Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

First up, he's being sued by upwards of $200,000,000 by former executives of Twitter. The former CEO, CFO, Chief Legal Officer, and General Counsel allege they are owed wages, health insurance premiums, etc. for unjust termination. Musk sacked them before they could resign when he took over, stating gross negligence, etc., then spent a year trying to get employees to prove said negligence and incompetence. They couldn't. Well, now they're back for blood, and they're likely to get it.

He's showing his true colors as an asshole billionaire: don't pay your bills. And he has multiple suits against him. I really hope they start getting some really nasty punitive damages that he begins feeling the hurt that he's putting on others, and that others flat-out stop doing business with him. Much like a certain former president.

The thing that's really going to hurt him in his defense for this suit is that he confided to his biographer that he did this on purpose, just to save money. That's definitely going to bite him in the butt in court.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/elon-musk-sued-by-former-twitter-ceo-over-refusal-to-pay-57m-severance/


In Tesla news, an eco-activism/terrorism group, for want of a better name, burned down a high-voltage electrical tower that powered the Tesla plant outside of Berlin, taking out its power and causing it to shut down an hour or so before the morning shift today. They were protesting the plant's excessive water pollution.

When the Muskbrat was stumping to open the factory, he said that it would internally process the waste so that the water discharge would be clean. Guess what! HE LIED! It's producing run-off six times higher of phosphorous and nitrogen than allowed, and the processing plant can't handle it! So much for properly handling it in-house. And the locals aren't happy.

Now he wants to expand the plant to produce a million cars annually, which will mean cutting down a lot of old-growth trees, and increasing waste output. You can imagine how popular that is with the locals.

Germany is pretty strict with its environmental laws, he's going to have to clean up his act. I don't approve of burning down power towers, but it definitely did bring attention to the pollution that Elon is putting out.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/musk-accused-polluting-german-rivers-132031339.html

All of these suits are just for failure to pay for services rendered or contracts in place. In several cases, the suits have been withdrawn by the plaintiff, potentially indicating a settlement.

Absolutely ridiculous. It also details the evictions.

I'd love to see these companies get court approval to file liens against other Muskbrat properties, like Tesla and SpaceX factories and lands.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/musks-unpaid-bills-dozens-of-lawsuits-try-to-force-twitter-aka-x-to-pay-up/

The Muskbro bought the company in October 2022. Many Twitter employees stayed on for the expected and promised annual bonus that was normally paid out in the first quarter of the year, bypassing job offers for new and better positions.

Care to guess whether or not the bonus was paid?

A class action lawsuit has been filed for non-payment, saying over $5,000,000 is owed to current and former employees.

In other news of the Twitterverse, employees of a Denver-area office building - I think I drove past it once or twice - were EVICTED for rent non-payment. The landlord had access to a slush fund and when rent wasn't paid they accessed it, which activated a legal requirement that Twitter replenish the slush fund. They did not, and the landlord began eviction proceedings, which culminated in the building being vacated earlier this month.

According to the Ars article linked below, there are TWENTY lawsuits against the Mustbrat for nonpayment of various services, including the lease on the HQ in San Fran.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/musk-owned-twitter-stiffed-employees-on-promised-bonuses-class-action-says/

Mister "Free Speech Absolutist" sure likes banning people.

There's some interesting history here. Twitter - not the Muskbrat - posted a policy saying that you can't dox people, nor post real-time location information about third-parties. If you want to post real-time location information about yourself, feel free and go wild. The location information is in response to a Florida university student by the name of Sweeney who ran a Twitter account called (at)ElonJet which posted real-time information whenever Elon's private jet was in the air.

Now, Sweeney wasn't spying on Elon. He was using publicly-available transponder information that was available on the web. He wrote a bot that scraped the transponder information and posted it on Twitter whenever it changed. He does the same for Bill Gates, Air Force One, and a few other prominent individuals. He also posts it to Instagram and other social media sites. He also uses similar tech to post the locations of business mogul' super yachts.

This infuriates Elon. "IT'S A THREAT TO MY PERSONAL SECURITY!" This reached a head earlier this week in LA when some loon jumped on the hood of the car transporting his child, X-13 Rocket Plane, or whatever its name is, and he blames Sweeney. Next day the Twitter ban goes through and ALL of Sweeney's tracking accounts go dead. AND Sweeney's personal accounts also go dead. And the Muskbrat says he's going to sue Sweeney. For taking publicly-available information and rebroadcasting it? That should go well.

