The awesome Taylor Lorenz reports this on Mastadon. Highly recommend to follow her if you like these updates about what’s going on.
That man is repeatedly showing the world how stupid he actually is and how little he actually understands about running a company. He has never been in a situation like this where he wasn’t surrounded by a bunch of people playing babysitter and doing all the leg work to try to actually get his shit ideas to work. IIRC I saw somewhere this morning that he hadn’t even figured out what to call tweets and retweets, he really hadn’t thought any further than changing the logo and repeating the same lame idea he had 30 years ago.
ABAM (All Billionaires Are Morons)
Or all billionaires are scum who have written the laws and ensured that the fine for this is no more than an annoyance and removing the sign without a permit was a worthwhile risk and the right call to make.
This guy gets it.
I think “all billionaires are scum” is perhaps too harsh, but it’s far closer to the truth than the views of society at large.
You cannot become a billionaire without being a scummy person.
Rowling became a billionaire by writing popular books and selling the movie rights. She’s a scummy person, obviously, but she didn’t become rich by being one.
Yeah you definitely can become a billionaire without being a scummy person, just not trough business. You need to be an artist or athlete.
Definitely not going to be a CEO without being a piece of shit. You need that lack of ethics to make it that high.
You can literally start your own company and assign yourself CEO. It’s probably all of a filing fee away. It’s easy to become a C-suite.
You could inherit it
Which means you’re born into a weird sociopathic upbringing. Very fee born into wealth see any issues with it and even then, it tends to be short lived. One of the Johnson and Johnson heirs put out a documentary, but not much after that.
As you say, she’s a scummy person, so you have no way of knowing that she only became a billionaire because of the books.
Most of the Harry Potter stories are stolen/copies of either existing young adult novels or existing mythology. There’s very little original material or concepts. All writers borrow from other writers, but Rowling is just barely better than a plagiarist.
Rowling became a billionaire
Google says her net worth is £820 million. Not a billoonarrr.
Too harsh? Can you name one that isn’t?
I’m pretty sure that future billionaire me seems like a cool guy, I’m totally not biased.
Eat the rich, except if I become rich, then I’m exempt because I am a honorary proletariat
/s but seriously tho, if anyone becomes a billionaire, they’ll soon get corrupted by the wealth
You don’t become a billionaire without exploiting so many people and then hording those riches to yourself. You’ve already been corrupted by that point.
A horde would come after their hoard of riches
You could exploit other billionaires, but that seems like the one thing you can go to jail for.
I think for most people, they become an asshole on the way to becoming a billionaire. You don’t make that kind of money without exploitation and plundering. The only exception I could think of would be if they inherited the money. And even so, if you inherit that kind of money and don’t give out a good chunk of it, you’re still scum imo.
IIRC I saw somewhere this morning that he hadn’t even figured out what to call tweets and retweets
Obviously Tweet -> Xeet 💩
Let me xeet that
Using the sino-X, pronounced “Sh”
…pronounced Faaht.
Yeets and Re-Yeets
Yeets and re-Yeets actually make sense for outgoing messages.
I think we need to read between the lines here.
I honestly think he’s intentionally driving Twitter into the ground. Thing is he can’t just fire everyone and shut down the servers or he won’t get the tax write-off. He’s burying Twitter in a way that maintains tax status. So in a way that’s smart, but also stupid he spent what he did only out of spite.
What he’s doing to Twitter is like a jumbo jet pilot that commits suicide by crashing the plane (that’s actually happened). Why do you need to take all those innocent people with you. Just go jump off a building, same end without killing a bunch of innocents.
Really his destruction of the platform is about control, he has some kind of personal beef with Twitter so he used his power and money to kill the whole thing. He’s taking his bat and ball and going home.
ABAM (All Billionaires Are Morons)
Bill Gates is actually a very smart, and nowadays even pleasant, man.
He has not always been pleasant. Don’t fall for the post-retirement PR spin
“Nowadays even pleasant” clearly implies he wasn’t always pleasant though.
It’s easy to act pleasant when you no longer have anything to gain from being awful
You say that, but look at the cadre of billionaires who no longer have anything to gain from being awful… but still are.
Old habits die hard?
That is a good point. I think most of them are just plain awful people who enjoy causing negatively influencing the world, while others are only awful when it benefits them.
He is the best billionaire. That may not be a high bar, but it’s something. If Elon Musk decided to retire and cure Malaria like Bill did (or maybe even just get back to space exploration or autonomous driving as he was doing before his Twitter craze, hopefully without fucking other people over?) I wouldn’t mind him as much
Most of Bill’s philanthropy was due completely to Melinda.
I’m watching with interest what new things he does now that he’s on his own.
I’ll take a horrible billionaire investing in malaria research over a manchild billionaire obsessed with naming everything X.
You do realise it was Bill Gates who made the creators of the Oxford Astra Zeneca Vaccine make it paid and keep the methods of producing it hidden? Their original plan was to make the methods of production public, so that Governments could set up their own labs to produce more of it and save lives. There were many deaths that could have been prevented if it wasn’t for this terrible human being.
