Some More News - SMN: The Talented Mr. Musk, Part 2: The Elon Files

Episode Date: January 18, 2023

Hi. For Part 2, we look at how The Twitter Files don't show the kind of nefarious intent that Elon Musk hoped they would, and analyze why he bought Twitter in the first place (oth...er than being forced to). Please fill out our SURVEY: https://kastmedia.com/survey/ Support us on our PATREON: http://patreon.com/somemorenews Check out our MERCH STORE: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/somemorenews?ref_id=9949 SUBSCRIBE to SOME MORE NEWS: https://tinyurl.com/ybfx89rh   Subscribe to the Even More News and SMN audio podcasts here: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA?si=5keGjCe5SxejFN1XkQlZ3w&dl_branch=1 Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/even-more-news  Follow us on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomeMoreNews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SomeMoreNews/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomeMoreNews/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@somemorenews  Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Yf91msiB6o8EvulJzU85DOopIFu4fTABQS6FvIVVYuE/edit?usp=sharing When you use ExpressVPN, ISPs cannot see your online activity; your identity is anonymized by a secure VPN server. Your data is also encrypted for maximum protection. Secure your online activity by visiting https://expressVPN.com/morenews TODAY! Stop throwing your money away. Cancel unwanted subscriptions - and manage your expenses the easy way - by going to https://rocketmoney.com/MORENEWS. MANSCAPED® Beard Hedger - one stroke, one guard, 20 lengths. So get 20% off and free shipping with the code MORENEWS at https://manscaped.com.Support the show!: http://patreon.com.com/somemorenewsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Choo-choo, honka-honka, all aboard the Musk train as it loses control and explodes. Also, it's a car, not a train, because Elon Musk doesn't like public transportation. Or people, it seems. Oh, fucking boy, it is time for part two of our totally flattering look into Elon Musk's extremely not silly takeover of Twitter,
Starting point is 00:00:23 in which he was not a dumb shit. And just to restate from the first video, I hate this, I hate it. I hate that we started the year with this subject. I hate talking about Elon Musk and his tweets and face and bad memes. And with any hope, we won't be talking about him much this year.
Starting point is 00:00:40 You know, unless we do a video about wealth or class or transportation or politics. Anyway, you should probably watch that first video so you don't get confused about our intricate plot line. Something about a cracker barrel waiter and an insult jar of some kind. I forget, or maybe I don't care. We'll never know.
Starting point is 00:01:00 But to recap, in part one, we explained how Musk had purchased Twitter for way, way more than it was worth. And as a result, put the company into massive debt. He then fired most of everyone and reduced the value of the site even more before unbanning all of the ghouls and implementing, and in some cases, almost immediately retracting
Starting point is 00:01:22 a confusing series of UI and policy changes. He made the blue check mark purchasable for eight bucks, then undid that when people were able to easily imitate notable figures. But now it's fixed. But that's, obviously that's the wrong word. It's still not fixed. Also, a bunch of data got leaked.
Starting point is 00:01:44 Also, all of the advertisers left and he's Also a bunch of data got leaked. Also all of the advertisers left and he's facing a ton of litigation while Tesla stock plummets every day. But at least child exploitation is down on the site. So he says, which isn't actually true. He did all of this in the name of free speech, except all of his moderation decisions seemed to be based on making sure people don't make fun of him specifically
Starting point is 00:02:06 and, you know, not doing things that he personally doesn't like because perhaps this was never about free speech. And so now it's time to discuss what it actually was about. Title, please. Elon Musk, Lord of the Memes. Solid title.
Starting point is 00:02:28 Lots of letters. That's good. No wingdings. Smart. And so here's some news. Despite being the most transparent baby shit King Joffrey type, Musk continued to present himself as a cool disruptor and a savior of twitter.com. Hated in his time, he will surely be vindicated
Starting point is 00:02:48 as having some kind of grand plan to save free speech. Then it's off to Mars, where he will save human consciousness with his Neuralink army of robot hybrid Pepe frogs. To his fans, he's like Ronnie Cox, you see. More specifically, Ronnie Cox, when he helmed the USS Enterprise NCC-1701D. Not sure you realize this,
Starting point is 00:03:12 but with the exception of Patrick Stewart, Ronald Coxer has the honor of being the captain of the TNG era USS Enterprise for more Star Trek episodes than anyone else. Yes, even more than Riker, who was only in command for the episode, "'The Best of Both Worlds Part II' and no you fool, the episode future imperfect doesn't count
Starting point is 00:03:33 because that was a simulation run by an alien child, you fucking fool. The point is that Ronnie Cox played Captain Edward Jellicoe in the two part episode, Chain of Command. And boy, the crew did not like the way he did things. Well, now that the ranks are dropped, Captain, I don't like you either. You are arrogant and closed-minded. You need to control everything and everyone.
Starting point is 00:04:00 You don't provide an atmosphere of trust, and you don't inspire these people to go out of their way for you. You've got everybody wound up so tight. There's no joy in anything. I don't think you're a particularly good captain. Yeah, you tell him, Riker, you bearded fuck dragon, you. Captain Ronald Coxer was a hard ass. He made everyone work long hours
Starting point is 00:04:20 and did not coddle his crew to the point of being cold and borderline sociopathic. But the twist of that episode was that in the end, Captain Ronnie Cox actually averts a war and saves Picard from capture. In his coxy heart, Ron understood what it means to be a starship captain. And despite his unconventional ways,
Starting point is 00:04:42 he eventually pulled through. He had a plan. And I think that's probably what Elon Musk wants people to think about the way he's operating things at Twitter. Not a people person asking for long hours, et cetera, but surely he knows what he's doing. The problem is that unlike Ronnie Cox, it's become very clear that Elon Musk hasn't the fart
Starting point is 00:05:04 of an idea what he's doing with Twitter, short of only slightly possibly buying Twitter to completely change it into his everything app idea, which he didn't want to make himself, thus making Twitter unrecognizable and laughing in the face of the version of Elon who says he hates monopolies.
Starting point is 00:05:21 But it's become clear that Elon was less like Ronnie Cox, the Starship captain, and more like Ronnie Cox, the mega corporation CEO killed by his own hubris. And so, faced with this reality, Musk's only hope was to convince people that his ineptitude was still better than what the old Twitter was like, even though it really seemed like there was nothing overtly wrong with the site before he purchased it.
Starting point is 00:05:45 He needed to justify this wailing clown show. And this is where the Twitter files came into play. In short, the Twitter files were, and I guess are, a series of tweets by a small group of handpicked journalists releasing internal emails and messages that were supposed to prove, more big quotes, that before his takeover, Twitter was secretly motivated by corrupt leftists who hated free speech.
Starting point is 00:06:11 Elon has said that Twitter had a left-wing bias for a while, despite there actually being no proof of that. And in fact, by all other accounts, Twitter's algorithm actually favored the right wing in the past. The closest to an anti-conservative bias is the fact that most social media cracks down hard on misinformation. And it turns out that conservatives are more likely
Starting point is 00:06:33 to post misinformation on social media. Interesting detail there about how conservative ideology is synonymous with universally accepted misinformation. So the idea behind the Twitter files seem to be for him to justify his purchase to the world, to show how he's saving free speech. And also, in my opinion, to try and justify Twitter as a place where news could break. Something that didn't happen until now.
