#elon musk is fortunately incompetent

[valentinsylve]

Instead of reblogging the OP which didn't have correct information, I'm signal-boosting these links which another helpful person added. I won't tag them because i don't know them and it might be rude idk.

The free tax-filing on the IRS page is still operational! It's still only been rolled out in 25 states, but check and see if yours is one of them.

[crazymuffin1]

more or less the full tiktok situation

okay so im not tinfoil hatting because its pretty obvious when you think about it

2020 trump wants tiktok banned im pretty sure the people who overlooked the whole spiel thought that there wasnt anything wrong with it and it and continued on as normal

then for some curious reason the stupidest most tech incompetent people of the congress are part of the hearing with classics such as asking the ceo 10 different ways of "are you chinese" making the viewer think that the next question is going to be whether or not the CEO has ever eaten chinese food. there are of course the other classics (and these are all real questions) "does tiktok read your brainwaves when you put on headphones" "does it record your eyes dilating to figure out what videos to boost via the algorithm" "does tiktok access your home wi-fi network" "are you chinese" "if you turn on airplane mode while in a plane, can tiktok talk to the plane"

im not making this up. these are real actual questions. its not word for word but im not changing the meaning of the questions it really was that bad

then of course beause they took the dumbest people in the congress they made a rule that basically boils down to "apps from countries we dont like have to be owned by america" (so we can censor it) (this is while also being racist towards china and yknow being all 'china censorship bad!')

now there hasnt been an official announcement of tiktok having been bought, BUT!

while it was down for americans, these messages appeared

message 1 ID: Sorry, Tiktok isn't available right now A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can't use TikTok for now. We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned! End ID oh yeah the same trump that got it banned in the first place, right? about 15 hours later the app is up again

Message 2 ID: Welcome Back! Thanks for your patience and support. As a result of President Trump's efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.! You can continue to create, share, and discover all the things you love on TikTok End ID.

heres the part where you gotta put the clues together! the tiktok page of the tiktok CEO no longer has "CEO of tiktok" on his profile

facebook/instagram is all of a sudden having popups of "link to tiktok" and an official tiktok page too. if youre on tiktok you get an add facebook friends promo (this hasnt happened to everyone yet, rolling out feature)

convicted felon donald trump is holding his inauguration indoors, probably because last time he got all pissy that the crowd size was small, but you cant take aerials indoors and indoors have limited seats anyway(maybe as a last fuck you, tiktok will once again reserve a bunch of seats that are left empty? oh please do that!). also its easier to check for weapons and not have snipers when indoors, which is important when first lady elon musk is going to be there, and his fellow oligarch mark zuckerberg is also going to be there. theyre reaaal scared of the snipers since their egos are so big they become an easy target!

but we all know the drill by now. "saving" tiktok is just a failed way to make the younger generation like him. even if he set it up and everyone on tiktok knows. its also a way to make people overlook whatever this weeks war crime is going to be. probably the mass deportation. forgot to add this thing but facebook recently removed fact checkers so tiktok is probably going to have even more (worse) misinformation

TL;DR facebook is going to announce they bought tiktok any day now and give the glory to trump even though he is the reason it was banned in the first place

also as a bonus on the last day, a lot of influencers and stuff like that were having the "since we're all getting banned anyway" moment so a lot of them said stuff like "i never used the products i promoted" "i hated collabing with this creator" "i was never xyz" people who did masked thirst traps (male presenting) were women all along. and then 15 hours later theyre unbanned and have to be like... yep...so that just happened.

anyway tiktok was one of the last few places people got news that werent completely filtered through the right wing lens of whoever owned the newspaper. even if there was a lot of misinfo. think of the ceo shooter and think of how the media portrayed it vs the people. "rich man is murdered in cold blood by some vile monster. he was very beloved" vs "this guy is a vile human being who is responsible for millions of deaths, and he was finally killed"

[terriwriting]

What’s happening in the United States bears “family resemblances” to fascism, says Alberto Toscano. But the term has limits and warrants a thoughtful exploration, advises the Italian philosopher and critical theorist. He applies a related term to what Donald Trump and Elon Musk represent: “Caesarism.” Toscano, a visiting associate professor at Simon Fraser University, is the author of Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis, published in 2023, and has spent much of his scholarly career thinking and writing about the various forms authoritarianism and fascism can take, past and present. The repression and seizure of power taking place now in the United States sure look a lot like the classic portraits of fascism as they are conventionally understood. Still, there are aspects of this moment that strike Toscano as peculiar. “This is a very unique conjunction of the culture war, persecutory politics against trans people, against migrants, against any form of diversity or difference in educational institutions etc.,” Toscano told The Tyee. “But then, on the other hand, this licence given within the state for a direct dismantling of state infrastructure, carried out by the world’s richest man and his minions — that’s not anything that one can find, I think, in the annals of fascism.”

Right now the looters are in charge. Dump public funds into crypto and a bullshit "sovereign wealth fund" to pump the fortunes of the wealthy, give the billionaire class a trillion-dollar tax cut, and buddy up to dictators who can give you a place to hide the loot. They're not worried about the future of the state because the billionaire class doesn't believe there is a future. In their minds, their personal death is the same as the end of the world.

Trump and Musk are also impulsive, incompetent, and driven by petty grudges. Trump keeps slapping the big shiny button marked 'Tariffs' both because he genuinely thinks they're a quick and easy way to fix the US economy and because the noise makes him feel like a big boy. Musk is burning down whatever regulators he can get his hands on because they told him 'no' and that made him feel bad. The impulsivity and grudge-holding compound the looting.

