Elon Musk vows ‘thermonuclear lawsuit’ as advertisers flee X over antisemitism
(www.independent.co.uk)
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 19 Nov 2023 04:00
https://lemmy.world/post/8455186
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 19 Nov 2023 04:00
https://lemmy.world/post/8455186
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’
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Elon Musk has vowed to file a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against a US media watchdog that claimed adverts were appearing on X alongside antisemitic posts, as major brands including Disney and Apple fled the platform.
Watchdog group Media Matters for America said earlier this week that it had found that corporate advertisements for IBM, Apple, Oracle and Comcast’s Xfinity were being placed alongside antisemitic content on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Disney, Warner Bros Discovery and Comcast, Lions Gate Entertainment and Paramount Global are also pausing their ads on X. Axios reported that Apple would do the same.
The Tesla founder added in a second post: “The split second court opens on Monday, X Corp will be filing a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and all those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company.”
“Far from the free speech advocate he claims to be, Musk is a bully who threatens meritless lawsuits in an attempt to silence reporting that he even confirmed is accurate,” Mr Carusone said.
“It is unacceptable to repeat the hideous lie behind the most fatal act of antisemitism in American history at any time, let alone one month after the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” the White House said in a statement.
The original article contains 673 words, the summary contains 211 words. Saved 69%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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?
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.
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Did he actually help start any of those companies? I thought he basically bought his way into all but one of them, and the one he was part of he got kicked out of. But I may be remembering that wrong.
You’re not wrong. Musk fanboys are goofy in the head too.
If you’re thinking of PayPal, I think you are at least partially wrong on that: he didn’t start that one either but another company that was not that successful… I want to say he bought the more successful company and kept that name, merging his into it, and tried to do a lot of his own software engineering on it that was so bad they had to rip all of it out when they ousted him for how badly he was managing the company.
This could be misremembered as well though, but I don’t think he actually has a single successful company he can legitimately claim the title of “founder” of without having bought the rights to call himself that when he bought the company.
I think he actually founded SpaceX.
I think you may be right on that one
I don’t mean to rag on you dude but I don’t think he started that many companies. His company was bought out by PayPal in like the late '90s, despite being listed as a cofounder he wasn’t a founder of Tesla, I think spaceX was also founded before Musk. He did help these companies succeed though so I suppose credit for that.
He founded SpaceX, but he was the money man. He didn’t like the way he was treated in Russia, so he said, fine, I’ll make my own rocket program, with blackjack and hookers… But he didn’t actually do any of the lifting, other than lifting the pen to sign the checks. Other, brilliant, people did the real work.
I mean having money and connections to cut through red tape is helpful even if it’s only from his privileged life.
I’d say that, other than the money, those companies succeeded in spite of musk rather than because of him. If your only positive contribution is to sign the checkbook to keep it running, that’s not much to give praise over.
I think musk is dumb but he’s engineer dumb, when you hear him talk about rockets with other rocket nerds he does actually know what he’s talking about - he’s not like rocket scientist level understanding but having someone in charge of the money that actually understands and is interested in the principles and practicalities of the task at hand is kinda huge in today’s corporate world.
His problem in Tesla comes from his ability to understand more of the technical situation than most the money people he knows as that’s led him into making some exaggerated claims and pushing through some half baked ideas. The business model for the gigafactory was fantastic, the initial development seemed promising but when he had problems with automation and flow rate that caused so many delays he wasn’t really accounting for that - he could design a great science fiction factory but it got to the point he couldn’t pay people to make his ideas work because they’re not problems you can just brush under the rug - the cybertruck one piece press seems to be an attempt at circumventing problems he already faced with more wishful thinking ‘theoretically we can just…’ classic engineer bravardo, it’s not a bad idea but it’s going to result in tradeoffs and I think we can already see that in how shitty the production version looks compared to the original design.
Elons biggest mistake of course is another classic engineering student error ‘I’m much better at engineering than other people who don’t study engineering, that must mean I’m better than them at the things they study too…’ I think he genuinely thought that rubbing a social network would be really easy for him, he had this idea that the evil fun police were artificially limiting his engagement and all he needed to do is get rid of the bias against him and everyone would see how great he is at reposting ten year old memes and hail him as a hero of the world…
What I’m getting at is you can’t be as dumb as Elon by actually just being dumb, it takes intelligence misdirected to be such an idiot.
