Tesla founder threatens to take action against media watchdog ‘the split second court opens on Monday’
Elon Musk vows ‘thermonuclear lawsuit’ as advertisers flee X over antisemitism::Tesla founder threatens to take action against media watchdog ‘the split second court opens on Monday’
Eh you spend your whole life getting away with anything because you have the money, you end up starting to believe your own bullshit.
One of the reasons so many people are rich is because they make money off the smart or the hard working. You never do the work yourself because you legitimately aren't the best person for the job.
I think Elon bought in too much during the wave of "I'm a tech genius who put a car in space, make electric cars and spaceships" and I think he actually believes he did that instead of the countless and thankless hours of all the real professionals.
The problem with this thinking, is now he feels like he ^needs to do something. Just like that micromanaging boss who doesn't help at all and just spouts random nonsense thinking it will magically make it go faster. But instead he's just self sabotaging the process.
This is what happens when you start to believe your own bullshit. If he was smart, he should walk away and let the professionals handle it.
He's more and more turning into Trump minus the dementia. In Germany we have the term "Cäsarenwahn", for when someone loses touch with reality from having too much unchallenged power. Haven't found any English equivalent so maybe it's time for another loan word.
They get this way partly because they’re surrounded by yes men.
To take an example of someone like Harvey Weinstein. They don’t typically come out of the gate asking people to get naked for a movie role.
But they might first just be handsy with people and nobody says anything so it becomes normal, then they start caressing people and this becomes the new normal. Before you know it you’re fucking insane.
To put it simply, people don’t normally notice incremental changes in people and over time these can become pretty outlandish.
With Elon it’s that nobody ever tells him he’s wrong and before you know it you think you know everything.
It makes perfect sense once you understand money is a hard drug.
No one needs this much money, they could be living a quit happy fulfilling life but instead all they do is try to obtain more, at the expense of social relations, their family and their own mental health. They destroy their own lives to get the dopamine hit of the numbers going up.
People like Elon are addicts. Greed is an illness but rather than giving these people medical help to stop hoarding excess wealth we glorify their problem like their winning.
Maybe the people who get this rich due so at the cost of their mental health.
It is not that power corrupts, but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Even the extremely rich tend to not wield power with such a kind of wild abandon as elon, they tend to offset as much responsibility as possible and ride the wave, because the level of delusional self-importance you need in order to believe yourself smarter than literally everyone under you is even too astounding to the leeches of society.
How would that work? If X goes bankrupt, he’s still on the hook for buying it? He’s not the one going bankrupt, the business he bought would be. That would be like if I bought a car and crashed it and wrote it off. I still bought the car, I just drove it into a telephone pole. I still owe the money for the wreckage.
It's not just a lawsuit, it's thermonuclear lawsuit! His lawyers better handle it carefully, lest they be blown into itty bitty pieces. Elon stopped maturing at about the age of fourteen.
He's not suing the advertisers, he's suing a watchdog who's pointing out all the antisemitism and whatnot, which causes the advertisers to flee because in his world, none of it is bad.
Unless Musk gets a hearing in front of a judge who exposes his own sympathy to fascism, I can't see this case going anywhere. The truth is an absolute defense to libel.
Well, even if he has no intention of winning, the simple act of filing will cost any named watchdog media group money. I doubt too many are swimming in it.
He's also got a habit of ignoring legal advice and running his mouth in public, so he's likely going to end up writing another big check for that misadventure if his lawyers can't talk him out of going through with it
Ok look The Independent, I know that the company says he's a founder and Wikipedia lists him as a founder, but he's not. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded the company almost a full year before Musk had anything to do with it. He had to sue them to add his name to the list officially.
Does it? I expected better of Wikipedia, so I checked, and both Musk's page and Tesla's avoid simply listing him as a founder by explaining the situation, i.e., that he was an early investor. Even the sidebar for Tesla, Inc. just links to a subsection rather than listing names.
Just a note to add, addressing a related talking point that inevitably comes up:
It's a very common piece of misinformation that he was determined to be a founder in a court of law. That never happened. It was part of an agreement to avoid a lawsuit. It's a lie that the relevant parties could all live with as part of a larger settlement.
I like to ask Musk apologists, "Do you need to found a company to be that company's founder, yes or no?" If they waffle or say "no," there's no point continuing in good faith, because they're not serious people. It's not hard to say "Okay, that's a bit of a fib, he should be called an honorary founder, but blah blah blah..." But if they can't even do that, then they aren't operating based on reality.
A lawsuit settlement agreed to by Eberhard and Tesla in September 2009 allows all five – Eberhard, Tarpenning, Wright, Musk, and Straubel – to call themselves co-founders.
Which I agree is sort of showing the trick and explaining how it's done all at once. But I wanted to give the headline writer a little bit of the benefit of the doubt that they actually looked it up somewhere other than on the Tesla website.
I will respond to this by asking "is registering the name of a company the only thing that counts when founding a company?"
Because that's what the original founders did. They registered the name. No patents, no designs, no engineering, no staff. They registered the name, then went searching for VC money.
Ok, it sounds like you're trying real hard to split hairs.
Not just the company itself and Wikipedia say so, but legally, he is a founder. That was the outcome of the lawsuit.
It's true that the first 2 founders legally registered the corporate entity known as "Tesla Motors". Then for the next year, they didn't do jack shit involving anything automotive... they were just going around looking for investors.
Musk was basically their first, and biggest, investor. They didn't actually hire any engineers or, you know, actually start doing anything until Musk's money came into play.
The rule of law in a specific geographic area in a specific period of time isn't nearly as important as the meaning conveyed which is misleading.