The Christofascists and Nazis are waiting in the wings for their chance on stage, and getting increasingly nervous as the looters burn down the empire they wanted to control.

[tomorrowusa]

Corporations pay their CEOs extravagantly while trying to cheat on taxes.

It would be one thing if, alongside the exorbitant executive pay, the quality of American CEO-ing was going up. But these executives are making off with bigger bags of boodle despite their persistent incompetence: Media executives keep running their businesses into the ground, tech firms are laying people off because of vibes, the planes keep nearly crashing, and examples of insane eye-popping greed—like Rite-Aid’s decision to claw back severance paid out to laid-off workers on the same day they handed their CEO a $20 million bonus—keep on coming. So it may come as no surprise that there’s a robust connection between the overindulged CEOs and the firms that are most flagrantly dodging their fair share of taxes. For a report released Wednesday, the Institute for Policy Studies teamed up with Americans for Tax Fairness to spelunk into the balance sheets at some of America’s best-known tax scofflaws between 2018 and 2022. What they found was pretty consistent: The firms took home high profits and lavished their top executives with exorbitant pay, all while stiffing Uncle Sam. The excess is stunning. “For over half (35) of these corporations,” the study reports, “their payouts to top corporate brass over that entire span exceeded their net tax payments.” An additional 29 firms managed this feat for “at least two of the five years in the study period.” Eighteen firms paid a grand total of zero dollars during that five-year span, 17 of which were given tax refunds. All in all, the 64 companies in the report “posted cumulative pre-tax domestic profits of $657 billion” during the study period, but “paid an average effective federal tax rate of just 2.8 percent (the statutory rate is 21 percent) while paying their executives over $15 billion.” Which firms are the worst of the worst? You can probably guess the company that tops the list because it’s the one run by The New Republic’s 2023 Scoundrel of the Year. During the five years of the study, Tesla took home $4.4 billion in profits as CEO Elon Musk carted off $2.28 billion in stock options, which, since his 2018 payday, have ballooned to nearly $56 billion—a compensation plan so outlandish that the Delaware Court of Chancery canceled it. Tesla has, during that same period of time, paid an effective tax rate of zero percent through a combination of carrying forward losses from unprofitable years and good old-fashioned offshore tax dodging.

Elon Musk is either the world's richest or second richest person. But he still wants more. Give him credit for pathological greed.

In all fairness, Musk is not alone when it comes to enriching himself while screwing workers.

What sort of innovations have these CEOs wrought from this well-remunerated period? T-Mobile’s Mike Sievert presided over the Sprint merger that led to $23.6 million in stock buybacks and 5,000 layoffs. Netflix’s Reed Hastings poured $15 billion in profit into jacking up subscription rates. Nextera Energy has devoted $10 million in dark money in a “ghost candidate scheme” to thwart climate change candidates. Darden Restaurants has been fighting efforts to raise the minimum wage. Metlife has been diverting government money meant to fund low-cost housing into other, unrelated buckraking ventures. And some First Energy executives from the study period are embroiled in a corruption scandal that’s so massive that even Musk might find it to be beyond the pale.

These oligarchs are going to spend lavishly to elect Republicans who would give them even bigger tax breaks.

Fortunately, they can't literally buy votes. If we return to old school grassroots precinct work then we can thwart the MAGA Republican puppets of billionaire oligarchs.

One to one contact is a more important factor than TV or online ads in convincing people to vote your way. It takes more effort, but democracy was not built by slacktivism in the first place.

[profblahson]

I don’t want to spread too much hate and fear stuff on my blog. I try to keep it to a minimum. But there are definitely things to be condemned, and we cannot allow those in power to make us forget who they really are.

Look at me. Look into my eyes.

Bark bark.

Fuck Donald Trump. Fuck Elon Musk. Fuck Mark Zuckerberg. Fuck Jeff Bezos. Fuck the Hyper Elite who sit idly by and watch as those less fortunate suffer.

Fuck the Republican Party.

Fuck the Democratic Party, while we’re at it. It’s their disconnection from reality and incompetence that let us down here in the first place.

Trans Rights are Human Rights. Abortion access is healthcare. All Cops Are Bastards. Black Lives Matter.

If you see this post and think “wow I don’t like this guy” then I don’t like you either, kindly remove yourself from my blog. If your instinct is to send hate to a blog with fewer than 200 active followers, fuck right off, get a hobby, go outside, reconnect to nature. Block me, whatever.

Paradox of Intolerance and all that, but I do want to be able to share love and hope when I can. But as stated, there are things to be condemned, and I do not want people who hate others for simply being around my space.

Woof.

[kilowogcore]

The X from Outer Space

Let's talk about space, poozers! I love space. I'm from space! If humanity manages ta' not go extinct, humanity's future is in space. There ain't no doubt about that.

Good talk! Now lets talk about SpaceX.

Years ago little Elon Musk had a dream: To be a technocratic racist and antisemite obsessed with the letter X like his grandfather (seriously, look it up, the man left the Technocracy Movement cuz it wasn't racist an' capitalist enough fer him, that's how Mother Musk's family ended up in apartheid South Africa).

After little Elon failed his way into a fortune by not inventin' Paypal, he thought, "What if I sabotaged humanity's future ta' usher in a horrifyin' dystopia?" An' SpaceX was born.

