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[Starver]

I'm sure he'll put his foot in it and insult practically the whole population of the world's second most populous country in one simple twix, eventually. It's only a matter of time.

He has proclaimed that Twitter should not be moderated (except for anything critical/unsupportive of him, personally?), which doesn't fit well with requirements your part of the world, so I imagine you're officially insulated from the obvious way to instantly annoy everyone, but I'm sure he'll do something stupid. And if he annoys your government enough, somehow, then sanctioned reporting of the perceived slight will find itself spreading all too easily.


(No doubt that he has significantly reinvented the electric vehicle/space travel bandwagons, perhaps shaped the ways that others approach the problems, but both of these could easily be construed as being in direct competition with other efforts. Time will tell.)

[Robsoie]

[...]
but I'm sure he'll do something stupid.
[...]

I checked that one from that list :
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-subsidies-tesla-billions-spacex-solarcity-2021-12?r=US&IR=T
That's just hilarious.

[Frumple]

My family bought a new car which consumes electricity and I am going to buy a new Tesla when I was economically independent.

I'd really, really strongly recommend against it -- there's other electric vehicle manufacturers out there, and most of them are both more economical and more reliable. Teslas are becoming somewhat notorious for things that include killing pedestrians due to design flaws.

Though if musk hasn't personally gone on a sinophobic rant lately, you probably would do well to pay attention to the sorts of folks he's supporting, retweeting, magnifying, etc. He's not a man with much sympathy for the chinese nation, heh.

[zhijinghaofromchina]

Thanks a lot for your warnings , but it still confuses me that why such a wise merchant who has a large market in China could insult my country.
In fact you can get lots of news here on the website here abot Elon Musk nearly everyday,sometimes I am also confused and envy the American that they have a GREAT leader who is very rich and aggressive.

[EuchreJack]

Thanks a lot for your warnings , but it still confuses me that why such a wise merchant who has a large market in China could insult my country.
In fact you can get lots of news here on the website here abot Elon Musk nearly everyday,sometimes I am also confused and envy the American that they have a GREAT leader who is very rich and aggressive.

I actually have far more respect for your country's auto manufacturer Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co., Ltd. (ZGH), commonly known as Geely (/ˈdʒiːli/ JEE-lee; Chinese: 吉利; pinyin: Jílì; lit. 'auspicious') and it's owner Li Shufu (simplified Chinese: 李书福; traditional Chinese: 李書福; pinyin: Lǐ Shūfú; born 25 June 1963). His company silently buying up foreign car manufacturers is brilliant. And he does not seem to cause trouble, far as I know.

[Starver]

This "wise merchant" had a large market on the Internet, with Twitter, and seems to have soured that relationship. Twitter had its problems, and I don't know how it could have been made better, but if he had done nothing at all to change things after buying it (something he had to be forced to do after making promises then trying to break them) then it would probably be rumbling along okish and not in this weird "is it dead/dying?" state.

He might have an 'ultimate plan', that's proceeding exactly according to schedule, but it really doesn't look like it. It looks like he's trying out some vague whims and second-guessing his 'customers', just because he can. And possibly the only reason he isn't actively insulting China (if he is not) is because he's still dependent upon its good will for (e.g.) lithium batteries or other components. Your country has become one of the main powerhouses in the supply-chain world.

But what I think we're mostly saying here is not necessarily that it's a very bad idea to imagine eventually buying a Tesla (which has problems right now, indeed). But that, if and when you get to that point[1], you may want to at the very least, shop around. And if Tesla has improved, probably so will something else.


[1] To quote (more or less) another comedy show: "I wish I had enough money to buy an elephant." / "Why would you want an elephant?" / "I wouldn't, I just want to have the money!"

[King Zultan]

I was always given the impression that Tesla cars were a lot more expensive than most other cars on the market.

Also Elon is less of a "wise merchant" and more of a guy with a lot of money that buys things and pretends that he came up with the idea in the first place.

[dragdeler]

wise merchant is an oxymoron... I'll take clever but wise?!

[McTraveller]

Yeah or maybe business-savvy.  But wise.  That's not a word I'd choose.

