i will never not be amazed that this is how a man with the resources to do almost anything imaginable in his spare time spends his spare time. https://t.co/lB8hrhomTo
— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) December 28, 2022
The eight year old hanging around older kids, repeating words and seeing if they laugh.
— Jesse Brenneman (@Jesse_Brenneman) December 28, 2022
Charlie Warzel, for the Atlantic:
… Plaintiffs in Twitter, Inc. v. Elon R. Musk et al. filed Exhibit H just before sunrise on September 29 in Delaware’s Court of Chancery. If you’ve seen excerpts, you probably know it by its street name: Elon Musk’s texts.
Exhibit H is remarkable insomuch as it is a spreadsheet containing the private messages between the (then) richest man in the world and his friends, associates, and hangers-on while they discuss buying one of the world’s most influential communications platforms—just for kicks. Leafing through Exhibit H, you will feel like you should never have seen these communications, and yet there they are, on display for the hordes of the internet, courtesy of the legal system…
For better or worse, Musk’s Twitter takeover and SBF’s downfall are two of the most symbolically resonant tech stories of 2022. You could view them as reckonings for supposed tech visionaries and the ways in which Silicon Valley’s hype machine dashes against the rocks of reality. It’s unfair to suggest that a few personalities are behind all of tech’s troubles—which this year included layoffs at companies such as Meta and Snap and a general feeling that we may be approaching the end of the social-media era—but the Musk texts demonstrate a decadence, an unearned confidence, and a boy’s-club mentality that coincide with the cultural disillusionment regarding the genius-innovator narrative.
The Musk messages also reveal how some of the richest and most powerful men in the world treat actual billions of dollars with a level of care more appropriate for a 3-year-old tossing around Monopoly cash. Oracle’s founder, Larry Ellison, essentially writes Musk a blank check over text, pledging, “A billion … or whatever you recommend.” The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen unsolicitedly offers Musk “$250M with no additional work required.” And Michael Grimes, a top investment banker at Morgan Stanley, proposes a meeting with Bankman-Fried as a way to “get us $5bn equity in an hour.”
“Does Sam actually have $3bn liquid?” Musk asks. (It’s unclear why he got the number wrong.) Grimes says that he believes so. Musk appears nonplussed but willing to do whatever is necessary to get some quick cash: “So long as I don’t have to have a laborious blockchain debate,” he quips. (Seven months after this exchange, Bankman-Fried would claim to have no more than $100,000 to his name.)
The blitheness is the point. It is a total power move to talk about getting “$5bn in equity in an hour” the same way we mere mortals talk about Venmo-ing a friend $15 for lunch. The texts make it clear that these men are fundamentally alienated from the rest of the world by their wealth. “In one sense, the texts show that billionaires are just like us—they’re not doing advanced calculus; they’re in their DMs talking smack, making jokes, and trying desperately to get their way,” Lauren Pringle, the editor in chief of The Chancery Daily, told me recently. But she added: “These are absolutely not normal people with a normal understanding of the world.”…
WSJ published a devastating piece saying the value needs to go even lower. This is how he responded.
Musk is getting the schadenfreude he so richly deserves. https://t.co/uQfgannNUp pic.twitter.com/NNk62yIAwh
— Brianna Wu (@BriannaWu) December 28, 2022
Yep, that Tesla stock price isn't done falling. pic.twitter.com/a6LY9NgVZU
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) December 28, 2022
War for Ukraine Day 308: A Brief Wednesday Night Update
sab
Elon Musk personal life: seeing his baby mamas and his girlfriends I generally think ” that girl ain’t right.” He isn’t either, but he is a billionaire.
Any hit that I was wrong? Nutcases everywhere, and fuck the resulting children?
Viva BrisVegas
“It’s dangerous to believe anything blindly.”
The science is settled, until you produce some countervailing evidence. Feel free to do so.
“That’s not how science works.”
You wouldn’t know science if it came up and bit you on the arse.
