Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

If you can’t control your emotions, someone else will.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

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

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

There are times when telling just part of the truth is effectively a lie.

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

You are here: Home / Economics / Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You / Late Night Open Thread: Musk-y Business, Trying to Buy Friends

Late Night Open Thread: Musk-y Business, Trying to Buy Friends

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New Elon scam initiative announced!…

… which usually means the *old* initiative is failing / falling apart…


Wroking as nintempted, Zuck!

He’ll buy himself some high-profile friends! He doesn’t have to settle for a bunch of anonymous losers, clapping like seals… Taylor Lorenz, for the Washington Post, “Far-right Twitter influencers first on Elon Musk’s monetization scheme”:

On Thursday, Twitter announced that it would begin sharing ad revenue with content creators on its platform for the first time. But the offer won’t apply to all creators.

The first beneficiaries appear to be high-profile far-right influencers who tweeted before the announcement how much they’ve earned as part of the program. Ian Miles Cheong, Benny Johnson and Ashley St. Clair all touted their earnings…

So far, many of the influencers who have publicly revealed that they’re part of the program are prominent figures on the right. Andrew Tate, for example, who was recently released from jail on rape and human trafficking charges, posted that he’d been paid over $20,000 by Twitter.

“This is a nice turnaround from being banned by Twitter 1.0 for almost 2 years to now being paid to post Thank you @elonmusk,” tweeted far-right influencer Rogan O’Handley, known as DC Draino.

But not all prominent right-wing Twitter contributors appeared to be part of the program. When asked if she was part of the program, Chaya Raichik, the creator of @libsoftiktok, offered a tongue-in-cheek response claiming that her relationship with Musk was thriving. She did not respond to a question about whether she was receiving payments under the program…

Twitter claimed in a blog post that creators’ share of advertising revenue would be based on a calculation of replies to their posts and monthly impressions. However, on Friday, Musk tweeted that payouts were not tied to public impressions but were calculated using a proprietary metric based on ads served to other verified users.

The program is available only in countries where Stripe, a payment platform, supports payouts, and recipients must pay for Twitter Blue, the platform’s monthly subscription service, to be eligible.

Not all creators who want to monetize will be able to. Creators who apply to the program will have to pass “human review,” and there is currently no open application for those interested in joining…

Former Twitter staffers who worked on creator-focused products expressed skepticism over the rollout, with several calling it a PR stunt. One former Twitter executive who worked on creator partnerships and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation, said that “any kind of content monetization we’ve done in the past was based on a revenue model. This just feels pulled out of thin air for a specific subset of creators that he wanted to placate.”

The former Twitter executive also cast doubt on Twitter’s revamped metrics, including impressions. “The numbers are totally and completely bogus. It’s all completely made up. It really feels like they’re arbitrarily writing checks to people they like, which is not a sustainable creator strategy.”…

The timing of Musk’s announcement comes on the heels of Twitter rival Instagram announcing that its Twitter-like app Threads had surpassed 100 million sign-ups in under a week, making it the fastest-growing app of all time...

Us Haterz love to see it!

Reader Interactions

59Comments

  3. 3.

    Anne Laurie

    @Alison Rose: Musk being able to “recruit top engineers” just tells me those top engineers are fucking dumb.

    To be fair, since Ben Smith advertises himself as a mark ‘open-minded media’, all we really know is that Elon told Ben he was hiring.  True, lots of fools with engineering degrees have fallen for the Musk Grift before, but even those guys must be getting a little suspicious about the payoff-for-performance ratio.

  4. 4.

    Amir Khalid

    Over here, Elon has just this week promised our PM, Anwar Ibrahim, investments in a Tesla assembly plant, a service centre, and an R&D centre. I’ll believe it when I see it.

  5. 5.

    BR

    There’s no way Space Caligula got top engineers for his weird xAI project. You mean they’ll choose the guy who is stiffing his engineers, erratically lurching from strategy to strategy, and behaving like a badly-behaved middle schooler? Instead of getting literally $1m / year starting compensation at OpenAI? Or at Google? Or the dozens of other AI companies VCs are pouring money into since crypto and the metaverse have gone belly up?

  6. 6.

    Martin

    I mean, Musk only promised to pay out $3M as a one time thing. I wouldn’t expect anyone to get a check after this.

    But this AI thing is very transparent. He was an original board member of OpenAI, then left when the board refused to make him CEO, 6 months ago he called for a moratorium on AI to buy him time to tip up this venture, which is going to get a free API key to scrape Twitter for training data, giving it something of an economic advantage, providing it can build anything sensible out of Twitter posts. This is the side hustle to leverage value in Twitter to help stem the bleeding at Twitter, and a few hundred million good dollars after $44 billion bad ones isn’t the worst bet. It’s not a good bet, though.

    A top AI scientist is $5M-$10M/yr, and there aren’t that many of them, so this is the sort of thing you need to do to get them. I doubt it’ll work, but the space is kind of fluid right now, so you never know.

  7. 7.

