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I'd like to give a little background. This isn't intended in defense of the move, I share the general discomfort with the change

X.com, a payments company, was Musk's second company formed in 1999. In March 2000 PayPal was formed by the merger X.com with Thiel and Levchin's Continuity. Musk was the initial CEO, but by September 2000 the board replaced Musk with Thiel while Musk was on vacation to Australia. October 2002, eBay purchased PayPal for US$1.5 billion

Musk repurchased the X.com domain from PayPal in 2017

In October 2022, Musk said he will execute the X product plan "with some improvements" which will make Twitter "the most valuable financial institution in the world"

Other notes:

- Musk is a fan of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin

- Starlink is an independent internet backbone that can be access from anywhere on earth

- Starlink plans to separate from SpaceX and IPO. Funds from the IPO is how SpaceX plans to pay for the Mars project



>opposed to censorship

He's not or rather he's in favor of being able to say anything he wants and shutting up anyone who says what he doesn't like (such as his jet's location or anything he views as woke).


He's opposed to censorship by others, but in favour of censorship by him.

Actually, he's also fine with government censorship as long as they're not censoring him or people he likes. Twitter obeying government censorship requests have gone way up since he took over.


Do you have a source for "Twitter obeying government censorship requests have gone way up since he took over"?


Two specific cases I've heard of:

Twitter honoring censorship requests from the Indian government has gone up from 20% to 90%:

* https://theintercept.com/2023/03/28/twitter-modi-india-punja...

* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/05/twitter-accuse...

Musk defended censorship of the Turkish opposition saying he "had no choice". Jimmy Wales disagreed:

* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/05/musk-defends-ena...




It's the GOP mantra: "rules for thee, not for me" - makes complete sense since he's been "unshackled".


Musk is absolutely not anti censorship. He's proudly removed views he disagrees with and fulfilled government requests to remove tweets (which is about as definitionally censorship as you can be.)


> but by September 2000 the board replaced Musk with Thiel while Musk was on vacation to Australia

These kinds of stuff always surprise me, like are you so scared of the CEO that you can only replace them on vacation?


The source of this seem to be a book about Elon, according to Wikipedia atleast, there might be an other side to this story


Maybe it's hard to meet discreetly with leadership + investors in a pre-zoom era.




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