It astounds and amazes me that there was a time Elon could have feasibly been considered a smart, level-headed entrepreneur. The whole submarine thing with the trapped kids really was the beginning of his unraveling. I for one thank Elon Musk for proving once and for all to even the most shameless corpo-apologists that having a ton of money doesn’t magically make you smart or cool. The dude’s an idiot, and I love watching him self-destruct.
At one point they even had him cameo in iron man, and had him name dropped on star trek as a pioneer of human discovery. People used to jerk off to this dude’s PR image like he was a real life Tony Stark.
If he stayed off Twitter he’d have a pretty impressive CV. Mainstream electric cars, actually usable Satellite Internet, Major Solar Panels etc. Even weird shit like Hyperloop would just be random neat things.
Same with JK Rowling, Kanye West, Notch, etc. It’s literally so fucking easy for people like this to remain loved by everyone. Just keep your fucking mouth shut. Give nice polite interviews about your job, stay out of politics, let a boring publicity agent manage your social media for you, and enjoy your billions of dollars in peace.
Why is it so hard?
Ego.
Every shitty thing can be traced back to ego.
I’m paraphrasing here (see https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/elon-musks-shadow-rule) but Musk 'desperately wants to save the Earth, but thinks only he can do it".
The problem is that they don’t want money any more. They want attention.
I would have a think tank. I would pay a hundred or so smart people obscene amounts of money to tell me my ideas are daft and come up with really great ideas for me.
The mind boggles as to why someone like musk doesn’t do this. It would be like achieving global eternal financial domination on easy mode. A world hack if you will. It would cost a mere fraction of his wealth.
Imagine if every descision you made was well informed and well reasoned instead of just shit.
Why should they care about being loved by people they don’t care about? It’s normal to have the desire to express your political opinion.
Or, you know, you could keep it to yourself and wait until someone asks for it.
He admitted hyperloop was complete bullshit he pushed just to try to sideline California’s high speed rail.
Wonderful. The bar keeps going lower doesn’t it?
He’s mentioned in star trek discovery as if he took us to mars. Those lines aged so poorly
Putting aside that that whole show is pretty rough and I’ve mentally decanonized it, the guy who said it is technically a mega space nazi from the space nazi dimension so I choose to believe he just thought that Musk being an aspiring space nazi was as cool in our universe as it was in his.
Truth.
I prefer to pretend that they’re talking about another person named Musk, one of his many kids perhaps…
Or the story is happening in the other better timeline.
When he called the submarine expert a pedo was when I started to go, “Is this guy being for real?”
Same. I actually looked up to him before that.
and I love watching him self-destruct.
I guarantee he’d rather be in his position than yours.
Yeah, can lose all this wealth and still be fucking wealthy in a way that literally dozens of people only know.
He overpaid for a piece of shit and ran it into the ground.
Everyone with a used BMW knows the feeling.
Please stop attacking my character based on terrible purchase decisions
What a beautiful car
Until I owned it
I’ll never forget my Sweet 3 series… Because I’m still paying for it’s repairs years later.
It’s a fascinating car and I’m always on awe any time one pulls up next to me
With trim and doors and shit so poorly aligned, I can’t believe it left the factory
Are you talking about the poor quality control on the Tesla Model 3? OP was talking about the BMW 3-Series, which typically have excellent fit and finish.
Ahh I just saw the 3 and a post about Musk and my brain made a nice leap to nowhere
You leave my E89 Z4 alone!
South African Magician Makes $40B Disappear!
Nah, he just donated 40B to the former ownership. Keeping the big bucks in the hands of the ultra wealthy.
Can this man baby just go away? No one cares dude. Enjoy your overpriced echo chamber.
Him buying twitter was just some sort of narcissistic flex on his daughter.
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I don’t think he ever intended to buy it. He was forced to buy it due to his own stupid actions.
When no-one was looking, Elon Musk lost forty billion. He lost 40 billion. That’s as many as four tens billions. And that’s terrible.
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I never would have guessed that Musk is a billion times worse than Lex Luthor, but the math is right there. Terrible.
It’s an older meme, but it checks out.
Source (spoiler'd because image)
Lex Luthor bought a company for 44 dollars then lost 40?
Thanks for making my day!!
He could have ended world hunger multiple times. But instead he bought a social media site so he could be popular with the Nazi crowd.
On the bright side, whenever anyone fucks things up now, they can think “well at least at least I didn’t fuck things up as badly as Elon Musk.”
Terrible for him. Great for everyone else that that 40 billion is now in the hands of other people. 
It’s also ironic, that he is single-handedly the greatest redistributor of his own wealth. 
That’s not really how that works. He just reduced the value of the site. He nuked value out of existence.
I mean he did spend 44 billion prior to said nuking. Site isn’t worth as much now sure, but the volume of currency still traveled into the hands of others.
Good point actually.
Is the previous owner also a fuckhead though?
But he hasn’t realized his losses yet - HODL!
