Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter may soon go through

Ag3ma

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Considering how frequently I've been called a Marxist Fascist on twitter I actually just doubt they know what a Fascist actually is. To them they're just words that mean "The bad guys" without knowing anything about the philosophy or theory around them.
We cannot understimate the time and effort that right-wingers have put into arguing that fascism is left-wing.

I think the very quick summary is that right wingers like capitalism and individualism, therefore anything that's totalitarian / non-capitalist is left-wing, therefore, when you think about it (don't bother), there's no real difference between Marxism and fascism. Of course, the obvious issue is that the right wing is not actually about capitalism and individualism, that's just a phase it's been going through recently. As we see from the rising populist right, which seems to be distinctly lukewarm on both.
 
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ralfy

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Twitter was already known to be much lower than it was valued when it was purchased because it lost money almost every year. The ones who overvalued it were Wall Street banks, and most of the former owners were eager to sell because of that.

Meanwhile, the intention is to turn the platform into X, which involves not social media but commerce, trading, and audio and video.

Facebook has been doing similar via Meta.

Finally, as one business magazine pointed out around three years ago, not enough money will come from advertising, so subscription, retail, B2B, and even charging for use will come into play. That's why companies like Reddit also started charging third parties for accessing their databases.
 

Ag3ma

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Twitter was already known to be much lower than it was valued when it was purchased because it lost money almost every year. The ones who overvalued it were Wall Street banks, and most of the former owners were eager to sell because of that.
Not quite. Twitter's market cap pre-covid was about $35 billion. During covid, the shares of pretty much all tech companies soared as lockdowns put people on their computers and phones more. Musk, silly sod that he is, put his offer in during this high period, hence $44 billion. Eventually when the covid tech stock boost declined, it drifted back down towards it's pre-covid range, <$40 billion. So Twitter was overvalued for the price Musk paid for it, but it wasn't really to do with its annual profit/loss. It's value ~$35-40 billion seems defensible enough given its size, performance and future prospects.
 
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Ag3ma

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So, apparently Musk has got in a spot of bother over this.

There's a bit of a controversy over this because the shareholders agreed to the package, but the judge decided that the board were not honest with the shareholders and that a lot of the so-called "independent" voices on the package turned out to be rather more close to Musk than advertised.

In response, Musk has threatened to reincorporate Tesla in Texas, which (presumably) has a law that allows him to cheat and stiff people more easily.
 

BrawlMan

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So, apparently Musk has got in a spot of bother over this.

There's a bit of a controversy over this because the shareholders agreed to the package, but the judge decided that the board were not honest with the shareholders and that a lot of the so-called "independent" voices on the package turned out to be rather more close to Musk than advertised.

In response, Musk has threatened to reincorporate Tesla in Texas, which (presumably) has a law that allows him to cheat and stiff people more easily.
Go ahead Musk; do it. Make my day. Be a ***** and make that decision.
 

Thaluikhain

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So, apparently Musk has got in a spot of bother over this.
Out of interest, when was the last time Musk has said or done something that hasn't gotten him into a spot of bother?

Of the top of my head...that time he got his company to make a weird outfit for Grimes?
 

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Ag3ma

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Fuck Elon.
To be fair, this looks more like a typical problem that tech companies have, which is a general inability to control who uses their platforms.

By default users tend to mean money, so they tend to be undiscerning about new customers signing up, and then very slow to kick them off in case of complaints and other issues.

Where tech companies have tended to move against fake accounts, again this tends to represent their bottom lines. Facebook, I think, didn't much like fake accounts or accounts under fake names because they interfered with FB's attempt to model real networks and individuals. Musk went after bots on Twitter because a) the accusation was a way to bring the price down before he bought it and b) he's upset that other companies are making money off the site by data scraping.
 

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But you can't put it through a car wash, because it shorts out
It's even stupider. Instead of using stainless steel, Musk demanded his company make their own stainless steel. This would not have happened if he just used the products already available and would have save him so much money
 
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Dirty Hipsters

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It's even stupider. Instead of using stainless steel, Musk demanded his company make their own stainless steel. This would not have happened if he just used the products already available and would have save him so much money
It still would have happened, stainless steel isn't rust proof. It probably would have happened slower though.
 
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Dirty Hipsters

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Has a sci-fi dystopian fiction ever explored a potential future where corporations and CEOs have their own cults/religions to fight and defend any battles for them? Fueled to extremes by a functionally-disabled defunded state who can't and won't step in?

Sounds like someone doesn't know the difference between rust and patina.

Rust is always destructive and actively eats away at metal. A vehicle that is rusting is being actively damaged. A patina is a discoloration caused by oxidation through chemical stabilization which causes ferric oxide reactions to become passive, thus protecting the metal from rust. Patina is a form of oxidization so it is similar to rust, except that it is self-limiting.

From what I've heard the cyber trucks aren't developing a patina (which could be kind of cool), they are in fact rusting. This is going to be seriously bad for them, especially anywhere near the ocean, anywhere humid, and anywhere that salts its roads during winter. So...I guess the only place where a cyber truck isn't actively being destroyed is the desert.

Every cyber truck owner should probably coat their entire truck in naval jelly (which is a rust remover that also forces a dark gray/black patina to reduce further rusting).
 

The Rogue Wolf

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Has a sci-fi dystopian fiction ever explored a potential future where corporations and CEOs have their own cults/religions to fight and defend any battles for them? Fueled to extremes by a functionally-disabled defunded state who can't and won't step in?

As someone who has lost no less than three cars to rust-related problems, this amount of copium should be bottled and used to launch the next SpaceX rocket.
 

Gergar12

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This is why you don't buy the first model, a game on release, the first brain chip. I have a Model Y, and it doesn't have this issue. It has updates to software, but no non-antirust.

There is a medium point where you aren't a tester(cough Apple Vision) with high prices, and low quality, and where you aren't late to the game where it doesn't matter like if I brought Destiny 2 right now or Monster Hunter Hunter World now great I have fewer people to play it with and servers are about to be cut for the next thing.

And yes there are ways to counter this like Starfield, it had bugs late in the game, and had a massive marketing & player fetish pressure campaign until it was realized to be only better than Fallout 4 but not Skyrim SE level. And yes I fell for it, I brought it later after a few weeks, and then the negative reviews came.

Edit: Grammar.