SpaceX has exactly one claim to fame: It does a few things and only a few things. Since it only does a few things, it can do 'em repetitively an' cheaply.

See, every NASA mission is bespoke. Even reuseable craft, like the Space Shuttle, had to be adaptable enough for bespoke missions. Each mission is designed from nearly the ground up, an' that's very expensive.

SpaceX, on the other hand, decided ta' build a kinda assembly line ta' do one specific thing. The space station needs cargo? Let's build a cargo hauler that just does that over an' over. Cuz it's the same mission profile, everythin' can be streamlined an' cheaper.

Now, SpaceX clearly didn't come up with the idea of a reusable platform. That's a standard thing in manufacturin'. Ya may be askin', why didn't NASA do that? And the answer's simple. Cuz Congress didn't want NASA to do that. Congress wanted SpaceX to do that. Congress was so impressed with Elon Musk not creatin' Paypal and gettin' fired from CEO for incompetence twice that they went with his idea rather than the organization that had put us on the moon with a shoestring budget.

There were a zillion problems, but one was bigger than the others: SpaceX, like all Musk enterprises, was a complete failure and its rockets blew up. Well, that certainly makes it difficult to be the best at space!

But Elon Musk's buddies and cronies in Congress had a solution: Throw money at him. Rocket blows up? Throw more money. And more. And more. SpaceX would have been bankrupt in 2006 without a single success if Congress hadn't kept throwin' taxpayer money at it.

Why didn't they throw that money at NASA? Well if NASA had designed the assembly line launch platform, which they could have done much easier and cheaper, then the assembly line launch platform would have belonged to a public organization, and thus to the people, instead of belonging to literally the worst human being on the face of the earth.

That's it. That's the only reason. I defy you to find me any legitimate reason. And I'm not talking about Musk bribin' them, that's all part of him being the worst, I'm talkin' legitimate scientific reasons to fund an absolute failure of a company instead of NASA. There ain't none. Capitalism is just evil fer evil's sake sometimes.

Today, SpaceX puts multiple times more space junk into orbit than the entire rest of the world combined. In just six months last year there were over 25,000 near-misses where SpaceX junk almost collided with other spacecraft. Astronomers are havin' trouble seein' through all the junk. Space missions have become astronomically (pun intended) more dangerous.

SpaceX is also a bad partner. Thanks to the Trump-appointed former head a' NASA, the US space agency is dependent on SpaceX. That means the Artemis 2 mission is indefinitely delayed because, surprise surprise, the necessary SpaceX components don't work. SpaceX misses every deadline it sets, which has repercussions for NASA as well. So Musk's incompetence is keepin' us from space exploration.

Sometimes people say that Musk ain't really in charge, that the engineers are. That's a lie. Musk is in charge. Musk wanted Starlink, Musk got Starlink. Musk wanted to mislead Ukraine about Starlink, Musk got it. Musk wanted Starship, well, he ain't gotten Starship yet but he's more than willin' to keep throwin' our money at it until he does. It's all Musk.

There are some very good engineers at SpaceX. And they oughta be ashamed of what they're doin'.

Starship is currently past the phase where it's blowin' up all the time. They've landed one of the boosters successfully. It'll take far longer than Musk says (it always does), but they'll bludgeon their way to a solution eventually.

Provided, of course, we allow 'em to. Provided we keep givin' 'em our public money to fund their failure. Provided we keep supportin' an evil company that is harmin' and destroyin' our future in spaceflight and astronomy by cloggin' up Earth orbit.

If starship explosions don't happen naturally, storebought is fine.

Be safe, poozers, an' keep watchin' the stars.

[madsociologist]

It's Not an Audit! It's a Grift!

IS PRESIDENT MUSK THE BALLSIEST GRIFTER OF ALL TIME

“What the Hell is Elon doing?”

If that was your response to watching Elon Musk on a stage throwing a Nazi salute, you were not the only one.

In fact, a great deal of time and energy is being spent trying to figure out exactly what President Musk is doing? In the name of fighting waste, it is clear that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is the most inefficient and wasteful agency in the entire federal government. And that’s saying something next to the Pentagon! From wantonly and illegally accessing sensitive databases, to shutting down congressionally approved and appropriated programs like USAID, to seemingly firing people at random including those responsible for our nuclear stockpile. On top of that, his department can’t even efficiently account for the costs of its own actions.This isn’t going to end well!1

Elon Musk is the Wreck-it Ralph of the Trump Administration.

His actions are akin to giving a baby a hand grenade. It’s a great way to get attention…but it will likely end badly for everyone around.

Is it that President Musk just has a penchant for destruction? Does he thrive in a schizophrenic world? Is he the extreme example of the “move fast and break things” mentality of Silicone Valley?

This speculation begs the question, what happened to him? The guy who had enough creative and generative focus to build Tesla after years of struggle, then SpaceX, cannot be the same DOGE Bull in the Government China Store that we see before us.

Is he a dedicated Nazi intent on bringing down the world’s most powerful democratic nation? Is he trying to create a Reichstag Moment by which he and his minions can orchestrate an effective coup? Perhaps he had a mental breakdown. Perhaps he has fallen to the age-old curse of extravagant hubris. He really believes the myth of his own greatness–and is on the precipice of his downfall.2

The speculations above are reflections of models for understanding the age of Musk that are going around the mediasphere:

He’s a sincere ideologue pursuing a clear agenda

He’s mentally unstable

He’s a the victim of his own hubris

The Grifter Model

I find it hard to believe that a man like Elon Musk, however we may debate the depth of his genius, is just randomly breaking things. It is better to assume that he has a rational purpose to everything he does. The trick is to parse out that purpose.

