This is also why there’s a crowd who loves Musk and people like him. Lots of people regard polish as synonymous with fakeness and PR with deception.
I think Musk has lost his mind, not because he speaks frankly but because of what he says (and boosts / promotes).
I’m sure there are loads more business leaders and other high ranking people who entertain what many (including myself) would find to be awful social and political views but we don’t know it because they go through publicists and PR people. Musk just hangs his ass out there.
I like Musk on the whole and have a lot of respect for his engineering stuff with the cars and rockets at which I think he's very talented but really on social media he's a bit rubbish and seems to be losing it slightly.
I mean accusing advertisers who stop advertising of blackmailing him and saying he'll let Twitter/X go bust to show them what for is a bit bonkers.
Building a business around online ads is a race to the bottom as the younger generation does not buy what they're advertised but instead what's advertised by people they follow. Ad revenue was never enough for twitter, and people acting like they were doing any better under previous management are uninformed at best.
The userbase will exist (growing or otherwise) so long as the platform does. They don't care whether its profitable or not. If he wants to turn X into another wechat/wepay for US or a Line competitor for Japan, then ad revenue is a low priority.
An "even greater discount"? He offered something around 30-35% above market value shortly before social media stock prices crashed. There was no discount the first time around, he made an unnecessarily high offer with terrible timing. Even absent his mismanagement, it would have been a long and difficult road to turn Twitter into a company actually worth anything approaching $44bn.
As far as "buying a second time," he could potentially buy out his other investors at a discount if they're willing to sell to get away from the dumpster fire, but that doesn't magically free him from the (11 figure) chunk of the price tag he paid himself the first time around.
Had to change the channel. Must have been live. It was funny the first time, but he insisted on repeating it, and he sounded a little unhinged.
Seems like a certain lack of emotional development. I don't want Musk to be a polished corporate drone but the most interesting people express themselves in a more controlled manner. Something I haven't mastered but I try not to disconnect my brain and cut loose. It never ends wells.
For Steve Jobs' reputation, he seemed to have learned, at least publicly:
The similarity between Musk and Jobs is risk taking and bold product vision - set an impossible goal and work your people into the ground achieving it. Both men share lack of regard for anyone's feelings - huge narcissists, their way or the highway. It achieves the results but Musk has a particularly hard time dealing with failure. He is a giant snowflake who melts down if he is not worshipped.
Jobs was smart enough to stay away from the spotlight and social media. Musk, on the other hand, is extremely addicted to it.
There is something else going on, however. He is known to partake in uppers and downers like Ketamine. Extreme wealth, insecurity, obsession with public opition, and drugs are a really nasty cocktail.
I didn't think it sound unhinged at all. it just sounded like someone that was sick of being pressured telling people to fuck off. That is a fairly common reaction we see in every day life.
Elon is simply making abundantly clear that he doesn't care what advertisers feel. If they want to stay, they can stay, and if they don't they can leave. And he's fine with that. That is a reasonable message to communicate.
IMO you might be overindexing on the usage of that word. It is clearer what Musk means in context. Again, he is simply saying that he won't let advertisers pressure him into changing X. That is clearly all he means by "blackmail" even if the actual usage of the term is incorrect.
He is fine, his values simply don't align with most peoples'. He is acting quite consistently with his stance on how he wants to run X (eg profit is not the primary goal.)
He has said that he's fine with running the company at-cost, and that profit is not the primary goal. His actions have been internally consistent with this statement.
He already apologized for the tweets? And said "If we make bad products that people don’t want to use, the users will vote with their resources and use something else." So what is he calling "blackmail"?
If I understand it correctly… he thinks users will go elsewhere and considers that okay, but by "users" he has in mind Twitter's audience, not its advertisers. Advertisers should bring their advertising budget to whichever platform has the audience and offers capable targeting, and not try to influence platforms or users. "Platforms serve users, not advertisers" or something like that, and advertisers should accept that the audience is real people with real people's occasionally nasty habits.
I personally disagree. To my mind, it's perfectly reasonable for advertisers to say e.g. "if a screenshot with some nazi shit blows up and causes a scandal, I really don't want our ad visible" and prevent that from happening by not advertising on Twitter. My disagreement means nothing, though, since I'm neither a user, an advertiser or Elon.
Musk is not saying that advertisers must stay on Twitter. he is simply telling advertisers to leave if they don't like the way Twitter is being run, instead of contacting him with notices of leaving.
I think that is a perfectly respectable thing to say if you don't want to change your platform to suit advertisers.
I like how one month he and Linda say "they're almost break-even and in fact profitable (if you don't count in debt, bills and unpaid invoices /lol/)", and next month Elon is like "this is killing the company". This has happened THREE TIMES IN A ROW already.
The situation is overwhelmingly, blindingly obvious.
