Elon Musk has said and done a lot of weird and outrageous things during his tenure as the owner of Twitter (now X), but we may have just seen the weirdest and most outrageous.
His main point is that he's not the one killing Twitter, it's advertisers (being ultimately under the control of the governments of the world). They're killing it because there's a vested interest in being able to control the narrative, and he's not folding.
Sometimes people do dumb shit. There doesn’t have to be a clever hidden motive. A rich man with a visible personality disorder is not putting on an act or carrying out a strategy. Sometimes, people are just assholes. Sometimes those assholes should know better… but don’t.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them.
If I were to attribute malice to something that is obviously sheer stupidity, I'd almost believe he's deliberately doing outrageous shit to kill off the website. I honestly wouldn't lose sleep at night if he succeeds, since it was already a shithole before he took over.
"Crafting a narrative" is too nice of a description for the pissy tantrum he's throwing. But he has enough chumps on his side to try to spin it as a corageous last stand.
He's a narcissist surrounded by yes-men, he might genuinely believe that his decisions didn't burn his $44B investment to ashes because as far as he's concerned, that would be impossible.
There's something he said in that interview that felt like a hint about why he's behaving like he doesn't give a damn anymore.
"For a while there I was like really getting demotivated and losing sleep over the sort of the threat of AI danger and then I finally sort of became fatalistic about it and said well even if I knew annihilation was certain would I choose to be alive at that time or not and I said I probably would have choose to be alive at that time because it's the most interesting thing. Even if there was nothing I could do about it. So then, you know, then basically sort of a fatalistic resignation help me sleep at night because I was having trouble sleeping at night because of AI danger."
A billionaire who believes that we're all probably doomed within the next decade and has accepted it so he can sleep at night.
Maybe explains a lot about his behaviour? If you know this all ends in the next few years, why not just try crazy shit.
This seems far more likely than an impending Skynet doomsday. We didn't even get those perfect self-driving cars he kept promising, how is AI going to really take over/destroy everything?
The way people keep trying to find secret schemes and reasons for his unhinged behavior feels like a trace of belief that the wealthy really are superior, and they can't just act stupid and crazy.
Not to mention, of course he'd be hyping ai now that his new toy has lost its luster. He's already thinking about x's migration to an AI company as his next grift.
If he had to worry about simple things in life like food, shelter and paying the rent perhaps he'd be a bit more grounded in what's important in life and not lose sleep over a potential problem and stop a life equivalent of shitposting on humanity. Perhaps being a billionaire should be seen as a type of mental health issue.
let's tax income above say $1M per year at 100% for his own good.
That was my first thought when I was watching a clip of him declaring it was going to be the advertiser boycott that killed Twitter. It was just like Trump talking about the elections being rigged before the election - he was setting up his way to shift the blame for why he lost.
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