Sure, I don’t deny that, but I don’t think he has ever done something great on purpose. It’s like if I give all of my friends 5 bucks and one of them saves a child from getting hit by a car on their way to 7-11 to buy a Slurpee with that fiver, I don’t get to take credit. Elon has enough money that he can throw a lot of shit at the wall. Some of it sticks. If the Boring company had taken off, he’d still be the same small dick white supremacist he is today, he’d just have exchanged one phallic symbol for another.
Spacex owes its success to Gwynne Shotwell if anyone, that woman is a powerhouse.
Not saying you’re wrong. There certainly could have been mental degradation over the years. Or he could have gotten investors lined up by being a really rich kid from a rich family. Money can do a lot of heavy lifting for a piece of shit.
I think it’s a bit of both. To me the coolest thing he ever did was make Tesla tech open source. I have a hard time seeing that Musk in this dude anymore. I used to think he did it altruistically but lately I’m thinking it was probably an ego thing after all. And now that all his ventures are starting to sink he probably regrets the move.
FYI, he didn’t make it “open source”. It was a joke of a sharing agreement that basically said they could use your patents if you used theirs. It was purely so they could steal IP from anyone dumb enough to think that Tesla had some magic “secret sauce”, and took them up on the agreement.
Whoa TIL. Thanks for the info, I stand corrected.
I can tell you right now, personally knowing people who worked with him way back on the first Model S, he has always been an absolutely unhinged shithead of the highest degree. He loved going into an absolute berserk rage dropping tons of F-bombs in conference calls, all because someone gave him an answer he didn’t like.
Yeah, there’s a reason the original people at Tesla all left, and he was kicked out of PayPal. Literally the only reason anyone tolerates him in any way is for the financial incentive, and that’s the only way he’s kept people around.
Jesus, I knew he was a piece of shit, I didn’t realize he’d always been like that.
Which successful company did he start?
Or, as former Texas governor Ann Richards said of George H. W. Bush in 1988:
‘He can’t help it, he was born with a silver foot in his mouth!’
Eh you spend your whole life getting away with anything because you have the money, you end up starting to believe your own bullshit.
One of the reasons so many people are rich is because they make money off the smart or the hard working. You never do the work yourself because you legitimately aren’t the best person for the job.
I think Elon bought in too much during the wave of “I’m a tech genius who put a car in space, make electric cars and spaceships” and I think he actually believes he did that instead of the countless and thankless hours of all the real professionals.
The problem with this thinking, is now he feels like he ^needs to do something. Just like that micromanaging boss who doesn’t help at all and just spouts random nonsense thinking it will magically make it go faster. But instead he’s just self sabotaging the process.
This is what happens when you start to believe your own bullshit. If he was smart, he should walk away and let the professionals handle it.
I’m pretty sure he’s high, like, all the time now.
So am I, but I don’t act like this.
Well, yeah, because you haven’t been grinding up hundred dollar bills into each bowl.
He’s gone full Howard Hughes.
I think it’s drugs.
Excessive wealth definitely leads to bad mental health outcomes for the wealthy.
The wealth and power leads to their becoming detached from the rest of humanity. They start seeing others as objects instead of people.
He is a Narcissist. Yes, that is a medical condition. He is thoroughly unable to recognize other people as equal. They are mere nuisances.
Until they are in power.
No, it makes no difference. The disability is in him. Their power or any other of their features cannot change it.
I thought “narcissist” was legitimately confused with “sociopath” in this thread for a second.
After looking over the definitions again for the distinctions, my immediate thought was “why not both?”
Indeed.
I don’t know, really: is “sociopath” also a condition or just a bad habit?
It’s also in the DSM, but there’s probably ranges of both and I don’t think either one precludes or excludes the other. Narcissism also shares a lot of symptoms with bipolar disorder, which the recent interviews with the biographer Walter Isaacson about Musk seems pretty clearly to be a problem. (See ‘demon mode’)
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The cake is a lie
Wow, 2 years old Lemmy user. That makes him an early adopter rather than a Reddit API refugee.
