He certainly figured it out, which is why he worked so hard to back out of the deal.
Though he never really expected it to earn its price back. As a large-fraction-of-a-trillion-aire, he may well have found that having trolls, clowns, and morons to enjoy his adolescent antics is worth $44B in pure enjoyment. He was buying a chance to put a significant thumb on the finger of world culture.
Musk has so much money that he doesn't really care if there's a net positive return to his purchases. He spends money to enjoy it. Which I actually find bizarrely refreshing, compared to the ones who want to use it for the purpose of acquiring more money, plus the occasional conspicuous consumption that seems more like a performance than actual enjoyment (e.g. megayachts).
> he may well have found that having trolls, clowns, and morons to enjoy his adolescent antics is worth $44B in pure enjoyment
This is the most disappointing part. I have a hard time imagining that any of these billionaires are "good people" in a way that I would recognize. But before this Twitter thing I felt like at least I can respect the things Musk chooses to spend his time and money on. How much would that $44B have moved the needle on on his Mars dream? Seems like a waste to me.
> How much would that $44B have moved the needle on on his Mars dream
It would make 0 difference, SpaceX is already moving as fast as possible, throwing money at them would not make things go faster. In the future when actual ships start flying to Mars Elon will still have plenty to fund that personally if he needed to.
In other news, the first flight test of the largest rocket ever built is scheduled for Monday the 17th
Forget about Mars, what about spending that $44B to lobby the government to end poverty for children in the US, feels like a noble cause. Senators and Congressmen/women are bribed, excuse me, lobbied, for peanuts (< millions).
For $44B, he could have just given every child $2,000. Not enough to end poverty, but surely enough to keep them fed for a year.
I realize that this isn't practical; the causes of poverty are complex and just giving people money won't solve all of it. But it does give some notion of the scope of what could have been accomplished directly.
But if you already have $100 billion dollars; and all you wanted in the world was adoration and accolades from adoring masses; and you didn't care those masses are trolls, clowns, and morons; then maybe $44 billion is the right price.
It really underscores how the Internet needs a notion of social networking that is based on open standards and open infrastructures. Imagine if it was 2002 and Bill Gates pulled a similar gambit and just "bought the web."
Fortunately that was actually impossible, but it underscores how a thing like Twitter is also too important to be a plaything of investors and playboys.
Every time someone mentions Mastodon here, we get a bunch of responders saying "they blew their chance" as if they're copy-pasting off of a script… I hate to be conspiracy-brained, but a quick note to those guys: if you are Twitter insiders, you're not being very subtle.
From where I'm sitting, Mastodon — and more importantly, ActivityPub — is doing great. For those that thing the standard is too weird for normies, keep in mind that the way things are going, more startups are going to follow Medium and Substack’s approach.
It's waaaaay better for those of us without an account. It loads every time, rather than failing about 2/3 of the time (at least on mobile—always figured that was some weird dark pattern to try to get me to use the app, did it to me consistently for years across multiple devices), and doesn't block me with a loginwall if I scroll too far before hitting "more replies" anymore.
All the drama around Twitter's also flat-out hilarious if one doesn't care whether Twitter lives or dies, and lots of that drama's on Twitter, so I'd call that an improvement, too.
Sometimes it wont show me current tweets. My timeline is full of accounts that I don't follow and nobody I follow replied. I had to block musk's account because it was the only thing I was seeing. Tweets disappear when I try to look at them. Its been frustrating to say the least.
I take it for what it is, a notification engine for "influencers" and media, and a time-waster, and basically nothing else
it's essentially not good for anything else, if you put too much faith in it to do things like learning or discovering new things, you're going to be disappointed
but at what it does I think it's better than a couple of years ago when I last spent some time using it - it was unmitigated garbage at everything back then
It's not, as long as you're not doing it to specifically target one company or be a dick about it. Is he going to label his own companies with the same thing?
>According to a Los Angeles Times investigation, Musk's companies had received an estimated $4.9 billion in government support by 2015, and they've gotten more since.[1]
Tesla, a government-funded company, has the ability to remotely disable your car. Surely they'd be happy to do this at the government's request, no? Locking your car mid-drive and rerouting you using FSD because you said something the government didn't like?
SpaceX, a government-funded company, has the ability to put all kinds of invasive, espionage-focused payloads into space.
The point is, if we're going to insinuate that NPR is doing the bidding of the US government simply because a portion (however large or small) of the money they receive comes from the government, then we can insinuate the same kind of sentiment towards Musk's companies.
If you think it's important to know that a media company takes government money, why wouldn't it be important to know if other companies in other industries are similarly connected?
Please act in good faith. You know why Twitter did what it did, and you know why it was wrong. We know you know that. NPR is not state affiliated, or even government funded. Fox news airs ads from the US Military - is it state affiliated?
Your logical fallacy is incredulity. What Twitter did was absolutely ethical, and since it applies to all government funded media, it is not political in nature. Yes anyone accepting government ad money should be labelled as well.
