Enough Musk Spam

> Over the weekend, the Spectator published a pretty compelling argument, saying that Dittman really is not Elon, and instead is just a German dude who lives in Fiji who is a huge Elon fan who just coincidentally sounds an awful lot like Elon.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/22379800

> > Since becoming a major force in American politics, Elon Musk has attacked the UK’s new Labour Government on multiple occasions through his social media platform X (formerly Twitter). He claimed civil war was “imminent” as riots swept across the country this summer. He has signal-boosted one of the riots’ instigators, the currently jailed convicted far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (known as ‘Tommy Robinson’). And he is now reportedly considering donating up to a $100 million to Reform UK Leader and MP Nigel Farage. > > > >This all prompts the question: why does Musk suddenly care about what’s happening in Britain? > > > >In my new book, published by Byline Books, Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy Democracy From Within, I explain Musk’s pivotal role in the network behind Trump’s return and the forming of a new ‘techno-utopian fascism’ that merges corporate tech power with the state. > > > >Musk and X are part of a broader network of billionaire oligarchs with questionable views on race, tech platforms, and far-right groups that are fed up with democracy as we know it. > > > >Russian President Vladimir Putin is an integral player in this network. And this has significant implications that the Western national security establishment ignores at everyone’s peril. > > > > a 2022, credible reporting has suggested that Musk has engaged in multiple, direct, and secretive communications with Putin and other high-ranking Russian officials. > > > >These interactions have encompassed discussions on personal issues, business interests, and geopolitics. At one point, Putin reportedly personally requested Musk not to activate his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favour to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Musk apparently complied. > > > >According to The Wall Street Journal, Musk has been in regular contact with Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin’s first deputy chief of staff, who holds enormous sway over the Kremlin’s war effort and control of Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine. > > > > ... > > > > To undermine the US-centric world order, Dugin advocated fostering internal discord throughout Western democracies. This implies exploiting social, political, and ethnic divisions, in order to fragment and destabilise democracies from within. > > > > ... > > > > The second element involves targeting the UK, due to its role as a vital ally to America. The aim is to diminish Britain’s influence in Europe, and to undermine NATO and other Western alliances in which Britain plays a significant operational and leadership role. > > > >The third element seeks to encourage divisions within the European Union and promote Eurosceptic nationalist movements – usually far-right, nativist movements – that challenge EU integration and liberal democracy. > > > >For Dugin, ‘cultural warfare’ is a key mechanism to undermine liberalism and the ideological integrity of the Western world. > > > > ... > > > > Having inserted himself into the 2024 Presidential Elections on behalf of Trump, Elon Musk’s sudden desire to interfere in British politics, by backing Nigel Farage, seems entirely consistent with Dugin’s strategy to destabilise the West through targeting the US, the UK, and Europe. > > > > ... > > > > Stoking division, fighting culture wars, spreading disinformation, and sowing confusion through the weaponisation of the far-right are all part of this strategy. > > > >Now Trump’s co-chair of the new US Department of Government Efficiency, Musk’s sudden interest in British politics aligns with Putin’s playbook. > > > >“All I can say is that I’m in touch with him and he is very supportive of my policy positions”, Farage recently told The Times in relation to rumours of Musk donating to Reform. “We both share a friendship with Donald Trump and Trump has said good things about me in front of Musk. We’ve got a good relationship with him.” > > > >He later told GB News: “What I do know is that Elon Musk is very supportive of me and what I’m trying to do, and he thinks that if Reform do well in the UK, we can bring about the same kind of change that he intends to do with Donald Trump in America.” > > > > ... > > > > Any financial interest or involvement of Elon Musk with Nigel Farage is likely to signal the scale of what could be coming to the UK in the years ahead. The forces behind Donald Trump’s 2024 victory see this as merely another step in a longer-term strategy to destabilise Western democracies. They will want to urgently exploit the advantage brought about by resurgent Trumpism. Britain will be next in line. Europe is the prize. > > > >And the entire Western world is at stake.