There is no way to really know for sure unless Musk himself offers an explanation for his actions that makes sense. And claiming to be saving democracy from bureaucracy is not a sensible explanation.

Reduced to speculating on President Musk’s intentions, I would like to offer that all of his seemingly irrational actions make perfect sense if we stop analyzing him as a sincere ideologue, or a deranged genius. To make sense of his actions, one need only interpret them through the eyes of a grifter.3

When he stepped out on that stage after the election, he must have been feeling a profound sense of euphoria. He had just spent over a quarter of billion dollars to get the most incompetent failure in presidential history re-elected. Did he do this for attention? Did he spend this kind of money to settle some personal scores? He certainly didn’t dump what for almost everyone else in the world is a fortune so he could be a glorified government auditor.

This money was a high-stakes investment in history’s ultimate grift.

This grift was born when Musk learned that The Orange Don’s decisions were often driven by whomever happened to have his ear last. In an article written in the Washington Post anonymous sources from his first campaign admitted that “[The Orange Don]4 tends to echo the words of the last person with whom he spoke, making direct access to him even more valuable…” Musk understood the kind of power inherent in being the last man in the room with such a malleable personality. How could Musk secure such a position?

Appealing to the twice impeached president was the easy part for the world’s wealthiest man, with one of the world’s largest communications technologies at his command. Smother him in praise and money. Everyone knows that the way to The Orange Don’s gaudy coifed heart is through his ego…and his bank account. And one only has to sell their soul, surrender their dignity and accept the eternal scorn of history. Not a problem for the likes of Musk.

After the election, the grift was in place. There he was, standing on that platform as if he were the one elected, sharing in his joy. Certainly, he was enticed by the crowd’s exuberance. It may be that he simply got caught up in the moment. Knowing that he just won an election on a campaign grounded in fascism, he knew his audience and gave them what they wanted–a hearty Nazi salute.

And the crowd cheered.

Perhaps he was caught up in the moment. Another possibility is that his controversial action was more intentional. In throwing the Nazi salute he was testing the depth of his grift. He was evaluating just how far he could push his con before going too far.

And the crowd cheered.

And the Republican Party twisted themselves into knots to explain away the most odious thing anyone on a national stage could do.

Whether or not he was caught up in the moment, or was cynically testing the waters. The response to that moment gave him a wealth of information. With that one brief scandal Elon Musk learned that he had the Republican base in his pocket, and he had the Republican Party under his heal.

The limits of his grift were far beyond the horizon.

The Evidence

So, this model begs the question, what is the nature of the grift? How can I be so sure that Elon Musk isn’t doing exactly what he says he is doing, selflessly dedicating his time to filtering out government waste and fraud by conducting a “long overdue audit”.

The concept of “wasteful government spending” is one of those unquestioned shibboleths of contemporary politics. Of course the U.S. government is chock full of wasteful spending. Just look around. It goes without question. Any serious political analyst must begin with the premise that the government is wasteful.

Not without reason. The United States government is the largest bureaucracy in the history of the world. It mobilizes trillions of dollars worth of resources to meet the needs of the third largest population in the world, the fourth largest country in the world, and the nation with the largest institutional footprint including military bases and civilian organizations all over the world. If one were to make the claim that the state did all of this without waste…that would be impossible to believe.

But where is this waste?

Contrary to common belief, audits of the U.S. government are not “long overdue.” In fact, every department in the United States Government is audited on a regular basis, every year or two years, by the Government Accountability Office and the Office of the Inspector General. In other words, the government is regularly audited by actual professional auditors who know what they are doing. Of course, it should be noted that among the many federal employees laid off by President Musk, are seventeen Inspectors General. Why would an agency dedicated to fighting waste fire experts in finding waste?5

Consequently, any discerning analyst of government waste has a good idea where the bulk of the waste is.

It’s not in USAID. How do we know? Well, because the Office of the Inspector General publishes its results for everyone to see. You don’t need an X account to see them. They are taxpayer funded and, therefore, open for everyone. Furthermore, they manage to avoid making mistakes like misreporting their figures by a factor of one thousand–because they are highly trained civil servants who know what they are doing.

Here’s the audit results conducted on USAID.

Audit of USAID’s Financial Statements for Fiscal Years 2024 and 2023Download

It’s a bit of a read, but the gist of the report is right there in the opening letter. “For fiscal year 2024, the audit firm found no reportable noncompliance with applicable laws, regulations, contracts, and grant agreements, including the provisions referred to in Section 803(a) of the FFMIA2 they tested. The audit firm also found no material weaknesses but reported two significant deficiencies related to USAID’s internal controls over (1) financial reporting pertaining to personnel and payroll actions (modified repeat finding) and (2) lease reporting in accordance with Statements of Federal Financial Accounting Standards.”

Was USAID perfect? No. Of course not. Is USAID a source of significant waste or fraud that could justify the chaos and suffering created when DOGE shut it down? It’s hard to make the argument that shuttering USAID was worth the cost, unless you are one of those people who likes seeing poor people suffer and die.

No. Programs like USAID are not a source of potential savings for the American people.