Too much caffeine, Space Karen?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/musk-bans-live-location-sharing-says-hell-sue-creator-of-plane-tracking-bot/


Last night, some news reporters saw their Twitter accounts go dead. They were from the Washington Post, CNN, and the New York Times. No warning or notice, apparently Elon thinks that posting a link to a different social media platform's ElonJet tracker to Twitter is doxxing him.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/musk-suspends-nyt-and-wapo-reporters-from-twitter-claims-they-doxxed-him/


If someone wants to take Elon out and is serious about it, ElonJet is probably not going to be a major tool that they would use.

Last week, The World's Richest Man, which I guess makes him think that he must also be the world's smartest man, which he clearly isn't based on his behavior, started tweeting smack about Twitter and the amount of spam bots on the site.

There's a problem with this. There is a specific clause in the purchase agreement that he will not disparage the company while trying to purchase it. Something that he has done repeatedly. He already has one shareholder lawsuit against him for manipulating the stock price, plus an FTC investigation against him. The man is a moron, or thinks that his wealth makes him immune to investigations and lawsuits.

Since he announced his intention to buy Twitter, the world economy has taken a bit of a nose-dive, and the stocks of Twitter and Tesla have tanked. Both are worth a lot less. But he has a signed agreement to buy Twitter at $54 per share. A lot of people are wondering if he actually has the backing to conclude the deal at this point, what with the stock price reduction of Tesla, which is one of Elon's major sources of wealth. People are also wondering if he even wants to go through with it at this point, and whether his derision of Twitter is a way of announcing he wants out, hoping THEY will cancel the deal, because of the cancellation clause. If the deal fails to be consummated, the side which fails pays the other a cool $1 billion. That's supposed to be a solid inducement to get the job done, which Twitter's board wants to see.

Elon? Who knows what he wants.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/05/twitter-board-tells-elon-musk-we-will-not-alter-the-deal/

You can't talk about Elon buying Twitter without talking about the legal definition of Free Speech in the USA. There's two parts to that. Quoting an Ars Technica article linked below: "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." The wording prevents the government from restricting speech, but courts have ruled that it does not prevent private companies from doing so.

And that is a critical point. People screamed bloody blue murder when Twitter perma-banned Trump and a number of others for violating THEIR RULES against hate speech a few years ago, saying that Twitter was violating their free speech. Twitter is not the U.S. Government, and at that time, was a corporation that was publicly traded on the U.S. Stock exchange. You could buy shares in it if you had the cash.

Quoting again from the Ars article, ...judges have ruled that private companies like Twitter have a First Amendment right to moderate content. Both Florida and Texas tried to enact laws that would force social networks like Twitter and Facebook to scale back their content moderation. Judges blocked both state laws from taking effect, ruling that the laws violate the companies' First Amendment rights to moderate their platforms.

President Trump, at that time, had the world's bully pulpit. He could call a press conference at any time and get world-wide media coverage. There was no way his Freedumb of Speech was being infringed, one company had taken away one of his toys because he wasn't following their rules in the way he was playing with it.

That was all.

Twitter – BM (Before Musk) – has a Board of Directors. They must answer to their shareholders and provide a return for their shareholder's investments. They must also play by the rules set forth by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in their public talking about the state of Twitter and any financial moves that they make: anything that they say that might affect Twitter's stock price must be very carefully reviewed before being uttered. Any CEO or Board member of any corporation knows about this and plays by these rules, it's part of the game.

Elon doesn't like this. He hates the SEC. He loves to use Twitter BM to broadcast to his millions of followers the least little thought that crosses his mind. He loves to make jokes about 420 – pot references, he tweets while stoned. He is being sued by investors for tweeting about Tesla in such a way that caused it to lose money. He sued the SEC for a tweet that caused chaos in Tesla's valuation, and just lost that lawsuit because a settlement he previously had with them forced him to have his tweets pre-authorized by his attorneys to make sure they weren't further violating SEC rules..

Basically because he's the richest man on the planet, he doesn't want to play by the rules that every other businessman in the country has to play by.