> Billionaire Trump associate Elon Musk’s latest disinformation campaign is targeting the U.K. government, which Musk appears to believe is not sufficiently anti-immigrant. Musk, who has already shaped the incoming Trump administration’s economic policy by proposing cuts to government spending and tech-oriented privatization of services, signifies a “new era” in American politics, says our guest Quinn Slobodian, who is chronicling right-wing tech billionaires’ accelerating attempts to mold the world according to their “destructive” and “nihilist” beliefs. In a far-reaching conversation, Slobodian touches on Musk’s clear admiration of authoritarian strongmen, market deregulation and white supremacist rhetoric. > > ... > > For more, we spend the rest of the hour with a person who’s documented the power of Big Tech billionaires and the new techs, specifically, among others, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at Boston University. His latest book is Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. He’s written several pieces for The New Statesman on Elon Musk, including one headlined “Elon Musk’s death drive.” Slobodian also recently contributed to The New York Review of Books running symposium about the reelection of Donald Trump, “The Return of Trump—II.” > > ... > > QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, it’s a pretty extraordinary situation to find ourselves in, right? I mean, if you think back to 2017, there was a lot of concern and attention to the efforts of Steve Bannon to create a kind of transatlantic coalition of far-right actors and parties. Imagine now here we are only a few years later, and there’s a Bannon-like figure but who also happens to be the wealthiest man in the world, overseeing some of the most profitable companies in the planet, who is leading that sort of effort to create a transatlantic coalition. So, the stakes are much, much higher. They are being dealt with with perhaps even less kind of care than someone like Bannon, which is an extraordinary thing to say. But Musk, I think, has entered this field of politics as a kind of scaled-up version of his video game play, with no real thought to the kind of consequences of the disruptive effects that he’s creating, from here to Britain to Germany and beyond. > > ... > > And I think that, you know, the kind of — the horizon of what the kind of politics in real life that someone like Musk is aiming at is broadcast by him frequently on his own Twitter account. Most recently, for example, he celebrated Nayib Bukele, the leader in El Salvador, as having done something that has happened in El Salvador and will happen and must happen in the United States, which, in El Salvador, has been to imprison 2% of the adult population as an absolutely draconian way of cracking down on crime. So, this vision of sort of authoritarian strongman on politics, sort of gloves-off mass incarceration crackdowns, on the one hand, and then a deregulatory kind of unleashing of the free market, on the other hand, is — produced this kind of curious combination of, on the one hand, Elon Musk posting Milton Friedman memes all the time, on the other hand, scaremongering about the, quote-unquote, “genocidal rape tactics” of nonwhite immigrants in the U.K. So, he’s produced this sort of surreal effect, I think, of sort of the strong state and the free market turning the sort of Thatcherist vision, grafting it onto all kinds of online aesthetics and kind of video game dynamics in ways that have really, I think, blindsided, for good reason, sort of mainstream, normal politicians, like Olaf Scholz, Keir Starmer, Biden-Harris, who don’t know how to deal with this kind of chaotic energy, which, unfortunately, has a huge amount of legitimacy behind it, not only his multimillion-dollar — or, multimillion number of followers on social media. > > ... > > AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you something. I’m looking at a piece in the Financial Times. “Elon Musk lived in apartheid South Africa until he was 17. David Sacks, the venture capitalist who has become a fundraiser for Donald Trump and a troll [of] Ukraine, left aged five, and grew up in a South African diaspora family in Tennessee. Peter Thiel spent years of childhood in South Africa and Namibia, where his father was involved in uranium mining as part of the apartheid regime’s clandestine drive to acquire nuclear weapons. And Paul Furber, an obscure South African software developer and tech journalist living near Johannesburg, has been identified by two teams of forensic linguists as the originator of the QAnon conspiracy, which helped shape Trump’s Maga movement. (Furber denies being ‘Q’.) In short, four of Maga’s most influential voices are fiftysomething white men with formative experiences in apartheid South Africa.”

>Speaking to the German weekly Stern, Scholz described the criticisms as nothing new. “You have to stay cool,” he said in the interview. “As Social Democrats, we have long been used to the fact that there are rich media entrepreneurs who do not appreciate social democratic politics – and do not hide their opinions.” > > He said he would make no efforts to engage with Musk, who has endorsed the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in next month’s federal elections and will host a live discussion on his social media platform X with its candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel. “I don’t believe in courting Mr Musk’s favour. I’m happy to leave that to others,” he said. “The rule is: don’t feed the troll.”

