Elon Musk vows ‘thermonuclear lawsuit’ as advertisers flee X over antisemitism::Tesla founder threatens to take action against media watchdog ‘the split second court opens on Monday’

  • M500@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    What is wrong with him? I think he legit needs psychiatric help.

    Maybe the people who get this rich due so at the cost of their mental health. Maybe it’s not healthy for a single person to hold so much wealth.

    Deep down, does he know what he is doing is wrong? Is his Twitter behavior an expression of some negative feelings he can’t cope with?

    • Diplomjodler@feddit.de
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      8 months ago

      He’s more and more turning into Trump minus the dementia. In Germany we have the term “Cäsarenwahn”, for when someone loses touch with reality from having too much unchallenged power. Haven’t found any English equivalent so maybe it’s time for another loan word.

    • eronth@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I think he’s just stupid and never actually had to run a company. Make insane demands and people had to figure it out

    • dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de
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      8 months ago

      They get this way partly because they’re surrounded by yes men.

      To take an example of someone like Harvey Weinstein. They don’t typically come out of the gate asking people to get naked for a movie role.

      But they might first just be handsy with people and nobody says anything so it becomes normal, then they start caressing people and this becomes the new normal. Before you know it you’re fucking insane.

      To put it simply, people don’t normally notice incremental changes in people and over time these can become pretty outlandish.

      With Elon it’s that nobody ever tells him he’s wrong and before you know it you think you know everything.

      • Octavio@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I want him to get the help that he needs. Not because I sympathize with him to any degree (I don’t). But because I want him to stop ruining everything.

        • XTL@sopuli.xyz
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          8 months ago

          Well, maybe hold off until he’s killed the failwhale.

          For greater good.

      • antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        8 months ago

        Trying to explain one’s behaviour as a psychological issue isn’t automatically sympathy towards the person.

        Who is “we”?

    • Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      He’s always been a shit head like this. He just got rich enough that he thought he could get away with showing his true colors.

      The dude comes from a family of slave owners and was born with a silver spoon up his ass.

    • daltotron@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Maybe the people who get this rich due so at the cost of their mental health.

      It is not that power corrupts, but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Even the extremely rich tend to not wield power with such a kind of wild abandon as elon, they tend to offset as much responsibility as possible and ride the wave, because the level of delusional self-importance you need in order to believe yourself smarter than literally everyone under you is even too astounding to the leeches of society.

    • NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      What is wrong with him? I think he legit needs psychiatric help.

      He is a Narcissist. Yes, that is a medical condition. He is thoroughly unable to recognize other people as equal. They are mere nuisances.

    • 4lan@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      He is sinking the ship on purpose.

      Bankruptcy frees him from paying back the 44 billion he borrowed to buy Twitter.

      That is his only option.

      Stop underestimating him, just because he is evil does not mean he is dumb.

      • darkpanda@lemmy.ca
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        8 months ago

        How would that work? If X goes bankrupt, he’s still on the hook for buying it? He’s not the one going bankrupt, the business he bought would be. That would be like if I bought a car and crashed it and wrote it off. I still bought the car, I just drove it into a telephone pole. I still owe the money for the wreckage.

  • eluvatar@programming.dev
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    8 months ago

    This is one of those cases where even if he wins he loses. Who would want to sell ads anymore?

  • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Tesla founder

    Ok look The Independent, I know that the company says he’s a founder and Wikipedia lists him as a founder, but he’s not. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded the company almost a full year before Musk had anything to do with it. He had to sue them to add his name to the list officially.

    • Lianodel@ttrpg.network
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      8 months ago

      Wikipedia lists him as a founder

      Does it? I expected better of Wikipedia, so I checked, and both Musk’s page and Tesla’s avoid simply listing him as a founder by explaining the situation, i.e., that he was an early investor. Even the sidebar for Tesla, Inc. just links to a subsection rather than listing names.

      Just a note to add, addressing a related talking point that inevitably comes up:

      It’s a very common piece of misinformation that he was determined to be a founder in a court of law. That never happened. It was part of an agreement to avoid a lawsuit. It’s a lie that the relevant parties could all live with as part of a larger settlement.

      I like to ask Musk apologists, “Do you need to found a company to be that company’s founder, yes or no?” If they waffle or say “no,” there’s no point continuing in good faith, because they’re not serious people. It’s not hard to say “Okay, that’s a bit of a fib, he should be called an honorary founder, but blah blah blah…” But if they can’t even do that, then they aren’t operating based on reality.

      • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Only here:

        A lawsuit settlement agreed to by Eberhard and Tesla in September 2009 allows all five – Eberhard, Tarpenning, Wright, Musk, and Straubel – to call themselves co-founders.

        Which I agree is sort of showing the trick and explaining how it’s done all at once. But I wanted to give the headline writer a little bit of the benefit of the doubt that they actually looked it up somewhere other than on the Tesla website.

      • weew@lemmy.ca
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        8 months ago

        I will respond to this by asking “is registering the name of a company the only thing that counts when founding a company?”