    Ripley

    I’ve literally never seen an ad on Twitter. What’s my secret? I suppose you could say it’s clean livin’ and a healthy lust for life.

    No, it’s uBlock Origin.

  9. 9.

    Martin

    @Anne Laurie: I think the only engineers that really regret working for Musk are the recent Twitter ones. Tesla guys made bank (apart from the ones Musk illegally harassed out of the job) as have SpaceX ones. I sent a bunch of students to SpaceX in the early years and they all did really well and generally got a lot of rep for having been part of that effort.

    But Musk is in a very different place now, and engineering tends to be a very networked environment. If you get a bad reputation, you have a bad reputation with *everyone*.

  13. 13.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Maxim: I make jokes about the small town I grew up in, calling it Weatherford East Incest, TX.  But FFS, it’s a joke, and sure, a cruel insult, b/c it’s a terrible town with terrible people in it.  But FFS, even I would be surprised if there’s enough incest going on there that it needs a public outreach program to combat it.  And yet, Florida is like that.

  14. 14.

    Sebastian

    Wholemarsblog aka Omar Qazi is one the biggest Elon shills out there. He is one of the original seven.

  15. 15.

    Alison Rose

    @Martin: Honestly, the fact that it starts with “getting drunk is never an excuse” is what makes my eyes bug out of my skull. Are there pieces of shit out there actually being like “Your Honor, I know she’s my own flesh and blood, but you see, tequila does crazy things to me”????

  16. 16.

    HumboldtBlue

    Saturday night’s a night for fighting. Get a little action here.

    Elton.

    Not Elon.

  17. 17.

    Urza

    @Alison Rose: Not sure about in the 2020s, but yes, in the 1990s that was a perfectly legitimate excuse for alot of things in small town America, at least to your family and friends who may also be the cops.  And families would hide it out of shame even though it meant the abuser could keep doing it.

  18. 18.

    Martin

    @Alison Rose: Look, when the abortion rights community goes reliably out of its way in every campaign to say ‘there needs to an exception for rape and incest’, they’re *extremely* careful to not omit the 2nd part of this.

    There’s a dataset out there driving policy that doesn’t get talked about in polite company.

    Back in 1979, the DOJ published this statistic:

    Incest is usually committed against daughters by their fathers. The average age of the victim is 8 years old. It is estimated that there are at least 100,000 incest cases in the United States each year, although no effective reporting system exists and most cases may go unreported.

    Who knows what’s changed since 1979.

  20. 20.

    Martin

    @Alison Rose: Look, when the abortion rights community goes reliably out of its way in every campaign to say ‘there needs to an exception for rape and incest’, they’re *extremely* careful to not omit the 2nd part of this.

    There’s a dataset out there driving policy that doesn’t get talked about in polite company.

    Back in 1979, the DOJ published this statistic:

    Incest is usually committed against daughters by their fathers. The average age of the victim is 8 years old. It is estimated that there are at least 100,000 incest cases in the United States each year, although no effective reporting system exists and most cases may go unreported.

    Who knows what’s changed since 1979.

  22. 22.

    SpaceUnit

    Not so sure this whole build a nazi bar and they will come business model is gonna work.  Sure, the nazis will come.  Advertisers probably not so much.  Good luck with that.

     

    And when I say good luck I really mean fuck you up the nose.

  23. 23.

    Alison Rose

    @Martin: I’m not saying that I’m surprised that incest happens. I know it’s a thing that happens. But the idea that someone might try to excuse it by saying they were drunk is mindboggling.

  24. 24.

    different-church-lady

    “I’d like to share some of my ad revenue with you!”
    “You don’t have any ad revenue.”
    “All right, you can have all of it!”

  25. 25.

    different-church-lady

    Creators who apply to the program will have to pass “human review,”

    How the hell did Andrew Tate pass that test?!?

  32. 32.

    scav

    So long as Dad doesn’t put on a dress before getting it on with his daughter, it seems to pass the smell test to traditionalists.

  35. 35.

    Martin

    Looks like Trump was notified he’s a target for a charge under the Insurrection Act based on something he said on his social media.

    Next week might be fun.

  36. 36.

    Baud

    @Martin:

    👍

    I was a little worried they wouldn’t be able to criminally link him to J6 since that’s a more complicated conspiracy than the purloined papers case. This gives me hope.

  37. 37.

    🐾BillinGlendaleCA

    The modified camera saga continues…

    As I’ve mentioned previously, I bought a used Sony A7r that I sent out for hot mirror removal on July 3rd.  The camera arrived at the company on the 7th and they completed the modification the 12th.  It was supposed to arrive today, and in fact did arrive here 6 minutes after I left for work at The Home of the Orange Apron.  I should be able to pick it up either Monday or Tuesday.

  38. 38.

    Betsy

    It’s a pyramid scheme, obviously.

    You pay to be a subscriber in hopes that some of the promised revenue from other subscribers / ads will come your way.

    The pyramid operator  is right now making a splashy show of early payouts to certain insiders and early enrollees.