Starting point is 00:07:01 Elon's now claiming he invented the idea that news can break and be reported on Twitter. As you can expect from a billionaire known for, to put it lightly, not treating the employees that he has very nicely. Musk isn't exactly a fan of the mainstream media. And so an ongoing thread of his takeover was that he was going to make the news open source.
Starting point is 00:07:24 Tech bro-ify the news, blockchain the info, or FO for short. News X, dog, yeah! Get your crypto FO injected into that skull sphere. It's clear that a big part of his blue check animosity we mentioned in part one was specifically toward journalists. You can see this when he banned those journalists
Starting point is 00:07:44 for reporting on Elon Jet. He was later confronted about it on Twitter Spaces, which is a live audio chat that anyone can join. Look at all of this free speech. I just real quick, Elon, thank you for joining. I am hoping that you can give a little more context about what has happened in the last few hours with a handful of journalists being banned. Yeah. Well, as I'm sure everyone who's been doxing would agree, you know, showing real time information about somebody's location is inappropriate, and I think everyone on this call would not like that to be done to them. Drew, I don't think you were posting the real-time information, right?
Starting point is 00:08:34 I mean, you're suggesting that we're sharing your address, which is not true. And you're suggesting that we're posting... I never posted your address. You posted a link to the address. We posted a link. In the course of reporting about Elon Jet, we posted links to Elon Jet, which are now not online and now banned on Twitter. And Twitter also, of course, marks even the Instagram and Macedon accounts of Elon Jett as harmful. You get your docs, you get suspended and the story.
Starting point is 00:09:13 That's it. Elon, I have to ask. I mean, I think what everyone's wondering is it's highly unusual for journalists at The Washington Post and The New York Times to be how their Twitter accounts suspended. And it just so happens that it's the boss in charge. So what's the deal there? I think Elon has left. Dude just kept repeating if you dox, you get banned like some kind of awkward mantra as these very serious people asked him equally serious questions about the inconsistencies in his banning to the point that he not only stormed out of the call, but then temporarily removed Twitter spaces
Starting point is 00:09:53 from the platform under the excuse that it was undergoing maintenance. And this is actually nothing unusual as Musk has never been able to handle it when people ask him tough questions. He's hung up on regulators before and has a long history of claiming that the media is out to get him.
Starting point is 00:10:10 In 2018, when BuzzFeed interviewed nine people who had previously worked with Musk, they said this is how he's always been. The difference is that the facade he had created was starting to fall apart. So of course he hates the press because the press are the people chipping away at this curated facade,
Starting point is 00:10:29 revealing him as the transparent man baby that he really is. And transparent is about to become an important word, not just because he's the parent of a trans kid who hates him, but because along with claiming that he would save free speech on the site, Musk's Twitter files was an attempt
Starting point is 00:10:46 to defy the leftist mainstream media by exposing Twitter's old fascist moderating machine with the totally transparent release of communications that went on behind the scenes before he took over. Because Musk, he's doing free speech and transparency, you see, that's why he's now threatening to sue his own employees for leaking any information about Twitter. That's why he's now threatening to sue his own employees for leaking any information about Twitter.
Starting point is 00:11:07 That's why he removed the labels showing what devices a tweet was done on, something that actually had a journalistic merit when tracking the tweets of politicians. It's almost as if, and just stick with me here, Elon Musk doesn't actually care about journalism. He might even hate journalism. And so while it's absolutely important to hold the media accountable
Starting point is 00:11:28 because they quite often suck turds and or shits, Musk doesn't actually want to do that. And so the Twitter files really seem to be a disinformation tactic, disguised as a journalistic scoop, one that would feed certain right wing circles so perfectly that they'd forever join Elon's little online army. It's propaganda that compounds itself
Starting point is 00:11:51 the moment any reporter points out that they were a quote, nothing burger, not a great word, but we're using it. Because the true believers can dismiss that immediately as yet another leftist media lie. But the reality is that the Twitter files contain very little proof of anything in terms of Twitter. And don't get me wrong,
Starting point is 00:12:09 there's actually some pretty interesting shit in there when it comes to the FBI and the government and social media sites generally. But for the most part, it was an illusion of transparency hidden in a highly curated series of threads done by a few misled journalists who themselves admitted to getting the information under specific conditions.
Starting point is 00:12:28 Condition number one, admit that Elon is a special boy. And what they revealed in a nutshell is that Twitter used to moderate their social media sites. That's kind of it. Additionally, they got a lot of government interference in their moderation efforts, which isn't to say that they followed orders from the government,
Starting point is 00:12:49 but a pretty key detail is that despite a constant framing that Twitter favorited the left in their moderation, at no point do any of the Twitter files release statistical proof of that. The closest they get is showing that Twitter employees donate more to Democrats, which doesn't prove that they're moderating in favor of the left.
Starting point is 00:13:06 Also, Tesla employees also donate more to Democrats. There's Tesla with the long blue bar, damned Musk and his cars left wing bias. Instead, the Twitter files cherry picked specific cases of moderation and then simply assured us they were part of a larger pattern. And in fact, there's evidence that the Twitter files are purposefully misleading.
Starting point is 00:13:30 Often, they'll just make a statement without any evidence, as if it's a universal truth. Every single fact in the New York Post Hunter Biden story was accurate, or that instead of chasing child sex predators or terrorists, the FBI was busy flagging social media posts. Why couldn't they be doing both, Matt? Was everyone in the FBI on Twitter emailing about tweets
Starting point is 00:13:54 in lieu of all the other stuff they normally do, which Elon has said he loves, by the way? Or for example, the first Twitter file dropped by this Matt Taibbi fellow was about how the Biden campaign requested that Twitter pull tweets about Hunter Biden, as well as Twitter moderating the Hunter laptop story. The thread showed an internal email
Starting point is 00:14:15 with a series of tweet links that said, more to review from the Biden team, with the added context from Taibbi saying, by 2020, requests from connected actors "'to delete tweets were routine.'" As if he was describing some really dirty crime syndicate whose misdeeds had become standard practice. What Taibbi didn't include, however,
Starting point is 00:14:36 was that the tweet links in that email were nude images of Hunter Biden. And so what he was actually describing was the Biden campaign asking Twitter to remove tweets containing private photos of drugged up naked man dick, the worst kind of man dick, and clearly not something that is allowed on most mainstream social media.
Starting point is 00:14:57 And when you realize that, it's a perfectly reasonable request. In fact, at no point does Taibbi link the Biden campaign or a government entity like the FBI with any demand to remove the laptop story as a whole. That central claim that the Biden campaign asked for the New York Post story to be censored is never shown.
