Xitter is currently facing an advertiser boycott, all because Musk has been promoting, and contributing to, a culture of racism, misogyny, and hate. It was his anti-Semitic remarks that finally kicked me in the pants and convinced me I had to leave the platform. He’s mad about it now. He’s blaming the advertisers.
This is what happens when the richest person on Earth overdoses on redpills. A clammy, twitchy, agitated Elon Musk took the stage at The New York Times’ DealBook summit today and told former Twitter advertisers to “Go f*ck yourself.”
“Don’t advertise,” Musk told the brands who left because of Musk’s bizarre and offensive tweets. He jutted his chin and spoke in a clipped, more prominent-than-usual Afrikaans accent. His eyes glinted and snapped with aggression.
“You don’t want them to advertise?” asked the host, incredulously.
“No,” said Musk, turning his head and jutting his chin again.
“What do you mean?” asked the host.
Musk stuttered, then blurted, “If somebody tries to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money? Go f*ck yourself.”
The nonplussed host stammered, “But–”
Musk interrupted and said in a tight, robotic voice accompanied by stiff gesticulations, “GO. F*CK. YOURSELF. Is that clear?” he said, whipping his head back toward the host.
“I hope it is,” he added. He waved to the audience and said, “Hi, Bob,” referring to Disney CEO Bob Iger. “I’m sure you’re in the audience.”
This is madness. The man runs a social media company that makes money by selling advertising — it would be wonderful if someone came up with an alternative scheme, but Musk isn’t doing that. Instead, he’s telling all the people who would buy his product to go fuck themselves, all while acting like an angry five-year-old bully. Look for yourselves: does this seem to be a stable, mature, responsible grown-up?
He’s even saying that if his company goes belly-up and fails, then “Earth” will blame the advertisers and not the incompetent CEO/owner.
Yeah, you go on telling yourself that. I’m saying that it’s all the fault of the guy who decided single-handedly to shape the culture to be tolerant of racists.
He’s a very stable genius.
He looks like he’s been taking a shitload of coke.
He reminds me of Carl Benjamin at that cringeworthy press conference where his candidacy for UKIP was announced.
Mistakes were made but NOT by me. GFY.
Teflon coated galaxy brain.
I think PZ needs to settle on a position and stop jerking us around. One day he is mocking belief in aliens, the next he is showing up footage like this.
He says that “the Earth” or “the people” will judge, but he has a warped view of what the general population wants because he surrounds himself with sycophants.
If and (hopefully) when it does go belly up, he’ll just blame the sacrificial lamb of a CEO he hired saying she didn’t try hard enough to sell advertising.
I’m sure Elon’s been reading a lot of Ayn Rand lately, and now he thinks he’s one of her sociopathic protagonists. Like Howard Roark or Hank Rearden before him, he thinks Twitter is HIS and he will do with it want he wants regardless of what the
“moochers and looters”. “woke” and the government tell him!Dunc@#2:
He looks like he’s been taking a shitload of coke.
Apparently Ketamine is his thing.
He may speak Afrikaans, but his accent would be South African English.
Ketamine would mellow him out. He looks to me like someone who has been strung out on uppers for a good long while and is getting paranoid.
FWIW :
https://www.geo.tv/latest/495991-does-elon-musk-do-drugs-thats-what-eyewitnesses-say
Ketamine is an excellent drug. When used by an anesthesiologist for proper indications, such as general surgery, severe pain and at low dose, for chronic pain (the latter, typically for not longer than 30 days). From what I’ve read, use for depression is a bit of a mixed bag and requires close supervision and interventions.
For recreation, no thanks, I’ll stick with booze.
Well, that and some self-prescribed naproxen. Just enjoyed a dose of that, due to some discomfort and inflammation to a wisdom tooth extraction site that I apparently was bruxing against overnight and bottom wisdom tooth grinding against raw gum isn’t a recommended activity.
Well, I’ll be looking forward to the next thunderfoot video, it’s gonna be fun.
Just read about this shit show on my usual IT news site.
So far no one in the comments has tried to defend the Twixxer.
Normally his fan brigade floods that forum with explanations of how everything is a genius move that will make him even richer or how everything is just the fault of the evil woke leftist conspiracy.
Is he finally becoming to much even for his fans?
He’s even saying that if his company goes belly-up and fails, then “Earth” will blame the advertisers…
Um, no, we might CREDIT the advertisers for their response to the CEO’s bigotry, lunacy and incompetence; but we’ll still BLAME the CEO for the actions to which the advertisers had responded. That’s pretty much what people tend to say about any other company that goes out of business for lack of paying customers.
It’s not drugs, it’s the newest business model, the “No! We don’t want to make money, businesses exist to lose money, so that I can insult investors and customers!” model.
Also known of as the penury model.
It might not be madness.
While he has lost mainstream advertisers, he has captured the Nazi-Fascist market.