This is actually hilarious. It didn’t occur to me that rebranding should also concern stuff like “tweets”, mostly because I’ve never used twitter, but I’m really looking forward to what he will come up with for those terms.
“X’s”
He has pretty much always been almost a caricature of a horrible boss.
The miniseries on Twitter’s collapse is going to be epic.
Get a black dude (or even better a black lady) to play Musk and watch the entire right spontaneously combust.
deleted by creator
But why though? Why the insistence on portraying people in documentaries or biographies as someone completely different? Why not do a biography on a black dude or black lady who can be played by such instead of trying to change the race of historical figures for fun?
Holy shit man. That joke was strapped into a car, stuck on a rocket, and blasted so far over your head it’s circling the sun.
Ah, thank you I needed that laugh. Sometimes things make me snort or chuckle or “ha”, but that was a proper full laugh, thank you.
That’s awesome, glad to help!
“Joke”
Yes, they made a joke. And you didn’t get it.
Yeah, the joke is that it would trigger the snowflake right wingers
And it did
He’s an African actually, look it up.
But why though?
To upset you, personally.
People don’t generally do that. If you’re referring to Hamilton, it was not a documentary or a biography. And historically white people did that all the time in plays/movies for entertainment, so why get all angry about it now that it’s not white people?
I mean, if we’re talking Hamilton it’s even further, being pretty clearly a commentary on the whole “founding fathers freeing everyone while most of them owning human beings they refused freedom to” thing.
I brought up Hamilton because it’s particularly not a documentary
Netflix’s Cleopatra comes to mind.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra_race_controversy Her race is actually heavily debated by historians, so that’s not a very clear cut example.
Actually reading that article you linked it doesn’t seem that debated and there isn’t really any evidence of her being black.
You’re right, based on that article. It doesn’t matter, I’m just pointing out that it wasn’t just a random choice to make her black. I’d argue they should have made her Iranian to be more accurate, but the claim is that people are randomly just changing skin colors in documentaries all willy nilly and so far the only example is a weak one.
Queen Cleopatra is a very recent example.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra_race_controversy Her race is actually heavily debated by historians, so that’s not a very clear cut example.
From the article you linked it seems that historians by and large agree she was of Greek descent with a bit of Persian ancestry, and a bunch of laypeople are heavily debating them on it.
Well, it’s not the biography of whoever is going to play him either, hence the only authentic choice would be him being played by himself.
Nobody seemed to mind when the History Channel docuseries FDR came out with a British actor without a mobility disability as FDR.
Why is it that the series produced by an black female actor starring a black female actor needs such stringent accuracy controls?
Never heard of it. How many alien conspiracies does it contain?
It could have been a Silicon Valley whole season worth of material.
I hope someone to graffiti “Los” in front of that “er”
Best part is that the LEDs for “twit” now shine really bright at night.
but seriously, “L0Ser” on the X building would be funny
To anyone interested about what’s really like to deal with this man, I highly recommend giving this a read: https://www.tumblr.com/numberonecatwinner/701567544684855296/elon-wyd
There are multiple stories like that from several people.
Apparently there were people at Tesla who were effectively employed to get fired when he was in one of his moods.
And if you read enough of the stories it all comes down to basically a single PA who kept him away from important things. And that person stopped working for him shortly before the public realized what an asshole he is.
And after learning that, I can’t stop wondering who they work for now… And I want to see a show based on their biography.
That’s a great thought. Are there any insane people that recently haven’t been as loud as usual? Which “important” person had lowered thier IM A GENIUS decibel level and no one noticed? That PA could be the reason.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Zuckerberg hired them.
The memes about him have been a lot less derisive, and recently they are semi-positive towards him/meta, people were reasonable in the response to his green screen grilling video and there are jokes about them changing the Threads logo high up on lemmy, etc. And he registered an X logo as trademark to potentially counter Musk.
But honestly we might never know. I doubt they went to work for someone as self-destructive as Musk.
Man, I was strangely impressed with Tumblr these days until I scrolled two.posts down and it froze me out because I wasn’t signed in
Ugh, I hate that. Twitter is worse, but those unclosable popups are a good way to make sure I never create an account on a site. I have no problem with the suggestion, but make it optional.
Really? It didn’t do that to me. I clicked continue reading and went pretty far down the comments.
I’ve never even been to tumbler before so I certainly wasn’t signed in :)
I’ve seen this story several times now, and it’s probably true. Unfortunately there’s nothing else but the anecdotal story and I wish we had more corroboration from other former employees.
“Again, I cannot stress enough how much of the company culture was oriented around managing this one guy.” I can’t decide between wanting to have a work environment like this for once for the laughs, or not wanting to act in front of him as if he’s a person to be respected. But I guess the collegial cohesion is great in this one, if you only have to tiptoe around a single person and everyone makes fun of it.
The Police actually stopped a rich guy from doing something illegal?
He didn’t pay for a permit to do so. The police are there to protect capital, but under clearly-defined rules. Anyone who isn’t a fuckwit knows to pay the city its fees before doing something like this.