    It’s obviously unsustainable (content creators pay in order to create a revenue stream from which to pay content creators?  That’s how musk has described his plan from the beginning, which is obviously just nonsense —  “we’re all going to make a living by taking in each other’s laundry.”

    Hopefully he’ll be prosecuted for this variation on a common fraud, just like Amway or Madoff.

  44. 44.

    jonas

    @Alison Rose: Musk being able to “recruit top engineers” just tells me those top engineers are fucking dumb.

    Narrator: “They weren’t ‘top engineers’.”

  46. 46.

    balconesfault

    Changed phones, new one didn’t have my Twitter password, now it won’t let me see any Twitter without re-logging in.

    Cutting down on the number of eyeballs viewing content (and ads) seems an odd way to reward advertisers for their business.

  47. 47.

    Ken

    @Betsy: Yeah, the phrase “payouts […] based on ads served to other verified users” caught my eye too, although that was because of how I imagined advertisers will react — what with the reputation “blue check” has gained in the few short months since Elon changed the program.

  48. 48.

    prostratedragon

    Blech. Another smoke day in Chicago. The dawn’s early light is decidedly yellow.

  49. 49.

    Ken

    @scav: Leviticus chapter 18 has the incest laws, and they don’t prohibit father/daughter incest. Neither does the shorter list in Deuteronomy 27.

    However Judaism does list the prohibition in the 613 commandments recognized, inferring it from the text’s prohibition on incest with a granddaughter. This is, as far as I know, the only time the authorities added a commandment, instead of expanding the scope of an existing one with halachic law (e.g. the commandment not to “seethe a kid in its mother’s milk” being protected by the kosher laws against mixing any meat and any milk product.)

  51. 51.

    artem1s

    @Martin: The dot org that put up the billboard has been around since ‘78. They provide services to a number of at risk populations. I guess that’s what happens when you have a country that lets hundreds of thousands of rape test kits sit on a shelf for decades. And has thousands of current and former prosecutors involved decades long efforts to help religious organizations keep thousands of pedophiles out of jail.

  52. 52.

    azlib

    @BR: Or the dozens of other AI companies VCs are pouring money into since crypto and the metaverse have gone belly up?

    I am waiting for the current AI boom to go bust as it has before. VCs can be really dumb at times.

  55. 55.

    Gvg

    @Martin: I have been told by my doctor sister, that various states have at times required genetic testing of all underage abortions, and that a large number perhaps a majority are incest. This has held true in both liberal and conservative states and over different times. It has also held that there are VERY few abortions for under age girls even in easy abortion areas. This is because very young girls aren’t really that sexually active unless pressured by someone older. Keep in mind that kind of genetic testing would only find blood relative incest not step father or other step relations which are also a problem. I was a foster mom. Society as a whole is fine. But there are exceptions and those individuals are very bad. Then the problem tends to get passed down in the family.

    Where society falls down is in not believing, looking the other way. It’s as if facing that the nice seeming guy you know is horrible and his wife is complicit, reflects on you or your father, instead of how not protecting a child reflects on you. However it really is hard to believe. Each story is so…weird and often uniquely icky. They are often unbelievable in a way. As a financial aid counselor I have had to look at evidence for independence overrides. These fucked up people do not make sense. Normal background people have to be taught how to not just say the child is making it up. Evidence.

    oh yeah, the numbers for child pregnancy’s and abortions of less than 16 is really small, it goes way up about then. I know 18 is legal age, but 16 is about hormone time. If a girl of 12 is pregnant, you should be thinking about incest and her family and investigating. Even if you think there is a boyfriend.

  56. 56.

    Jinchi

    @Betsy: It’s worse than a pyramid scheme in that each level in a pyramid scheme is supposed to get paid by the ones below it.

    In this case, Elon just personally picks and chooses his favorites.

  57. 57.

    RaflW

    Garnet’s answer “We hope this clarifies your concern” is low key hilarious.

    Clarifies is not in any way the same as addresses. But it is clarify, that payouts are a select bribe to keep the RW troll corps around and paying $8.

  58. 58.

    Tony G

    @Alison Rose: “Top Rated Engineers”.  Last month Twitter was essentially down for at least a full day.  I worked in I.T. for forty years, and if a system was down for more than a half-hour that was treated as a crisis.  If “Top Rated Engineers” had been working at Twitter last month then they were so demoralized and-or mismanaged that they weren’t doing their jobs.  For the past forty or fifty years normal companies and organizations have had procedures in place to control software changes and to back them out if they screw things up.  Normal companies also have procedures in place to rapidly respond to and fix outages.  Perhaps Musk dismantled all of those procedures because he “knew” that he’s a genius.  Everything he touches turns to garbage.

  59. 59.

    JaneE

    So the more you pay “influencers” to generate ad revenue the more revenue drops.  As a business model this is unsustainable.  Sadly Musk is not the only business to think they will have the magic to make sell at a loss work.

    At least the place I worked for had the excuse they did not know the cost of producing their products, at least in part the result of laying off all their industrial engineers and accountants who did those cost analyses.

    It almost makes me think that laying off the people who really know how your business operates is not a good cost cutting measure.

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