Your periodic reminder that VC-funded CEOs are in a situation that they have bet both their kidneys on being able to deliver a 100x return to the bone-saw wielding loan sharks who funded them.
Your “community” is worthless to them unless it delivers Kidney Money.
They cannot just “decide” to not enshittify the community you mistakenly believed was yours. No appeal to justice or fairness will work, unless accompanied by a donor kidney or two.
@brandonscript @Unixbigot @tonyarnold
“Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back. The true witches know that.”
- Peter Beagle, "The Last Unicorn"
Let's not forget that the muskrat is in a totally different situation, however. He has PLENTY o' money to pay off the loansharks. He's enshittifying the birdsite just for funsies.
I still argue that it's performance art: he's providing an object lesson to people about why you shouldn't let important things get purchased and run by billionaires and he spent $44B to show how much he meant it.
And a bunch of people *still* haven't gotten the point.
@stevendbrewer @Unixbigot @cstross
To be clear, (he spent if I recall correctly) $15 billion to turn Twitter into a shrine to his trollish nature, not $45 billion.
The purchase included ~$15 billion in new bank loans to Twitter, and other investors (the Saudis, Jack Dorsey, some others) agreed to hold on to their share of Twitter instead of forcing him to buy them out (and the inflated price his contract required him to pay).
@warren__terra @Unixbigot @cstross
I think the sale price was $44B and you're assuming it will still have some value when he's done.
He's worth something like $200B. It was more convenient to put some of it on a credit card, but he's good for it.
@stevendbrewer @Unixbigot @cstross
No, it's already probably near zero net value (it was worth maybe $15-25 billion when he bought it, and as part of the purchase he had it borrow $15 billion from banks, and even if he hadn't tanked its advertising sales and damaged its brand there's been a tech slump since then).
But he put in about $15 billion of his own money, he didn't have to pay the full $45 billion.
@stevendbrewer @Unixbigot @cstross
The rest of the $45 billion purchase price isn't his responsibility; 1/3 of it is on the banks, who inexplicably loaned that $15B to Twitter (not to Elon), and 1/3 of the owners decided to hold on to their share, not sell to him.
Though, the $15 billion is his cash outlay. As Charlie points out, his antics at Twitter have reduced Tesla's stock price and hurt his net worth, by a lot.
Also he's likely to subsidize Twitter's losses rather than admit defeat.
You may well be right. If it *is* a performance, he's not broken character yet.
OK. I'm being somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But I still think that's the lesson that we should take away from the experience.
@cstross @stevendbrewer @Unixbigot
Lack of consequences also means fewer opportunities for learning
When he made a hash of running PayPal/X, they put him in an advisory position, probably positioned as a promotion; not really useful feedback for improvement
Whose learning?
I'm less concerned about the muskrat and more concerned about the rest of us: if WE will learn, we can take steps, collectively, to rein in the power of rogue billionaires and make the world a safer place. But people are incredibly resistant to learning that when they believe profit can be made by aligning themselves with the face-eating leopards.
It's sometimes hard to tell the difference.
But is it a reign of terror, or does terror come raining down upon you?
@KimSJ @cstross @stevendbrewer @Unixbigot Oddly no - I think Trump *knows* he's just a grifter, but he's *very good* at it.
Musk is what happens when you start to believe your own myths. He's far from brilliant. He's just been lucky to be rich enough to be able to afford to try stuff that most of us couldn't, and not be bothered if most of it doesn't work.
@Soyweiser @cstross @Unixbigot
I always thought McConnell was a tortoise -- not a painted turtle. 😉
(typos are always funny)
@Soyweiser @stevendbrewer @Unixbigot He's not a failed science fiction writer (take it from a successful one—I'd know!) … he's an Extropian. And that's much, much, worse.
I mean, that's a great philosophical basis for writing SF, but as a pragmatic tool for managing the here-and-now it's potentially as efficient as Stalinism at building pyramids of skulls. (Only, on Mars.)
@Soyweiser @stevendbrewer @Unixbigot @cstross
Seriously? Do these people not read/write science fiction since, like, forever, or even at least seen a James Bond movie?!
@pjohanneson @stevenradecki @Soyweiser @Unixbigot @cstross
During the reign of TFG, I wrote a post to remind myself that this is not always true: https://blog.bierfaristo.com/content/long-arc
@stevenradecki @stevendbrewer @Unixbigot @cstross In cybersecurity, taking movie plot threats as real is very much frowned upon. As it leads to crazy unrealistic reactions to imagined threats which make real security harder.
For example see the movie plot contest: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/04/announcing_movi.html
related: https://xkcd.com/538/
@Soyweiser @stevenradecki @Unixbigot @cstross
As I was getting run out of technical work (because the the leadership of the University would rather outsource everything than maintain their own skilled workforce) I was pleased to see the notion of "convergent security" finally getting bandied about: Cybersecurity isn't just its own, separate thing: it needs to be integrated into all of the security practices of the institution, including physical, legal, financial, etc.
@stevendbrewer @Unixbigot @cstross He doesn't own all of that as money, he has loads of shares and trying to sell $15b of Tesla and SpaceX shares at one would reduce the price suddenly and significantly.
Instead he can pay them as shares but they do go up and down, and I'd expect him to pay way more than that in actual Tesla shares - they're going down faster than his rockets.
@cstross @stevendbrewer @Unixbigot Sorry, I'm not a writer and can't claim I'm that good at analogies.
What about like the chance of an endangered species living near one of his launchpads retaining the hearing capability?
Call it whatever you like: being charitable, wishful thinking, unreasonable optimism… I just wish people would take the opportunity to learn the lesson and begin to empower themselves rather than giving into despair and cynicism.
@MPgh @stevendbrewer @Unixbigot @cstross I argue that M is considering twitter his command&control platform in the vision of getting independent from nation states (which basically means he’s a rogue oligarch trying to get from nation states to plutocracy)
Remember when he disabled starlink for Ukraine forces who made too much progress into Russian terrain—even though those were paid for by the US government, Ukraine and others? And seemed to stop after getting stern looks by the US government?
@MPgh also keep in mind that Musk is a Science Fiction fan. Do you know the sheer number of SF stories where a rich genius saves humanity by breaking out of the rules of the worlds nations?
I think that that’s where Musk comes from and where he wants to get to.
@cstross … and like me you’re no billionaire who could really realize those wishes — and "bless" humanity with the fallout …
In the stories playing with extremists "because you’re the one who recognizes the pact out of necessity while the others are too frightened to do what’s required" usually ends well, because the genius can reign them in.
In reality …
Anyway: that’s what I’m worried about with Musk.
@MPgh @stevendbrewer @Unixbigot
@stevendbrewer
I disagree; Phony Stark doesn’t have plenty of money. He has what, for the sake of brevity, I will call wealth; ownership shares in several large ventures. He’d have liquidate¹ most of that to replace that pile of cash to which he set fire.
¹ which is essentially impossible. The “value” of a majority stake in Twitter/SpaceX/Amazon/Facebook etc evaporates if you try to sell it in a fire sale.
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