The Muskbrat tells advertisers to "Go fuck yourselves"

[thewayne]

He literally said this, on camera, in front of a live audience, in an interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit.

The event in question: ''On November 15, Musk replied, "You have said the actual truth" to an X post that said Jewish communities are "pushing hatred against whites."

Many major advertisers immediately suspended advertising on the platform or flat-out cancelled contracts due to this on-going shit by the head shit-gibbon.

In the Ars article, he goes on to say "he regretted making the post that kicked off the advertiser boycott. "I should in retrospect not have replied to that one person and should have written in greater length what I meant," Musk reportedly said. "But those clarifications were ignored by the media and essentially I handed a loaded gun to those who hate me and arguably to those who are antisemitic. And for that I'm quite sorry, that was not my intention."

Musk also called it "one of the most foolish—if not the most foolish—thing I've done on the platform."

Well, yeah. We know you're an idiot. You're embracing Nazis, Pizzagate apparently, and you're not doing much to deny or shut down such trolls. And you're wondering why advertisers are fleeing your site?

I appreciate what he's done with SpaceX, it has truly revolutionized space flight, though the concept of colonizing Mars is really idiotic. The only thing that impresses me about Tesla is the nation-wide charging network, the build quality of their cars has massively plummeted. And the fact that he kicked out the guys who invented the car from the corporation just plain sucks. But that's the kind of asshole that he is. He thinks because he was born with a gold spoon in his mouth that he's brilliant. The problem is, he's not as smart as he thinks he is and doesn't appreciate how much privilege his money has brought him, especially that his starting money came from daddy's opal mine in South Africa.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/elon-musk-on-x-antisemitism-controversy-dont-advertise-go-f-yourself/

Comments

[disneydream06]

I hope they keep leaving and don't come back. :)
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

XTwitter has been in a death spiral for months, it's just been a question of time.  If he'd managed to relinquish control of it and stopped this 'freedom absolutist' BS, it could have been a different story.  But he has to be the smartest man in the room.

[disneydream06]

I do like to scroll through my feed, but it wouldn't kill me if it went away.
I already ignore FB for the most part. LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[silveradept]

Regarding him, everyone seems to believe that he's trying to run these businesses as businesses, with the idea of making money and profit with them, and just about every time I run into him and what he says in public and private, I suspect he sees his businesses as vanity projects, and if they happen to make money, that's great, but their real task is to give him a platform to say what he wants and for people who don't know any better to flatter his ego and fawn over how brilliant he thinks he is.

[thewayne]

Having lunch with my wife today, she said she saw someone developed a formula that showed that 'if you were to destroy Twitter, this is how you'd do it', and Musk is following that exactly.  But WTH is his end game?  He is personally losing a bucket of money on it, not to mention making a fool of himself and banking BOD's are going to be a bit more hesitant to do business with him, i.e. higher interest rates on future projects.  It just doesn't make sense.

[silveradept]

I wouldn't be surprised if the end game is that he's regularly selling the more important thing: data. Because there's a lot of that available and he can let that go anywhere he wants to whomever wants to pay for it. Eventually, the only users he will have are the people who love Twitter as a much less obviously fascist Truth Social, but that's clearly on a long spiral down.

[thewayne]

The interesting thing is that with "Truth" Social also being in somewhat dire financial straits, we could see both sites vanishing from the social media landscape!

[silveradept]

Certainly possible, and then they'll likely be Bluesky's problem, and then we'll have started the cycle completely over again.

[thewayne]

Bluesky and Threads.  Mastedon, while viable, still seems somewhat nascent and niche.

[silveradept]

Mastodon, much like Dreamwidth, is unlikely to ever hit it Big, but it will do perfectly fine siphoning off some people from the other places every time they blow up. And there will be plenty of things blowing up.