Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Let there be snark.

He really is that stupid.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

The revolution will be supervised.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Late Night Open Thread: Elon Breaks Another Toy

Late Night Open Thread: Elon Breaks Another Toy

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First Taibbi gets brutally handbagged by the generally toothless Mehdi Hasan, and then his Emperor-Employer betrays him?…

It could have started as another one of the Apartheid Princeling’s jeenyus business decisions: SubStack wants to compete with Twitter, so SubStack must be unplatformed, whatever the cost to Twitter:

… On Friday, Twitter began preventing users from engaging with tweets that contained links to Substack articles, blocking any likes, retweets and comments from these posts. Additionally, users were unable to pin any tweets to the top of their profile if they included a Substack link.

It had been widely speculated that Twitter disabled Substack from the site because the online publishing platform had recently launched a new feature called Substack Notes, which provides a Twitter-like feed to authors and subscribers of the newsletter site…

Since Twitter has been a major platform for Substack writers to share their newsletters and articles, and Musk largely relied on Substack journalists to publish his Twitter Files, the move was met with widespread backlash across the social media site. Even from some of his fiercest defenders…

Of course, once it looked like blocking SubStack would be unpopular, Musk promptly reversed the decision — or rather, as per usual, insisted such blocking had never happened…

On the schneid — that’s a new phrase to me:

Maybe it’s turned… personal?

On one thing we can all agree: Taibbi and Musk deserve each other.

Reader Interactions

47Comments

  1. 1.

    Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]

    This does warm the cockles of my heart.  Tabibi thought he was “IN THE CLUB” but he just hitched his horse to the Techno-equivalent of Louis the 16th, and has been brutally kicked to the curb the moment his expiration date as a “Useful Idiot” was up.

  2. 2.

    SpaceUnit

    Never interrupt your enemies when they are wrestling in the mud and trying to fuck each other in the ear.

    If only for the entertainment value.

  3. 3.

    Betty Cracker

    Musk is Trump-like in the way he co-opts people who should know better and then casts them aside, having soiled whatever reputations they brought to the relationship. As in the Trump paradigm, the used-and-tossed people were all pretty gross in their own right even before the association.

    For a while there, I thought Musk had a sketchy plan to turn Twitter into a democracy destroying device — a Fox News of social media. The platform has always punched above its weight class in influence, so the danger was and is real.

    But now I’m pretty sure Musk is just a hyperactive idiot who will keep degrading the platform through relentless, ham-handed attempts at monetization until a viable competitor emerges.

  4. 4.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    Stalin didn’t have Photoshop—but that didn’t keep him from wiping the traces of his enemies from the history books.

  6. 6.

    Betty Cracker

    @eclare: The swamp is extra noisy tonight because we’ve had the first rain in a long time. Every manner of frog is singing, and the Limpkins are screaming their heads off as they do each spring.

  9. 9.

    Ken_L

    absurdism
    noun

    1. ​the belief that humans exist in a world with no purpose or order

    2. ​deliberately strange or silly behaviour or character

    Taibbi is clearly using the word in the latter sense, although how either would constitute an “ideology” is not apparent.

  10. 10.

    Aussie Sheila

    Taibbi has really shown his butt. Like MelonTusk, he’s shown he’s not nearly as smart as people thought, and is a thin skinned cry baby to boot. Two down, a world to go.

  13. 13.

    Betty Cracker

    @John Revolta: This year’s butter lamb is currently two ordinary sticks of butter in the fridge. I plan to carve the lamb around 9 AM. This year we’re attending Easter dinner for the first time since the start of the pandemic, so Polish food!

  15. 15.

    Shalimar

    @Betty Cracker: Musk’s plan is to turn Twitter into a bank (i.e. Paypal 2.0), except with 10 times as many users because everyone loves Twitter.  Since Paypal 1.0 is only profitable because EBay and a few other places require it, his plan seems to be insanely stupid.

  18. 18.

    Betty Cracker

    @Shalimar: Yeah, I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work either. Musk said something about attracting users by offering high-yield money market accounts, giving no details, and maybe he thinks he can make money by skimming transactions? All of his monetization schemes seem 1) half-baked and 2) to fundamentally misunderstand what Twitter is for. 

  21. 21.

    Splitting Image

    Musk’s inability to seriously analyze Twitter’s potential sources of revenue speaks more against his reputation as a genius businessman than anything else he has done.

    I refer both to his sneering dismissal of revenue streams that Twitter was actually tapping (advertising) and to his completely unrealistic expectations about how much money they can get from subscriptions.