I'm not sure what ethical means in this context, or what it has to do with them being wrong. What responsibility does Twitter have to anyone? They are a privately held corporation. Where they were 'wrong' is in not being consistent in their labeling, and the subtext surrounding that - of which we are all aware but some of us (like you) are unwilling to acknowledge in order to advance an argument or to just Troll. But go on...
Because the "government funded media" was a last minute save, the original "state affiliated media" is a false claim. Surely you grasp the difference between the two labels? The latter has corporate and editorial control in case you were unaware.
Anyone providing money to a media org has some amount of editorial control. The newer version is more specific but it doesn’t mean state affiliated is inaccurate.
It does mean it's inaccurate because state affiliated is already a specific term to describe editorial control. I don't know how else to put it to you, maybe an example.
You can publish a podcast or article or whatever on NPR right now about how much you hate the current administration and want them replaced. You cannot do that with state affiliated media, if CGTN tomorrow did the same, the state has the direct ability to take action against that by firing people, changing management, altering funding, etc. That's if they even get past initial filters!
To argue that "state affiliation" is meaningless by handwaving it as "anyone providing money to a media org has some amount of editorial control" is bad faith.
Aren’t you assuming bad faith by claiming that Twitter is somehow conspiring against NPR by labelling the state sponsored media as being state sponsored?
It isn't. What's bad is that by singling NPR out for receiving less than 1% of their revenue from the government implies that's something unusual. It isn't. Almost every business receives money from the government.
Because "state-affiliated" specifically means the state has editorial control - which is certainly not the case here - not merely that they provide some funding.
They have not. You are relying on a false headline that calls things like contracts, loans, zev credits from other automaters as ' government subsidies', which is obviously incorrect.
Tesla is only just now receiving subsidies to produce batteries from the IRA that was passed last year, but previously had received no subsidies from the federal government
It feels like you’re attempting to make excuses for bad faith behavior through contortions of criteria. That is a choice, but not one I think that would stand up to scrutiny (based on the facts of the matter, Elon’s very public history of how he exists, operates, and “lashes out” whenever feeling challenged or sleighted).
> RT’s parent company, TV-Novosti, is registered as a state-owned Autonomous Non-commercial Organization (ANO) with the Russian Ministry of Justice. According to TV-Novosti’s official filings with the Ministry, it is almost entirely funded by the state budget, with the exact figure ranging annually between 99.5% and 99.9%.
That would depend entirely on the specific details, including that 99% funding number. If you wanna allege specifics about NPR beyond "they once hired someone who used to work for the government", go for it.
True but it does lean heavily in one political direction. If it is receiving any federal funding then it should be pushed to neutrality, and remove the one-sidedness of their news programing.
I think NPR would be very upset if the government required political neutrality as part of its funding.
NPR seems plenty neutral to me. Neutral is not defined as the midpoint between our two main US political parties (as your username would suggest you know).
I always hear more than one side to each story, when they're long enough, and a good mix of brief stories about either side, positive and negative.
I am a regular listener to at least Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and I can assure you their reporting is very biased to the Left.
The credulous reporting of politically left ideas, policies, and positions on news stories without even strawman explanations of competing ideas is very frequent.
I listen to podcasts for long form, fair discussions of issues, but NPR used to (seemed to?) hew to an objective ideal of reporting, and the new crew happily crusades for their team/goals.
Or maybe your perception of what is actually neutral is too skewed by American political extremism. It seems any source that isn’t ranting about trans folk and teachers being groomers or that the 2020 election was stolen is somehow “left leaning” to many people in this country.
When Trump threatened to cut their funding because they weren't friendly enough to him, their funding increased from donations quite a bit. They're making content their listeners want.
Not at all ragequitting and not degrading to NPR. Staying on the platform tacitly implies NPR accepts the label ...which would be degrading, from their perspective.
Around the time they left, the label had already been improved to mention funding instead of affiliation.
If they could just be a bit chill about it, is quite possible within a month it might have been replaced with a approximate-percentage-funding label, which should not be particularly offensive.
Would be really slick to see all media accounts have company ownership / funding listed.
Both. Elon's approach to all this is pointlessly erratic, alienating himself from numerous people and orgs he could really use as allies. He might be right that moving entirely to paid verification is needed... but even if that is needed, it could be rolled out over a long time, with much less alienation of the user base.
NPR could benefit from a bit of patience also: realize how erratic the counterparty is, and wait a bit to see what shakes out.
asking NPR to be patient while elmu abuses and insults them is like asking an abused spouse to just stick around in case their abuser with a history of abuse & gaslighting suddenly and inexplicably cleans up their act
at the very least, twitter & elmu have to understand their actions were wrong and show conciliation for wronging them – if they're incapable of that bare minimum, there's obviously no hope of them cleaning up their act
Experiences seem to vary a lot. Some people report the Twitter feed changed radically for the worse. Others (including me) have found it's about the same. I think it must depend greatly on what accounts you follow.
McDonalds, a state funded eatery,... (because they accept tax breaks)
Amazon, a state funded company,... (because they shopped around for the best tax breaks)
Or any single other company that does what a company does by making any deal they can to better their bottom lines by taking tax breaks or gov't funding in any form would need to be called state funded.
