The fact that owning Twitter was worth half a Mars colony to him should give you an idea of how seriously he's taking this whole thing. It's up there next to "Full Self Driving" and "$25,000 EV" in the Big Jar of Promises Used To Raise Capital and Nothing Else.
Are we really giving Twitter that much credit these days? I feel like we gave it less credit when it was actually popular. I would give Elon jumping around on stage more credit than what Twitter/X did for this election.
> I know it is hard to imagine, but 1/2 the United States voters see it as the last free speech area of the internet
It is very easy to imagine that. I can also imagine shuffling a bunch of cold cuts and slices of bread and making a sandwich like on Scooby Doo but that also has no reflection of reality
> Hard to say if that happens without him owning Twitter.
Its fairly easy.
In almost every western country the incumbent administration has been punished by voters due to inflation, this has been the case in the uk, germany, romania, france, mexico... list goes on. So Trump could have won without Elon buying twitter.
Similarly he could have donated to Trump without buying Twitter, and been on stage and been all day on twitter saying nonsense without purchasing. So being close to Trump is possible without buying Twitter.
The market would have reacted the same way, because the market is reacting to the fact that Trump is a corrupt leader and being close to him means the market will be skewed to benefit his cronies (in this case Elon). If im not wrong Trump has already mentioned creating "self driving car initiatives" that probably means boosting Tesla dangerous self driving mode, and also they have alluded to investigating rival companies to tesla and spacex or at least "reviewing their goverment contracts". Other industries without social media owners, like private prisions, also skyrocketed after trump won and those paid trump as much as Elon but were not on social media. The market would have reacted to Trump being corrupt regardless of Elon buying Twitter.
So its easy to say that his stock would be up 70% without buying twitter, as long as he kept the 250 million investment in the Trump campaign, and then market assesed Trump admin as affecting market fairness, both of which would happen without his purchase.
The ironic part is, Elon's own attorney, Alex Spiro, represented $100 million in BHR (China) shares for Hunter Biden. Alex also tried to save Jim Baker's job (FBI official) at Twitter, which is why Alex was removed. Those BHR shares are now controlled by Hunter's Malibu attorney.
Alex's law firm was able to get this story removed in 1-day from The Sun. But it's true, Alex's passport is online due to this deal-
Twitter famously deplatformed Trump, as a sitting president. They were a captured institution and it was shown that corrupt intelligence agencies were directly influencing Twitter's censorship. There was no other distribution channel available. Messaging is important. Counter narratives are important.
> In a June 2023 court filing, Twitter attorneys strongly denied that the Files showed the government had coerced the company to censor content, as Musk and many Republicans claimed.[8] Former Twitter employees asserted that Republican officials also made takedown requests so often that Twitter had to keep a database tracking them.[9]
> shown that corrupt intelligence agencies were directly influencing Twitter's censorship
That is a hyperbolic way of saying the fbi used the report feature everyone has access to when worried about domestic terrorism along the lines of the Oklahoma City bombing. Not exactly government censorship - not a potato potahto thing.
It doesn't sound exactly ridiculous when Zuckerberg also admitted those same intelligence agencies pressured them into censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story.
That's so absurdly far from what Zuck said it's an outright lie.
"Zuckerberg told Rogan: "The background here is that the FBI came to us - some folks on our team - and was like 'hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there's about to be some kind of dump that's similar to that'." He said the FBI did not warn Facebook about the Biden story in particular - only that Facebook thought it "fit that pattern".
So to you "intelligence agencies convinced Facebook that future big stories around leaks might be Russian propaganda" is the same as "FBI pressured Facebook to take down the Biden laptop story"?
This. In hindsight, buying Twitter at a loss was well worth the long (though, more like medium) term results. As much as it disgusts me, I'm impressed.
That's a mischaracterization. He tried to get out of the deal because the stock market overall had crashed significantly between 2021 and 2022 and Twitter was no longer worth $40B.
Honestly not convinced it was about that. I'm sure he likes the stock going up but I think he is somewhat earnest about why he bought twitter, or at least what he wants to do with it when he got stuck with it.
As per usual, he bet the house and won. The vibes are shifting, Trump won, etc
I’m sure soon enough we won’t have to worry about NHTSA keeping that sort of data private (because that agency will simply be found inefficient and eliminated).