Starting point is 00:15:17 The Twitter files skips that part and assumes that you will fill in the blank yourself with evidence that exists, even though nobody's seen it. Instead, after completely skipping that part, the files shows internal discussions by Twitter employees grappling with whether or not the laptop story was Russian misinformation, a conversation that led to the mistake
Starting point is 00:15:42 that was banning people from sharing the New York Post article about it. It also shows that the FBI would constantly pester Twitter and Facebook to moderate what they saw as potential threats and misinformation, to which Twitter only sometimes agreed with them. There's a lot of evidence of Twitter
Starting point is 00:15:59 refusing to do what the FBI wanted. While that says a lot about the FBI, it doesn't say that much about Twitter. Of course, you can argue it was bad that they pulled that Hunter laptop article because it was bad, but it also wasn't a big revelation since many people working there
Starting point is 00:16:16 had already admitted to that being a mistake. Also, wait a second. So Twitter banned a news story before unbanning it. Isn't that literally just what Elon did with the jet stuff? Care to comment, Mr. Musk? And Twitter also, of course, marks even the Instagram and Macedon accounts of Elon jet as as harmful using, you know, we have to admit, acknowledge using the same exact link blocking technique that you have criticized as part of the Hunter Biden New York Post story in 2020. So that's unacceptable what you're doing? No, your docs, you get suspended, end of story. So that's a no then. Finally, and most telling, the thing completely buried in the first Twitter files
Starting point is 00:17:13 is Taibbi casually dropping that along with the Biden campaign making these requests, the Trump White House could also ask for tweets to be pulled. That seems like a much bigger deal. And frankly, it's weird these files don't also go into what the White House wanted to have moderated, isn't it? They never show us those requests. They don't care about that transparency,
Starting point is 00:17:35 which is arguably the bigger story. It's weird that the Twitter files are so focused on enforcing right-wing talking points that they yada yada anything that seems to imply the conservatives were also getting special treatment. In a later thread about shadow banning, for example, Barry Weiss posted this screenshot of libs of TikTok being on a trends blacklist
Starting point is 00:17:57 without explaining any of the other contexts there. She doesn't explain the context of their recent abuse strikes listed, or the fact that mods apparently aren't allowed to take action on that account without consulting a higher up, which sure seems like Libs of TikTok was being given special treatment over regular users.
Starting point is 00:18:17 I'm not gonna get into every detail, but the Twitter files are all sort of like this. A long series of tweets framed dramatically that when you take the time to untangle them, ultimately they say very little. And in fact, make a case for Twitter having gone out of its way to be thoughtful in their moderation and fighting back
Starting point is 00:18:35 against outside government influences. We're gonna do a little more Twitter files, okay? So exciting stuff, but first an ad for some kind of great stuff and things. Hey, it's Cody. Did you know that going online without a VPN means that internet service providers can see every website you visit? Even the weird ones about dental equipment, even though if you explained yourself, it wouldn't seem that weird. But when you use ExpressVPN, you can browse joysmouthclamps.com completely anonymously from the ISPs that want to sell your info.
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Starting point is 00:20:58 that aren't exclusively about nunchucks. Keep the nunchucks, of course. Like, obviously. rocketmoney.com slash more news. We loved that. We loved those ads. My Pleasure Center is engorged because of those ads that we love. And when we left off, we were talking about how the Twitter files had a lot of evidence that the FBI and government were pestering Twitter to moderate based on their wishes, but very little evidence that Twitter actually honored their requests. And yet for some reason,
Starting point is 00:21:30 the narrative of these extremely curated leaks seem to constantly try to frame old Twitter as a villain. For example, in one of the more recent Twitter files, Taibbi is describing how Twitter became overwhelmed with requests from officials to ban accounts they simply didn't like, such as Adam Sch requests from officials to ban accounts they simply didn't like, such as Adam Schiff asking them to ban a journalist, which would be bad.
Starting point is 00:21:50 Taibbi goes on to say, "'Even Twitter declined to honor Schiff's request "'at the time,' as if he's already established "'that Twitter loves honoring all these ban requests, "'but he doesn't actually show emails "'or files that prove that. "'We only see one side of the transaction, "'the government making requests, but he doesn't actually show emails or files that prove that. We only see one side of the transaction, the government making requests, and none of the other side,
Starting point is 00:22:10 which is evidence that Twitter acted on those requests. That's odd, right? Why don't they show any evidence of that? If Twitter was taking all of these moderation requests from officials and acting on them in some unfair way, wouldn't you want to show the emails demonstrating that? You know, instead of the one email where they declined an unfair request?
Starting point is 00:22:33 There's a lot of this in these Twitter files. Here's the sixth installment that focuses on the FBI sending moderation requests to Twitter. Taibbi begins with an email from the FBI wanting action about several accounts they thought were spreading election misinformation. He then points out that a few of those accounts were joking and the FBI were taking their jokes as a serious offense. He then concludes with a tweet saying that all of these accounts were suspended except for the two accounts that were joking. He never reveals what the other actually suspended account said.
Starting point is 00:23:06 So the FBI contacted Twitter and asked for a bunch of accounts to be suspended for misinformation. And Twitter banned some of the accounts, but didn't ban the ones that were obviously joking. And so they didn't do exactly what the FBI wanted them to do. And in fact, moderated based on their own, probably correct judgment.
Starting point is 00:23:28 Is that the big bombshell revealed there? You see how mundane the actual information is. Twitter was basically getting a lot of tips from the government and then chose which ones to act on. That's all the files say. And if Elon Musk actually cared about transparency, you'd think he'd just release all the Twitter files to the press, just release all of it.
Starting point is 00:23:50 But he's not doing that, is he? And by purposefully choosing incendiary topics to quote, reveal, he guarantees that anyone who wants to conclude something will conclude that, despite there being no actual evidence of that. No, what we learned on Friday is that big tech works aggressively and in secret with government agencies to subvert the outcome of what the rest of us assumed were free and fair elections.
Starting point is 00:24:14 Tucko Bum Bum is referring to the Twitter files that were specifically about the internal conversation that led to Trump being banned on Twitter. And if you actually read the thread, what you'll see is a group of serious people grappling with the president of the United States fart blasting out election misinformation with his little liar thumbs, leading to no real world event whatsoever, I guess. Now you could of course argue
Starting point is 00:24:37 that they bent their moderation rules along the way, which is often how content moderation works. An example you never thought of comes up and you consider how to address it. You can even argue that Twitter made mistakes, but that's in the face of a man wielding the most powerful office on the planet, purposefully spreading lies and inciting violence
Starting point is 00:24:56 to a group of cultist fans. And you'll notice nothing has changed under Musk in the sense that rules are just being made up on the fly. It's just, it's only one guy now. You can tweet at him with your moderation requests. That's the new system. And by acting like these files reveal anything, especially sinister, is to feed that same far right fan base
Starting point is 00:25:19 to a dangerous degree. It's wildly, wildly irresponsible of Elon Musk, and he's either really bad at reading comprehension, didn't read it, or just flat out lying. Here he is tweeting, and I quote, "'Government paid Twitter millions of dollars "'to censor info from the public.'" But the evidence he's referring to is the fact
Starting point is 00:25:38 that the FBI reimbursed Twitter for processing their moderation requests, something they are legally required to do. And in fact, according to his own Twitter files, they were probably underpaid. So to say they were paid to censor info, like this was a dirty deal, is purposefully misleading. And so Elon is just lying about what the Twitter files say
Starting point is 00:26:00 in order to make them seem more important, pretending he's at risk of being assassinated for exposing the extremely boring truth. And that lies passed on by grifters and or people who don't bother to read the actual details. They just see a lot of important looking texts on these half blacked out emails and figure it must be like really serious stuff.