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40 billion going into the bank accounts of investors that previously owned Twitter stock certainly is a redistribution of wealth, but I doubt it’s the kind you’re referring to.
Depends what they do with it, I guess.
40,000 millions. Most people could live without working ever again with one million dollars (provided they managed them wisely.)
While one million is a pretty good amount of cash, you’re delusional if you thinks it’s a “never working again” amount of money. I had this talk pretty recently with a friend of mine, if he used it to finish paying his house (150k) at 24k a year it would not even last 40 years.
You’re assuming that everyone living today will live for more than 40 years. Ageist much? (I’m kidding.)
No, I’m not delusional. I’m not saying “never work again and live in luxury.” I’ll gladly live in a studio apartment for a few years while I put some of that money work for me (instead of me working.) It’s doable.
Edit: you can also move to a relatively safe country where 20K a year gives you the same standard of living as a middle-class westerner - minus the 9 to 5 grind.
At a 4% return, a million nets you around 4000k/month without affecting the principle. After taxes, youre likely walking away with 40k/yr.
Plently of places in the US you can live for around 40k/yr. Not luxury, but if youre fine with rural to semi rural, you can do well on interest alone.
I could be remembering wrong but Twitter was only worth $15B at best, and Elon bought it for $44B because he’s that smart.
I genuinely think he’s just a pawn in a bigger game in which some powers wanted twitter gone.
Brainless but sounds like a competent leader. Has all the qualities the Illuminati are looking for when appointing a new drone.
Why gone? I understood that the Saudi government just wanted to de-anonymize it (i.e be informed about the authors of any critical tweets).
Like that guy who has been condemned to death for a critical tweet to his… 8 followers.
I bet that’s happening right now.
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He hasn’t stopped a lot of folks, including all the shitty ones that would normally be banned. Hell, he unbanned them in many cases (i.e. Trump.) With Blue he gave them a way to be all the top responses in comments no matter how shitty their take is. Making the feed useless can be just as bad (if not worse) then censoring it.
No. He may be influenced by others, but it’s clear his ego is just that enormous and that his emotional immaturity makes him do stupid shit impulsively.
Which makes him perfect for manipulation.
Even if he was ‘manipulated’ he would be the same person regardless if he wasn’t. He is clearly a self-serving person with ego problems. There are no billionaires that aren’t fucked up people.
Oh for sure! But a stupid person may do stupid things on their own, and more stupid things when manipulated.
How are you defining worth? It’s value was probably in the 20Bs and it’s market value was well in the 30Bs. By value I am saying a world where owners just dumped all their shares until they were no longer owners, by market value I mean what another entity might pay to buyout twitter.
Didn’t Elon have the opportunity to end world hunger for 8 billion dollars a couple years ago?
Almost. He said that if anyone could present a plan on how to end world hunger for $6B, he’d sell Tesla stock to pay for it.
The U.N. publicly presented a plan on how they’d use that $6B, but it fell way short of that goal. Which isn’t surprising, since they never claimed they could solve world hunger permanently for $6B. Musk’s challenge was rhetorical because the bar was impossibly high. He was really just trying to make the point that he does not have the money to truly end world hunger.
The U.N.'s plan for that $6B would “feed 42 million people for one year, and avert the risk of famine”. That’s nothing to sneeze at, obviously, but it’s not a permanent solution.
Friendly reminder, for context, that the U.S. military budget is $842B. For one year.
As much as I dislike Musk, I think your argument is a bit of a straw man. He responded to something or someone saying it was possible for $6bn. They stopped responding after Musk said “open books for accounting” or something. The UN shouldn’t have responded at all since it wasn’t feasible
I still think it’s interesting information, and feeding 42 million people for a year is a better deal than funneling that money to people like musk or the DoD.
For that to be true, it would have needed to be worth $44B in the first place, which it absolutely was not. But there is no doubt that his mismanagement has tanked the value of the investment. He’s a narcissist so never see it that way, but the whole rest of the world knows that.
As a business? Probably not worth that valuation. As a propaganda machine to be able to influence a decent percentage of the population? I think it was.
Only because larger media outlets use it as “news”
Twitter has always been one of the smaller “social media” giants
I think he realized it wasn’t worth what they claimed but he couldn’t back out of the deal.
AFAIK he had to be sued into buying it once he tried to weasel out of the deal. So it wasn’t for lack of trying definitely 😂😂😂
There was a clause in the contract that said if he backed out he would have to pay $1 billion. Who knew that would actually have saved him way more to exercise that clause.
This is the quote:
“I don’t see any scenario where they’re responsible for less than 10% of the value destruction, so around $4 billion.”
In my head, he is comparing the minimum size of ADLs value reduction to be 10% or 4 billion. 10% of 44 billion is 4,4 billion. In this comment he is not saying anything about the current value except that 10% of 44 is around 4.
How else can you read it?
He’s saying that 10% of the value reduction is 4 billion so the total value reduction is 40 billion (of the 44 billion he bought it for).