However, we do know which department is a significant source of waste and fraud. This is the only department in the federal government that has never passed an audit. This department cannot account for over sixty percent of its assets. Over thirty-five trillion dollars cannot be accounted for by this agency. That amount is fifty percent higher than the entire U.S. economy. The data is staggering.

The department in question? Defense. The good ‘ol DoD!

If Elon Musk and his DOGE team were, in fact, auditors looking for waste, they would locate their office in the Pentagon. That’s where DOGE needs to be unleashed, if anywhere.

If the standard is to shut down a wasteful department, as claimed without evidence for USAID, then the Department of Defense should be shut down at least until its books are in order. If that’s the standard. How can we justify shutting down USAID, without any evidence of waste presented by DOGE, while at the same time increasing spending for the Department of Defense for which evidence of waste is so abundant it is beyond comprehension?

Could it be that an audit of the Department of Defense might dredge up some questions on the billions of dollars’ worth of contracts and the dependence of the department on Elon Musk’s Starlink and Starshield? According to Reuters, “The total value of Musk’s companies’ contracts with the DoD is estimated to be in the billions of dollars, but the true figure cannot be determined since many of them are classified.”

Can you say “conflict of interest?”

In fact, an analysis of DOGE’s actions since its inception reveals some interesting patterns. Take, for instance, the audit of USAID above. It turns out that USAID was in the process of conducting an investigation into its contracts with Elon Musk’s Starlink. What was the nature of this investigation? Alas, we may never know, because it was shut down by the very guy it was investigating. Musk, of course, claims that USAID was an evil organization…but it wasn’t so evil that Musk was willing to turn down a million-dollar contract. At least, thanks to DOGE, we now know the price of evil.

A deeper dive into DOGE world reveals that mass layoffs at agencies conducting investigations into Musk’s businesses is a recurring theme. According to the New York Times, “At least 11 federal agencies that have been affected by [layoffs] have more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions into Mr. Musk’s six companies.”(Fig. 1) See link to the New York Times article above for this image.

This is just the result of the direct impacts of Elon Musk and DOGE. However, it is good to be the last man in the room with the current elected president. A couple of weeks ago the Orange Don crippled the National Labor Relations Board. He fired one of its three board members, thus denying the board the necessary quorum it needed to advocate for workers and oversee labor elections. That the Orange Don is antagonistic to organized labor is no secret, but this action far exceeds anything he did during his first term. What is the difference between the first and second desecration of the Oval Office? According to the New York Times, “On its own, the National Labor Relations Board, an independent watchdog agency for workers’ rights, has 24 investigations into Mr. Musk’s companies…”

It’s a grift, folks. This is clearly a grift.

Shutting down agencies and firing those who might be a threat to Musk’s business interests is not the endgame of this grift, however. If Musk really is the Grifter in Chief, he has bigger goals than simply hiding possible indiscretions.6

The second part of the grift is in access to sensitive federal databases. What could Elon Musk want with access to everyone’s treasury records, IRS data, and other personal information? The federal government is certainly one of the largest repositories of sensitive data in the world, perhaps only rivaled by big tech companies like Amazon, Google, and social media.

Imagine if you were the head of multiple multi-billion dollar companies in an age where artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and any of a number of technological breakthroughs could define the status of your portfolio. If only you could get access to critical information about your competition, about potential start-ups, about ongoing research, patents. That would be of significant advantage to an oligarch.

Now imagine that as a major business owner and wealthy investor, you could paralyze upon whispering in the President’s ear, those bodies in a position to be an obstacle to your business plan. The SEC, the FCC, the CFPB. If only those regulatory agencies would go away.

If this is a Grift, then there is only one question remaining

Elon Musk has successfully purchased a presidency through pandering and dumping truckloads of money on the campaign. He has won over the fascists and the right-wing cultists into his own Cult of Personality. In doing so, he has cowed the most powerful political institution in the country, the Republican Party, into providing cover for his graft.

Musk may go down in history as the greatest grifter of all time.

That leaves one question remaining. Is the president that everyone actually voted for in on the grift…or is he the mark?

I don’t have a good answer to this question.

On one hand, the Orange Don has a long history of grifting. He has grifted his workers, his contractors, students, even his wives. He has no scruples when it comes to getting what he wants.

On the other hand, he does not play well in the sandbox with others. This likely includes grifters. To my knowledge, he has never participated in a con that involved such a visible and equal partner as Elon Musk. The Orange Don works alone.

Also, from the perspective of a conman, is there a better mark than The Orange Don. He is profoundly ignorant, with an overinflated opinion of his own competence and intelligence. He is narcissistic and thin skinned, addicted to praise and pandering and plaudits on his behalf. And he’s greedy. These are the traits of a perfect mark.

