and Google ad revenues when Musk first announced his takeover bid. Could be coincidental, but the whole industry just seems to be reeling right now.
Martin
@Frankensteinbeck: I think either the entire corporate relations or all but 1-2 people were fired. There may not be anyone left there to reply to journalists other than Musk tweeting ‘$8’ at them.
Lady WereBear
It figures. I never liked Facebook and it returns the favor, changing all the things creators need to do and blithely not telling you why the latest attempt didn’t work either.
Pinterest is looking at people’s collections with tiny pictures and I never found anything there.
Instagram baffles me. We can have conversations, but I need another app to share something? And they constantly make me go through a tortuous new password process at random that doesn’t work half the time…
Twitter was the only one that worked for me. And I was doing okay there.
Guess a small business like mine is just “flies to wanton boys.”
Lady WereBear
I was personally enjoying seeing jerks dragged, which happens more and more as Twitter was the only access to push back against corporate media and the FNYT and the like.
Maybe Dorsey is ready to kill his creation. It’s getting in their way.
Nettoyeur
@Ruckus: SFB???
Baud
@Nettoyeur:
Trump.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
The sad part is, Twitter was a place for people who couldn’t build their own place, for marginalized people to gather and make their voices heard by the wider population, and that is on the brink of being destroyed, even if Twitter survives in some form.
The comparisons to Chornobyl seem more and more apt; Pripyat still exists, but only as a ghost town, because the contamination made the place uninhabitable.
satby
I was too, and it was pretty effective there. Now I’m hanging out for the sheer gawker at the train wreck aspects, but it’s a shame that an effective avenue for communication is being ruined. But, I think that’s part of the point. The richest man in the world is mostly rich on paper, and he’s busy setting fire to his assets, not just what he used to purchase Twitter.
Ohio Mom
@Nettoyeur: Sick Fat Bastard aka the Former Guy.
lowtechcyclist
What I don’t understand is, how was Musk able to borrow a shitload of money to buy Twitter, with (if I understand correctly) Twitter as officially the borrower, because Twitter the corporate entity is responsible for paying back $1B/year in interest that it can’t possibly pay?
I’m not asking how the deal was structured (although I’m enough of a geek to find that somewhat interesting), but WHO THE HELL WOULD LEND THAT MONEY UNDER THOSE TERMS, AND WHY??
I mean, unless the lenders can come after Musk personally, or his Tesla or SpaceX stock if it turns out that Twitter’s value goes to zero, who’d be crazy enough to put that sort of big money into the deal?
And yeah, I’m asking WHO: Deutsch Bank, which was stupid enough to keep Trump afloat forever, or the House of Saud, or who? Tens of billions of dollars doesn’t just come from nowhere, and the previous stockholders in Twitter (other than Musk) had to be paid off with actual money, I presume. Hell, maybe I *am* asking how the deal was structured, because that’s probably part of the answer.
ETA: I’ve wondered that about other LBOs in the past, but at least most of the time, there seemed to be some reason to believe the corporate entity being borrowed against was at least barely worth the money being loaned. This time, AYFKM?!
Sanjeevs
@Martin: Some people speculated that Elon’s $54.20 a share offer for Twitter was a cannabis related joke.
I thought that was nuts but given his behaviour this week and his earlier claim that the Saudis had made a $420 a share offer for Tesla I’m not so sure.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Lady WereBear: I don’t know if I sold books by being on twitter, but I assume I did. I also socialized with people I know all over the world. It’s hard to replace all that
ETA: I just looked and I’ve been on twitter since 2009. It will take a long time to build up a network elsewhere
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@lowtechcyclist: Perhaps people for whom the payoff would be having Musk and all his assets inescapably indebted to them, and having Twitter bent to their will. Authoritarians, totalitarians, and fascists don’t just want a place where they can speak, they want a place where they can’t be ignored, and where dissent to their speech can be suppressed.
And Musk’s effectively handed them that.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@satby:
And like a lot of selfish rich bastards, he’s completely indifferent to the massive collateral damage he’s causing along the way.
lowtechcyclist
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
That at least makes some sort of sense, though by the time Musk (or his backers) are done with Twitter, it’ll probably be right down there with Parler, Gab, and Truth Social in terms of a captive audience for those authoritarian backers.
