I can't get over the fact that this is the guy who was supposed to be some kind of tech genius.
He was never a tech genius. Maybe fairly competent in some areas, I'll give him that, but his main shtick was coming up with spectacular and insane ideas (who doesn't like rockets?) and having enough emerald money to pay engineers until they could come up with solutions that work.
So basically he is any eight year old with emerald money.
Have you seen starship?
Or his bid for the lunar lander?
It looks like a back of the napkin drawing that he gave to real engineers and gave them billions of government dollars to turn into something real, at least in the case of starship.
It’s a tube, the same diameter all the way up with a ridiculous number of engine strapped to it. You know why nasa didn’t do that? WEIGHT. The more shit you have to push, the less distance you can go. Elon’s napkin plan is to refuel the upper stage in orbit, something that has never been done before, and something that requires multiple launches per mission.
You know what happened the first time they launched one, it fucking exploded a third of the way to space. You know what didn’t explode? Any of the Apollo missions, except for Apollo 1, which caused nasa to commit to a “no second chances” philosophy. Elon’s philosophy with starship was “if it gets off the pad, it’s a success” would you step into a building if the construction foreman said “if it doesn’t topple over on day one, it’s a success?”
Space travel is hard, but we were doing successful missions that survived failure scenarios over 50 years ago. Rockets that were designed with slide rules and notebooks full of handwritten math. Spacecraft that were hand built by talented engineers and tradesman, all survived their missions on the first and only try. This bullshit move fast and break stuff strategy shouldn’t be applied to human Spaceflight.
He’s not even spending his own money. SpaceX is primarily funded by the US government. Starship was a government payed experiment, and watching it blow up in the sky and hearing everyone at spaceX cheer made me angry. Real research deserved that money, real engine tests should have been done. Instead, we got the most expensive firework in history because Elon wanted to launch that day.
He repeatedly is stumbling into the same fucking roadblocks tech companies have struggled with for a decade or more, and he's walking through even worse thought processes when there's mountains of data and analysis and proof on what does and doesn't work.
It's like rewatching a train wreck in slow mo, but for some reason there's extra explosions added in.
How people thought, let alone still think, he's some sort of tech genius is absolutely beyond me.
It was a bunch of marketing hype all along, apparently. The more he's revealed who he actually is, the less most people believe that he's really good at much of anything besides hype and being pretentious. The past decade of fawning news articles about how he's the smartest and most hard working person in the entire world is even more nauseating now, in retrospect.
Just fucking do it.
Maybe then other media will finally stop reporting shit like
"Person Z said Y on X (formerly Twitter)."
It’s annoying enough when they report what someone famous said on Twitter but the articles about what a bunch of random unknown people posted on Twitter (often phrased as if they represent a community) are even worse.
This is a great idea. Do it!
Please kill it harder
Who in their right mind would pay for a dying social media platform? This reeks of desperation from a man trying to convince himself of his own supposed public image.
The requirement to create an account to view replies/threads is a show stopper for me and it has somehow made Twitter even more useless. It barely had value when it was freely legible but it's not worth sharing data with them to get festering garbage in return.
Yet he thinks people are going to pay for it?
We live in a world where social media and communication are commoditized as fuck and people refuse to pay premiums for shit they can do for free elsewhere. How is Twitter going to compete with Instagram, Threads, Mastodon, Reddit, and Facebook when it's arguably the worst choice, objectively the least feature rich, yet the only one that costs money?
I think it’s a great move Elon, charge $100 a month base price to keep the riff raft out, and then offer packages going up to $10,000 a month that allow people to post. I really, truly, seriously think you should do this!
He said creating such a system is “the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots
Lol the fucking “bots” again.
Do it.
You won’t.
No balls.
Great idea. I definitely support this decision.
Please DO
Yes, do it then everyone will move to mastodon and we can finally forget about twitter (x) existence
Dew it!
Oh thank God, then we can all finally move on and stop talking about it.
