Ya gotta wonder, really, how smart or dumb is Musk. From my perspective, the guy is clueless but rich. Is there something in humans, they attain great things then self destruct? It's tied in with ego and lack of humility perhaps?
I guess jumping back on Twitter and immediately posting a string of antisemitic crap does not pan out very well. Twitter suspends account of white supremacist Nick Fuentes a day after restoration https://www.reuters.com/world/us/tw...ick-fuentes-day-after-restoration-2023-01-25/
2012 The Hyperloop will be operational in two years, believe me. 2012 We'll have Tesla full battery swaps available in two years, believe me. 2014 The self driving car will ship in two years, believe me. 2016 I'll land two rockets on Mars in two years, believe me. 2016 Solar powered roof tiles will be available in two years, believe me. 2017 The Tesla truck will ship in two years, believe me. 2019 We'll have self driving robo taxis in two years, believe me. 2022: I am a Free Speech Absolutist, believe me.
2018: The Thai cave divers who were risking their lives to save trapped children, they're peadophiles believe me.
$3 Billion of Twitter's debt is an unsecured short-term bridge loan with a high interest rate which keeps rising. Musk is looking to refinance this debt and is not having much success so far. Yikes, his daily interest payments are $3.4 million.... that's even more than my wife could spend. Elon Musk wants to raise $3 billion to solve Twitter's debt woes Twitter's interest payments amount to $3.4 million a day now. https://interestingengineering.com/culture/musk-to-raise-3-billion-pay-part-twitter-debt Since December 2022, Elon Musk and his team are looking for potential investors who can help raise $3 billion at Twitter and shave off a significant chunk of a high-interest loan at the social media company, The Wall Street Journal reported. The valuation of Twitter has been a hurdle, though. Even though Elon Musk was the world's richest person at the time of his $44 billion bid for Twitter, the Tesla CEO sought a loan to acquire the social media company. Interesting Engineering has previously reported that Musk's acquisition has put an additional burden on Twitter's finances as it now needs to pay out over a billion dollars in interest alone every year. Now Musk is looking to restructure the loan to reduce the burden of payments estimated to cost $3.42 million a day. For this, his team has approached current as well as potential investors of Twitter, but market conditions have not helped their case. Musk's cost-cutting ways Soon after taking over Twitter, Musk announced a massive round of lay-offs which hasn't ended so far. As per the WSJ report, the number of employees fired hovers near the 6,000 people mark, leaving barely 1,500 people in the company across all its offices on various continents. In addition to auctioning off office supplies and furniture to raise more money, Musk has stopped paying rent for multiple offices and fired janitorial staff to save money at the company. All this has allegedly helped Twitter as Musk said that the company was no longer in the fast lane to bankruptcy. However, the real reasons for Twitter's problems lie elsewhere. Twitter's money woes Since Musk became CEO, as many as 500 advertisers have paused advertising on the platform in light of the new CEO's controversial decision to bring back people who were previously banned from the platform, this has led to a revenue loss of approximately $4 million a day, Gizmodo reported. Twitter's high payouts that are now due starting this quarter actually stem from how Musk raised money to finance his purchase. According to the WSJ report, Musk raised $13 billion in debt from banks, out of which $3 billion is an unsecured bridge loan. This is financial terminology for a short-term loan intended to be paid out quickly or secured with another financing. These are high-risk money lends and therefore attract the highest rate of interest as well. In Twitter's case, the $3 billion attracts a 10 percent interest plus secured overnight financing rate, currently at 4.3 percent. As per the terms agreed with the bank, for every quarter the loan remains unsecured, the interest rate goes up by 0.5 percent. Last April, when Musk first announced his intent to buy out Twitter, the overnight rate was a meager 0.3 percent. In less than a year, it has shot up by four percent, and if Musk cannot secure it anytime soon, it is likely to go further up, possibly explaining why Musk tweeted this last month. The pain of the unsecured loan becomes even more evident when considering that a $6.5 billion term loan attracts only a 4.75 percent interest rate. In comparison, a $3 billion secured bridge loan carries a 6.5 percent interest. As per the WSJ report, Musk and his team are looking to sell shares of the now-private Twitter to secure the bridge loan. However, they intend to raise the money at the $44 billion valuation that Musk paid for Twitter; some have been things investors do not agree upon under current market conditions. Musk has denied that he is looking to secure the bridge loan by selling his Twitter shares but with payments due soon, something or someone will soon have to give in.
TSLA up of late so you no longer mix your "TSLA the sky is falling" report in with your daily kick in the groin to Musk. It's how you roll.