Starting point is 00:26:23 But in the end, pretty much all the Twitter files ultimately revealed, at least about Twitter, is that a private social media company was being bombarded by the White House government and the Biden campaign, but ultimately moderating based on their own discretion. And again, I'm not sure if you noticed this yet, but that's pretty much what Musk is also doing
Starting point is 00:26:44 and says he's doing it. Quote, new Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach. Negative slash hate tweets will be max de-boosted and demonetized. So no ads or other revenue to Twitter. The new policy he's describing is just shadow banning and blacklisting certain accounts,
Starting point is 00:27:05 also known as the exact same thing old Twitter was doing as revealed in the Twitter files. So why is the old Twitter moderation some kind of sin while it's okay when he does it? Especially since he's quite frankly, way worse about it. There are no group emails debating it anymore, are there? It's just him, one really rich guy. He's pulling news reports and accounts he doesn't like,
Starting point is 00:27:30 shadow banning people who upset him and making snap moderating decisions based around his whims. You could say, well, at least he's not working with the government, except he is also doing that. Musk works with the government on his projects all the damn time. And also, you know, loves taking their money. except he is also doing that. Musk works with the government on his projects all the damn time and also, you know,
Starting point is 00:27:47 loves taking their money. Heck, he wants to be a government someday. Dude and the Pentagon are tight. The only difference is that Twitter's old moderation system was run by a larger and more diverse group of people and was at least aspiring to be as fair as they could. I'm not saying they were fair, but like, for example, the old blue check mark system was a lot more friendly
Starting point is 00:28:11 to free speech than having to pay money, right? The old system allegedly gave higher visibility to people who were verified as experts in their field. And in the fabled marketplace of ideas or whatever, doesn't that make more sense than definitely giving visibility to anyone who decides to pay a small fee? Isn't it better for free speech to have a group
Starting point is 00:28:34 of people debate and discuss what to moderate than a single billionaire taking a bunch of ketamine and consulting his mind colors? No offense to ketamine. I'm sorry. Sorry I lashed out at you. I'm so sorry. Also, sorry, I meant a single billionaire
Starting point is 00:28:48 and his gaggle of weird, rich, sycophantic, and right-wing tech bro buddies. Is gaggle the right word there? A gaggle of tech bros? I think it's technically called a campus. That makes sense. Because one thing we've yet to get into here is who Elon Musk chose to take the place
Starting point is 00:29:05 of all of the executives he immediately fired. Not necessarily as official employees of the company, so much as a personal circle of all of his tech dude friends, like David Sachs, a PayPal founder and longtime friend of Musk, as well as his partner, Jason Calacanis, another rich computer boy. One of the things we learned early on
Starting point is 00:29:25 was that Musk was basically surrounded by the most embarrassing of yes-men when he first began his acquisition of Twitter. We know this because, thanks to the litigation involved in the process, a whole bunch of Musk's personal text exchanges were released by the court. And what was discovered in those texts
Starting point is 00:29:42 weren't sinister or evil per se, except for the part about explicitly saying they wanna purge all the blue check journalists or whatever, so much as they were, there's a way to say this nicely, dipshitted. As in the ideas that Musk and his pals were initially considering for Twitter were dipshitted, also known as bad,
Starting point is 00:30:04 worse than a child's understanding of the site. Jason Calacanis, one of the people who advised early on in Musk's takeover was the MVP of embarrassment, literally saying he'd pledge his sword to Musk. At one point he's asked to dial it back and responds, "'Only ever want to support you.'" Like just the saddest little suck up in the teat farm. Calacanis also proposes a new feature for Twitter
Starting point is 00:30:31 that would allow people to pay money for the power to mass DM their followers, essentially allowing even more and precise spam messaging on the site. Elon himself joins the fuckwad parade, getting very excited about the idea of creating a blockchain social media system that would require people to pay a fraction
Starting point is 00:30:54 of a cryptocurrency to send a tweet. Something he seemed convinced would solve free speech. Again, it just seems like his awful everything app idea more than how to improve Twitter. There's a lot of broad text speak in the messages, often talking about how they need to solve the free speech problem without giving any practical solutions. It's almost all crypto shit and bro speak combined with a bunch of people doing their best to suck up to the billionaire. It is to say the least extremely embarrassing stuff.
Starting point is 00:31:29 And these texts alone really paint a picture of how completely unprepared Elon Musk was to run a social media site. He generally seems to gravitate towards whoever compliments him the most, no matter how horrifying those people are. And while that used to be Democrats and the left, lately, he's seen a lot of heat from that side,
Starting point is 00:31:51 a lot of pressure to, you know, treat his employees right and all that pesky stuff. And so as we covered in the past, that of course led him in another direction. The Democrat party is overly, overly controlled by the unions and by the trial lawyers, particularly the class action lawyers. And generally, if you'll see something
Starting point is 00:32:12 that is not in the interest of the people, on the Democrat side, it's going to come because of the unions, which is just another form of monopoly. And the trial lawyers, that's where actions will be happening from the Democrats' side. They're not in the interest of the people.
Starting point is 00:32:30 Notice how he always frames his obviously selfish choices as in the interest of the people. Power to the people by paying me money. Unions are bad for the people. Anywho, in theory, there's no reason to condemn a person simply because they subscribe to a different political party than me. But as that clip demonstrated,
Starting point is 00:32:51 Elon's loyalties seem deeply dependent on which side benefits him the most. Much like how he moderates, his principles appear to be entirely ego-driven. And so what we've been seeing lately is Elon Musk openly communicating with right-wing trolls and absolute white fucking supremacists on Twitter. Here he is, for example, replying to Paul Ray Ramsey,
Starting point is 00:33:14 a man who has openly denied the Holocaust and said that women shouldn't be allowed to vote. Here he is having a back and forth with Andy Ngo, a provable liar and right-wing propagandist with a weird fake British accent. And he seems to be taking moderation advice from him, literally banning anti-fascist accounts based on what Ngo has claimed.
Starting point is 00:33:35 But at least it's not the FBI, I guess. These are the new people that Musk has chosen to surround himself with, seemingly acting as a personal customer service representative to the biggest right-wing trolls and liars on Twitter. It's his whole image now, his little troll board of advisors. Yes, Mr. Cat Turd, I'll get right on that. No, Mr. Cat Turd, don't insult electric cars, sir.
Starting point is 00:34:00 Meanwhile, he's waging a full-blown war on the leftist activists, claiming they are to blame for not moderating hate speech on the site, sharing stay woke shirts he found at Twitter HQ, like that's some kind of damning evidence. Here he is tweeting that the hands up, don't shoot narrative was a fiction based on a DOJ's report
Starting point is 00:34:21 on the shooting of Michael Brown. Of course, that slogan was based on eyewitness accounts. And despite whether it's accurate, it became a rallying cry for a reason. I wonder if Musk would also share this other DOJ report about how the Ferguson Police Department absolutely targeted black people disproportionately to white people.