I didn’t realise Lemmy had cake days.
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.
Is that derived from caesar as in a Roman emperor? Because that’s pretty cool if it is.
Yes. It literally means “lunacy of ceasars”. Ancient Rome had plenty of examples.
I love it. German has some terrific words.
Megalomania?
Yeah, that is what all of the major dictionaries are translating it as.
use that word on the Internet and it’ll be confused with megalovania
Metroidvania?
Caesar’s wank?
He is 100% going to run for president at some point unless something stops him from thinking he has a chance.
Not of the US anyway, he isn’t a Natural Born citizen and that is a constitutional requirement. As I understand it, changing that would require an amendment and as it stands, I can’t see any way for that happen with the chaos in government.
Ah right, forgot about that. Hopefully that technically keeps his power limited.
Happy cake day!
They get that rich at the cost of A LOT more than their mental health…
I think he’s just stupid and never actually had to run a company. Make insane demands and people had to figure it out
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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.
Well, maybe hold off until he’s killed the failwhale.
For greater good.
Trying to explain one’s behaviour as a psychological issue isn’t automatically sympathy towards the person.
Who is “we”?
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But nobody here is actually excusing Musk’s behaviour. You’re arguing against something that hasn’t been claimed, with weirdly authoritarian rhetoric at that.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
It makes perfect sense once you understand money is a hard drug.
No one needs this much money, they could be living a quit happy fulfilling life but instead all they do is try to obtain more, at the expense of social relations, their family and their own mental health. They destroy their own lives to get the dopamine hit of the numbers going up.
People like Elon are addicts. Greed is an illness but rather than giving these people medical help to stop hoarding excess wealth we glorify their problem like their winning.
There is absolutely nothing related to technology with this. Twitter is not a tech company. They produce no tech. They’re a social media company.
Curious, how do you access Twitter?
Is the implication that any business you access via a web browser or app is a tech company? Boy do I have news for you about literally every business
yes, pretty much every company is a tech company at this point, very few contract out all of that stuff
So a plumbing business which books appointments via their nothing-customized Squarespace page, that’s a tech company? And you would think it appropriate if a news story about that plumber causing a water main break being posted to a technology news feed?
Having a website does not make a company a tech company and you are objectively wrong if you think it does.
they have literally just contracted that out like I mentioned in my comment
This is one of those cases where something might TECHNICALLY be true, but it doesn’t make sense in the context of what we’re discussing
I do not access it.
No, they’re an advertising company.
You (users) pay musk to display your original created content on his platform, your content is then used to attract companies that pay musk so they can display adverts to people reading your original content.
I don’t know what their current level of public contribution is, but there was a time where they put out some pretty popular OSS like pants / pex and bootstrap. In any case I think it is pretty common to consider social media platforms themselves to be technology. I get your meaning though, but there are many posts much further over the obviously-not-tech line then this.
How else are you going to fight against people like Elon except by talking about them constantly and making sure not a day goes by that they’re not on the front page of every social media site and news outlet? Worked so great with Trump too.
Seriously, My entire feed is just Musk, Trump and Biden.
We have a politics sub for this
Ah, I see, he finally came out of his conman closet and is ready to go full con.
Discovery time. Let’s see what Musk is texting to his friends.
I love a good discovery.
Can we get a discovery channel special that details everything revealed during this discovery?
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He paid 44 billion to avoid discovery I want to see that kompromat too
Wasn’t it to avoid all his lies on how many bots there were?
I guess it’d still be about how he lies out of his ass and is a petulant child, but that’s about as far as the similarities go.
The best part is discovery will include the tweet he promoted and agreed with along with his promotion and agreement, which is what he is saying is a lie.
So frivolous, got it [mind tap guy meme]
I’d imagine it would be rather easy to to prove wether that claim is true or not; show screenshots of said posts with these advertisements next to them.
They did in the article he’s suing over.
That pretty much settles it as far as I’m concerned.