Rather than missing the forest for the trees, why might he push for the title of founder? Why might some discredit his efforts and tactics in assuming the founder of title in specific contexts?
He did not play a meaningful role in the beginning of the company and is not responsible for its success. Money was responsible, the two founders' expertise was responsible, that specific person is not special enough for their contribution to matter much. Anyone can supply capital especially during the inflated economic conditions (of which we are suffering the consequences of now) and during the time where EV and technology at large was developed enough to allow such developments to take place.
This is the entire argument Musk made in court, and honestly I don't think I care. Tarpenning and Eberhard are both engineers with actual inventions and software attributed to their direct design long before the idea of Tesla; Eberhard wrote the company's mission statement and guiding principles, and the two did the market research to discover that an electric vehicle could be a high-end consumer product. At its core, before the battery technology and stators were invented (neither of which Musk contributed to), that's what Tesla was.
While it's true that Musk led development on the Roadster, I think we've seen very publicly over the past year what his "development leadership" looks like and I'm not entirely convinced it's a value-add. (Even before his disastrous year with Twitter, his checkered past leading Paypal—and being forced out for his poor leadership—would give a similar impression.) He didn't come up with the battery tech or the stators. He didn't contribute to a single patent in the early days of Tesla. In fact, that first design of the Roadster probably owed more to Lotus Motors than to Musk himself.
It appears that he did with the Roadster, and the early years at Tesla, what he always does when leading product development: jump into an existing idea, make wild assertions and insistences, let the actual engineers figure out how to do it, and then justify a reason to exclude stuff when it turns out to be unfeasible. He did this demonstrably with SpaceX, Hyperloop, Boring Company, PayPal/Zip2, and now Twitter, and he's done it demonstrably at Tesla with the Cybertruck, so I don't know why it would be a surprise that he did it twenty years ago at Tesla too. He doesn't invent things or lead teams, he just makes noise and bluster.
Which just leaves the money. And would you credit a really loud bank with "founding" a company?
Musk is definitely the type to say "the customer is always right" when he's the customer yet apparently didn't realize that same thing applies to his customers.
I'd imagine it would be rather easy to to prove wether that claim is true or not; show screenshots of said posts with these advertisements next to them.
To be clear, is he in hot water over what he said about the ADL? Or the fact that Nazi's are proliferating on his platform and advertisers don't like it?
Nothing to see here. He definitely isn't suing them because he wants large advertisers like Dosney on the platform and to be able to say the worst shit imaginable at the same time. Clearly nothing to see, obviously. /s
The Nazi stuff he posted to a public platform with half a billion users where he personally has 160 million people watching his account, potentially being actively notified of his posts?
That's just you, with intelligence, trying to explain what he, without intelligence, is doing. You're projecting intelligence on him because he won capitalism, and Capitalism wants you to think it's because of merit. It isn't, he's an idiot. Look at the name of his child.... Do you think this is a person with foresight?
I agree with you. I think twitter was as good for progressives as it was for nazis and Elon and others couldn't have that. The fact that we're not discussing this on Twitter and not even on Reddit, but on this beautiful but obscure platform, showd it all works well for the nazis.
You (users) pay musk to display your original created content on his platform, your content is then used to attract companies that pay musk so they can display adverts to people reading your original content.
I don’t know what their current level of public contribution is, but there was a time where they put out some pretty popular OSS like pants / pex and bootstrap. In any case I think it is pretty common to consider social media platforms themselves to be technology. I get your meaning though, but there are many posts much further over the obviously-not-tech line then this.
How else are you going to fight against people like Elon except by talking about them constantly and making sure not a day goes by that they're not on the front page of every social media site and news outlet? Worked so great with Trump too.
Meanwhile Media Matters are absolutely salivating over the thought of what they can get in discovery. Never sue journalists unless you're really comfortable giving them unfettered access to your server logs, internal communications, and much, much more.
"Telling people what I do in highly visible public spaces is a violation of my rights in some way that I haven't figured out yet. Everyone has to like me and tell me what a cool guy I am. It's the law."
From what I see Media Matters said ads were placed against antisemitic / racist posts and then Twitter confirmed it. So wtf is the lawsuit even about???? Twitter tried to cast it as "free speech" or that these ads were a fraction of their total but the reality is they happened. So all I see happening if Twitter goes ahead with a lawsuit is a) they get anti-SLAPPed back to where they were or b) they go to trial and get screwed by discovery and reality. In a way I hope they don't get the anti-SLAPP since discovery would kill them.
Maybe he's going to sue himself and split his ego, creating mini Elon Musk egos that will themselves sue themselves, creating a chain reaction until eventually the whole legal system is so saturated by it that they just succumb to him.
I wouldn't shoot them. I'd show them things that undermine what they believe. That's what the allied forces did to all the axis solders that were captured.
Elon Musk has vowed to file a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against a US media watchdog that claimed adverts were appearing on X alongside antisemitic posts, as major brands including Disney and Apple fled the platform.
Watchdog group Media Matters for America said earlier this week that it had found that corporate advertisements for IBM, Apple, Oracle and Comcast’s Xfinity were being placed alongside antisemitic content on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Disney, Warner Bros Discovery and Comcast, Lions Gate Entertainment and Paramount Global are also pausing their ads on X. Axios reported that Apple would do the same.
The Tesla founder added in a second post: “The split second court opens on Monday, X Corp will be filing a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and all those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company.”
“Far from the free speech advocate he claims to be, Musk is a bully who threatens meritless lawsuits in an attempt to silence reporting that he even confirmed is accurate,” Mr Carusone said.
“It is unacceptable to repeat the hideous lie behind the most fatal act of antisemitism in American history at any time, let alone one month after the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” the White House said in a statement.
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