Starting point is 00:34:40 Speaking of Ferguson, maybe Elon should have been on Twitter during that uprising considering it was a good example of Twitter being an alternative to mainstream media narrative and a great source of on the ground information. Something Elon invented for Twitter. Wow, news can break on Twitter.
Starting point is 00:34:58 Who would have thought? For a man who claims to be a logical centrist, wanting to host a platform of civil debate, it's odd that every single thing he tweets and does is unfairly favoring far-right misinformation. Every person he associates with, every moderating choice, it's all to help him personally or to impress his weird troll friends
Starting point is 00:35:21 and his weird troll need for attention. Because for years now, pretty much every interaction he has on the site has been through some sad attempt to be a troll. And so going back to the question of why Musk purchased Twitter and the idea that it was some secret plan to destroy the site or 4D chess or whatever, well frankly, I really think he might
Starting point is 00:35:44 just have no fucking idea what he's doing. I think he's extremely partisan, easily misled, a liar, and just gloms onto whoever is stroking his ego the most. He's known for completely winging it and having a very insular bubble in other tech fields. I would personally argue he's not good at those other tech fields. I would personally argue he's not good at those other companies too.
Starting point is 00:36:05 I do have to say, I appreciate the idea of SpaceX, not for the commercialization of space, which is a gross phrase and idea, but for the development of reusable rockets, an idea Elon didn't come up with, and a technology he personally did not invent. And in fact, there's a video of him explaining like a new technology for some of the rocket engines
Starting point is 00:36:26 or whatever, and the interviewer is like, so do you use it for the other ones? And then in real time, Elon slowly realizes, oh yeah, we should do that, that makes obvious sense. And then there's a video later, at a later date of Elon telling that same interviewer that it was his idea to use that tech on everything. You already have hot gas,
Starting point is 00:36:46 but this is only for the booster, right? Yes. Although arguably, now you mentioned it, it might be wise to do this for the ship too. We're gonna fix that. Jeez. I'd say that's like one of the biggest improvements that we've made.
Starting point is 00:37:06 It occurred to me while I was explaining it to you. I was like, wait, what are we doing? Also, while we're here, I like his alleged view of patents, which are that they stop progress and stall innovation and are for the weak. Though that also might just be because he can't invent stuff himself. But anyway, no matter what you think about Elon Musk
Starting point is 00:37:26 up until his Twitter acquisition, I think social media specifically has really thrown him off. And I'm gonna explain why after we break. For snacks? No, we're breaking for ads. About snacks? Probably not, maybe. You want us to hawk your snacks?
Starting point is 00:37:47 Get at us. Email. I'm gonna tweet at Elon and he'll get back to us about it. Ad time. You know, ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to have a beard. And someday when I finally get that beard, I'm going to use Manscaped brand new Beard Hedger Pro Kit.
Starting point is 00:38:06 It's a whole kit for your beard, a beard I someday hope to get myself. Let me tell you, this thing comes with the Beard Hedger, a cordless and waterproof trimmer that gives you 20 different cutting lengths. Then there's the beard shampoo and conditioner. Next comes the Manscaped beard oil to lube your beard. And finally, the beard balm for styling that sweet, and conditioner. Next comes the Manscaped Beard Oil to lube your beard.
Starting point is 00:38:25 And finally, the Beard Bomb for styling that sweet, beautiful, oiled up, shampooed and trimmed beard. God, I want a beard! The Manscaped Beard Hedger Pro Kit even comes with some free gifts like a beard brush and scissors and so on and such. It really has everything you need to be king of the beards.
Starting point is 00:38:48 That's why it's called a kit. If you have a beard, of course, which someday I really hope to achieve. What's that? Oh! Well, that's fantastic news. So it turns out I have a beard. Problem solved.
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Starting point is 00:39:24 20 lengths, Cody's beard, Iger, one stroke, one guard, 20 lengths, Cody's beard, I'm Cody. Okay, we're back. Sorry about the ads. So now we've more than established Elon Musk as an emotional partisan troll who is basing all of his Twitter decisions off of who sucks him off the hardest.
Starting point is 00:39:40 We've covered a lot, but I still think there's one very key issue that we need to address. It's the key to why, no matter what the conditions, Elon Musk is fundamentally unable to run a social media site like Twitter. Are you ready? Of course you are. Close your eyes. Now, imagine you're an aspiring stand-up comedian who frequents a weekly open mic night. Now imagine that you're also very rich, or perhaps have famous parents, or were given some other privilege that allows you to get up on stage anytime you want. Now imagine that you're a bad stand-up comedian.
Starting point is 00:40:19 But despite that, you're surrounded by yes-men assuring you that you're actually really funny. You know, because you fired all the people who might say otherwise. And so even though you keep getting booed by the audience, you are absolutely certain that you're actually funny and cool, no matter how many comedians seem to mock you. I mean, with the exception of Dave Chappelle, of course. seem to mock you. I mean, with the exception of Dave Chappelle, of course. Hey, wait Those new boys Tough on the head Woo!
Starting point is 00:41:30 Tough on the head, it sounds like. But you know this one thing? All those people are booing, and I'm just pointing out the obvious. They have terrible seats. I understand. Oof. Incredible. I'm pretty sure my ancestors just cringed.
Starting point is 00:41:46 A cringe that transcends the dimensions through time and space. Cringe is the fifth dimension. Seriously, imagine thinking that you, the at the time richest person on the planet, were like, cool or edgy. To go on stage like that and yell, I'm rich, bitch, in this weird way into the mic,
Starting point is 00:42:04 like the most awkward kid at the karaoke party. What I'm getting at here is that Elon Musk, to be frank, is extremely unselfaware and not at all charismatic. He is after all a fancy little rich boy whose dad owned an Emerald Mine and has never had to earn his popularity. I'm sorry, fact check, it's a share in an Emerald Mine. Where'd that rumor come from?
Starting point is 00:42:26 Oh, I don't know. It was you, Elon. The rumor came from you, you liar. Oh my God. Okay, I don't think even Musk fans would disagree that the dude is incredibly awkward, to put it in the most gentle of terms. However, in the least gentle of terms,
Starting point is 00:42:42 I'd argue that Elon Musk is an embarrassing edgelord who is surrounded by sycophants and posts pictures of replica video game guns by his bed and has the sense of humor of a grandma genetically merged with 4chan. Here he is dressed like the Marquis de Sade, a picture he himself proudly posted that has now been mysteriously removed from his tweet.
Starting point is 00:43:03 Here he is pretending like he's too smart for chess, like a 12 year old on Reddit. And I would argue that he's progressively gotten worse. As of recent, he's become full blown red pilled, far beyond reasonable thinking. I don't have to explain why having a QAnon style conspiracy clown in charge of Twitter is a bad thing. Also, you can open your eyes now.