Chetan Murthy
@Viva BrisVegas: I wonder which bit of “undecided science” prompted that bit of oppositional defiant disorder ?
lgerard
The intervention can’t be far off
I’d like to be a fly on the wall for that
HumboldtBlue
The motherfucker ruined Twitter.
It was fine as it was.
He’s the face, the middle finger to us, from the money men.
scav
@lgerard: It’ll be a PR team that attempts it, if anyone.
Chetan Murthy
@scav: Huh, I woulda said it’d be when his bankers come to take a big-ass chunk of Tesla shares (for margin calls) and then, a few days later, they come back for even more (b/c the Tesla stock price drops even more). He’s pledged a shit-ton of those shares to cover various loans, so I read.
HumboldtBlue
Here’s a question: does your dog know your furniture is hand made?
Maybe you don’t have a dog, or furniture.
That would be weird.
Not the dog.
Lacking.
Anne Laurie
More likely, it’ll be his creditors. Some of whom have pretty persuasive methods — including, y’know, bonesaws.
HumboldtBlue
Butter, cream, more butter… then buttercream!
Two Fat Ladies cook Christmas.
scav
@Chetan Murthy: & @Anne Laurie: But what would their interest in preserving the rep of one Elon Musk? Or, how would they benefit by its preservation? I can see they would want him out ASAP, but an intervention seemingly absolves him, whereas why not make him as liable as hell for any of your losses?
Chetan Murthy
@scav: Why would bankers care about reputation? They only want their money, and the way they get it, if Tesla’s shares keep dropping, is to demand money or shares. That is to say, close out his margin borrowings as Tesla shares drop. I mean, they wanna get paid, it’s that simple.
Now, as for MBS, I got no clue. Anne could be right, but then again, I don’t know whether MBS views losing $billions is being in the same category as publishing news articles that make his regime look bad.
Viva BrisVegas
@Chetan Murthy: It’s hard to tell unless you exist in the same right wing ecology as Musk, but the Lego “authority” figure appears to be a doctor, so I assume it’s something covid related.
Chetan Murthy
this looked interesting. early days yet, but still, promising.
Baud
I nominate “And you have tiny testicles!” for the rotating tag.
Baud
@Anne Laurie:
Presenting us with a moral dilemma from which we may never recover.
Frankensteinbeck
@Viva BrisVegas:
I had assumed it was trans issues, because that’s one where wingnuts are convinced they know more science than actual doctors and scientists. I figured the ‘racist’ part was part of the primal scream of conservatives that it’s so unfair that they get called bigots.
Covid fits much more neatly. Covid conspiracy theories get debunked right and left for their bad science, and those theories are heavily larded with ‘evil Jews are trying to take over the world’ and ‘kung flu’ style anti-Chinese racism. The wingnuts, of course, whine about getting caught on both counts.
bjacques
Won’t somebody think of the GOP? Musk is eroding at least two of its pillars: QAnon and the “job creators”. Bonkers conspiracy theories gain traction by being spread by sober-sounding people, not by swivel-eyed lunatics like Musk. And he’s making it hard for the Liz Cheney wing of the GOP to make the case for billionaires being the divinely-ordained philosopher-kings and thus our rightful rulers.
Shalimar
@Frankensteinbeck: Even if they were right about the science, they’re still objectively racist as hell, so I am not sure that is the lame punchline Elon seems to think it is.
Balconesfault
How far away is Musk from being the pillow guy?
Tony Jay
According to my new Universal Scale of Wankerdom chart (I’m so easy to buy for at Christmas) I calculate that if Musk is this much of a flailing poop-shooter while he’s still one of the (on paper) richest dildos out there, by the time he’s finished tanking Tesla shares he should be performatively obnoxious enough to win a GOP primary in the Californian Outback.
The Thin Black Duke
Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain.
EntroPi
Since have wealth and having money are separate, we know that Musk affords his lifestyle based on loans backed by wealth.
How long before he actually has to change lifestyle, or sell other assets to keep it going?
Tony G
@lgerard: I don’t think that there will be any intervention though. Interventions are for little people. With rare exceptions, wealthy people never face consequences for what they do. And, even if Musk loses 99% of his wealth, he’ll still be a billionaire.