        Because that’s what the original founders did. They registered the name. No patents, no designs, no engineering, no staff. They registered the name, then went searching for VC money.

        • Mike@lemmy.ml
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          8 months ago

          That’s a terrible argument. As if the idea and pitch aren’t relevant in any way. For a preschool example of this, check out Shark Tank. You might have heard of it?

          • Roboticide@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            No, it’s not a terrible argument. Anyone can have a pitch or idea. That does not mean it’s automatically a viable product/service or a viable business.

            It’s a valid question, how do we define “founder”? To play devil’s advocate, I’m curious if the people who think Musk didn’t co-found Tesla also agree Aaron Schwartz didn’t co-found Reddit. He joined later, after reddit was already incorporated by Hoffman and Ohanian.

            In business, “founder” is already an honorary title. It has no inherent power. Co-founders often ensure they get C-suite positions as a company grows, have stock/shares, or other legal powers, but none of those are guaranteed just by being a “founder”. So practically, there’s no difference between calling Musk a “co-founder” versus “honorary co-founder.” Let’s just focus on calling him a piece of shit for the very definitive and obvious things we can point to.

            • Mike@lemmy.ml
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              8 months ago

              If the pitch is made and a VC opts in but doesn’t negotiate a title, then they aren’t privvy to the title of co-founder only after the concept is proven sound. Either you’re a founder or you’re not.

              *edit to add visual

    • weew@lemmy.ca
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      8 months ago

      Ok, it sounds like you’re trying real hard to split hairs.

      Not just the company itself and Wikipedia say so, but legally, he is a founder. That was the outcome of the lawsuit.

      It’s true that the first 2 founders legally registered the corporate entity known as “Tesla Motors”. Then for the next year, they didn’t do jack shit involving anything automotive… they were just going around looking for investors.

      Musk was basically their first, and biggest, investor. They didn’t actually hire any engineers or, you know, actually start doing anything until Musk’s money came into play.

      • JohnDoe@lemmy.myserv.one
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        8 months ago

        The rule of law in a specific geographic area in a specific period of time isn’t nearly as important as the meaning conveyed which is misleading.

        Rather than missing the forest for the trees, why might he push for the title of founder? Why might some discredit his efforts and tactics in assuming the founder of title in specific contexts?

        He did not play a meaningful role in the beginning of the company and is not responsible for its success. Money was responsible, the two founders’ expertise was responsible, that specific person is not special enough for their contribution to matter much. Anyone can supply capital especially during the inflated economic conditions (of which we are suffering the consequences of now) and during the time where EV and technology at large was developed enough to allow such developments to take place.

        • OrteilGenou@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          It sounds like nobody played much of a role at all until ol’ moneybags showed up. Money talks, bullshit walks as they say

          • JohnDoe@lemmy.myserv.one
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            8 months ago

            I think it’s work that does the work, a tautology, I think using money as a proxy for work is a convenient hop and skip. When it comes down to a rigorous analysis (of the kind say a climate scientist does in a life-cycle assessment money is to vague a reason. What does it represent? Some amount of gold? Well, the US dollar is no longer pegged to gold à la Bretton Woods, how then does ‘money talk’?

        • weew@lemmy.ca
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          8 months ago

          He did not play a meaningful role in the beginning of the company and is not responsible for its success. Money was responsible

          You say that, but applies just as well to the first 2 founders.

          the two founders’ expertise was responsible

          What expertise? Seriously, tell me what they actually brought to the table aside from pitching their idea for a company and attracting venture capitalist money. They registered the name of a company and had ideas. Not expertise. They hired the expertise, with Musk’s money.

          Speaking of missing the forest for the trees, tell me this: Is an automotive company “founded” as soon as someone registers the name, or when they begin actual engineering efforts towards building an automobile?

          • I_dont_believe_it@lemmynsfw.com
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            8 months ago

            See I’d tend to think that founding a company has to be more than just registering a name. Like maybe that’s the dictionary definition, but it seems a bit weak if that’s it.

          • wildginger@lemmy.myserv.one
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            8 months ago

            Was elon choosing who was hired, and managing the initial company team?

            Cause if writing the title and coming up with the ideas doesnt count as founding, giving up some cash doesnt either. Thats just buying a company, not founding it.

            • weew@lemmy.ca
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              8 months ago

              Yes? That’s basically what the initial 5 cofounders/investors did. Start hiring people and managing the company. They basically formed the board of directors.

              I know you’re desperate to paint Musk in a bad light in any way possible, but how do you pretend that Musk just handed over cash and did nothing else while other people are calling him a micromanaging control freak?

          • foofy@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Did musk hire expertise? Or do the actual engineering?

            It sounds like your actual argument is that neither he nor they founded the company.

            I guess it just sprang into existence on its own…

          • JohnDoe@lemmy.myserv.one
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            8 months ago

            I was meaning to respond but I think other’s have. I have one of those 30+ min YouTube videos or similarly ridiculously long blog posts (and a longform article somewhere…) though I think you might not be interested so I’ll keep it to myself unless you are interested in a good faith argument (argument, root word is the latin argumentum, to make clear; prove), I would rather not waste your time or my breath if that isn’t the case.

      • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        This is the entire argument Musk made in court, and honestly I don’t think I care. Tarpenning and Eberhard are both engineers with actual inventions and software attributed to their direct design long before the idea of Tesla; Eberhard wrote the company’s mission statement and guiding principles, and the two did the market research to discover that an electric vehicle could be a high-end consumer product. At its core, before the battery technology and stators were invented (neither of which Musk contributed to), that’s what Tesla was.

        While it’s true that Musk led development on the Roadster, I think we’ve seen very publicly over the past year what his “development leadership” looks like and I’m not entirely convinced it’s a value-add. (Even before his disastrous year with Twitter, his checkered past leading Paypal—and being forced out for his poor leadership—would give a similar impression.) He didn’t come up with the battery tech or the stators. He didn’t contribute to a single patent in the early days of Tesla. In fact, that first design of the Roadster probably owed more to Lotus Motors than to Musk himself.

        It appears that he did with the Roadster, and the early years at Tesla, what he always does when leading product development: jump into an existing idea, make wild assertions and insistences, let the actual engineers figure out how to do it, and then justify a reason to exclude stuff when it turns out to be unfeasible. He did this demonstrably with SpaceX, Hyperloop, Boring Company, PayPal/Zip2, and now Twitter, and he’s done it demonstrably at Tesla with the Cybertruck, so I don’t know why it would be a surprise that he did it twenty years ago at Tesla too. He doesn’t invent things or lead teams, he just makes noise and bluster.

        Which just leaves the money. And would you credit a really loud bank with “founding” a company?

        I wouldn’t.

  • 13617@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    So much for the free market and the ability to choose 🙄🙄🙄🙄

    • HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      Musk is definitely the type to say “the customer is always right” when he’s the customer yet apparently didn’t realize that same thing applies to his customers.

      • don@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        Musk: The customer is always right!

        [Ad buyers stop buying ads]

        Musk: WAIT NO NOT LIKE THAT

  • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    This isn’t technology news… It’s business news, and Elon spam.

    Just look at the comment section how many comments are actually related to technology?

    Can we not put the bar on the floor?

  • HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    So he’s gonna sue his customers for no longer buying stuff from him? That’s it, I’m suing all of you for never buying any Marxism-Fennekinism merch!

    • ericbomb@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      He’s suing the company that brought attention to the nazi stuff.

      Just as insane, but slightly different!

      • zipzoopaboop@lemmynsfw.com
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        8 months ago

        The Nazi stuff he posted to a public platform with half a billion users where he personally has 160 million people watching his account, potentially being actively notified of his posts?

        • ericbomb@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          … yeah but they posted screen shots of the Nazi stuff next to advertisements from companies that don’t want to be associated with Nazi’s!

          So clearly he is the victim here as advertisers shouldn’t know what their stuff is next too! /s

    • MuuuaadDib@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      Maybe if you didn’t put all your merch in the left handed store we would know about it.

    • ohlaph@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      It seems pike he’s suing the watchdogs for reporting the situation which lead to the mass exodus.

    • 4lan@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. This is all a part of his plan to bankrupt the Twitter.

      He has to pretend he is trying to make the business profitable, while sinking the ship in the process.

      He owes more in interest than Twitter makes in profit.

      The company is worth less than a half of what it he bought it for. He can’t even sell it and break even, there would be a 20 billion dollar loss

      Yet again he is going to be bailed out on the back of the taxpayer. You and I

      • nicetomeetyouIMVEGAN@lemmings.world
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        8 months ago

        That’s just you, with intelligence, trying to explain what he, without intelligence, is doing. You’re projecting intelligence on him because he won capitalism, and Capitalism wants you to think it’s because of merit. It isn’t, he’s an idiot. Look at the name of his child… Do you think this is a person with foresight?

      • Kainsley@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by neglect, ignorance or incompetence

        • reksas@lemmings.world
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          8 months ago

          And what do you do when someone is actually doing something malicious?

          clarification edit: malicious people can easily pretend to be stupid and claim they have made a mistake when they do bad shit.

      • angrystego@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I agree with you. I think twitter was as good for progressives as it was for nazis and Elon and others couldn’t have that. The fact that we’re not discussing this on Twitter and not even on Reddit, but on this beautiful but obscure platform, showd it all works well for the nazis.

  • ikidd@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Do it, you coward. Bet you won’t because you’re a fraidy cat that listens to his entirely rational legal team.

    • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works
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      8 months ago

      Meanwhile Media Matters are absolutely salivating over the thought of what they can get in discovery. Never sue journalists unless you’re really comfortable giving them unfettered access to your server logs, internal communications, and much, much more.

  • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    Nothing to see here. He definitely isn’t suing them because he wants large advertisers like Dosney on the platform and to be able to say the worst shit imaginable at the same time. Clearly nothing to see, obviously. /s

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    “Thermonuclear” you mean the word you used during one of your (many) most embarrassing public failure moments when the glass shattered?