Is it possible that when Elon heard that the president was easily influenced by the last person in the room that he recognized an easy mark when it saw one? The only question was, ‘how do I become the last person in the room?’(Fig. 2) Stone is not Forever is a classic immigrants tales. It is a warm reminder of where almost all of us came from. It is also a humbling image of how far we have regressed in this land of immigrants. To order, Click Here

Footnotes

All illustrations except fig. 1 and fig. 2 are AI generated using WordPress. ↩︎

In which case, he is positioned to take us all down with him. ↩︎

I must reiterate that I claim no special insight into Musk’s actions. I’m offering a model that may not be valid. Here I am arguing why I think it is valid. ↩︎

Yep…I’m going to continue not using his name on this venue. ↩︎

Because it’s not an audit. It’s a grift. https://www.tiktok.com/@madsociologist/video/7474314522384239914?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7402607063417718315 ↩︎

Again, it’s impossible to say for sure what the outcome of these investigations would have been. It is possible that all of these investigations would have cleared Musk of any wrongdoing. The problem to highlight, however, is the conflict of interest demonstrated. The fact that Musk is not recusing himself from these conflicts is suspicious. The effect, regardless of Musk’s possible liabilities, is in delegitimizing government as a legitimate authority in investigating big business, which was already tenuous at best, and the advancement of Elon’s business interests. ↩︎

[faulentzer]

I like that the republican party is so inclusive. They are the only party, that I’m aware of, to not only include, but elevate the mentally incompetent and downright whacko people to leadership positions. If you’re not fit for society you are leadership material for the GOP.

[spiders-hth-is-an-outlier]

I know it's fun to make the Elon Musk connection with Miles Bron in Glass Onion, with the whole "incompetent smug dumbass passing himself off as a genius futurist" connection, but honestly it does sell the movie short a little, to me. Elon is just some nepo kid; like Donald Trump, someone just gave him a pile of money and he's barely managing not to fritter it away entirely. That's boring. Real life is boring.

Miles is an interesting character because he's a con man. He schmoozes his way into this fortune by making friends with more talented people, then uses a whole arsenal of tricks and manipulation to warp each situation to his advantage, until these more talented, more intelligent, more successful people are reduced to dependency on his goodwill. That's interesting!

Miles is a Gatsby sort of character, someone who just shows up one day and turns out to be so good at fitting the template of a rich and powerful white man that the riches and power begin flowing toward him -- and away from the women and the men who can't leverage whiteness and the appearance of class privilege the same way he can. His character definitely says a lot about who feeds labor into the system and who reaps the rewards, but in an infinitely more fun way than if he were just some guy who rolled up able to pay his way to the top from day one.

[mastcomm]

Lots of Rich Men Tweet Like the President Now

Twitter was founded in 2006. Fourteen years later, and perhaps thanks to the influential example of President Trump, the masters of the universe have apparently learned to post to it.

This week alone, a plethora of influential politicians and business leaders have at least attempted to use the social media platform with the same air of casual authenticity coupled with severity that characterizes many of Mr. Trump’s tweets.

On Thursday, Mike Bloomberg responded to a taunting tweet from Mr. Trump — pitting him against his rival for the Democratic candidacy, Senator Bernie Sanders — by telling Mr. Trump that their mutual connections had nothing but contempt for him.

“We know many of the same people in NY. Behind your back they laugh at you & call you a carnival barking clown,” he said. “They know you inherited a fortune & squandered it with stupid deals and incompetence.”

Mr. Bloomberg is, among other things, competing with Mr. Trump on his own terms on social media — and has spent no shortage of money in doing so. But he was not alone last week in bluntly expressing himself on social media.

Lloyd Blankfein, the senior chairman of Goldman Sachs who is 65 and very, very rich, tweeted late on Tuesday about the possibility of Senator Sanders becoming the Democratic nominee for president.

“If Dems go on to nominate Sanders, the Russians will have to reconsider who to work for to best screw up the US. Sanders is just as polarizing as Trump AND he’ll ruin our economy and doesn’t care about our military. If I’m Russian, I go with Sanders this time around,” Mr. Blankfein tweeted.

Mr. Blankfein’s tweet came only a day after a series of tweets from Jay Carney, the former White House Press Secretary and senior vice president for global corporate affairs at Amazon. Mr. Carney lashed out at critics of an op-ed he wrote in The New York Times (also about Mr. Sanders), criticizing their word choice and suggesting that one might be a bot.

Mr. Carney’s sudden spate of unusual and aggressive tweets makes sense in the context of a less private Amazon ecosystem. His boss, Jeff Bezos, recently set Twitter alight with his own post, the point of which appeared to be that Mr. Bezos had met Lizzo at the Super Bowl.

Historically, Goldman Sachs and Amazon are known for extremely careful and policed corporate messaging. But in 2020, the example of the tweeter-in-chief (and, clearly, the specter of Senator Sanders competing in the general election) seems to have loosened their Twitter fingers.

Elon Musk, another rich and powerful man, has long been known for boisterous online behavior — in 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged with him with securities fraud for what it called “a series of false and misleading tweets about a potential transaction to take Tesla private.” But even he made a minor stir this month when he released a song called “Don’t Doubt ur Vibe,” and then highlighted that it had become the eighth most popular song on SoundCloud. (Early Wednesday morning, Mr. Musk also tweeted about Mr. Sanders.)

Jon Meacham, a presidential historian, said that the business leaders of the United States have long taken cues about how to behave in public from the staging of the presidency. At shareholder events, for example, he said, everything from the podium to the branded backdrop is often staged to look “like a place where a president of the United States could plausibly give a talk.”

“Prior to Trump there was a visual vernacular of dignity and gravitas that corporate America borrowed from the presidency,” Mr. Meacham said. “And now, as the president has become a Hobbesian bully online, they’re borrowing that. Because at least in their minds, that’s where people are at.”

This week’s tweets are meant to influence voters, and Mr. Trump has modeled a singular method of influence in that regard. Rebecca Katz, who has worked as a communications adviser to Mayor Bill de Blasio and Cynthia Nixon, attributed this week’s tweets to the increasingly blurry lines between politics, business, media and celebrity.