Many of the nutcases Elon let back on to Twitter get re-suspended within a week. Maybe Musk needs to re-think allowing these clowns back on to Twitter -- there was a reason they were banned in the first place. In many cases, Elon personally intervened to add them back to Twitter. At the same time Musk is removing material from Twitter which outlines the actions of right-wing leaders. The most recent example is removing references of a BBC documentary about the Indian leader Modi. This is not a way to properly run a financially successful social media site. Twitter Is Quietly Re-Suspending the Lunatics Elon Musk Let Back On https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/tech...he-lunatics-elon-musk-let-back-on/ar-AA16M5DT It's only been a few months since Elon Musk took over Twitter and promised to resurrect those permabanned right-wing chuds who kept getting kicked off for being terrible — but now, the chickens seem to be coming home to roost. At least two previously-suspended right-wingers — Ali Alexander, best known as Kanye West's 2024 campaign advisor, and Nick Fuentes, an incel-of-all-trades who has his very own Anti-Defamation League explainer — have been suspended this week. As the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hannah Gais pointed out, Fuentes got the kibosh "roughly 24 hours" after Twitter infamously allowed him back on, and Media Matters' Alex Kaplan noted that his fellow "Stop the Steal" organizer Ali Alexander was on the chopping block soon after. Fuentes joked about his termination on Telegram, a messaging platform favored by drug dealers, Russian government officials, and white supremacists alike due to its apparent lack of rules. "Well it was fun while it lasted," the 24-year-old wrote, according to screenshots shared on Twitter. Censorious Musk While it's obviously easy to laugh at the expense of such reprehensible jerks, it's worth noting that this appears to be one of the first major instances of Twitter's content moderators sticking to their guns since Musk took over the site in late October and subsequently played host to a huge uptick in hate speech. The suspensions also come on the heels of a shorter-reaching but arguably more important Twitter censorship story out of The Intercept that claims the social network worked on behalf of India's far-right ruling party to suppress the reach of a BBC documentary that was critical of the country's controversial prime minister, Narendra Modi. While those serious claims of legitimate censorship barely made waves in the US, they did catch the attention of Musk, who said he was simply too busy to address the issue. "First I’ve heard," Musk wrote. "It is not possible for me to fix every aspect of Twitter worldwide overnight, while still running Tesla and SpaceX, among other things." It's unlikely that Musk hasn't heard about Alexander and Fuentes getting the can — though for now at least, he's wisely remaining silent.
Let's provide some context -- this is "Anonymous" - the collective hacktivist group - using Twitter as their main announcement mechanism to let everyone know about their displeasure about Musk banning a user from Twitter. Anyone want to place bets on their next target?
Leaked Messages Seem to Show Elon Musk Using Twitter to Punish His Enemies "Since the acquisition, the company's only actions have been to silence critics of Elon, to expose journalists and others to harm, and to violate basic ethical standards and privacy laws." https://futurism.com/elon-musk-twitter-leaked-messages-twitter According to a scathing new report from Bloomberg, Trust and Safety over at Elon Musk-owned Twitter is, well, pretty untrustworthy. Internal company messages reviewed by Bloomberg reportedly show that in the wake of longtime Twitter Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth's resignation, Musk's new position appointee, Ellen Irwin, has spent her first few months on the job — which she arguably shouldn't really have in the first place — bending and breaking established safety guidelines as needed to help her boss pettily punish his enemies. Not exactly trust-instilling, nor indicative of a particularly bright future ahead for the app. "Nearly all the people who know how to build safety systems at Twitter have left the company," Laura Edelson, a computer scientist at New York University who studies online political communication, told Bloomberg, "and those who are still there appear to be unwilling or unable to tell their boss that the things he is asking them to do are dangerous or violate Twitter's legal commitments." According to the internal docs, Irwin had a hand in two high-profile — and widely decried as unjustified — user bans, the first being that of Jack Sweeney, the teen behind @ElonJet. Upon taking over the platform, Musk used the flight-tracking account as proof of his commitment to free speech absolutism. As such, a lot of eyebrows were raised when, just weeks later, both @ElonJet and Sweeney's personal account were missing from the platform. And that action, per the Bloomberg report, was done manually, accompanied by a note reading: "Suspension: direct request from Elon Musk." (Bloomberg also notes that before he was kicked offline, Sweeney himself had posted a screenshot "showing Irwin had sent a Slack message directing employees to restrict visibility" to @ElonJet.) Bloomberg also pointed to the company's sudden ban of several prominent Musk-critical journalists, a move that was met with a fair share of public scrutiny. They too were silenced manually, an order that was executed by "direction of Ella," according to a different screenshot. The Bloomberg report was expansive, alleging as well that Musk and Irwin have disbanded a Twitter committee dubbed the Global Escalations Team, a group that formerly had the power to overrule execs "based on existing policy" — basically, a measure built to encourage corporate checks and balances. (Irwin told Bloomberg that allegation is "not accurate at all.") Meanwhile, Twitter's domestic and international teams, including content moderation and safety teams that work on topics as sensitive as child sexual exploitation, are still in shambles. Look, managing trust and safety for any social media platform, Twitter or otherwise, is a very difficult thing to do, perhaps now more than ever. These sites sit rather perilously at the core of both broader societal functioning, at the same time mediating our interpersonal and even interior lives. Considering the real weight that social media has on our personal and public worlds — not to mention the reality that a lawless internet is always bound to be a hell gutter of leashless bad actors — strict security guidelines are necessary, while simultaneously difficult to define and enforce due to varied international free speech laws. In other words, when it comes to social media trust and safety, nearly everything is gray area. Decisions are complex, and can't and shouldn't be made on whims — let alone on whims that serve only to settle a new and chaotic owner's personal feuds. It's not only ridiculous, but potentially quite damaging, to the site as well as its users. "Twitter's policies and practices in the trust and safety space were built around defending the rights of users around the world, especially the most vulnerable and marginalized communities," an unnamed former Twitter exec told Bloomberg. "Since the acquisition, the company's only actions have been to silence critics of Elon, to expose journalists and others to harm, and to violate basic ethical standards and privacy laws." READ MORE: Twitter's Trust and Safety Head Ditches Protocol for Musk Whims [Bloomberg]