Matt McIrvin
My post-Trump 2016 intuitions have been positively screaming through this whole episode: In the end, Elon Musk will win. Somehow, I don’t know how, all this will cause him to win.
ColoradoGuy
@Chetan Murthy: The 47% reduction in Long Covid from taking 1500 mg/day of Metformin jumped out at me. 1500 mg/day is not a particularly large dose, and Metformin is largely free of interactions with other drugs. It’s a strong anti-inflammatory drug, and was being investigated as FDA-approved life extension drug before Covid struck, largely on the basis of the anti-inflammatory action.
The biggest downside is it can cause digestive upset when ramping up to the nominal dose, so that’s usually spread over two weeks.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Baud:
I mean, I might not watch the video of such an event regarding his disposition more than 10 times while heartily guffawing, so I have SOME inner compass….
Frankensteinbeck
@EntroPi:
I don’t know, but his deal with Goldman-Sachs to get the money to buy Twitter comes with ‘we will ruin you if you fuck this up’ clauses. Their way of guaranteeing it was a good loan was to make Musk unable to afford tanking Twitter.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@ColoradoGuy:
The digestive problems attributed to metformin nearly killed my dad in 2021. He lost 40 pounds, was afraid to leave the house for fear of an a accident in public, and I had to threaten to intercede with his medical decisions if my mom didn’t take him to the gerontologist that I’d set an appointment with in order to review the idiot volume of prescriptions his moronic internist was shoveling at him.
trnc
No, no, no, no, no. Let’s be careful in our wording here. The motherfucker is ruining Twitter.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-suffers-another-outage-030357937.html
He completed “significant architectural changes,” which apparently consist of placing an order for ram, plus breaking something and getting someone locked inside to fix it.
different-church-lady
I mean, it’s really hard to believe a white South African would be defensive about being called racist…
trnc
Depressing, but certainly possible. Tesla is back up to 120 and climbing today, so we’ll see how long that lasts.
different-church-lady
All that does is fill me with foreboding about what horror will replace it.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Frankensteinbeck: Musk is a con man when you get down to it. For his grifts to work he needs to tear down the experts to keep the myth that he is this Tony Stark like genius going.
It also figures Musk is in thick with Larry Ellison, speaking of bullshit artist who only produced over hyped crap.
MattF
@Matt McIrvin: Think about your definition of ‘win’. My view is that he has already suffered a huge reputational loss.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Matt McIrvin: meh, worst going to happen is Musk loses his favorite executive time toy. Otherwise Twitter will just go the way of his tunneling company. that stupid vacuum train and his insane Mars colony plan.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@HumboldtBlue: Do you think the Twitter BoD would have jumped all over Musk’s flippant offer if Twitter was doing fine? Sure, Musk paid five times what Twitter is thought to be worth, but remember at the same time Musk made that offer Tesla stock was 13 times it’s likely real value.
neldob
Power corrupts. The big money corrupts. As far as I’m concerned they are mostly fascists.
Carlo Graziani
My only problem with the kind of shadenfreude in the articles that we’ve been seeing about the Fall of Tech lately is that they seem to presume that The Reckoning is here, and that somehow Sanity Has Finally Returned.
The thing is, I recall several similar societal collective lapses of reason, including the collapse of the savings and loans bubble, the collapse of the junk bond bubble, the collapse of the original tech stock bubble, and oh, of course, who can forget the classic near-reprise of the Great Depression in 2009. The cryptocurrency debacle and the concomitant rise-and-fall of veneration of tech titans are easily recognizable pieces of the same pattern.
I mean, yes, rationally you would expect each such episode to lead to chastening and correction, but the evidence so far is that in the long-term it doesn’t. The reason may be that systemic income inequality is still accelerating, and the resulting tilt in the economy pours wealth into the control of individuals afflicted by easily-suckered weak intellects, who nevertheless regard themselves as geniuses because of the validation conferred by that wealth. And every few years, those pools of dumb wealth get large enough to attract predators who have, in the meantime, developed a new scam to separate them from that wealth.