Bully tactics from Musko.
screenshots from a single source don’t prove much though, they can be easily doctored. Not saying that they are, but twitter could use that angle to make the case. That’s why services like archive.org are so important IMO, having an unbiased third party take a snapshot of a site that corroborates with what you’re seeing is gold. It’s a shame though that I don’t think archive.org can actually do this with twitter in this way?
if the source doesn’t lie they very much prove it. the number of sources doesn’t mean anything because a doctored screenshot can easily be spread by many, it’s the quality of source that matters.
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I think they mean corroborating evidence more than simply more than one person sporting a screenshot.
Twitter is heavily heavily heavily monitored by bots day in and out. This is how we have news articles about the latest Boebert tweet that she deleted minutes after drunk posting it. These shots could be corroborated a million different ways.
To be clear, is he in hot water over what he said about the ADL? Or the fact that Nazi’s are proliferating on his platform and advertisers don’t like it?
Short answer: yes.
Longer answer: he’s in slightly-higher-than-warm water over his interactions with the ADL and Nazis/antisemitism on the site. He’s in hot water over his personal promotion and espousal of antisemitism and ads being displayed next to Nazi content.
You can’t sue people for deciding NOT to patronize the service you sell, idiot
He’s not suing the advertisers, he’s suing a watchdog who’s pointing out all the antisemitism and whatnot, which causes the advertisers to flee because in his world, none of it is bad.
Yes advertisers are only publicly insulted not sued : “Many of the largest advertisers are the greatest oppressors of your right to free speech.”
I suppose that’s meant to inspire confidence they will not be sued, only slightly bullied if they come back.
Unless Musk gets a hearing in front of a judge who exposes his own sympathy to fascism, I can’t see this case going anywhere. The truth is an absolute defense to libel.
the 150 upvotes on this absolute clown of a comment gives serious Reddit vibes
Sure, do it, Elon. Anything to make advertisers feel safer.
Boy, this is gonna be fun!
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
It’s not just a lawsuit, it’s thermonuclear lawsuit! His lawyers better handle it carefully, lest they be blown into itty bitty pieces. Elon stopped maturing at about the age of fourteen.
That my friend, is a insult to 14 year olds.
Have you seen 14 year olds? These days, many of them are much like Musk.
They usually grow out of that awkward phase. But wealth is known to retard maturity.
Idk I was definitely as stupid, as Elon is now, when I was 14.
Elon’s going death con 3
This is one of those cases where even if he wins he loses. Who would want to sell ads anymore?
Well, even if he has no intention of winning, the simple act of filing will cost any named watchdog media group money. I doubt too many are swimming in it.
That’s why there are SLAPP-back laws.
He’s also got a habit of ignoring legal advice and running his mouth in public, so he’s likely going to end up writing another big check for that misadventure if his lawyers can’t talk him out of going through with it
Planned bankruptcy. How is it that we all think he is a genius but also think he is dumb at the same time? This is all according to plan
There must be a better way to bankrupt a company than flushing your personal reputation down the toilet. He’s just dumb. No contradiction.
All he has to do is file in a state without SLAPP protections. There’s no federal SLAPP statute.
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Do it, you coward. Bet you won’t because you’re a fraidy cat that listens to his entirely rational legal team.
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.
Free speech absolutist, got it.
Unless he disagrees with you
Judge asks the hypernuclear question: “Have you tried NOT catering to Nazi’s and racists?”
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
Or, he’s just a bit of an idiot.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by neglect, ignorance or incompetence
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.
You rule out the other options first, and then you shoot them in the face.
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?
nice view. he’s an arrogant greedy pig. he’ll probably intelligent people for the lawsuit. and bankrupt etc. right?
What?
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.
This is going to be the best discovery since Einstein figured out how to put bubbles in beer.
“You’ve actually split the atom?” “It was just a Tasmanian beer atom”
Omg. Yahoo serious. Thanks for the reminder
Thank you for getting my very dated reference.
“Telling people what I do in highly visible public spaces is a violation of my rights in some way that I haven’t figured out yet. Everyone has to like me and tell me what a cool guy I am. It’s the law.”
“Thermonuclear” you mean the word you used during one of your (many) most embarrassing public failure moments when the glass shattered?
