The Elon Musk Thread

[Murphy]

bless

 

[Mr. Tea]

Twitter is nowhere close to biggest, you are deeply deeply confused

You could have just said "wrong."

OK, so it's not as big as Facebook or whatever. Still hundreds of millions of users around the world. It's a fairly big deal in terms of how ideas are shaped and shared.

 

[Mr. Tea]

The hair trigger deployment of the "musk stan" antigen, a thing of beauty, like watching the spirit of discourse sing through a host.

yeah but

 

[versh]

 

[versh]

He's posting memes about himself 'going to war' with Apple now.

 

[versh]

 

[Leo]

Such a dipshit.

 

[Mr. Tea]

He's posting memes about himself 'going to war' with Apple now.

This just made me cringe myself inside out.

 

[IdleRich]

Looks ripe for one of those accidents where the phone rings and you accidentally pick up the gun instead of the handbset and blow off your own head.

 

[DannyL]

He did a tweet with 88 in it earlier. We all know what that's a signal for, right?

 

[craner]

He did a tweet with 88 in it earlier. We all know what that's a signal for, right?

Yeah, blu-ray Kung Fu movies.

 

[Leo]

When do investors start to get concerned that he's too distracted with nonsense trolling? Tesla has lost half it's stock market value since the Twitter acquisition, and not all of that drop can be attributed to "supply chain issues".

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

He's brought back Trump (who just had dinner with avowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes and [sighs] Kanye), Marjorie Taylor Greene, etc and now he's banning - personally, it seems in some cases - high-profile anti-fascist accounts, under the guise of "restoring an even playing field". I'll be honest, the blatancy of it has surprised me. Peter Thiel you always knew had that cold hard fascist steel in him, but I didn't expect to see Musk so open and aggressive about it.

It seems strange that tech of all sectors is home to the most hardline reactionary views in all of corporate America. Or idk maybe it isn't.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

 

[DannyL]

He's brought back Trump (who just had dinner with avowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes and [sighs] Kanye), Marjorie Taylor Greene, etc and now he's banning - personally, it seems in some cases - high-profile anti-fascist accounts, under the guise of "restoring an even playing field". I'll be honest, the blatancy of it has surprised me. Peter Thiel you always knew had that cold hard fascist steel in him, but I didn't expect to see Musk so open and aggressive about it.

It seems strange that tech of all sectors is home to the most hardline reactionary views in all of corporate America. Or idk maybe it isn't.

There's something in the "reshape the world" tech utopianism that tends towards fascism. You can see it in longtermism pretty clearly.
Reminds me of Henry Ford in some ways.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

When do investors start to get concerned that he's too distracted with nonsense trolling?

Tesla was insanely overvalued even by tech standards, so much so that even after losing half its peak value its p/e still at 56, 2.5x the S+P 500 average (its peak was something wild like 75 iirc), so the bubble was always going to burst at some point. Tbf the decline started well before he bought Twitter, it's lost more like 20% of it's value in the last month than half. Can't imagine the ongoing Twitter disaster is helping tho.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

There's something in the "reshape the world" tech utopianism that tends towards fascism. You can see it in longtermism pretty clearly.
Reminds me of Henry Ford in some ways.

That is unfortunately true

Case in point, Filippo Marinetti, author of both the Futurist and Fascist Manifestos

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

The destructive impulse of fascism I fully understand in tech - disrupt, move fast break things, build the new world on the ashes of the old

What I understand less is the other side of fascism - the appeal to traditionalism, return to a mythical golden age - which would seem to be totally at odds with that forward impulse of tech

 

[Mr. Tea]

The destructive impulse of fascism I fully understand in tech - disrupt, move fast break things, build the new world on the ashes of the old

What I understand less is the other side of fascism - the appeal to traditionalism, return to a mythical golden age - which would seem to be totally at odds with that forward impulse of tech

I wouldn't say this was surprising, exactly. Fascism is full of contradictions has always been eclectic in the things it adopts, co-opts, or fetishizes. You could say it's been consistently inconsistent.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

it doesn't surprise me at all in fascism. one of fascism's cornerstones is reconciling seemingly irreconcilable, incoherent contradictions, what Eco refers to as its fuzziness.

it surprises me in tech, how strongly and widely - if not unanimously or even majority, certainly a strong and vocal minority - people seem to be drawn to these social relations so heavily rooted in the past. on an elitism level it certainly makes sense.

it doesn't necessarily have to make sense tho. contradictions abound. it just surprises me.

I should be clear I guess that it's like anything it's a complicated ideological ecosystem in which various related but not exactly similar things sit side by side, which accounts for some of the dissonance