Which may be a lot larger than anyone thinks.
Remember that Trump almost won the last election.
So, what do Nazi-Fascists buy and sell?
Riot batons, shields, combat boots, scary T shirts, pepper spray, assault rifles, red MAGA hats, and so on,
I hope they don’t branch out into heavy weapons, mortars, tanks, rockets, and armed drones though.
@PZ Myers, #11, and others re: “Recreational Pharmaceuticals”.
Speaking from a position of professional expertise (Plus a touch of personal experience! Everyone’s allowed a past):
A K-hole is categorically not what this man needs. :-)
If ketamine is his thing, he’s really not helping himself. At least a coke-heart could finish him off quicker, and sooner rather than later. Repeated ketamine misuse at psychedelic doses is going to make life “interesting”.
Anyway, he’s the richest man on earth (IIRC, could be Arnault) with a net worth of >$2.4 x 10^11 (Forbes). If he loses ~$4 x 10^10 because of Xitter, it’s bad, but he still has ~$2.0 x 10^11. I think the ends will keep meeting. As far as anyone can tell, no slave whispers “Remember you are but a man” in his ear.
[Aside: As this is Pharyngula: Fellow Pharyngulites, I know this story about Marcus Aurelius is disputed. These numbers are very ballpark too. Don’t @ me!]
He doesn’t need drugs. In my utterly uninformed opinion of the man, it’s unlikely that drug use is a proximal or even distal explanation of his behaviour. Contributory? Who the hell knows! Isn’t ego, wealth, hubris, and (apparent) lack of anyone to stop him enough to explain his behaviour? He’s a white man that grew up in Apartheid South Africa with his own emerald mine. I do not expect him to have a sense of proportion!
In terms of his wealth, he surely KNOWS. He is likely to know deep in his bones how much he is worth. If he lost Xitter he would still have wealth worth the combined (projected) 2023 GDP of Tonga, Micronesia, the Cook Islands, Anguilla, the Marshall Islands, Palau, Kiribati, Nauru, Montserrat, and Tuvalu (using that favourite Pharyngulean source, The Pffft.)
Or, taking the median wealth of every single adult on the whole continent of Africa, about a 30th of the total. A 30th of the combined median wealth of ~7.1 x 10^8 adults. Or 1.8 x 10^6 North Americans.
Or, taking the median wealth of every adult on earth, some 5.4 x 10^9 humans, as $8654, about 2.3 x 10^7 humans, about the population of Taiwan.
Of the world’s 2,640 billionaires with a total net wealth of $1.2 x 10^13, he’s worth about a 60th of that. The mean billionaire coming in at a touch under $5 x 10^9, means Lone Skum has as much post-Xitter wealth as 40 of them. In a world of 8.1 x 10^9 humans, with a forecast 2023 total GDP of 1.0 x 10^14, the billionaires have about an 8th, or ~12% of that, and Elon a 500th, 0.2%. Other sources give different numbers, but all our billionaire chums have as much money as a billion people, an 8th of humanity, and Elon as much as a mere 1.6 x 10^7. A trifling 16 million or so.
I would be astonished if that knowledge alone didn’t give him an absolute diamond-cutter of a boner 24/7 and render him the world’s greatest arsehole. In fact, if humanity were to praise him for anything, it should be that he is less of an arsehole than he could be. And let’s be blunt, he doesn’t deserve any praise!
Drugs? I’ve done drugs! (Don’t do drugs, kids) Per Bill Hicks, I’ve had some great times on drugs. I’ve never done “wallet the size of 0.2% of humanity’s wallets”. That has to be the good shit.
Louis
(As an aside: I fucking hate/do not know all the formatting tricks here. There has to be a better way of spacing/bulleting things. And what the fuck is the non-Comic Sans quote trick again? I want to quote but feel I will accidentally insult people. And dammit, I want to insult people on purpose)
< blockquote > The quote here < / blockquote >
Take out the spaces between the carrots and format command (blockquote) and it looks like this.
Louis, it is HTML.
To put things in block quotes is easy.
You use the sideways carrots in the keyboard and end the command with a /.
Try it, it is very easy.
Raven,
I just forget the blockquote one every time! I know it’s easy. :-)
Louis
Worse still he tried to Muskwash the antisemitic accusations by cuddling up to that genocidal blood-soaked despot Nasty-yahu. He has yielded to the pressure of the Israel lobby and told Gazans to fuck off because he is not going to let them use Starlink to expose Israels war crimes any more
So, apparently, NOT doing business with Elon Musk is akin to blackmail, in his mind.
Is it even possible to have a more entitled attitude?
X CEO Linda Yaccarino addresses Musk’s ‘go f— yourself’ comment to advertisers
Marketing babble. X turned the corner from Main Street in order to march in a Nazi parade.
@mordred
There are a lot of idiot musk fans in the YT comments. If fact that seemed to be the majority in my browsing.
