When Musk says X is all about freedom of speech, remind him that one of its biggest owners is intimately tied to a government that executes people for mild criticism.
X is a megaphone for Musk and a tool to get political favours. X was already used to silence the opposition in Turkey and India during elections. A Saudi prince having a minority stake is a drop in a bucket of free speech violations.
Unfortunately for Musk the US Constitution doesn't apply everywhere.
Lately I've been thinking that the Chinese had a good point with their great firewall. The EU is already banning Russian media perhaps we should ad Americans to the list.
Agreed, and btw I'm suspecting GFW could be a funny one: have you seen a Chinese neckbeard on the Internet? I mean, don't you find suspiciously large fractions of them PLL locked solid on Western values above everything?
If one owner bans speech he doesn't like (@Elonjet), other owners will ask to do the same. Having control of speech on Twitter was likely a factor in the "investment".
I'm still convinced that Elon took a deal to deliberately burn twitter to the ground. I'm unsure how we'd prove it but his behaviour makes little sense otherwise.
Right. people don't seem to get that. there's this narrative about how Elon Musk overpaid for Twitter, as if there were a vibrant market of buyers and sellers of Twitter. there's only one Twitter, and it's worth whatever someone wants to pay for it.
Say somebody comes up to you and says hey, nice jacket. Would you like to sell it to me for $5,000? You bought the jacket for $500, and it was mass produced and you can just buy another one with that money. sounds like a great deal! But if I add that we're in Boston and it's winter and we're outside, miles from shelter, and it's snowing. Suddenly, sellling your winter coat is a way worse idea and not worth making $4,950.
Americans have long held this belief that prices are prices. If I buy a can of beans, it should be the same price if you buy the can of beans instead of me. But in reality, prices are totally made up. Hopefully the price of something is greater than it cost to make it, along with all the other expenses, so the business can remain open and continue, but businesses that go out of business have to sell their items at a loss. Which makes their inventory worth exactly as much as people are willing to pay, usually at a discount.
Sure, he wanted a better deal, but there's only one Twitter, and it's his (plus a bunch of investors and Fidelity). He didn't overpay for anything, he gets to run it how he wants, now that it's his.
If you have to sue the person offering you 5K for your jacket to ensure they fulfil the deal, it's fair to speculate that even they thought they'd paid too much.
fair, but I mean, money is money, if I could see a way to potentially weasel out of paying what I said I would, in those kind of amounts, is probably give that a shot too.
My favorite pet theory is that Musk taking over Twitter is to disentangle the bureaucratic and journalistic class from the direct Tumblr/4chan content pipeline they've all been drinking from for years. The only way he could make it work was to make the space as distasteful as possible. I'm giving him way too much credit, of course, but I can dream.
He offered to buy an unprofitable company for 10 times what Disney paid for Lucasfilm because "funny number", tried to back out of the deal any way he could, and in the end was forced by a court. What are you talking about?
I assure you the 4chan content pipeline has increased an order of magnitude since the Musk takeover. A comment thread on an Elon post will consistently have multiple posts with >100k views containing slurs or "jews bad Hitler good" accounts.
Clearly yes; my point was that the taste and decision makers that previously might've taken stronger cues from Twitter are now much less likely to see it as a venue for worthwhile discussions. I'm probably overvaluing that vs the harm of broadcasting puerile content, but I recognize this is fundamentally an unserious take.
ps. Alwaleed has also invested $400 million into xAI