    Business 101 says that if you are contemplating changing your revenue model, you need to accurately estimate the potential revenue of the new model and compare it to the expected revenue from the old model. Then you go with whichever model gives you the higher profits in the foreseeable future.

    It’s obvious that Musk didn’t do that, but he didn’t do due diligence either when he bought Twitter, so I guess it’s not that surprising.

  22. 22.

    Morfydd

    @Betty Cracker: I read an interesting interview with the CEO of Brex, a “neobank” (yes, ugh, I know) in the context of Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse: https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/4/23669463/silicon-valley-bank-collapse-brex-ceo-henrique-dubugras-banking-crisis-fintech

    “I think this leads to an extremely dumb question, which is how do you then make money?

    We charge a very small percentage to buy that money market fund for you as a broker.”
    I’m unqualified to say how good their plan is, and the general SV-ness of it all makes my teeth itch, but they have a business plan and it seems… sensible?

    Musk probably doesn’t have the discipline to create what they are doing, but I could see him buying a firm like this.

    (And then driving it into the ground because financial laws, even relaxed non-banking laws, are for little people.)

  23. 23.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Morfydd: A *percentage*, eh?  That reminds me of when a friend worked for AMEX Financial Svcs (“parting widows and orphans from their life savings, on the regular”) and yeah, they got paid based on how much they could convince people to roll over from their current investments, into AMEX investment accounts.  A percentage.

    At Vanguard, it’s a fixed price per trade, not a percentage.

  24. 24.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Splitting Image: Your analysis might be accurate, but I subscribe to an even worse one: I don’t think he thought things thru at all.  The sequence of events whereby he (1) buys Twitter, (2) proceeds to bring onboard all manner of nutjobs, (3) scares away advertisers, (4) sees revenue drop, and (5) then starts to come up with schemes to make money, which ends up where we are today, makes me think that he didn’t actually do any “businessman” thinking at all.  It was all just id, the lizard brain acting and reacting.  I don’t think he expected advertisers to flee when he brought all those Nazis back.

    But I could be wrong.

  25. 25.

    NotMax

    Cross your paws, jackals.

    Mentioned a few days ago the VOIP phone modem for my landline had gone dead (no lights, no nuthin’). As part of my monthly trip into town on Saturday I stopped by the cable company’s office and swapped it for a new one.

    Hooked that on up later on in the evening and — it lit up but no dial tone on the phone.

    Called them about 90 minutes ago on a cell phone. After 25 minutes (really) wrestling with the automated answering nonsense finally got connected to a Real Human Being™. He managed to perform the appropriate incantations on his end (“This will take 6 to 10 minutes. Just hang on, I’m not ending the call.”) and lo and behold, a dial tone!

    For now, anyway. Will see what mañana brings.

  29. 29.

    Baud

    @Betty Cracker:

    This year we’re attending Easter dinner for the first time since the start of the pandemic, so Polish food!

     

    I didn’t know Polish food was associated with the end of pandemics.

  30. 30.

    Splitting Image

    @Chetan Murthy:

    The sequence of events whereby he (1) buys Twitter, (2) proceeds to bring onboard all manner of nutjobs, (3) scares away advertisers, (4) sees revenue drop, and (5) then starts to come up with schemes to make money, which ends up where we are today, makes me think that he didn’t actually do any “businessman” thinking at all. It was all just id, the lizard brain acting and reacting. I don’t think he expected advertisers to flee when he brought all those Nazis back.

    But I could be wrong.

    No, I think you’ve hit it pretty much exactly. The only trouble is that when you point it out, a Musk fan will invariably call him a genius and claim that plebians like us simply don’t understand how the mind of a genius works.

    I think the experiment has gone on far enough that even by the standards of plain, ordinary, non-geniuses, Musk is a terrible businessman.

  33. 33.

    Anne Laurie

    @Baud: I didn’t know Polish food was associated with the end of pandemics.

    Voice of a Pole, in my head:  If you knew how many pestilences have rolled through our beleaguered nation…

  34. 34.

    Ken

    @John Revolta: And the butter lambs? What kind of noise are they making pray tell??

    I’m not sure — is this a Silence of the Lambs reference?

    Or maybe Silence of the Hams, the spoof that came out a few years later?

  35. 35.

    Joey Maloney

    @Shalimar: So why does anyone still use Paypal?  Their fees were excessive.

    They’re useful as a pass-thru for foreign currency transactions if your credit card makes that difficult as some do. Likewise if you want to use Amex for a site that doesn’t accept it. And they’re useful for sending small sums from your bank account to people internationally without having to fuck around with SWIFT codes and the exhorbitant wire transfer fees most US banks charge.

