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Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

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Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#921

Post by williamtrask »

origin_path wrote: post #915
EMM_386 wrote: post #864

I am not sure what Elon's vision of a "free speech" platform is, but if you allow absolutely all legal free speech, with limited/no moderation, it will turn into a cesspool. This "Welcome to Hell, Elon" article sums up most of my points so I won't bother to repeat them all here. https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitt...

That's the left wing perspective, not some universal truth. Obvious counterexamples: America, the internet, e2e encrypted messaging.

I’m not sure the latter two are actually counterexamples. The internet has some pretty dark places and e2e encrypted messaging isn’t visible enough for us to really know what goes on in there.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#922

Post by colechristensen »

wzyoi wrote: post #349

I always wonder: how much honesty is in him? For example, he stopped talking about the bot population on the platform altogether after he could not get out of the deal. Was he honest about this being a big issue in the first place? For me, it’s not easy to believe this because this bot issue appeared right after Twitter staff did not like his speech, and talks with the CEO fell apart. Am I mistaken about how it all p…

It was a legal dispute over billions of dollars, nobody was telling the truth it is all a game to win a case and a negotiation tactic to get a favorable deal. It wasn’t an opportunity for an honest conversation with internet commentators with no actual stake in what happened.

There are legal arguments and then there is being deceitful, there’s quite a lot of distance between the two.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#923

Post by 6nf »

roughly wrote: post #831

Firing Vijaya is a hell of a move here. Parag had been in the CEO seat for less than a year and had no real experience, and Twitter's not such a unique company financially that the CFO is anything special, but Vijaya had been in charge of legal and policy for a decade at a company that regularly has to tangle with nation state governments, as well as navigate all the other kinds of various policy hell that is Twitter…

Elon purchased Twitter to fire Vijaya.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#924

Post by madeofpalk »

sawyna wrote: post #897
roughly wrote: post #831

Firing Vijaya is a hell of a move here. Parag had been in the CEO seat for less than a year and had no real experience, and Twitter's not such a unique company financially that the CFO is anything special, but Vijaya had been in charge of legal and policy for a decade at a company that regularly has to tangle with nation state governments, as well as navigate all the other kinds of various policy hell that is Twitter…

You are spot on. That style of working or perspective towards policy is exactly what Musk wants to remove at the grassroots level. Agreed that this wisdom and experience is not replaceable. But Musk intends to replace it with something else. If you think about it, Vijaya's perspectives and intuition is only going to pull back Musk's vision however vague that might be. Musk doesn't want to sit around and convince Vija…

> plan

Plan?

You say "i don't what his plan is", and then "this was a mastermind move for him to execute his plan".

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#925

Post by pnt12 »

emadabdulrahim wrote: post #804
georgeg23 wrote: post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He had help from the government, specifically Mike Griffin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career The rocket landing stuff largely borrow from DC-X and the spinoff work at NASA (+Lars Blackmore), all originally Strategic Defense Initiative stuff. He used all that money from Mike as collateral for loans to Tesla. He deserves some credit for impressive financial engineering and attracting talent under…

> Most people who work with Musk 1:1 know he's unpredictable but pretty mentally unimpressive. Sources?

People who don't like him really downplay his past achievements. I currently don't like him, but he's been involved in PayPal, Tesla and Space X, all companies which had/have a big impact in our world.

Some will say he bought some of these, or the engineers did the real work, or he got government and family funding. But so what? Lots of companies with funding and good engineers don't get anywhere. So I don't know what, but he's been doing somethings right for a very long time.

More recently? Only crap shots, in my opinion. The boring tunnel sucks. Self driving will likely never become a reality. The Twitter deal feels off. I miss the visionary Mars seeking Musk, what we have now is the libertarian boomer Musk and he's disappointing.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#927

Post by madeofpalk »

pj_mukh wrote: post #850
roughly wrote: post #831

Firing Vijaya is a hell of a move here. Parag had been in the CEO seat for less than a year and had no real experience, and Twitter's not such a unique company financially that the CFO is anything special, but Vijaya had been in charge of legal and policy for a decade at a company that regularly has to tangle with nation state governments, as well as navigate all the other kinds of various policy hell that is Twitter…

AFAICT he's planning on folding to any authoritarian governments demands [1], while fighting for free speech mostly in the American context (and that too, just online). For that, he probably doesn't need Vijaya. I hope someone pays her buckets of money now to fight at the actual frontline of free speech (Texas government sanctioned book bans perhaps?) [1]: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-free-speech-twitter-gl.…

> while fighting for free speech mostly in the American context (and that too, just online)

Like the Texas social media law that twitter is fighting (though industry lobby groups) in the supreme court?

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/10/courts-decision-uphold...

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#928

Post by fredgrott »

It would seem that Elon Musk might know that cash is needed for the internal revamp of infrastructure to move and transition from social graph to AI graph feeds in that behind the scenes is making an attempt to cut costs to get an amount of cash needed for such a transition.

What that would do:

1. Attract top creators back as it is more money revenue speculative in revenue one could gain as a creator. 2. Creators coming back would then attract advertisers

His issue with free speech was always a red herring as he has stated many times that h wants free speech under what the law requires which some includes even the voluntary items twitter has to do to meet the congress lawful section they have to follow that was passed by congress for all sm platforms and all internet platforms in general.

But then again this is conjecture as taking it private will close certain inquiry angles until Elon desires some PR and becomes somewhat forthcoming.

Should be interesting to see the switch to AI feeds if Elon is able to pull it off.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#929

Post by buzzkill90 »

bradgessler wrote: post #543
cutenewt wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's going to be more in the other direction. He really hates the bots, so he'll probably close up the API. Until bots gets solved, no developer should expect the API to open up.

IMO framing it as "get rid of the bots" is the wrong way to solve the problem because it's unsolvable, especially as we head more towards a world of content being generated by increasingly sophisticated ML algorithms. It's probably best to embrace the bots and instead think about it as a problem of categorizing, quantifying, and applying more metadata to messages that let people, agents, or other bots determine the q…

> IMO framing it as "get rid of the bots" is the wrong way to solve the problem because it's unsolvable,

I think it's super simple actually. Wanna get a blue check-mark to prove you are human? Here, pay us 10$ pledge. You'll lose it, if you break the "rulez". Add financial frictions to the game, and bots strategy won't scale...

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#930

Post by quickthrower2 »

nanolith wrote: post #887

Elon Musk's ideological takeover won't save Twitter. It's too late for that. Twitter has lost too many active users to make a comeback. I deleted my Twitter account this year. I had it for 16 years. My Twitter account was boring. I'm not a right-wing or left-wing anything. My political commentary is less about ideology and more about practicality and appearances. It was also rare. Mostly, I used my account to post sc…

Free, Most Popular, Perfect Moderation might be a pick 2?
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