Boo and hoo.

Hey! I revitalized the electric car industry and launch rocket ships! Fuck the SEC!

Nope, it doesn't work that way, boyo.

So now he's trying to buy Twitter and take it private.

The day after the deal was announced – not finalized, mind you – just announced, lots of things happened.

There's a billion dollar payment in the deal that if Musk doesn't succeed that he's got to pay to Twitter for mucking around with the company and failing to buy them. A break-up payment.

There's the resignation of core programmers quit along with a lot of other people

There's the deletion of a lot of users who left Twitter in search of other similar messaging platforms like Mastedon. I have two Twitter accounts, I have not yet decided what I'm going to do with them.

Today there was the revelation that Twitter has inflated the number of followers for years

One problem that Twitter has had for ages is that "the market" thinks that it should have been much more profitable than it is, as social media companies go, considering how many users it has. They just haven't been able to, or interested in, monetizing that. But is this going to be a driving interest of Elon's?

The deal is not final. It has to be approved by shareholders and regulators, i.e the SEC/FTC probably. Tesla shareholders aren't too keen on this either as this spreads Elon across yet another company, and there's just so much Elon that you can spread around. How much attention can he spare?

Tesla lost over $1,000,000,000 in stock value the day that the Twitter acquisition was announced. Stockholders of Tesla are probably not too happy about that!

I read a reporter's comment who interviewed the CEO of Gab, a right-wing version of Twitter, who said he spent all his day working on privacy and free speech policies for his platform. Elon's big interests are SpaceX and Tesla, he also has his neuro-link company and the Boring Company and his solar company and I don't know what else going on. He won't have a Board of Directors after he takes Twitter private, though he'll still have department managers.

Elon says that he wants to maximize free speech, and the follower numbers of some right-wing nutters like MTG surged big-time. Some are saying that he should restore Trump's account, even though Trump has said in public that he doesn't want his Twitter account back. That's probably because his own platform, Truth Central, or Truth Social, or Trub Whatever, which he cannot remember the name of and has only posted to twice, is so much better.

I'm not sure how good of a background Musk has in international law when it comes to how other countries regulate free speech. For example, in Thailand if you talk smack about the Royal Family, you're in big trouble.

"Maximize free speech". Interesting idea, but he'll still have to regulate it within the parameters of each country, which is what Twitter is doing right now. No talking about Nazis in Germany, etc. Twitter BM kicked people off their service for making death threats and spreading misinformation that was provably wrong. If you look at Truth Social, Gab, and other supposed bastions of free speech, you'll find that you will get banned for talking smack about the platform or certain key people, or for making death threats, or certain other types of speech. Platforms are allowed to moderate their content, and do.

Will you be able to make death threats on the new Twitter after Elon takes over, assuming the deal goes through? Is that valid free speech? Will you be able to call Elon "Pedo Guy", as he called one of the Thailand cave rescuers on Twitter after the guy disparaged Elon's offer to build a mini-submarine to rescue the kids and the diver shot down the idea? Elon being the brilliant and experienced cave diver that he is. Oh, wait. He isn't a brilliant and experienced cave diver.

Interesting times ahead.

No, I don't think Musk taking Twitter private is a good thing for Twitter. I think it will turn into a giant cesspool and ultimately I'll leave it because the content that I like will vanish. I appreciate the fact that he kickstarted the electric car revolution and has done amazing things for the space industry, but otherwise, I really don't think much of him as a human being.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/04/elon-musk-twitters-next-owner-provides-his-definition-of-free-speech/

I don't know how to embed a Twitter video directly, so you have to click on the link. You don't need a Twitter account to view it.

It's quite brilliant, and takes place after Duncan's "accident".

https://twitter.com/anticapitalizm/status/1239300682882134017

Pull up the Twitter hashtag feed for #WarOnChristmas. Author Sam Sykes posted "I have but one request this Christmas, guys. Take the #WarOnChristmas hashtag and fill it with accounts of the horrors of battling elves across snowy fields and firing anti-aircraft missiles at sleds streaking overhead." John Kovlic retweeted it.

For example: "My father was never the same after his service in the Kringle Korps. The smell of pine, the jingle of sleigh bells...anything could set him off. One time he saw a Krampus in town, and we had to spend hours talking him down out of the chimney."