Starting point is 00:43:25 I'm sorry for depriving you of this for so long. But generally speaking, he's also just painfully uninteresting as a person. And outside of his ability to invest money, he's not particularly creative. His ideas are for the most part, extremely boilerplate sci-fi. Brain chips, automation, robots, going to Mars.
Starting point is 00:43:49 When you think about what he aspires for, it's not especially unique or visionary. And all he's really doing is throwing money at basic ideas. Anyone can put a rocket into space and then land it if they pay enough smart people to do it for them. And to credit Musk for bankrolling these projects would be like crediting the head of Paramount for making the Godfather.
Starting point is 00:44:09 But more importantly to Twitter, Musk isn't very funny or good with words. Ironically, out of all the things he outsources to experts, he seems to insist on doing his humor by himself. And so his tweets are stolen memes, stale right-wing rhetoric, misinformation, anti-trans horse shit, and embarrassing attempts to explain that no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Starting point is 00:44:30 They weren't booing me after all. My goodness, he tweeted that first thing in the morning. I know I've made this comparison before, but he really is Michael Scott from the office shouting, "'That's what she said to a bunch of miserable employees.'" Like, did you know that this was a feature on Teslas? It's a fart balloon. And fart on demand is what I like to have, obviously.
Starting point is 00:45:04 It literally has an I'm so random button. That is no joke, a feature that would blast fart or goat sounds outside of Teslas that Elon clearly thought was super based or whatever the ungodly fuck. It was almost immediately recalled for safety reasons, something he's very familiar with having to do, before no one bothered to check the regulations.
Starting point is 00:45:27 And not to be a comedy snob, but goat sounds are the least random way to tell the world how random you are. He's just copying forced random or absurdist ideas from like eight years ago. And you can just imagine the engineers too afraid to speak up when Musk asked them to work overnight to make the totally cool with the K fart speaker on his Radmobile.
Starting point is 00:45:51 It's just all like stale Reddit shit, the least creative or visionary attempts, much like his ideas on car design or a tunnel with lights or his sci-fi aspirations. You can just see how he's pulling from other sources without a single original idea. As we wrote this episode, news came out that Twitter might implement Reddit style awards with titles like Mind Blown and Super Like and a gem that is quite hilariously an Emerald icon.
Starting point is 00:46:21 There's just nothing cutting edge there. It's just like what Facebook did years ago and something that would make the site worse while maybe making Elon a little extra scratch. It's the husk of an imaginationless brainstorming session sharted out as a last ditch attempt to make Elon's Twitter feel new and improved. It's like even a basic misunderstanding of the site.
Starting point is 00:46:46 He wants to add a bookmark icon, so you don't have to go through a menu to choose add to bookmark, which is a fine, slightly more convenient idea than the current situation. But he also claims that bookmarking is a de facto like button, which no, it's not. It's a bookmark button.
Starting point is 00:47:04 It's for bookmarking stuff. The like button is to let people you know that you like their tweet. Bookmark is for bookmarking. It's all just weird, all right? And so I don't want to be insulting, but there's no good way to say that Elon Musk isn't exactly the hottest fire
Starting point is 00:47:24 in the Tesla dealership. And in fact, I think we're learning more and more just how little he knows, how childlike his sensibilities are, how he seems to like Star Trek because of the little gizmos and gadgets, not the underlying philosophy, which is kind of in direct opposition
Starting point is 00:47:42 to his approach to pretty much everything. How constantly wrong he is and how bad he is at basic research. For example, he seems to be a weird COVID truther now. Here's a tweet where he appears to think that Dr. Fauci's wife is the person who oversees whether he's acting ethically. His evidence is her wiki that says
Starting point is 00:48:04 she's the head of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. Except if you look closer, just a little bit closer, you learn that the Department of Bioethics is a training and research center that doesn't oversee anything. It's just, it's an office
Starting point is 00:48:22 with like a few dozen people working there and anyone with an academic or science background, which Elon apparently doesn't have and lied about having, could figure that out. Hell, you just have to know how college departments work. So this is like Facebook meme shit that he just blindly fell for or started himself. And so it really seems like Elon Musk might be kind of a dipshit. A walking series of unironic drill tweets, the most transparent and easy to
Starting point is 00:48:55 dunk on human that ever lived. And the only reason he's notable is because he's so incredibly fucking rich. And if he wasn't so incredibly fucking rich, he would just be another clueless reply guy posting bad memes. He didn't earn his followers the way someone might by being funny or interesting on Twitter. He is, if you didn't already figure it out, the failed standup comedian in my little analogy from before
Starting point is 00:49:20 when your eyes were closed and you couldn't see my face. But now, imagine that this failed standup comedian bought the comedy club. That person would have exactly zero idea on how to run it, even if they had business experience. Because up until that moment, their entire perspective on how the club ran would be skewed and bitter and based on bad information.
Starting point is 00:49:45 He would have an animosity toward most of the people in the club, along with everyone working behind the scenes. That's why his takeover of Twitter was so weird and hostile because Elon can't conceive that he might just have bad opinions or shitty humor. So he clearly grew resentful of Twitter, to the point that he impulsively locked himself into buying it for way too much money.
Starting point is 00:50:11 And it's not entirely his fault. For starters, Twitter made him buy it. But also, besides the brain disease that comes with having so much money, which we will do a solo video about in the future, we as a society really did a number on his ego. Mr. Musk, how are you?
Starting point is 00:50:30 Congratulations on the promotion. Thank you very much. Those Merlin engines are fantastic. Elon Tusk, listen, we need your help. Rick, Morty, why me? Did something happen to Elon Musk? How do you want to be remembered in history? Alongside the Wright brothers, Elon Musk,
Starting point is 00:50:46 Zephyr and Cochran? The moon's coming with me like an hour. What would Elon do? Moonfall, how could you? Remember that night we had together? We made love. See, there was that brief window of time where the general public didn't know
Starting point is 00:51:03 that much about Elon Musk. And because he ran these seemingly innovative companies, people naturally assumed that he was also responsible for the actual engineering behind SpaceX and Tesla. We really liked that Iron Man fantasy so much that we put him in Iron Man. On top of that, electric cars were seen as an especially good cause
Starting point is 00:51:22 in terms of mitigating climate change, which honestly, I don't even know if he even believes in anymore. So Musk was embraced by a lot of the left, but specifically wealthy liberals who could actually afford his products. And Musk ate up that praise and attention. And with all of it, he became more of a public figure.
Starting point is 00:51:42 But the more we learned about Elon Musk, the more it became clear that he was not the man that Hollywood made him out to be. And while this is for another video, there's a case to be made that Elon Musk has never been good, and in fact is working to harm human progress. Hey, did you know that in 2021,
Starting point is 00:52:01 Tesla made $1.5 billion just by selling regulatory credits to other car companies? You see, governments award car companies these credits when they make efforts to reduce carbon emissions. And the car companies are required to have a certain amount of these credits. But instead of meeting those requirements, they can just buy credits from Tesla instead. And so Tesla is profiting off of these other car companies
Starting point is 00:52:27 not reducing their carbon emissions. Also electric or not, manufacturing and disposing of cars is extremely bad for the environment. Electric is obviously better, but what we should be leaning on is public transportation. Trains, for example, are the most eco-friendly option, far more than cars. And yet Elon Musk has been specifically hijacking
Starting point is 00:52:48 any funding that could go to trains for his boring tunnel project, which amounts to people driving fucking Tesla cars through death trap tunnels. They took $48 million from Las Vegas to drive Elon's cars 1.5 miles in a fucking tube. He's had failed tunnel projects in California, in Baltimore, in Chicago.