Original reporting in German: https://archive.is/gWLZL

>[W]hat if Elon Musk hadn't written the article himself? What if Welt am Sonntag had not printed a controversial guest article by one of the most powerful people on the planet, but an AI-generated text created in seconds? One that presumably agrees with Musk's views, but whose argumentation may have been cobbled together from millions of freely available bits and pieces about Germany and the AfD on the internet? > >If one asks [Musk's] language model Grok to write an opinion piece for a conservative newspaper that shows why only the AfD can save Germany, the program spits out a text that is remarkably similar to Musk's “Welt” article. In tone, argumentation, structure - and in many places literally. Like Musk's op-ed, the AI-generated text begins with the words: “Germany is at a critical point - its future is teetering on the brink of economic and cultural collapse”. This is followed shortly afterwards in both texts by the formulation that has particularly angered many in Germany: the AfD, it says, is the last spark of hope for Germany. Dozens more overlaps follow, some of them verbatim. > >Translated with DeepL.com

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/34878765

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/22307245

> > Elon Musk continues flexing his political muscle in 2025, calling for the release of a controversial British far-right political figure and increasing his support for a German far-right party. > > > > ... > > > > The Tesla CEO then made a slew of controversial comments in support of German and British right-wing movements. > > > >He said he might invest upwards of $127 million into the right-wing Reform U.K. Party and later said the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is the "only" party that can "save Germany," while rejecting the idea that the party is "rightwing extremist." > > > > Musk wasted little time in the new year before he hit out at the British government, calling for the release of Tommy Robinson, a pseudonym for Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. > > > >Robinson was a member of the English Defence League, a British social movement that has been described as racist and Islamophobic. He is among the most prominent far-right activists in the U.K. > > > >Robinson is currently serving an 18-month prison sentence for contempt of court after he aired a documentary that a judge said contained libelous claims about a 15-year-old Syrian refugee. This is Robinson's fifth prison term. > > > > Musk posted the full one hour and forty-five-minute documentary to X, formerly known as Twitter, along with a message to "Free Tommy Robinson!" > > > >Politico spoke with a number of British members of parliament (MP) who expressed shock over Musk's backing of Robinson. One anonymous Labour MP called Musk's language "dangerous," while another called it "manipulative rhetoric." > > > >Robinson has also drawn criticism from other right-wing activists and politicians. > > > > ... > > > > What People Are Saying > > > > Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss wrote on X: "I am appalled by the attacks on free speech in Britain and Europe. We can't be truly free without free speech. Good for Elon Musk and X for standing up to these bullies." > > > >Alex Jones of "InfoWars" reposted the Robinson documentary and wrote on X: "Tommy Robinson is an absolute hero! He is now in solitary confinement for defying the courts orders not to release his film exposed a huge Islamic child kidnapping sex ring! The totalitarian UK government governments attempt to suppress Tommy's film has completely failed and now it has over 122 million views." > > > >"Veep" creator Armando Iannucci, who was born and raised in Scotland, wrote on X: Musk is a "dangerous fool" for supporting Robinson. > > > >Labour MP for Walthamstow Stella Creasy responded to Musk's support of Robinson on X, writing: "Tommy Robinson is in jail for contempt of court because he repeated false claims against a Syrian refugee. Its not a 'debate'. Its a lie and he tried to use it to foment anger and hatred in our society for political gain. Elon Musk appears to be doing the same." > > > > Shayan Sardarizadeh, a senior journalist for BBC Verify, wrote on X: "The owner of this app seems unaware that Tommy Robinson is in prison because he admitted to contempt of court after repeating false claims about a Syrian refugee who had been physically attacked at school despite being instructed by a court not to do so."

Here's the deal: Adrian Dittmann is not Elon Musk, and we have concrete evidence.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/22329761

> > Elon Musk has said Reform UK needs a "new leader" because Nigel Farage "doesn't have what it takes". > > > >The X owner posted the tweet on Sunday following days of headlines over his comments about the historical grooming scandal that took place across UK towns and cities more than a decade ago. > > > >Although Mr Musk is in agreement with Mr Farage and the Conservatives that there should be another national inquiry, a dividing line has emerged between the tech billionaire and the Reform leader over the former's support for jailed activist Tommy Robinson. > > > >Shortly after Musk's post, Mr Farage said: "Well, this is a surprise! > > > > "Elon is a remarkable individual but on this I am afraid I disagree. > > > >"My view remains that Tommy Robinson is not right for Reform and I never sell out my principles." > > > > ... > > > > His comments about Mr Farage will be embarrassing for Reform, who have been courting the billionaire and soon-to-be efficiency tsar of the incoming president-elect Donald Trump.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/tech-companies/elon-musk-agrees-with-post-that-calls-americans-retarded-amid-maga-civil-war/ar-AA1wzQs3

> Actual free speech means that public figures, like Elon Musk, need to have a thicker skin. They need to recognize that not everyone will publish things that are flattering, and sometimes you just have to suck it up and take it. Or use the fact that you have one of the world’s largest megaphones to… use your own voice to respond. Rather than threatening legal recourse. That’s how free speech works.