X is standing at the intersection of Nazis and Fascists.
And no it isn’t unique.
The last time they had power, Europe ended up in ruins and 50 million people were dead.
“…all while acting like an angry five-year-old bully”
That’s because he is.
I keep getting the sense that he’s expecting the audience to cheer and clap. And then when they don’t, he tries again.
Remember that Muskrat bought X with a lot of other people’s money. People that expect a return on their investments, lest they limber up their bone saws. The fact that Musk isn’t dodging teams of Saudi agents suggests that he is doing exactly what he was paid to do: destroy Twitter, since it was actually a pretty useful tool of democracy at one point.
The confederate battle flag is an X. I think it could be adjusted by someone with more graphical talent to take that flag symbol and change it to look more like the X font twitter uses, but keep the stars and make it black and white. But make it clear it is amalgamation of the two symbols.
And then rather than using “Xitter” to lead out articles like this, use the X from that graphic artist then spell out “itter” after it.
Just a thought.
Akira MacKenzie@8: I’m pretty sure Muskrat has spent his entire life believing himself to be an Ann Rand protagonist.
You first Elon. Oh wait you already are.
Well, they say good things come in threes. First henry goes, maybe darnold and elon can be the next ones. We can all hope.
“No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.”
~ François de La Rochefoucauld
Based on reading a lot of authoritative articles, I am convinced that the Elongated Muskrat is no more honest or credible than George Santos or tRUMP. In our failed society, money screams lies with impunity. Anyone want to try to refute that?
shermanj:
Will a counterexample suit you? Samuel Benjamin Bankman-Fried.
Had money, got no impunity for his lies.
Not sure if he’s on coke or meth, but that is definitely some “hasn’t slept in weeks” kinda bullshit he’s on.
I think he’s exhibiting that uncanny valley aspect of celebrities who overdo the plastic surgery.
Incidentally Musk recentty posted a meme supporting the cringe-worthy long sinc emultiply debunked “Pizzagate” Conspiracy theory as discussed by TYT here – 10 minutes long.
Artor @ 30, therein lies his fall. For, other than what most people think, he owes a statutorily required fiduciary duty to those investors to give a return on investment that’s significant. Intentionally losing money is a fast track to federal prison.
wzrd1:
It’s not a public company, so no. This is a fundamental misunderstanding.
@41
with an ego like that he could very easily fuck up big time.
@ John Morales : Maybe its time govts stepped in & made Twitter/ X and also fb & other platforms public in the national (& international) intrest? Took them over and made them a lot more accountable given their roles and harms they’ve done already?
StevoR, perhaps. But for decades now the opposite of nationalisation has been occurring.
Be aware it’s a rather like saying perhaps Walt Disney Company should be nationalised. Or Fox News Channel, for that matter.
Perhaps.
lotharloo@26: Yeah, it was to much to hope for that Musktwix’ annoying fans would stfu.
They were just a bit late to the discussion I mentioned. Some claim that it’s just the evil (probably Jewish /s) press who hate him and losing millions in advertising money is absolutely no problem at all, others cry that it’s better for Twixxer to go down (I agree so far), than to become a tool of the big business advertisers like Disney who want to turn all of the internet into a left wing bubble (my brain hurts…).
john morales @37, SBF only got in trouble after he had negative a lot of billions of dollars. It doesn’t discredit the money = impunity argument.
John Morales @ 42, Musk financed the Twitter acquisition. Those financing that transaction will want a return of their funding plus profit. That’s rather hard to do if he turns Twitter into a penny stock worth company, as he’d be unable to finance off of his Xit and he’d be unable to recoup his losses to repay the promised 46.5 billion by selling it, given its massive drop in worth.
A case could be then made, based upon his previous stock manipulations, that he intentionally defrauded investors.
I kind of doubt he actually believes it. That he is serious about wanting them to “go fuck themselves”.
But, for once, I also believe that he is doing the smart thing, relative to the issue. As in, the damage has already been done, and it seems unlikely that he is going to moderate himself, so why not double down?
Maybe “the smart thing” is the wrong way to phrase it. Maybe it’s just a less dumb option awash in a sea of dumb things.
Isn’t it charming how Mu5k believes he’s entitled to money from advertisers? Maybe he’s just trying to outdo Linda Taylor (the semimythical “welfare queen” invoked by Reagan, who did abuse the welfare system… but mostly got her five-figure-income in 1975 — not $150k tax-free annually as Reagan claimed in that dogwhistling racist speech in 1976 — through a combination of tax evasion, fraud, extortion, and other more-traditional crimes).
But what about the poor investors in his takeover? Umm, there weren’t any — except Mu5k himself, and later revolving-line-of-credit bankers. He doesn’t make a very convincing widow or orphan, does he?
For ref: https://techmonitor.ai/policy/big-tech/who-owns-twitter#h-does-elon-musk-own-twitter-now