So, Elon Musk buys Twitter Last year for $44 billion and change, and the company is now worth somewhere around $14 billion. That’s not bad – only a loss of 70% in eight months.
And how does Musk account for this remarkable result of his investment skills? He says – ready? – that the company has been punished because it now promotes ‘free speech.’
“Half our advertising revenue disappeared overnight,” he says, “because we’re insisting on free speech … they’re literally trying to drive Twitter bankrupt.”
Now of course, you know who the ‘they’ are – it’s all those Commie, Socialist, Pinko, Queer and Transgender corporations who are the same bunch that stole the 2020 election away from Donald Trump.
The anti-Twitter cabal is also the same bunch which is offended by the degree to which Twitter has become a safe haven for racists, anti-Semites, and all kinds of other spewers of hate and disgusting rhetoric since the company was taken over by Elon Musk.
Now don’t get me wrong. I believe that everyone including the biggest assholes and Pieces of Shit like Marjorie Taylor Greene (who now uses the acronym POS in her tweets) should be able to say whatever they want to say.
By the same token, I also have no issue with anyone who decides that that they can do without a bookmark for Twitter on their computer or their phone. And when it comes to hateful and offensive speech, I subscribe fully to what Associate Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography: “I can’t define it, but I know when I see it.”
What’s really going on here, whether Elon Musk understands it or not, is that the whole social media environment, which became the central focus for how people communicate with one another thanks to Donald Trump, is now beginning to lose its value and importance in the same way as Donald Trump is also beginning to fade away.
Trump’s highest number of Twitter followers is now far below the number of accounts following Elon Musk, or following Barack Obama, for that matter. But when Trump started using Twitter during the 2016 campaign, he was far out in front of everyone else and he also set a hateful and angry tone in his tweets which encouraged every other POS to come out from underneath their rocks and join the social media fray.
When Musk talks about ‘restoring free speech’ to his online network, he’s using ‘free speech’ like the same kind of euphemism which racists and haters like George Wallace and Barry Goldwater used it in the good ol’ days. Know what Goldwater meant when he said that his 1964 Presidential campaign was an effort to support ‘honest, hard-working Americans?’
Funny, but the most revolutionary and innovative automobile manufacturers otherwise turn out to be real jerks. Henry Ford, for example, created an assembly line process which brought the cost of a car down to where it could be afforded by the average American family, an innovation which totally transformed virtually every aspect of American life.
Otherwise, Ford was a real dope whose comments about Jews, blacks and just about everyone else can’t be repeated in a polite space.
Musk seems to be solidly within that tradition, except that Ford’s first River Rouge plant, which started operating in 1920, was producing cars until 2008 when operations shifted to other sites. Tesla sales are still strong, pushed somewhat by a price drop last year. If Musk keeps shooting his mouth off, there could be a negative reaction to his brand, particularly as GM and Ford start rolling out their all-electric cars.
Internet start-up costs are pretty low. Design a website, pay some hosting company a few bucks each month and you’re good to go. Maybe what I should do is put together a couple of hundred bucks and create an online ‘movement’ that will advocate a boycott of all Tesla cars. Will you join?
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