But you’re right, he probably meant it like you read it and just failed to express himself properly.
Are you saying that real life “Tony Stark genius, billionaire” is a bit thick and incapable of expressing his thoughts coherently?
I’m shocked I tell you. Shocked…
Don’t forget philantropist
You can read it as “being responsible for 10% of the [total] value destruction, equal to $4B”.
So if they’re responsible for 10% of the total value loss, and that’s equivalent to $4B, then 100% of the total value lost would be $40B.
Otherwise you would say “they’re responsible for destroying 10% of the value”.
Right. So it’s a Schroedinger’s quote…😑
But thanks for pointing out what was obvious for others
I think you replied to the wrong comment.
Imagine having so much wealth that he can walk away from his utter failure at Xitter and remain completely unaffected. For him, this is like some side-hustle vanity project a bored trophy wife runs.
Losing 40b is a pretty big deal even for Musk to be fair. It’d be more like a bored housewife remortgaging the house to pay for their vanity project.
I mean not really, he knows he’ll always have a roof over his head, food on his table, doctors when he’s ill, it is a rather big deal but that doesn’t really affect his daily life in any significant way.
He’ll still be able to afford anything he may ever want, what he really lost is financial power and social respect.
In short I think it’s more like a bored housewife getting thrown out from the homeowners association.
He’ll still be able to afford anything he may ever want, what he really lost is financial power and social respect.
That’s like the worst for a person like Musk.
Exactly, a bunch of made up problems in his own head is the worst that can happen to him
Can this fuck buy russia and fox “news”?
Would you like some making fuck, berzer ker!
My love for you is like a truck, berserker
When you have a net worth measured in the billions of dollars, it’s genuinely impressive to be able to lose money. With that kind of sum behind your name, you could just do nothing and out-earn most people on the planet with just interest alone. To actually be able to lose money? Now that takes work!
Since Elon is just flushing money down the toilet do you think he might do me a solid and slice me off like 50k? Brah, that’s like if I dropped a penny on you from my last paycheck, right? I ain’t even getting greedy.
Like he could do that for 800,000 people and it would just be buying twitter, right?
With $40 billion you could give a random person $1 million today. Then give another person $1 million the next day. And so on, for 100 years.
And you’d still have a private jet, a bunch of mansions, a fleet of luxury cars, and a bunch of yachts.
It’s completely bizarre that a billionaire that’s so desperate to be popular doesn’t just give money to people. They don’t want to give up the power that wealth gives them and so try to trick people into liking them.
I’m assuming he could still be accruing wealth if he did that.
Assuming he made at least 5% or so per year on investment income, that would be 2 billion, and if you assume a 20% tax rate on that, it would be 1.6 billion, still more than 365 million it would take to give away one million every day.
And so if he could live on less than ~1.2 billion per year, he’d still be gaining wealth…
let that sink in.
No tears shed here. The people who built Twitter got a nice payout when they absolutely robbed Elon Musk in that deal. Anyone who chose to stay on the Elon train after his first weeks at the helm gets no sympathy from me.
Anyone who chose to stay on the Elon train after his first weeks at the helm gets no sympathy from me.
Except for the green card holders whose residency in the US was literally held hostage by Elon.
Pretty sure they were held hostage by the US government policy of getting deported if they lose their job.
Xitter was just a vessel on which that was presented.
Okay yeah one tear for them and the special hell they are in.
A lot of people say this, but there seems to be almost zero effort being put into resolving many of the systemic issues with the US visa system.
As a British person in tech, I’d love to work in the US for a year or two, but I have zero intention of dealing with the shitshow that is visa slavery in big tech, and how the visa system is lop-sided to deal with 2-3 countries and a handful of companies over others. In the UK, it’s much simpler to offer visas to Americans, and even mid-sized companies can sponsor visas.
Facts.
Elon tried so hard to back down from that deal. I’m not sure why it took actually signing that deal to realize he had been hosed.
If I was an executive at twitter, I would have absolutely done everything possible to get Elon to pay that $44 billion.
Elon: Fuck you Twitter!
Twitter: Fuck yourself, Elon!
Elon: Oh yeah? Maybe I’ll just BUY you.
Twitter: Ha! No you can’t….
Elon: No? Watch this!
Twitter: Gotcha, dipshit.
Elon: What? Wait no!
Twitter: Ahem… judge?
Judge: They got you, dipshit.
Elon: (unbans Trump) Nyah-Nyah!
Twitter: Ahahahaha (all the way to the bank)
Elon: Everyone see this? This is the ADL’s fault!
They robbed Elon in the deal? They accepted his deal. He robbed himself!
The only people there that get sympathy from me are the people trapped there on work visas if they want to legally remain in the USA.
The rest are either shit workers that can’t make the cut elsewhere, or bought into the Elon hype and are a lost cause.
I wouldn’t normally trust his math but he might have gotten this one right