Starting point is 00:53:10 And I would argue the one in Vegas counts as a failure as well. He is quite literally Lyle Landly, the monorail guy from the Simpsons. And I would argue that much like free speech, Elon Musk only cares about the environment so long as it directly benefits him. As long as his cars are used
Starting point is 00:53:29 and not some dirty commoner system. Oh look, weird. Twitter temporarily banned the DC bus system account for literally no reason. Probably an accident, but still, pretty funny. Anyway, and over time, a lot of people realized what I'm saying and began to turn on him. People that I think Musk was genuinely a fan of, who are now calling him a piece of shit. And so things got a little sad for him. He became very divorced from both women and the comforts of
Starting point is 00:54:01 his previous fame, and by extension, divorced from reality. And I think all he's really ever done since is try to find that comfort again, that pocket of praise that he can curl up in like a warm Tesla fire. Because one thing Elon himself has absolutely admitted to is that he's not a guy who likes to be alone. You said that you cannot be and don't want to be alone.
Starting point is 00:54:45 He can't even accept the idea that a lot of people are perfectly fine being alone. And while I'm not exactly crying into my Patrick Wilson body pillow about this, loneliness is a very common problem for the ultra rich. After all, how could they possibly make friends? They're surrounded by people who want their sweet fuckable money.
Starting point is 00:55:06 And most of them just kind of generally suck. And so now might be a good time to point out that Elon Musk is known for forcing his employees to have meetings at one in the morning. He's done it at SpaceX and Twitter. He's a big fan of making everyone physically come into the office as well, even installing bedrooms so he can have a big mandated sleepover if he wants.
Starting point is 00:55:27 And I really think that's just because he's, you know, a sad and lonely guy. Being wealthy is generally not good for the brain, which is why it's not a good idea for rich people to be in charge of something like a social network, you know? So Musk, a man so very desperate to be loved, could not understand why so many people suddenly hated him on this social media platform.
Starting point is 00:55:50 And his conclusion was that there must be something wrong with Twitter and not with him. It's a mind virus that makes people not like me. Again, see his tweet about how all the people booing him were unhinged leftists. Surely that's who to blame because it was at this point that Musk finally found a new pocket of praise.
Starting point is 00:56:14 And that was all the other people who were made bitter by being ratioed or banned or mocked on Twitter, otherwise known as racists and anti-vaxxers and trolls, not to mention a large portion of conservatives convinced that they were being censored for being right wing as opposed to spreading election and COVID misinformation. And so all their anger turned toward the so-called blue check mark leftists and Twitter mods
Starting point is 00:56:38 that surely were the reason, a conspiracy perhaps, but the reality of how Twitter worked is actually pretty simple. I'll even put it in big words on the screen for the cheap seats. You know, the only ones who booed Elon, according to Dave Chappelle, those poor cheap fucks. Twitter was a popularity contest.
Starting point is 00:57:00 That's it. Twitter was fundamentally designed to reward people who are more charismatic or funny or smart or popular than other people. The same way Reddit has an upvote and downvote system, Twitter's entire deal is that the people who have the best jokes or the most compelling information or can lie the best or are simply the most famous
Starting point is 00:57:18 in real life, those were the people it rewarded. Is that good? Not really. Dare I say, no. It's the same social structure as high school, and high school sucks unless you're high. And while there was absolutely a subjective nature to Twitter's old moderation,
Starting point is 00:57:34 and I would certainly believe even government interference, especially if I saw some actual evidence, the goal was to maintain the status quo. Is that good? Nah. I think that's very important to say. Twitter wasn't good before Elon Musk bought it. It was just kowtowing to mainstream beliefs.
Starting point is 00:57:51 But I would argue that it was better than it is now, being run by the world's richest or formerly richest and most sensitive man and his army of bitter fans. Because again, Elon Musk and his weird fans weren't popular. They aren't very funny and have really bad opinions and lean on the side of being trolls. A troll of course, being someone who craves attention in any way they can get it, even by acting like a jackass.
Starting point is 00:58:17 You know, malarkey dealers, if you'll pardon my harshness. And everything Musk is now doing is designed to reward that behavior as opposed to any kind of other merit. I don't think he fully knows he's doing it, but every decision he's made to try and game the system to benefit himself is also making Twitter more and more insular and toxic. He broadened the recommendations,
Starting point is 00:58:39 forcing people to have to see more tweets of people they don't follow lest they mute or block them and make an echo chamber again. Or a better example is that he changed the UI to include view counts along with likes, because he personally thinks that liking a tweet is less valuable than seeing a tweet. Except Twitter literally boosts the visibility of some tweets over others.
Starting point is 00:59:04 And now he's going to reward Twitter blue users, otherwise known as his fans, with more visibility as well. So it's going to be this feedback loop where people will act like tweets with high view counts are valuable, even though they are being artificially boosted. And quite obviously, seeing something has nothing to do with liking it.
Starting point is 00:59:23 I see Elon's flaccid fucking tweets every day. And I don't know if you know this, but I'm not a fan of that guy. But of course, Elon doesn't understand that because his entire existence is based on attention. No matter if that attention is good or bad, a car making a fart sound, or just tweeting the word keck. Again, just like Michael Scott,
Starting point is 00:59:46 he naturally thinks getting a reaction is the same as being approved of. So of course he would change Twitter to value attention over likability. And we're now seeing this very unpopular man, amplified by toxic fandom, getting forced on everyone. I think his fans like him because they see themselves
Starting point is 01:00:06 in him. Going back to Twitter as high school, I think they're imagining Elon as like the nerdy kid getting picked on, an underdog getting revenge. Except the underdog can't buy the entire school. An underdog doesn't treat their employees like trash. I would argue that Musk is less like a heroic underdog, a resistance fighter or whatever,
Starting point is 01:00:28 and more like, I don't know, a rich guy trying to steal everyone's resources. But in this case, it's attention. Like the villain in Total Recall trying to steal the air, who was played by Ronnie Cox. Hey, hey, hey now, hey now. Rich guy trying to rule Mars, robot, space captain. Is that, did I just have a Ronnie Cox breakthrough?
Starting point is 01:00:50 Is this anything? No. That's fair, I just got excited. But there's a reason I keep thinking of Cox-like dystopian villains here. As I said before, Musk's moderating decisions favor the rich over anyone else. Corporations and celebrities were the first entities
Starting point is 01:01:06 to get special check marks to mitigate the damage he did with $8 verification. His no private jet tracking rule also benefited every rich ghoul with a private jet. And like, of course, right? The list of people who invested in Elon's Twitter are all Saudi princes and tech billionaires. And so I guess what I'm getting at here
Starting point is 01:01:25 is that Twitter was always a shithole. But before Musk, it was our shithole. Not liberals or celebrities, but most people and most politics. Everyone from Kathy Griffin to Randy Quaid, the definitive political spectrum. It mostly kept the really shitty, hateful accounts
Starting point is 01:01:45 off the site and allowed the majority of users to go about their terrible online existence unimpeded. It was a site that aspired to allow complete nobodies to be able to tell Taco Bell to eat their ass, where people could speak up against powerful figures. And most importantly, where hilariously ignorant babies could embarrass themselves and get made fun of by everyone. Was it free speech?