I don't hate what Twitter used to be. I never engaged with it much myself, but it was a fantastic tool for progressive organizations to network and mobilize, and the loss of that will genuinely hurt us all.
But at this point, that tool is already on life support. Better for it to die outright so that people find a new way to do those things x rather than this endless half life it's now trapped in.
He could've spent money building his own Twitter and leave us be but instead he had to go and waste 44+billion to cause harm and damage and destroy a company with employees making a living. It goes without saying he is just such a shit, vile and evil person.
I pray this bumbling moron actually does it.
Edit: spelling. Apparently I’m a bumbling moron too.
God I hope his checkmark followers gaslight him into doing this
just putting it behind a login screen was catastrophic by itself... just saying
I will pay you money to do it, Elon.
Twitter is dead in 2024 if not by the end of the year.
I remember saying "Twitter ain't making it to Christmas" a few months ago and every decision since then has not made that any less likely.
Do it..The ring commands you to do so.
Good, then all the actually normal people will leave and Elon will have his echo chamber
This supports the model that he's intentionally driving the platform into the ground.
Although I would not at all be surprised if he really is that stupid.
Hes worth 200 billion. God! I cant believe someone can actually have that kinda money and people in some part of the world can't afford a meal. If I had 200 billion , I would create X2 , will be called xtwice, just for shits and giggle. May be that's what he's doing.
Then you would not reach 200 billion. In order to reach that number you need to basically be a dragon sitting on your hoard. Bill gates would probably have been richer than Musk if he didn't start doing stuff with his money.
It is also relevant that these kinds of numbers are imaginary anyway. If they were to put all that money into actual use they would basically break the economy and a lot of it would evaporate.
I think a lot of people forget that Bill Gates was on a similar (if less public) fuck face path as Musk is on now. His complete turn toward philanthropism is pretty incredible.
I'm not saying he hasn't done awful things, I'm not saying he hasn't crushed the little guy, I'm not even saying at a basic level he's a good person. But he's used his incredible wealth to do a lot of good in the world, and with incredibly flippant monsters like Musk showing us the alternative I feel like it's worth re-acknowledging.
I honestly can't figure out what he is thinking: is he trying to kill of twitter because he doesn't care about it, or does he honestly belief that this will make good money? I feel like i'm watching a bouncing ball in a small room, you never know which way he goes next
I heard that he killed off Twitter because they were supporting Ukraine, and daddy Putin doesn’t like that.
At a press conference today, Musk was quoted as saying:
Look at me. Look at me. Please, God, I need people to be paying attention to me and validating me all the time. Ever since I fucked it up with my hot goth gf I've been an absolute mess of transparent attempts to remain relevant. I tried to gain your approval by doing what I guessed would be cool guy shit like going on stage with Dave Chappelle and yelling at you small people about how rich I am. I did the meme thing with the fake money and the fun monkey pictures. I spent billions evading your blocks on Twitter. I give up. You don't have to love me. No one will ever love me. But I need you to always be looking at me.
Musk then produced an acoustic guitar and began to play a cover of Matchbox 20's "Push". According to reports, the entrepreneur who used his slave-generated wealth to build a private space program was on the verge of tears and within shouting distance of the key as he sang the line "Don't just stand there/say nice things to me/cuz I've been cheated and I've been wronged".
I switched to Bluesky a few weeks ago and it's so much better than Twitter. It's a smaller number of people but the vibe is generally positive (plus half the posts aren't ads).
Honestly it feels like Twitter did 10 years ago.
Please do! Then we can post pictures of "X marks the spot of Twitter's grave"
Certainly gives him a good way to limit social media as we approach the new election cycle.
I'm supposed to be the random idiot here, Musk.
Stop stealing my shtick.
If that doesn’t finally kill off Twitter, I honestly don’t know what will.
Given how he's been doing things recently, you can expect a paywall to be added by next week sometime
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