Legal news in a tech community?
But it’s about Elon Musk who owns Starlink and space X so it’s tech by proxy
If you go by that logic then all news belongs here. Everything is tangentially connected to tech, it’s 2023.
Except Armish news
BREAKING: Amish still not using technology!
Twitter is tech-via-Silicon-Valley.
There are vast swathes of “tech” startups that are simply social media websites.
Your pedantry is borne of a frustration that I happen to share but it is also making you seem ignorant.
No it’s more that I was hoping this community would be about technology itself. New things coming out etc. but most of the time i just see news about the business that surrounds tech where the story has nothing to do with the tech itself but instead just the management of said tech companies. I don’t care that it’s social media adjacent or to do with the silicon valley area or whatever. If this article talked about how a social media made in the silicon valley works underneath (and not just the running of it and the drama surrounding it) I’d be fine with it. Heck, it could even be about musk for all i care as long as it was actually about tech.
Yea I get you.
So much for the free market and the ability to choose 🙄🙄🙄🙄
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.
Musk: The customer is always right!
[Ad buyers stop buying ads]
Musk: WAIT NO NOT LIKE THAT
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!
If only we could read 😭
He’s suing the company that brought attention to the nazi stuff.
Just as insane, but slightly different!
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?
… 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
Damn that’s just cowardly then.
Maybe if you didn’t put all your merch in the left handed store we would know about it.
Uh, in that case, I’ll take two.
It seems pike he’s suing the watchdogs for reporting the situation which lead to the mass exodus.
I bought your branded buttplug set, that has to cunt for something
Edit: leaving it
Threats always fix everything, it shows how stable and introspective you are!
From what I see Media Matters said ads were placed against antisemitic / racist posts and then Twitter confirmed it. So wtf is the lawsuit even about??? Twitter tried to cast it as “free speech” or that these ads were a fraction of their total but the reality is they happened. So all I see happening if Twitter goes ahead with a lawsuit is a) they get anti-SLAPPed back to where they were or b) they go to trial and get screwed by discovery and reality. In a way I hope they don’t get the anti-SLAPP since discovery would kill them.
Maybe he’s going to sue himself and split his ego, creating mini Elon Musk egos that will themselves sue themselves, creating a chain reaction until eventually the whole legal system is so saturated by it that they just succumb to him.
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.
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.
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.
You say that, but applies just as well to the first 2 founders.
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?
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…
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.
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?
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.
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.
It sounds like nobody played much of a role at all until ol’ moneybags showed up. Money talks, bullshit walks as they say
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’?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/f2da57ee-1c0b-419a-a53d-788ae4c9d138.png">
The godaddied Tesla?
Only here:
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.
But what is reality? Is it vijñapti-mātra?
Let it crash and burn. Fuck twitter.
The only good thing StinkyElon has done with it was reveal the twitter files to the world.
Everything else he did to it was shit.
We aren’t being censored here. We can say pedophile.
We can also say we should bring back guillotines for billionaires.
We can also say Nazis deserve to be shot.
Seriously get out of the reddit/YouTube/Twitter mindset. You can use words without worrying it might flag up some algorithms
I wouldn’t shoot them. I’d show them things that undermine what they believe. That’s what the allied forces did to all the axis solders that were captured.
.
You can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into. Also, why would we bother showing them compelling evidence before we shoot them?
All right, but can we shoot them after?
Well… Not all
Would you consider limiting their free speech enough to have other ideas presented to them directly? Becuse if so you are in violation of the Telecommunications Act and an enemy of liberals, plenty of which are on this site
He’s kind of a dork, isn’t he.
This is just pure spoiled brat tantrum mixed with some stupidity and lack of reality checks.
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?
Please frame your comment about how this is not a technological article in a more technological way. Microchip.
Give birth to EnoughMuskSpam.
Good luck Musky lol
This doesn’t feel like tech news to me
Do you want to do something about it?
Uhh, good luck with that. The free market taketh, the free market taketh away.
Let’s hope it starts givething at some point
Okay, monday morning. So, where is it?
Yeah waiting for the news headline… Any second now… Zzzzz