Duh. Twitter is obviously hurting for cash. Blue subscribers are paying them, almost literally for the privilege of doing whatever they want - no incentive to ban/suspend them.
He very clearly cares deeply about Twitter losing money. He was desperate to cut costs and increase revenue right from the start. He frequently whines about the cost of running Twitter. He has been stiffing a ton of Twitter's suppliers and not paying the bills.
And there's a good reason for this. He is using a his own Tesla shares as collateral for some of the debt.
“Altruistic purposes”, what would those be? I’ve only seen him censor his opponents, spew bog standard far-right talking points and make poor product decisions. How is that “altruistic”?
There's part of me that considers driving the hate machine that is Twitter into the ground and general irrelevance an altruistic purpose.
The world would be better off without Twitter, until they can figure out how to separate the hate machine from its useful purposes in a sustainable way.
Finally destroying the hellsite, for the benefit of all.
(As someone who (a) used to enjoy Twitter a lot, (b) always suspected that Twitter was quite bad for society, I have mixed feeling about its current implosion.)
(To be clear, he obviously is not destroying Twitter for altruistic purposes; the above is a joke. It should not be necessary to point this out, but one odd attribute of figures like Trump and Musk is that there are always people who insist that everything they do, no matter how obviously ridiculous, is actually intentional and ingenious, so Poe’s Law is in full effect here.)
Sucking up to autocratic rulers while claiming to be a free speech advocate is very altruistic (/s).
Saying Twitter was already in the ground and then praising the guy that dug the hole a lot deeper, is also suggesting that your assessment of him is not based on his business acumen.
Maybe you're hoping he's pumping your crypto bags? That's one of the things I consider him to be very good at.
Not really, only if we assume the market is rational.
I think the fact that Elon Musk it the most successful entrepreneur in the world is a testament to the contrary. And that being a successful businessperson has nothing to do with merit or skill, but a lot more to do with happenstance, and former wealth.
Our public policy on the global market has been neo-liberalism on full steam, the rich are getting richer, not because business people are getting smarter, but because government is deregulating exploitation as a matter of public policy. Somebody is bound to become extremely rich in this environment, and it just so happens that the people getting extremely rich are either the ones that exploit workers (i.e. Jeff Bezos) or the ones that fool rich investors (i.e. Elon Musk).
Lack of moderation is 10x a worse problem for revenue that offending the blue icons.
Moreover, it seems most of the activists don't want to contemplate that bigotry runs in all directions and saying things about 'men' or 'white people' probably should fall under the same auspices ... which is why even as irresponsible and inconsistent as Musk is, he leans a bit more 'loose' than not which is probably preferable than ideological forms of censorship.
I also feel that as a society, we're going to get used to 'foul language' and that it just doesn't have the resonance it might have had.
Someone spreading fake papers saying 'doctors are trying to kill you with vaccines', with a ton of followers, is actually more problematic than some random dirtbag's side-comment.
Anecdote to the contrary, I personally got banned from Twitter for answering the question “What do you think about them men?” with “#KillAllMen”. Now this is obviously not a real threat to use violence, but it got me banned nonetheless. To me it seems like Twitter is perfectly happy to moderate against the likes of feminists and LGBTQ+ activists.
The statement 'kill all men' is literally a call to violence.
Now of course (probably?) you didn't mean it as that, but it still falls well within purview of 'obviously moderated', probably immediately, by the automated mechanisms, and frankly, how could you expect anything otheriwse?
The fact that you're willing to admit your bigotry and blatant hate speech on another forum, as though somehow you're a victim, is probably an exmaple of how we tolerate trolling dirtbag bigotry, so long as it 'targets the correct side'.
Never claimed I shouldn’t have been banned (and frankly, I’m a little glad I was), just providing an anecdote that “saying things about 'men' or 'white people' does indeed fall under the same auspices” as bigots on the other political wing.
Full disclosure though, I do believe moderation should not be applied equally across political the spectrum, when one extreme goes against a protected minority, but I won’t go into further details here on HN, as it would go against the guidelines of not engaging in political battles.
>>The fact that you're willing to admit your bigotry and blatant hate speech on another forum, as though somehow you're a victim, is probably an exmaple of how we tolerate trolling dirtbag bigotry, so long as it 'targets the correct side'.
Well said, it's like a neonazi taking pride in having advocated genocide of all Jews. This is why the "protected minority" ideology, whereby how people can be treated is based on the alleged victimization of their group, is dangerous.
>This is why the "protected minority" ideology, whereby how people can be treated is based on the alleged victimization of their group, is dangerous.
I remain hopeful that US laws and regulations regarding "protected classes" will someday be successfully challenged by the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.
My "perennialy [sic] problematic ideal" is that the history book you got from the library has been overdue since 1972, and the historian has a 1950s conformist America mindset, which is the basis of the basic, red-pilled model of white male resentment.
There is no "nuance" in that mindset. It is factually wrong. It doesn't work today. It wallows in nostalgia. The nostalgia is, in part, to make up for the fact that the red pill contains no culture: No art, no literature, no music, no theatre - nothing that makes America a global cultural beacon, and nothing that women would want to spend any time with. It is a loser mindset, and deservedly so.
Would you please stop posting ideological flamewar comments to HN? You've done it repeatedly in this thread. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
We've had to ask you this before, so if you'd please fix this, we'd be grateful.
I would gladly delete most of my comments on this thread. HN is a fine site and the way you run it is instrumental to keeping it that way. Still, you might give some thought to the healthiness of showcasing what are objectively fringe ideologies that would in other places be rightly be called out as, at least, adjacent to outright bigotry. There's another site that's dying because they think that stuff is good.
We've banned this account for posting flamewar comments and ignoring our request to stop.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Would you please stop posting ideological flamewar comments to HN? You've done it repeatedly in this thread. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
We've had to ask you this before, so if you'd please fix this, we'd be grateful.
Also, there are no moderators anymore.