> If someone’s going to try and blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself.
I don’t see how what advertisers are doing could be construed as blackmail or any other form of extortion. At least to me, this looks like a simple protest - certainly not anything illegal or nefarious.
Maybe there’s more to it that I’m not aware of. If so, he didn’t make a compelling case here.
Not even a protest. There is a lot of talk about - "vote with your wallet" and they are choosing to vote. Sure, one can disagree with their vote and say it is bullshit and what not. But it is not blackmail.
Not even necessarily a protest. Some of them may not care about whether Twitter changes itself or not, they just want out. Nobody is obliged to advertise on Twitter.
Before Elon took over Twitter child porn and human trafficking was running rampant all across Twitter, you can do the Google search yourself to read up on it. Advertisers sure didn't care about that. I think there are many reasons to not like Elon, but I'm glad he is not giving in to this attack. Pure politics as usual.
I think it is pretty clear that Elon does not care about attracting business. He has mentioned that he is fine with running Twitter at cost. I'm not sure why people keep on insisting that he make a profit.
It was an emotional response driven from frustration. But obviously something highly inappropriate to say outright, and only creates yet another PR disaster. He is his own worst enemy, unable to adequately control himself. It seems verbatim what Dana White said the other day. That said, he did apologize for the remarks and the rest of the interview was rather normal. We'd all be better off not clinging to the constant desire for drama and focusing on meaningful actions over words.
Telling the Jewish CEO of the company that pulled ads over antisemitic remarks to go fuck himself on live TV is not a gamer moment and it completely negates what was obviously a BS apology.
I don't think you understand where those comments are coming from. I didn't interpret it as malicious but rather venting his frustration. It's obviously (very) inappropriate, but there is a (very) big difference between speaking out of frustration and hate. And the apology was after, not before that remark, to be clear. If you have it out for yourself as a Musk-hatee, for one reason or another, I don't think it's meaningful to argue on the semantics. It's not going to win back advertisers, but that's a problem for X/Twitter to deal with, not me. But IMO, and just my view, he's done what is reasonable in apologizing for his remarks, and sometimes you can't do much more but just move on. Likewise, there is nothing of value to extract from these types of debates, hence my last point on focusing on meaningful actions over drama.
> I don't think you understand where those comments are coming from.
I can't speak for anyone other than myself, but I don't care where those comments are coming from. He's a 50-something year old man, he can grow the fuck up and take responsibility for what he says.
He did apologize for his remarks. I'm not sure what else you expect. Do you want him to prostate himself in front of the world? Self-flagellate, perhaps?
All he saying in this interview is that he simply does not care if his remarks are the reason advertisers want to leave, in essence drawing a boundary between the discourse on Twitter and advertiser presence. He is making a clear statement that Twitter will not change its policies to appease advertisers, even if it means running at a loss.
I think it that is a perfectly reasonable thing to say, even if you don't agree with Musk's politics or X's policies.
Turning Twitter into a niche, subscription-funded platform is a totally acceptable thing to want to do, but he should just come out and clearly say that is the aim. I bet the investors didn't think that was what was going to happen. It's the doublespeak that is a problem here: he appears to be saying both "I'm taking my ball and I don't care about any of you" and "you meanies won't play with me".
We are often taught that the working class revolts against the elite--that's how revolutions happen. Not exactly right: usually, elites split, then one group joins the popular revolt. Same thing in companies too: Even though people at the bottom are not happy about the managerial class, they can't openly revolt; however, when there is a split among c-level, that's how the winning c-group garners the support of the unhappy underlings.
Since Musk has FU money, and a dominant segment of normal population supports Musk's view point that advertisers 'blackmail'. Whether one agrees with Musk or not, at least we know how elites set what to say, what to say, what is permitted, what is forbidden, what one obligatorily has to say.
Regardless, but these advertisers are starting(or already?) to act as a political party and try to use that in a political manner, twitter been and will always be a space for controversial political opinions, and as long as the platform doesn’t promote something illegal like drug dealing and such, it shouldn’t be a problem, in fact, other social media like instagram already have a big problem of illegal activities like drug dealing or human/minor trafficking and I don’t see advertisers have any problem with that..
> twitter been and will always be a space for controversial political opinions,
At a certain point, Twitter kicked out a bunch of the white supremacist types. He invited them back on and then boosted their messages on several occasions.
I bet if advertising was successful on the platform, a lot of advertisers would have very quietly resumed after things blew over, because most corporations care more about making money than making statements.
But I don't think he's helping and perhaps advertising wasn't working out that well there anyway.
When the carnival barker stands in the center ring and claims those not in attendance are political or unbelievers, it ceases to be fun and no longer resembles a carnival.
Video: https://twitter.com/jd_durkin/status/1729991850079990080