[Frumple]

He's definitely not business savvy, though. He's fairly good at PR, tricking investors into doing stupid things, and swooping in and claiming credit for other people's efforts, but we have years of indication he's not, himself, particularly good at anything involving owning, running, or developing a business.

Twitter's just been an incredibly visible demonstration of that exacerbated by what looks to all appearances like a fairly nasty midlife crisis. Basically everything he's been involved in has functioned best when he stayed the hell out of the way and stuck to boondoggling investors.

[McTraveller]

I mean I guess that's a kind of savvy? I mean in an alternate universe, I might be envious of these megalomaniacs who manage to accrue enough money to be able to literally destroy a company for the low-low-price of 700 thousand¹ median person-years of salary.

¹$40B / $60k is almost 700000.  I think people don't understand just how stupidly massive that amount of money is, for one person to be able to control that amount of influence - for at those levels, money is no longer about buying "stuff": it is only about influence.  Which incidentally is what I believe Musk was buying.

[hector13]

Remember, Musk wanted to back out of the deal, and instead of paying the breakup fee (which I think was $1 billion if I recall correctly) he decided to go to court, lost, and got forced to buy it for the initially promised $44 billion.

[JoshuaFH]

Remember, Musk wanted to back out of the deal, and instead of paying the breakup fee (which I think was $1 billion if I recall correctly) he decided to go to court, lost, and got forced to buy it for the initially promised $44 billion.

Then he sued the lawyers that the previous Twitter owners hired to sue Elon Musk to force him to buy Twitter.

And didn't succeed, obviously.

[TBeholder]

I mean I guess that's a kind of savvy? I mean in an alternate universe, I might be envious of these megalomaniacs who manage to accrue enough money to be able to literally destroy a company for the low-low-price of 700 thousand¹ median person-years of salary.

There is probably a difference between “reboot a former social media platform that obviously ceased to function as anything other than a weird hybrid of an advertisement platform and shitposting board^x long ago” and “destroy a company”. Because “blue check” acquired a new meaning very soon after introduction.
Unless, of course, someone would convincingly demonstrate that vast swarms of bobblehead bots and shills:
1. …did in fact generate revenue,
2. …better than actual living users.
Actually, it would be morbidly hilarious if so. But this cannot be taken for granted at all.
Until then, the decision to bury Twitter brand and just use servers for the original purpose does not appear necessarily ruinous.

^x okay, for the sake of completeness there is also the third misuse: posting art on it. As a (poor) substitute for tumblr, after that one acquired the reputation of a lunatic cesspool, and became less and less usable, or DeviantTArt, after the latter turned into furry/horrid fan “art” cesspool. I am, indeed, quite sympathetic. Yet this still falls both under a form of promotion and usage for a purpose having very little to do with social media… and one for which Twitter was obviously much less suitable than for the other misuses, at that. And obviously much less suitable than any actual art site. Especially after Team Norwegian Blue removed RSS.

just how stupidly massive that amount of money is, for one person to be able to control that amount of influence - for at those levels, money is no longer about buying "stuff": it is only about influence.  Which incidentally is what I believe Musk was buying.

Well, duh. But that Musk may now have it was not what caused 60 pages of exercise in “When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout”, was it? It was the seeming gilded era of shills coming to an abrupt end, under a thousand of different fig leaves. And here we are in a rather decent place. To think of the horrors that lurk at some places beyond…

[Frumple]

Unless, of course, someone would convincingly demonstrate that vast swarms of bobblehead bots and shills:
1. …did in fact generate revenue,
2. …better than actual living users.
Actually, it would be morbidly hilarious if so. But this cannot be taken for granted at all.
Until then, the decision to bury Twitter brand and just use servers for the original purpose does not appear necessarily ruinous.

Twitter was actually starting to fairly consistently post profitable financial periods, iirc... before musk lmao'd his way into being forced to cash the check his mouth wrote, and then promptly kicked over the jenga tower that had finally started to figure out making money as a social media platform.

Since then it's lost tens of billions of dollars worth of evaluation and its profits have tanked into the dirt, if I'm not misremembering :V

If that's not ruinous, it's something cosplaying a remarkable rendition of it, heh.