    At least, that’s what I use it for.

  36. 36.

    Ken

    @Chetan Murthy: then starts to come up with schemes to make money

    Replacing the twitter bird with the dogecoin dog, possibly to help fuel a pump-and-dump, doesn’t deserve the dignity of the word “scheme”.  Especially when he’s already being sued for a pump-and-dump of the same cryptocurrency just a couple years ago.

  37. 37.

    West of the Cascades

    @Chetan Murthy: I’d bet Mush thought something like “Hey, Nazis are consumers, too, I’m sure advertisers will be glad for all the new consumers on the site.”

  38. 38.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Splitting Image: His reputation rests on SpaceX and Tesla, two ventures with a futuristic, science-fiction image that were successful in sectors where many others had lost their shirts and there was a widespread belief that you couldn’t make it work.

    But in both cases, the extent to which Elon Musk was the genius responsible seems to be wildly exaggerated–he basically managed to pick a couple of good ones and buy the public image of being the genius founder.

  39. 39.

    Shalimar

    @Ken: I assume Musk changed the image to prove that anything he did would raise the dogecoin price and thus it was just free speech.  He seems to have forgotten that financial evidence of the dump part is why he’s going to lose the lawsuit.

  40. 40.

    Doug R

    @Shalimar:

     

    So why does anyone still use Paypal? Their fees were excessive.

    We haven’t used it much in decades but it’s nice to have that layer between an iffy seller and your bank card.

  41. 41.

    Another Scott

    Meanwhile, over at TSLA, … Reuters:

    But between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras, according to interviews by Reuters with nine former employees.

    Some of the recordings caught Tesla customers in embarrassing situations. One ex-employee described a video of a man approaching a vehicle completely naked.

    Also shared: crashes and road-rage incidents. One crash video in 2021 showed a Tesla driving at high speed in a residential area hitting a child riding a bike, according to another ex-employee. The child flew in one direction, the bike in another. The video spread around a Tesla office in San Mateo, California, via private one-on-one chats, “like wildfire,” the ex-employee said.

    Other images were more mundane, such as pictures of dogs and funny road signs that employees made into memes by embellishing them with amusing captions or commentary, before posting them in private group chats. While some postings were only shared between two employees, others could be seen by scores of them, according to several ex-employees.

    Tesla states in its online “Customer Privacy Notice” that its “camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle.” But seven former employees told Reuters the computer program they used at work could show the location of recordings – which potentially could reveal where a Tesla owner lived.

    “Flounder, you can’t spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes! You fucked up. You trusted us!”

    Meanwhile, Melon can’t make his quarterly numbers without cutting prices. TSLA US new inventory numbers over time graph. Obviously Models X and Y was nuts for a while.

    Note the caveats:

    Tesla's inventory page here where the data originates from shows only 1 car even if the same location has multiple copies of the same configuration. I think the conversion ratio was 14x on Dec 31 and is currently 9x. https://t.co/YdcwEYv1Mf

    — Troy Teslike (@TroyTeslike) January 12, 2023

    Kinda stupid that one has to play games to count how many cars are actually available, but that’s Melon for you…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  42. 42.

    Capri

    @Splitting Image:  No, you left out a few steps. 1) First he committed to buying  Twitter.  2) Then he looked at the numbers and tried to back out. 3) Then he was sued and wasn’t allowed to weasle out and was stuck with Twitter.   At some point he knew he made an error, but it was too late to change course.

  44. 44.

    Feathers

    @Shalimar: what I mostly use it for now is anything that will be a recurring payment. PayPal keeps a tab with those transactions and you can cancel them through PayPal.  This needs to become a feature on all credit and debit cards.

  45. 45.

    kindness

    I don’t do Twitter.  Never signed up.  I do read the Tweets people publish on blogs and occasionally follow them over to see the replies.  But I’m so happy not to be a part of it.  1) I don’t have excess time to give it 2) Elon is the apartheid princeling of darkness (quite a contradiction, eh?).

  46. 46.

    E.

    “In contemporary hypercapitalism all that matters is price. Dignity has no place.”

  47. 47.

    Ruckus

    @kindness:

    Twitter had it’s usefulness. A large audience and lots of folks having at least limited conversations. Sure we have similar here and in some ways better because we can get into more depth. But there the audience is, at least in concept, bigger/wider. It is/was not to everyone’s taste. And with elon showing his ass I’ve gone to maybe checking once or twice a week from having it always open. So it’s value is, well, basically zero. What a great businessman, taking a website worth not even close to what it cost to operate, and paying double the asking price so he could screw it up and make it worth even less. What a genius!

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