The Musk rat had a very bad day yesterday.
Tesla Inc. disappointed investors with its first-quarter results, sending the electric-car maker’s shares down 9.75% on Thursday to $162.99. An experimental Starship rocket designed by SpaceX achieved liftoff in Boca Chica, Texas, only to explode about four minutes later in a fiery ball above the Gulf of Mexico. And on Twitter, as Musk promised weeks ago, many users lost their legacy blue checkmarks for choosing not to pay $8 per month for the privilege.
When it comes to the billionaire’s net worth, Tesla’s sinking share price had the most immediate consequences. His wealth dropped by $12.6 billion as a result, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, his biggest decline this year. His stake in Tesla, including shares and options, makes up the biggest part of his $163.9 billion fortune, though SpaceX has become more important as its valuation soars.
The stupid blue checkmark thing is all the rage on Twitter. It’s Musk’s grand plan to make Twitter profitable by charging $8 for a little blue symbol on your account, but few people are taking him up on it, and mainly they are conservative twits begging for approval from senpai. Some famous people are refusing to pay for it, which is a bad look (what good is a status symbol if high-status people reject it?), so Musk gave Lebron James, Stephen King, and Willam Shatner the blue check for free…and then the nobodies started clamoring for a free check mark, too.
His get-rich-quick scheme of selling a pointless blue logo is flopping. Oh no, quick, his capitalist brain thinks of a way to force people to buy it…I know, it said, compel your advertisers, the only people bringing in revenue, to pay for it!
What a super-genius.
At least it’s not Parler. Parler has already closed up shop, and its former employees are scrabbling for ways to open alternatives.
“Parler management are straight up f*ggots,” Dennis Harrison, whose LinkedIn identifies him as a lead engineer at the company, wrote in a private Discord server this past Sunday. “They ruined something good.”
I’m sure Dennis will find a way to express himself elsewhere. I don’t think I’ll be interested in any company he engineers, but sure, he sounds like a genius of Musk’s calibre.
“We’re getting an entity setup so we can take donations/money whatever to help with some of the costs,” the former Parler engineer wrote on the Discord channel. “Currently about $300 a month just for the dev stuff.”
“Once we start making it public, that will go up to $500 a month, I bet,” he continued.
Speaking of get-rich-quick schemes on social media, here’s another: Align Us, an app that lets users rate businesses on a conservative to progressive scale, so you can boycott them. I’m not at all interested — I know that all businesses are pro-business, so what more information do I need? — and I also don’t believe in the companies claim of neutrality.
In the wake of “Go Woke, Go Broke”, consumers are feeling highly motivated that they can make a difference in society simply by where they spend (or don’t spend) their hard-earned money. They want to know that when they support a business, that business isn’t going to spend it with organizations or give money as political donations to an agenda that goes against their values.
The site has a number of advertisers — they all seem to be niche conservative weirdos, like Mammoth Nation (totally a grift) and Law Enforcement Today. It’s also badly coded, frequently popping up an alert to tell you it’s struggling, along with quotes from people like Ronald Reagan and Thomas Sowell, and then not being able to find any business near you and instead handing you a link to a random review of a company in Chicago. Did you know that Frito-Lay Inc. is liberal? Put those corn chips back on the shelf.
I’m learning that “Go Woke, Go Broke” is not a thing. It is obvious that putting right-wing ideologues in charge of anything, whether it’s the Supreme Court of a website, leads to catastrophic failure.
So, this is that New Capitalism I’ve heard about.
No! I will not take your money! First, you have to pay me $8.99/month or I won’t take your much, much larger check!
Kind of reminds me of the incompetent armed robber.
“Give me all your money and valuables and I’ll kill you!”
“Don’t you mean or?”
“No, I meant what I said!”
“I see no value in any participation here.”
“Build a better Twitter through verification?” He’s kidding, right? Twitter WAS better through verification when he bought it, then he destroyed all that, and now he’s pretending he’s building something better, when it has no chance of being as good as what he’d initially bought? What a jucking foke.
Actually with Parler’s demise and all seems mroe like its “Go anti-woke, go broke!”
Behold western Europe (these days not including Britain):
Mixed economies. Often facing problems, but fixable problems as the Insane Clown Posse rarely is put in charge.
There are billionaires but- once Italy saw off Berlusconi- they don’t get to dictate policy.
EU is cracking down on monopolies and oligopolies (which is why British oligarchs hated EU). They are cracking down on money laundring.
I mention this because these examples show it is not impossible to have good institutions.
Hardly a day goes by where Elon Musk doesn’t do something horrible to someone. Occasionally that someone is himself so there is that. The latest.
Musk spends a lot of time enabling Russian and Chinese government propaganda “news” outlets.
In the ongoing Russian genocide of Ukraine, he openly favors Russia.
This is just another step in destroying whatever credibility Twitter had.
As Parler showed, you can’t make much money running a social media site whose main customer base are trolls.
StevoR: the form I’ve come to like is “go fash, no cash”
I don’t see that Elon Musk is all that bright.
It is a huge mystery how he ended up as the world’s richest man. Data.
There is so much wrong with this. Every sentence is wrong.
.1. ” But once you have birth control and abortions and what not, now you can still satisfy the limbic instinct but not procreate.”
Humans have always limited their numbers by social and nonsocial mechanisms.
To take one example, there are estrogenic herbs that act like birth control pills, widely used in ancient societies. One common one is wild carrot seeds, now growing in my yard next to the Pennyroyal. The Romans had one based on a type of fennel.
In middle ages Europe, only the eldest son inherited the land meaning a huge number of men just never got married. And so on.
.2. “I’m sort of worried that — hey, civilization, if we don’t make enough people to at least sustain our numbers perhaps increase a little bit, then civilization’s going to crumble. ”
The earth’s population is 8 billion and still growing.
We aren’t going to run out of people soon.
It isn’t known what the sustainable carrying capacity of the earth is, but we may well be over it right now in an overshoot.
The idea of boycotting businesses that reflect the worst humans can come up with isn’t a bad idea.
I will never buy anything that is associated with Elon Musk. I don’t even have a Twitter account.
raven @5, why, it’s almost as if minority rule is impossible if the majority refuses to pay for it.
When a rather right-slanted person starts openly worrying that we’ll “run out of people,” one can probably be confident the Great Replacement paranoia is implicit.
They aren’t talking about too few humans.
@6. numerobis : I love it.
.***
Incidentally meme on facebook seen today :
Author unknown. Any typos no doubt mine.
Pretty good example of fusion of anagrams and rocket science albeit it was actually the self-destruct that blew it up but yeah.
My take on reality is, “Go Woke, not broke”.
Raven @ 7
When the Musk talks of civilization he is whistling through his dog-like lips. For him only whites are civilized, and any reduction in their influence, or even perceived influence, is enough to agitate him.
Never forget which kind of political system Elon Musk grew up in.
Musk was a well known liberal philanthropist for most of his life. If anything, he was formed in the hellish fire pits of liberal capital thought. But capitalism knows no political bounds so those liberals shared a zip code with their fellow-NIMBY conservative damned capitalists.
That said, he has always been a know-nothing capitalist. He has created nothing. He’s given the world nothing but a dramatic barking of orders and sometimes humorous quotes in interviews.
Apparently going woke is good for business.