When JPMorgan Chase buys out a smaller bank, they apply for the permit in triplicate and pay all the fees, then make a donation to the Fraternal Order of Police. The cops then show up to attack protestors.
God damn, that’s depressing to think about.
Can we now start pronouncing X as ‘errrr’ when referring to the company? It would be good not to taint the good name of the letter entirely.
And it does say ‘er’ on the side of not-his-building.
I call it Xitter, using the Chinese pronunciation of Xi.
Brb gotta take a xit
I like the idea of calling it “ten”.
I like the idea of never referring to it again
Oh man can you imagine how great this would be if they got hit with a 3 day eviction notice for damaging the property?
That would be so fucking funny
They haven’t been paying their rent anyways, so I’m not sure why they bothered to change the sign.
I’m curious why they haven’t been kicked out after not paying rent for so long. Why does the owner allow him to stay rent free?
There’s literally nobody who would replace them. The commercial real estate market in SF is in shamble. Offices go empty all the time at a discount.
Edit: to add, it’s better to let them squat and be able to sue them later for potential money than to have the offices empty.
Squatters rights lmao.
I am genuinely baffled at how anyone still thinks Musk is even remotely competent. There’s absolutely no way he’s running all of these companies by himself.
This has to be false. If only ‘er’ remained, the ‘Twitt’ would have been removed. But the twit is still in charge.
Honestly, this is a comedy that needs to be seen to be believed.
Not that it isn’t fun to laugh at what a boondoggle
TwitterX is, but why do you need a permit to change a sign on a building?Guessing less about the sign itself and more about the heavy equipment/traffic obstruction involved in getting it down.
Also possibly becathe doesn’t own the building and needs approval of the owner.
Owners don’t issue permits, the government does.
But owners would probably call the police to stop the illegal work from being done to their building. They don’t want the liability. This would be reasonable to be part of an approval process with the building owners as you’d likely need their signature with the city, not just twitters.
Agreed. But the owner of the building would presumably be able to control modifications of his own building.
Need to make sure a qualified contractor does the work, that the sidewalk is roped off, and that other construction on the same road isn’t happening. Pretty typical stuff.
Normal procedure to make sure it’s within legal standards.
yes that is what a permit is
On public roads and sidewalks, you need permits and to have submitted a plan showing how much of the footpath/road will be blocked and for how long. You need to show where your bollards and rope or whatnot will be and any necessary signage (like 'pedesdrians keep left’s) that sort of thing.
Once you get the approval, you can jam up the area with a cherry picker/crane until you’re finished and everything is packed away.
So anyway, what I’m getting at, is this is the signage company not getting the permits - which they would have charged Twitter/X for and not an Elon oversight - UNLESS Elon decided to park that crane out there himself and to get whoever to pull down the signage.
Presumably because he (the company) doesn’t actually own the building. So any modifications have to be approved by the building owner.
Same way you can’t really paint the wall of your rented accommodation. It’s not your property.
local laws
I think I read that they had permission from the city but the landlord themselves didn’t approve it.
I wonder why the landlord who has been stiffed repeatedly wouldn’t sign off. Hmm…
Is this the landlord and city that Musk is currently having his asshole drilled into for illegally (without permit and using unlicensed workers for commercial work) modifying a bunch of shit? I remember he asked some dude to add a toilet near his office. Not like to hire a plumber or get estimates or ideas and shit. Just like, “hey. Put a toilet here.” That was my favorite story and where I really went like “oooook duuuuude” uncontrollably out loud. I’ve had a fuckton of “trade” jobs like HVAC, electrical work (mostly related to the HVAC), did some industrial scale backup power generator installs/maintenance, did some plumbing stuff. Kinda touched all over and all around in the world of building and adding on shit. So when I heard about him modifying electrical circuits without a permit… ok. I can see that if you get the right dude who knows what to do but isn’t legally certified. Of course you shouldn’t do that, especially with a business and a place you don’t own, but I get it. Adding a fucking bathroom though is absolutely bonkers to ask a regular dude (not even a guy who considers himself “handy”) to do. Like I think with all the shit I’ve done over 15 years or so, yeah, I could add a bathroom somewhere. But it would probably suck ass. And I’m not an engineer nor have I dabbled at all. And adding a giant, heavy object filled with water, ventilation to suck your shit smells out, a sink, lighting and all that stuff is gonna obviously require some demolition and then doing the whole thing. It’s an insane job to ask of someone who isn’t presenting themselves as a professional in that field. If it was replacing a toilet or sink, ok, again, not correct but I get that. Building a full whole new shitter is insane. It just shows his complete detachment from reality too because I don’t think most “normal” people would even think to ask anyone BUT contractors/plumbers whatever to do such a job. Definitely not a personal assistant.
Slight shame that the contractors didn’t start from the end. It could have been funnier if they had taken off the “er” instead.
My thoughts the same, though it should have been the “ter” to properly describe Musk.
Then again, having “twit” misspelled might have been even more on-point. Maybe they can just add the X and become Twit-X
Mf can’t stop taking Ls
To er is to be Musk