Starting point is 01:02:09 Absolutely not. I would argue that literally no functioning social media site is free speech, but it certainly wasn't the play thing for a single attention hungry billionaire, so transparently desperate to be popular that he paid $44 billion to hijack everyone's attention. He knows that by tweeting shit like,
Starting point is 01:02:28 "'My pronouns are prosecute Fauci," he's guaranteed a reaction now. Not because what he's saying is edgy or honest or funny, but because he's the guy in charge. I won't lie that it's been a gas to make fun of him on his own website, but I'm a tad bit nervous about just how impulsive the man can get. After all, it's no revelation
Starting point is 01:02:50 that this all feels very Trumpy, right? Like Musk, Trump seemed to run for president as like a half joke brought on by spite and got locked into it. Originally, both Democrats, Musk and Trump waged a war against experts and elitists and somehow convinced an army of fans that they were the underdog despite being tremendously rich
Starting point is 01:03:11 or rich-ish in Trump's case. Their fans insist they are playing 4D chess no matter how obviously bad their ideas are. Meanwhile, most of the world is just disheartened that someone so toxic could force their way into our attention by obtaining power. Also, this. Elon Musk is firing back on Twitter denying a sexual misconduct allegation by a flight attendant who worked on his private jet. Right. Both Trump and Musk have accusations against them that they like to blame on the deep state or some garbage
Starting point is 01:03:45 because neither figure has an ego that would ever allow them to accept mistakes or defeat. And so everything that happens will be blamed on a conspiracy of leftists because the biggest enemy Elon Musk has at this point is his completely demolished ego. He's willing to risk it all to convince everyone or anyone that he's actually very cool
Starting point is 01:04:06 and smart. The clearest example has to be when in the midst of massive Twitter layoffs, Elon tweeted, and I quote, did it for the lulz before deleting the tweet two hours later to repeat, he did it numeral four, the lulz with a Z. Because Elon Musk in that moment would have rather people thought he purposefully destroyed a company for the lulz than accidentally destroyed a company because of his incompetence and ego to the point that he would legally implicate himself
Starting point is 01:04:40 to save face. You know, because I'm pretty sure purposefully trashing a bunch of jobs would get you sued into oblivion. Again, even the self-destructive path feels very Trumpy. But no matter what's going on in his head, the damage is already done for the rest of us tweet folk. He stole the microphone and is screeching hogwash in it, and now everyone's leaving.
Starting point is 01:05:01 And if you're one of the many people who makes their living from social media promotion or work for Twitter, this shit is devastating to watch. Believe me, I personally know what it's like to see an industry completely collapse because of a single rich guy making snap decisions. It's just sad. Social media sites come and go for sure.
Starting point is 01:05:20 And there's perhaps some hope in places like Post or Hive or Mastodon or my news site, some more use. Social media for you and also several investors who reserve the right to viewing your personal information. But there was nothing irreparable about Twitter before Musk took over. It had more time left, more years to watch people get offended about which direction toilet paper goes
Starting point is 01:05:42 or see a celebrity embarrass themselves by admitting they hunt drug addicts for sport. Or this Lena Dunham one, where she tried to joke that Asian men can't be rapists. Jesus fucking Christ, Lena. But now, thanks to a single rich weirdo, the site is most likely tanking. And I think the lesson to be had from all of this
Starting point is 01:06:03 is that perhaps, just perhaps, we need to completely rethink the way we use social media. And I don't know, the internet, we're a long ways away from garage geniuses, revolutionizing technology and creating a digital anarchy of free thought, you know? The internet is basically just five Walmarts competing with each other now.
Starting point is 01:06:21 Because while we love the idea of everything being under one roof, this futurist vision of convenience, it also creates a system where too much power is put into the hands of too few people. Be that Elon Musk or Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg or the FBI. There was a time when people's livelihoods weren't at the whim of a single fucking algorithm.
Starting point is 01:06:41 And that's what they're pushing for. Zuckerberg and his metaverse, or Elon with his X app idea that might just be what Twitter will turn into. There's this battle to monopolize the entire fucking internet, and we can't let anyone win. Not some rich Saudi prince, not the government,
Starting point is 01:06:58 not even me, especially not even me, but especially, especially not this guy. not even me, but especially, especially not this guy. Again, oof. It's hard, man, because there's literally no power we can turn to here. And failing a catastrophic event, no way to put the genie back in the bottle. And Musk knows that social media is kind of worrying
Starting point is 01:07:26 and he's using that to try and gain personal control under the guise of being concerned about censorship and government interference. It's yet another comparison in that part of the reason Donald Trump was elected was because people had lost a lot of faith in the establishment. And they weren't wrong to lose faith, just like it isn't wrong to think the internet
Starting point is 01:07:44 is kind of terrible now. But I can promise you, the same way Trump didn't care, neither does Musk. He just wants it for himself, to get to do the censoring himself. And his fans don't care because they want him to be the big edge Lord of Twitter, because he's Tony Stark or whatever.
Starting point is 01:08:01 And so the ends justified the means. The means in this case was Musk and his fans pretending like they were actually concerned about free speech. It's like if we built a Stargate, you know, Twitter's kind of like a Stargate in that it transports us to many different realities. And there was this one Senator who acted like
Starting point is 01:08:22 it was a waste of money and opposed it. But then we secretly learned that he actually just wanted control over the Stargate for his own personal gain. That's what Elon is like. This hypothetical Stargate thief perhaps, played by Ronnie Cox. Are we sure there's nothing to that?
Starting point is 01:08:38 We're completely sure I didn't just figure out something amazing. Anyone gonna answer me? Yeah? Okay, fine. All right. Deny my genius, if you have to. I'll start my own show.
Starting point is 01:08:53 One without the elitist who don't like my Ronnie Cox thing. Some more, more news. Just you wait. Eight bucks a minute. Eight dollars, $11 dollars eleven dollars for apple users and uh and maybe more later if i just want to change my mind because why not twelve dollars okay bye $14. $18.
Starting point is 01:09:41 $27. Wait, wait, wait, hold on. Put my thinking cap on. It's innovation time. Okay, get this. $34. Okay. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa $52. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, $52. comment. Okay. We got a merch store with merch to buy from the store.
Starting point is 01:10:27 We have a patreon.com slash some more news. We have a podcast called Even More News and this show, Some More News as a podcast if you hate my face. Interesting fact, this episode's script now fits in one tweet
Starting point is 01:10:46 which is cool we love our 30,000 word tweets don't we folks I award that one hilarious for nine bitcoins
Starting point is 01:11:02 god what a dumb piece of shit all right see you later

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