The threat from the oligarchy's point of view might be the openness of it. Maybe they plan to have different mini-Twitters in order to atomize people. Truth social, Blue Anon, libertarian, maybe even one for leftists just for surveillance purposes--half the accts will be feds.
:hexbear-retro: /s
We'll have to ask about this at the next meeting. Hope they give me a Posadist server
I see dead people. Walking around like regular people. They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead.
This is why leftists should at least make some attempt at learning about stonks and business. Yeah it's boring and unfulfilling but it offers insight into how capitalists think and why they behave the way they do.
Tesla was shitting the bed. You have to start there. Elon, like a lot of other dipshits, put a factory in China so he could have cheaper labor and sell directly to the Chinese market. China actually attempts to stop covid so they shut down his factory. When the same thing happened in the US, he moved out of California and into Texas. He moved from regulation to deregulation. He can't do that with China. If he wants a billion people to buy his shitty car he has to play their game.
On top of that the competition is outperforming him. Everyone's EVs are surpassing Tesla's and they're also getting actual contracts. Tesla lost out on a huge contract just before all this Twitter shit started.
Tesla has been propped up for a while. It's been way over valued by any stretch of the imagination. He's basically been doing a legal ponzi scheme with orders. Use new orders to pay off old orders. Use new loans to pay off old loans. Raising prices on orders that haven't even been filled so he can buy more time. The government helped him out and allowed him to manipulate EV credits. Because the neoliberal government loves wonky policy and private-public partnerships.
It also came out that Tesla had about $800M in crypto holdings. What happened to crypto in the months before this Twitter shit? Crypto continues to reach lows it hasn't seen for years. Tesla is holding a pile of shit for an investment that will never return anything even if crypto prices doubles tomorrow.
With all that came the sexual exploitation, which is what it was even if nobody else calls it that. He's been fucking his staff and having kids with everyone. He tried to pay for a handy with a horse. Exchanging material goods for sex. That's when his opportunistic "I'm republican now because cancel culture is out of control" shit came about. Which was also right before the twitter thing.
He offers to buy twitter, the price of the stock jumps up. He says he has to raise money for it so he sells off a chunk Tesla options which are definitely taking away more money than they'll be worth ever again. He then tries to back out by claiming bots. Twitter's price is now so inflated that it can't be profitable. Meaning if he bought it at that price, it doesn't generate enough real money to justify the stock price. He wouldn't be able to pay back the loans.
Then comes a court case where a lot of private texts leaked. Turns out he's not very smart at all. He never had a problem with the bots. So he caves and buys twitter to push that out of the news and make it look intentional. But now he's bought twitter at a huge price that can never be justified with current cashflows.
When he gets the company he does a bunch of stupid media shit to please his online fans rather than think like a business owner or investor. Because he is that ignorant and arrogant. We watched what happened since then. Mass layoffs, people quitting. Advertisers pull out.
Firing people is smart (from a capitalist view) because it reduces cost. But it only works if you can maintain production or shrink your other expenses to compensate for the reduction in production. He didn't do that. He just fired people and hoped it would work out somehow. Since it's not a public company there is no bump in the stock price. Revenue drops while it's still overvalued from the sale. Meaning he's even worse off than he was at the $44B sale.
The only way out is he leaves and hopes things settle out enough to start making money again. Or he sells at a loss just to get out from under it and twitter starts rebuilding. Other than that, it's going to go bankrupt and be sold anyways to repay investors.
Then we go back to watching Tesla slowly crumble because none of that has been solved. In fact it's worse because since all this started his cars have killed people and been publicly shown to hunt down toddlers like a goddamn T-800.
I think the real take here is that the intelligence state has spent so much time and money outsourcing their cointelpro and other programs to these social media companies. Now that they've done that it can only end in tears. By trying to get away from the big government spending and privatize everything, the created their own demise. Capitalists love doing that kind of thing.
Now we have to go back to some psycho from Yale trying to trick some 4channer into shooting demsucc politicians to stop communism.
He tried to pay for a handy with a horse.
Had to re-read this bit a couple of times before I realized what you meant.
good run down, and there's also been the Starlink Ukraine drama as @BynarsAreOk pointed out
intelligence state has spent so much time and money outsourcing their cointelpro and other programs to these social media companies
Yes this is the key part being speculated on here, what shape those efforts might take next
"Controlled demolition" implies too much. Must keep in mind the factionalism and brokering etc that goes on, as in @Awoo's reply
this theory seems like it would mostly be appealing for people who can't internalize that being rich doesn't mean you have any ability or intelligence, it threatens their worldview too much so it's easier to make it all part of some bigger plan
nope, nobody's at the wheel and the brick of capital is on the pedal
Yeah, I kind of agree in that the hypothesized shift from centralized -> siloed is still compatible with "capital as a real god" mindset
This feels like a refreshing new take on "9/11 was an inside job".
Excited for a whole new generation of Twitter Truthers, here to remind us that it was a massive state financed propaganda network pretty much from day one and therefore Elon pissing all over it was 11D chess you idiots just don't understand.
Yeah OP is a pretty dumb take.