But if the loans really are ultimately backed up by Musk’s other holdings, then they can at least gut him like a fish.
Chief Oshkosh
@sab:
“Mastodon” as a name is a problem for me, having read Hiassen’s “Squeeze Me.
;)
pat
I prefer SFB = Shit For Brains.
mrmoshpotato
@Ohio Mom:
Ruckus uses SFB to mean Shit For Brains for Dump.
Though Sick Fat Bastard works too. And Soviet Fat Bastard would work too for the Soviet shitpile mobster manbaby.
Ken
The firings included some of the SREs, so yeah, quite literally. I don’t know if he’s still planning code changes, but if they try to roll anything out without operations monitoring, it will not be pretty.
Gvg
It is pretty common for these takeover bids to make the debt for the purchase part of the company debt and in fact it is often what pushes them into bankruptcy later. It’s also how they strip out pension funds as an asset. I think it’s a flaw in our financial laws. It ought to be the oldest debts first meaning at least pensions earned before the purchase debt should have seniority which would make more companies safe from asset raiders.
There are a whole bunch of these purchases where I just don’t understand why the banks agreed to finance them but this one was especially stupid. If I were a stockholder in one of these banks I would be screaming for an investigation looking for bribery, blackmail or threats. It made no sense and will lose money for the banks. Even with the Tesla stock it will gain.
I hope Musk loses control of Tesla and Space X though. Twitter seems to be doomed.
Starfish
@Martin: But it wasn’t JUST Elon. We learned that Zuckerberg burned billions and billions of dollars on a Metaverse that no one wants. Stripe laid off about 1000 employees.
Starfish
@Ken: They fired people who were on-call, as in actively monitoring things to make sure that the site did not fall over. Firing half the workforce likely means that people will be doing twice as many on-call shifts in the same period of time.
They fired their entire accessibility team.
Raoul Paste
“ Squawk!”
Is that the birds, or Elon?
Starfish
Warcraft Chris who was pretending to be Elon Musk in some of the tweets above got banned from Twitter for pretending to be Elon Musk.
zzyzx
Mastodon looks like it has too many structural flaws built in – basically you have to trust your server controller is a good person and – unlike Twitter – you’re not just one tiny cog in a huge company – that I can’t see going there.
J R in WV
Elron never struck me as all that bright. Many of his decisions at Tesla seemed counter-productive and actually harmful to the auto maker over the long haul, if not now and forever. So no surprise that he is storming into a complex technical structure and tearing things down with little understanding of who is critical path important and who is not.
If there are positions held by hundreds of technical staff all with overlapping experience and authority, yes, you can fire lots of them without actually destroying the company’s future. But if you fire everyone in an organization with the knowledge and experience to deal with certain critical path issues, the moment one of those critical path issues rises up to bite the org on the ass, you are out of business right then at that moment.
No telling when a critical path issue will bite Musky right on his private parts, hard. In many ways I am waiting with baited breath for just that sort of event. Right wing fascist jillionaire from South Africa rolling in wealth from an emerald mine in darkest Africa losing money hand over fist in public …. I’m so all in for that close up!!
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Starfish: if he wanted to kill the company why do it a piece at a time. This seems next level stupid. Who fires the people who figuratively speaking keep the lights on and the infrastructure working???
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Ken: ah yes the We Didn’t Test this At All model…
StringOnAStick
@Ken: We have a neighbor who was high in the SRE team; he got laid off yesterday and is completely relieved because whoever remains in any position there is going to get worked to the bone. He worries about the team members on H-1b visas because they have a limited window to find a new job contract/sponsor or else they have to leave the US.
I suspect anyone who is left there is waiting to get their stock options paid off and resumes are flying everywhere. Major major major major posted about his East coast tech job (unrelated to twitter) doing layoffs yesterday, so there might be a bit of temporary oversupply in tech starting about now, with a recession highly possible early next year. If I was a Twitter employee still there, I would be scrambling for an exit NOW.
Stuart Frasier
@Starfish: ChrisWarcraft is Chris Kluwe, the former punter for the Minnesota Vikings.
Llelldorin
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: Someone who hasn’t worked at a tech firm since the mid 1990s and can’t understand why it can’t be run with a couple dozen people like back then.