this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2024
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I don't buy this conspiracy theory at all, 1) twitter is disinformation heaven, which is very useful to authoritarian regimes and 2) Musky would never intentionally do anything to harm his public image, he's a textbook narcissist after all.
Don't agree with your premise, and think maybe you're conflating Twitter today with Twitter back then for the most part...
Twitter USED to be... a place where you could get a decent idea of the zeitgeist and verification actually meant something. By no means ideal on any count, but it was the closest thing we had to the world's unified quick communications platform. And yes, some missinfo anywhere, but generally you could get to a lot of usable info and communicate with people more directly.
To your second point, you're missing SO MUCH OF the nuance of how desperate and out of touch this chud is. Go watch musk on stage with Dave Chapelle and then go see how Peter thiel is the senior class man to elon's freshman - thiel is always giving him swirleys and calling musk names, but elon follows like a kicked puppy hoping for approval.
I just honestly don't believe Musk is competent enough to pull off such a conspiracy. Far more likely that he just fucked up into buying twitter at a massively inflated price then ran it into the ground by being an idiot who thinks he's a genius.
What do you mean "such a conspiracy"? There's no grassy knoll? No Zupruder film here?
Fire most of the staff, retain only sycophants and incompetents, remove security and functionality infrastructure so the site is unreliable and insecure, complicate and invalidate verification by giving to all or making "pay to play" until info source verification itself is meaningless, turn off universal access to the platform and openly manipulate the algorithm "news feed" until it's known that you won't see actual "trending topics" and there is zero conference that Twitter is a window the the zeitgeist - and we're there.
We saw it all happen in plain site, no secret meetings. These fucks are always on mega yachts in the Aegean Sea and shit like that, they discussed it one day and that lopsided dipshit essentially said, "I can jump my bike off that high ramp, if I can sit with you guys at lunch" he wasn't thinking and immediately regretted it. He was going to bail before the actual jump and make that move where you trip and then immediately pretend you were just jogging, but in no time he was already going downhill fast and too committed legally so he just hit the ramp... He fell on his face, but it doesn't matter because that was the task, to publicly be a tremendous failure. They probably wanted him to do it a little more subtle even, but he is incompetent, so you got this.
musk isn't a "mastermind" here, he is a useful idiot that was going to fail regardless, the actual money/skill just pointed his failure in their preferred direction that benefited them most. When actual money doesn't matter, power is the currency. musk doesn't have real power, people like the Saudis and venture capitalists do. That's what he's chasing.
Fair point, but I would argue that if you had that kind of experience on twitter, you're weren't really the target demographic.
Desperate and out of touch, yes, but deliberately fucking up a platform and ruining his "Iron Man" persona? He's too stupid and too invested in what people think of him.
There's a version of this conspiracy I could buy though: the Saudis gave him money and stroked his ego knowing that there was no way he wouldn't fuck the whole thing up. Everyone except him knew how this was going to end. That conspiracy I could get behind.
Yeah, you're closer on the last part.
With the "target demographic" comment though, you're conflating business motivation with political/cultural... You can be concerned with selling the most hammers at your hardware store, or you can be afraid that a smaller percentage of your customers will then use their purchased hammers to come break your windows and your legs.
"Gave" like Trump and the Russians.