Which may in fact be the most cynical thing that I’ve ever written.
sab
@different-church-lady: The only decent thing the entire Musk clan ever did was to be openly anti-apartheid.
Matt McIrvin
@Carlo Graziani: The excoriation of asshole tech billionaires also often has this disturbing undercurrent of “this is why we were right to beat up the nerds in junior high,” and if that’s the main takeaway we just traded the veneration of “geniuses” for a different kind of trouble.
A Man for All Seaonings (formerly Geeno)
@Baud: Seconded!
Another Scott
@Carlo Graziani: Someone claimed a few years ago that since the ’80s (maybe earlier) the US has had a boom-and-bust bubble economy. The MotUs look for another New Thing that they can wring their monopoly rents from, then cash out before the crash. Maybe so. Maybe not.
(One can write similar stories about land speculation and gold rushes and railroads and steel and…)
One just needs to remember that it really isn’t different this time…
Be careful out there!
Cheers,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott: From the mid-1990s to 2008 there were claims of the opposite–that we had managed to find a permanent Great Moderation. Measured in GDP terms, the boom-bust cycle was worse before the 1980s, I think even if you figure in the post-2008 recession. Maybe it affected the average person less, at least from the 1950s on?
Bill Arnold
@Carlo Graziani:
HFT has been pushing on the “what we need are faster predators, that evolve more quickly” approach for a while. (Current tick to trade for the dumbest/fastest automation is roughly 100 nanoseconds, with ASICs.) Not clear that it is better for humans, but at least the booms and busts are, so far, pretty quick and ephemeral on human meat-mind time scales.
Barbarians at the Gateways – High-frequency Trading and Exchange Technology (ACM Queue, Jacob Loveless, October 16, 2013)
moonbat
@The Thin Black Duke: Now THAT should be a rotating tag if it isn’t already.
Another Scott
@Bill Arnold: Haha.
Yeah, I remember the arguments that Manhattan would always be an important center of finance because every picosecond counts in trading these days and one has to be close to the trading floor at the NYSE because the speed of light is fixed.
I wonder if that’s true anymore, what with frontrunning always being so tempting and such a guaranteed moneymaker (as long as you don’t get caught).
Something something I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you.
Cheers,
Scott.
Carlo Graziani
@Bill Arnold: Well, you’re going to have that problem in a “scientific” field such as financial engineering, where the epistemology is purely phenomenological, so that a model is “true” if it makes money on a financial time series.
Many people look at FE and fail to grasp its fundamental difference from most fields of science that operate with a bona-fide scientific epistemology, wherein model “truth” is gauged by the degree of connectedness to a network of evidence and other evidence-connected models, many of which are simpler, and well-validated by evidence.
Ironically, machine learning/AI currently works with a pragmatic, operational epistemology that closely resembles that of FE: a model is judged “true” if it has a valid score on a test dataset after completing its training and validation on training and validation datasets. No effort has been made to turn AI neural networks from heuristics into true algorithms—programs motivated by mathematical theorems. I’ve started a discussion at work, in part premised on the thesis that this epistemological issue is the reason for the “unexplainability/uninterpretability” problem of AI, a pathology which in my opinion has lead the field to a Kuhn-style scientific crisis, only partly and belatedly being recognized now.
But that would be a digression. Open thread, I guess.
leeleeFL
@Carlo Graziani: And utterly delicious, thank you very much!
rikyrah
@Balconesfault:
He’s already there.
BellyCat
@Carlo Graziani:
Cynicism is just another word for Capitalistic Darwinism.
Chris T.
@ColoradoGuy: I’m on 1500 mg/day, and I would generally disagree that it’s not “particularly large” – the prescription limit is 2000 mg/day, and the Metformin Runs are real and significant and hit a lot of people by this point.
Chris T.
(Oh, and I should add, Metformin Extended Release tends to help with the Metformin Runs, so if you find yourself put on metformin and are having the usual issue, ask for the XR. Only downside seems to be that it comes in 500 mg pills so you wind up taking a lot of them; fortunately, unlike so many drugs these days, they’re cheap even in the XR formulation.)