“While few business leaders would probably admit it, Trump’s rise has made them think that they can do what he’s done,” Ms. Katz said. “Trump’s shown them that the way to make news and command attention isn’t by being respected. It’s by being outrageous.”

Jack Grieve, a fellow at the University of Birmingham and one of the authors of a paper about linguistic variation on Mr. Trump’s Twitter account, said in an interview that the style of the president’s posts was not arbitrary.

“The stylistic variation you see on Trump’s twitter account is far from some random dumpster fire,” he said. “It’s very systematic.”

For instance, he said, Mr. Trump’s Twitter language became notably more formal once he became the Republican nominee for president in 2016. But it then reverted to informality after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape. Since the president was inaugurated, Mr. Grieve said, the informality of his language had crept up again. (Mr. Grieve’s analysis spanned from 2009 to early 2018 and did not include the impeachment process.)

That informality was characterized by short sentences, an abundance of pronouns, contractions, questions and direct interactions with other users on the site, Mr. Grieve said.

“The fact that people are imitating him is further evidence that it’s not just random,” Mr. Grieve said. “It’s been appreciated by people who aren’t just political pundits or who aren’t just journalists but who are really in there trying to do this. They’ve appreciated that there’s an art to what he’s doing.”

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/tech/lots-of-rich-men-tweet-like-the-president-now-2/

[thehowtostuff-blog]

People hate hubris and hypocrisy more than they hate evil, which is, I think, why we’re seeing the beginnings of a bipartisan cultural backlash against the tech industry. A backlash which is wrongly conceived and wrongly targeted … but not entirely unfounded. It’s hard to shake the sense that, as an industry, we are currently abdicating some of our collective responsibility to the world.

Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk do a ton of objectively bad stuff, but I just want to be clear that the mere act of holding onto that much money in a world with this much inequality is in itself a brutally evil action, and alone makes them bad people.

— Joseph Fink (@PlanetofFinks) June 13, 2018

I don’t want to overstate the case. The tech industry remained the single most trusted entity in America as recently as last year, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer. Jeff Bezos is the wealthiest man in the world, and Elon Musk probably its highest-profile billionaire; of course they’re going to attract flak from all sides.

Furthermore, tech has become enormously more powerful and influential over the last decade. The Big Five tech companies now occupy the top five slots on the Fortune 500, whereas in 2008, Hewlett-Packard was tech’s lone Top Ten representative at #9. Power breeds resentment. Some kind of backlash was inevitable.

And yet — the tech industry is by some distance the least objectionable of the world’s power centers right now. The finance industry has become, to paraphrase Rolling Stone, a vampire squid wrapped around the our collective economic throat, siphoning off a quarter of our lifeblood via increasingly complex financial structures which provide very little benefit to the rest of us. But a combination of learned helplessness and lack of hypocrisy — in that very few hedge fund managers pretend to be making the world a better place for anyone but their clients — shields them from anything like the rancor they deserve.

Meanwhile, we’re in the midst of the worldwide right-wing populist uprising which has led governments around the world to treat desperate refugees like nonhuman scum; turning them away by the boatload in Europe; imprisoning them on a godforsaken remote island in Australia; tearing children from their parents and caging them in America.

Tesla and Amazon’s treatment of factory and warehouse workers is at best questionable and at worst egregiously wrong … though if they were all replaced by robots, that would eliminate those complaints but also all of those jobs, which makes the complaints look pretty short-sighted. But it’s not whataboutism to suggest that outrage should be proportional to the relative scale of the offense in question. If it isn’t, then that indicates some seriously skewed priorities. What is it about the tech industry’s relatively venial sins, compared to those of finance and government, which so sticks in the craw of its critics?

Partly it’s the perceived hubris and hypocrisy — that we talk about “making the world a better place” when in fact we sometimes seem to only be making it a better place for ourselves. Life is pretty nice for those of us in the industry, and keeps getting nicer. We like to pretend that slowly, bit by bit, life is getting better for everyone else, too, while or sometimes even because we focus on our cool projects, and the rest of the world will get to live like us too.

Which is even true, for a lot of people! I was in China a couple of months ago: it has changed almost inconceivably since my first visit two decades ago, and overwhelmingly for the better, despite all of the negative side effects of that change. The same is true for India. That’s 2.6 billion people right there whose lives have mostly been transformed for the better over the last couple of decades, courtesy of capitalism and technology. The same is true for other, smaller populations around the world.

However. There are many, many millions of people, including throngs in our own back yards, for whom the world has gotten decidedly worse over the last ten years, sometimes as a result of those same changes or related ones (such as increasing inequality, which is at least arguably partly driven by technology.) Many more have been kept out of, or driven away from, our privileged little world for no good reason. Why is it somehow OK for us to shrug and turn our backs on them? The tech industry is enormously powerful now, and Peter Parker was on to something when he said: “with great power comes great responsibility.”

So why is it that we’re only willing to work on really cool long-term goals like electric cars and space exploration, and not the messy short-term stuff like inequality, housing, and the ongoing brutal oppression of refugees and immigrants? Don’t tell me it’s because those fields are too regulated and political; space travel and road transportation are heavily regulated and not exactly apolitical in case you haven’t noticed.

That painful, difficult stuff is for governments, we say. That’s for international diplomacy. That’s some one else’s problem. Until recently — and maybe even still, for now — this has been true. But with growing power comes growing responsibility. At some point, and a lot of our critics think we have already passed it, those problems become ours, too. Kudos to people like Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, who says “But we cannot delegate these complex problems off to the government and say, “We’re not all part of it,”” for beginning to tackle them.