Musk tanked it because he's an idiot man baby who cornered himself into losing $44 billion and lashed out. If the feds were worried about the propaganda machine they'd just throw another $100 million at their bot farms and hire a few extra ghouls on the mod team.
But that's just it, the feds aren't worried about the propaganda machine anymore. It was an experiment to control the narrative from your smartphone like they did in the days of mass media on the idiot box. The experiment failed and now they are cutting their losses. Resources will be redistributed to :reddit-logo: or facebook or just let go.
Lmao those two conspiracies have nothing to do with each other thematically or contextually
My pet theory is that Peter Thiel convinced Musk into buying Twitter knowing he would tank it and open up the market for a competitive site.
Following that line though, why not multiple competitors, gives illusion of choice and each silo is smaller and easier to manage narratives within
I am not against this take.
I think Elon is an idiot. But I'm also not against the idea that he's been shoved, or that he did it to himself and nobody is helping steer him right or intervening because the outcome is what they want. However, I also don't think Elon is unaware of labour laws existing in other countries, he afterall has had offices in multiple countries for multiple companies. The way he has behaved with some of the firings has felt odd to me as he knows damn well that the company will lose even more money the way he's put things in writing. The only explanation I have for this behaviour is that it doesn't matter to him if the company loses more money to lawsuits over firings because he doesn't care if it loses more money.
Another way to interpret this series of events is not that Elon entirely caused this, but that media, establishment, the billionaire class, etc etc, all took this purchase as the opportunity to stick the knife in. Pounding twitter with everything they can, supporting the workers with everything they can (that doesn't strike you as odd?), suddenly caring about working habits and labour laws and the way Musk treats people. This outpouring of support from the media and their attack against Musk can only be interpreted as a complete turn by establishment against him and Twitter. So even if he isn't doing this intentionally, you can still interpret this whole event as intentional on the part of the establishment.
All rational actors all acting in their self-interest, independently, simultaneously. Or as the right calls it, a conspiracy.
Whatever the media supports, look into why they're doing it and who it benefits.
If it seems like they're supporting workers... Something else is going on.
Another way to interpret this series of events is not that Elon entirely caused this, but that media, establishment, the billionaire class, etc etc, all took this purchase as the opportunity to stick the knife in.
If you want to connect the dots this is all happening after he pulled Starlink from Ukraine and demanded more money from the Pentagon. My immediate reaction then was that while this was a logical move for him it probably created a few more enemies in the government and MIC. They all hated him already but they were all more than willing to accommodate the useful village idiot.
But now they see that punishing him through twitter and the media is very useful in the long term, best case scenario he thinks twice about ever standing up against their interests again, worst case scenario he will become American Eike Batista.
Another way to interpret this series of events is not that Elon entirely caused this, but that media, establishment, the billionaire class, etc etc, all took this purchase as the opportunity to stick the knife in. Pounding twitter with everything they can, supporting the workers with everything they can (that doesn’t strike you as odd?), suddenly caring about working habits and labour laws and the way Musk treats people. This outpouring of support from the media and their attack against Musk can only be interpreted as a complete turn by establishment against him and Twitter. So even if he isn’t doing this intentionally, you can still interpret this whole event as intentional on the part of the establishment.
This is the real answer. It's awfully strange how you suddenly see all these articles hyping up Mastodon when the real Twitter clone is Telegram. I'm not debating Mastodon vs Telegram, but I don't think it's a coincidence that MSM is trumpeting the merits of a particular Twitter clone instead of just putting out bland Twitter clone listicles with Mastodon and Telegram as two Twitter clones. This implies a certain degree of coordination, which implies shared interests and agreed upon goals.
The only implication I see is that Tele and Mastodon are the only two places for people to end up, I can't think of any other alternative outside of Facebook or TikTok which are already known values and probably (TikTok in particular) have seen a bit of a usage bump (since there was already plenty of overlap in the first place).
Again: social media is massively popular right now. In a capitalist system, nothing legal for which there is a huge demand just vanishes.
Demand is huge, but (1) it makes everyone who participates in it miserable, and they know it, and also (2) the profitability problem still hasn't been solved, and in fact it looks less solvable than it did five years ago.
Is there even a precedent for that?
Really felt like this was inevitable from both right and left, especially the libertarian musk fan crowd. There was really no way they wouldn't see this as Musk playing stupid to destroy Twitter for the greater good or something.
One theory i’ve heard is by tanking twitter, elon feels he can get out of paying the debt of buying it, saddling it with the debt instead.
Kinda “well i didnt graduate, so why should i pay it back” kinda energy
i will not assume my opposition is clever or smart, they are dumb and obvious, musk is the dumbest man alive he just has to much power and money, like he literally was posting "how to make a small fortune on social media? start with a big fortune" like no we all saw how you do it you hold out on your almost non profitable but really important social media until a dumbass makes a stupid 44 bi offer for it and you take it and leave, this is a man losing a inconceivable ammount of money and IT DOESN'T EVEN MATTER HE WILL STILL BE RICH NO MATTER THE RESULT
Nonsense. It’s the opposite. You want people to think they are “free” and living in democracy, so you don’t want to remove their speech platform. You want to control it and control the narrative within.
However, in this case I’d use the Occam’s razor to attribute current events to good old incompetence.