What a baby.

The Headline sounds like a bingo card. RIP

The article is already 2 weeks old, but I think it got missed before

> The Trump transition team wants the incoming administration to drop a car-crash reporting requirement opposed by Elon Musk’s Tesla, according to a document seen by Reuters, a move that could cripple the government’s ability to investigate and regulate the safety of vehicles with automated-driving systems.

> Taboola's data, shared exclusively with Axios, shows Musk has outpaced his closest peers — Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg — for years, but the gap widened dramatically in 2024.

The spam is already exponential. :(

> > > The tech billionaire supporter of President-elect Donald Trump has written pieces backing the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD). > >

alt account is Adrian Dittman

Billionaire Elon Musk is coming under fire from some right-wingers online over comments he made in support of H-1B visas, non-immigrant visas that allow employers to hire highly skilled foreign workers.

“We don’t want or need to turn this country into India,” reads one viral response to Musk’s post.

“America is not your sports team. It’s my home,” countered someone else.

“I used to have some faith in Elon, but after this post I’m done. The mask is off,” slammed one right-wing account. “Elon supports erasing the cultural and ethnic identity of America to help grow his bank account. He’s parasitic and destructive.”

“So why not try to get people from Europe?” replied another account. “Engineers here in northern Europe earn HALF of what US engineers do, yet you keep importing Indians instead.”

Please understand this post is my personal opinion and is not financial advice. I don't have any investing experience so this could be wrong.

Today I was thinking about Tesla. Tesla's stock has for a long time had some kind of weird cult status among retail investors and the stock has been a lot higher than other car companies for reasons I don't understand.

It seems Musk has alienated everyone with Tesla's cars. People on the left are not going to want a Tesla because it funds Musk's far right extreme agenda. People on the right are not going to be all of a sudden in favor of electric cars and I know this from talking to Trump supporters in real life.

As long as Musk is running TSLA I don't see how Tesla will be sustainable if no one buys their cars anymore. I predict that as people get more frustrated with Musk the stock will start to go down.

In addition another risk to TSLA is starting to become known for poor quality and high prices. Basically you'll be stuck with an expensive car that most people won't be willing to repair for you.

Theoretically speaking if there was to be a large scale selling of TSLA and boycott of TSLA it would make Elon worth a lot less meaning he won't be able to influence as many elections.

Perhaps now would be a good time to sell the stock and urge your friends and maybe even hedge fund managers to do the same thing.

Archive link

How long until President Musk decides to unilaterally delete the NHTSA?

Hey, Luigi! I have your next target.

Elon Musk's extreme agenda is a threat to the world. He helped elect someone who's going to take away our rights and try to become a dictator and despite his wealth doubling after the election his greed and thirst for power isn't and never will be satisfied. He wants to do the same in the UK. Very likely he will try to consolidate and gain power and wealth globally.

I've been brain storming ideas of what we can do to deal with him and here is what I came up with.

1. Do what you can to get as many people off Twitter/X as possible. Since he has control over Twitter he manipulates the algorithm to boost himself and his interests. It's great if you can tell anyone you know to stop using Twitter but what would have a bigger impact is if large accounts and institutions stopped using Twitter. Try leaving a comment on their page about why using Twitter is bad. This will also have a benefit that other people will see you comment. You can also send a DM to their account.

2. Try to get your country to ban Twitter/X. There's a petition to get X banned in the EU. This could be important for the survival of your country. Musk could show you propaganda that's bad for your country so banning X would be a good idea.

3. Contact advertisers on Twitter and demand they stop advertising. Send screenshots of their ads next to neo-Nazi and extreme content to the people who paid for the ads. They will not be happy seeing their ads next to that kind of content.

4. Mass simultaneous strike or resignations at his companies especially Twitter. I think this one might be the most powerful one. Imagine if most employees all of a sudden stopped working or quit. Maybe a lot of employees could quit and start a rival company. The sad thing about Elon's companies is there are many smart, talented and hardworking people who don't get the credit for all they put into working for Elon. Also I'd highly recommend this article about turnover contagion.

5. Investigate and sue for any illegal activity. Analyze everything he and his companies do under a microscope and if he did something illegal make sure he faces justice for it. Hold him accountable in all countries, not just the US.

6. Boycott of his products. Make sure to not only boycott his product but do everything you can so other people also boycott. The less money Elon has, the less power he has.

I would love to hear your thoughts on how we can stop Elon Musk. If you have any ideas on how these ideas could be implemented or have ideas of your own please do share!

https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/