Today in "private provision of public goods", Salesforce founder Marc Benioff pledges to shelter or house all the homeless people in SF in five years; https://t.co/5fO7y8Gyct

— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) June 16, 2018

Let’s hope he’s only among the first. And let’s hope we find a way for technology to help with the overarching problem of incompetent and/or malevolent governments, while we’re at it.

from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2Mz5RKk

[mastcomm]

Lots of Rich Men Tweet Like the President Now

Twitter was founded in 2006. Fourteen years later, and perhaps thanks to the influential example of President Trump, the masters of the universe have apparently learned to post to it.

This week alone, a plethora of influential politicians and business leaders have at least attempted to use the social media platform with the same air of casual authenticity coupled with severity that characterizes many of Mr. Trump’s tweets.

On Thursday, Mike Bloomberg, responded to a taunting tweet from Mr. Trump — pitting him against his rival for the Democratic candidacy, Senator Bernie Sanders — by telling Mr. Trump that their mutual connections had nothing but contempt for him.

“We know many of the same people in NY. Behind your back they laugh at you & call you a carnival barking clown,” he said. “They know you inherited a fortune & squandered it with stupid deals and incompetence.”

Mr. Bloomberg is, among other things, competing with Mr. Trump on his own terms on social media — and has spent no shortage of money in doing so. But he was not alone last week in bluntly expressing himself on social media.

Late on Tuesday, Lloyd Blankfein, the senior chairman of Goldman Sachs who is 65 and very, very rich, tweeted late on Tuesday about the possibility of Senator Sanders becoming the Democratic nominee for president.

“If Dems go on to nominate Sanders, the Russians will have to reconsider who to work for to best screw up the US. Sanders is just as polarizing as Trump AND he’ll ruin our economy and doesn’t care about our military. If I’m Russian, I go with Sanders this time around,” Mr. Blankfein tweeted.

Mr. Blankfein’s tweet came only a day after a series of tweets from Jay Carney, the former White House Press Secretary and senior vice president for global corporate affairs at Amazon. Mr. Carney lashed out at critics of an op-ed he wrote in The New York Times (also about Mr. Sanders), criticizing their word choice and suggesting that one might be a bot.

Mr. Carney’s sudden spate of unusual and aggressive tweets makes sense in the context of a less private Amazon ecosystem. His boss, Jeff Bezos, recently set Twitter alight with his own post, the point of which appeared to be that Mr. Bezos had met Lizzo at the Super Bowl.

Historically, Goldman Sachs and Amazon are known for extremely careful and policed corporate messaging. But in 2020, the example of the tweeter-in-chief (and, clearly, the specter of Senator Sanders competing in the general election) seems to have loosened their Twitter fingers.

Elon Musk, another rich and powerful man, has long been known for boisterous online behavior — in 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged with him with securities fraud for what it called “a series of false and misleading tweets about a potential transaction to take Tesla private.” But even he made a minor stir this month when he released a song called “Don’t Doubt ur Vibe,” and then highlighted that it had become the eighth most popular song on SoundCloud. (Early Wednesday morning, Mr. Musk also tweeted about Mr. Sanders.)

Jon Meacham, a presidential historian, said that the business leaders of the United States have long taken cues about how to behave in public from the staging of the presidency. At shareholder events, for example, he said, everything from the podium to the branded backdrop is often staged to look “like a place where a president of the United States could plausibly give a talk.”

“Prior to Trump there was a visual vernacular of dignity and gravitas that corporate America borrowed from the presidency,” Mr. Meacham said. “And now, as the president has become a Hobbesian bully online, they’re borrowing that. Because at least in their minds, that’s where people are at.”

This week’s tweets are meant to influence voters, and Mr. Trump has modeled a singular method of influence in that regard. Rebecca Katz, who has worked as a communications adviser to Mayor Bill de Blasio and Cynthia Nixon, attributed this week’s tweets to the increasingly blurry lines between politics, business, media and celebrity.

“While few business leaders would probably admit it, Trump’s rise has made them think that they can do what he’s done,” Ms. Katz said. “Trump’s shown them that the way to make news and command attention isn’t by being respected. It’s by being outrageous.”

Jack Grieve, a fellow at the University of Birmingham and one of the authors of a paper about linguistic variation on Mr. Trump’s Twitter account, said in an interview that the style of the president’s posts was not arbitrary.

“The stylistic variation you see on Trump’s twitter account is far from some random dumpster fire,” he said. “It’s very systematic.”

For instance, he said, Mr. Trump’s Twitter language became notably more formal once he became the Republican nominee for president in 2016. But it then reverted to informality after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape. Since the president was inaugurated, Mr. Grieve said, the informality of his language had crept up again. (Mr. Grieve’s analysis spanned from 2009 to early 2018 and did not include the impeachment process.)

That informality was characterized by short sentences, an abundance of pronouns, contractions, questions and direct interactions with other users on the site, Mr. Grieve said.

“The fact that people are imitating him is further evidence that it’s not just random,” Mr. Grieve said. “It’s been appreciated by people who aren’t just political pundits or who aren’t just journalists but who are really in there trying to do this. They’ve appreciated that there’s an art to what he’s doing.”

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/lots-of-rich-men-tweet-like-the-president-now/