Florida State Seminoles

[hedge]

[innocentbystander]

Elon Musk didn't buy Tesla, but instead became an early investor and board member, and eventually took over as CEO:
Founders Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded Tesla Motors in 2003.
Musk's investment In February 2004, Musk invested $6.35 million in Tesla, becoming the company's largest shareholder and chairman. He also invested an additional $48.65 million over time.

hedge, stfu. He didn't invent Tesla or buy it, he invested in it. His $55 million investment gave him a 100,000% ROI. It is so expensive now, no one can "buy" it. Your copy paste from twitter are lies.

[aTm]

Elon Musk also founded SpaceX, he did not “buy it”

Starlink is a product produced by SpaceX, saying he didnt “invent” it is like dunking on Apple for not inventing phones

[innocentbystander]

I guess it doesn't really matter to me, buy it, invest in it, or create it. He who creates it, sells parts of what they create to investors, they make big bucks. And they are entitled to that. I am sure that Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning made shit loads of money.

I don't think Nazir cares if Elon creates or buys or invests, either. The Winklevoss twins didn't create Facebook (they aren't smart enough to code) but they still got $50 million in a fucking lawsuit for coming up with the idea of it. Is that creating? It is certainly not buying or investing. I think that Tweet from Nazir Afzal, his comments, he was just pissed that 14 days from now Trump is President again and he wants to denigrate every single person who he thinks helped get Trump elected.

[hedge]

Elon Musk also founded SpaceX, he did not “buy it”

Starlink is a product produced by SpaceX, saying he didnt “invent” it is like dunking on Apple for not inventing phones

Never knew you were such a Musk fluffer, aTm. Regardless, he definitely bought Trump. And now he'll buy any House seat he wants, which will be cheap compared to Trump, but it's just crumbs for him in any case. Good times, a South African immigrant buying the US government, and not even trying to hide it. And so many appear to be delighted by that...

[aTm]

Such concern. What about all the other billionaires doing the same thing?

[hedge]

I'm not a fan of that either but Musk has taken it to another level. Can't really say that I blame him or any of the other billionaires doing the same thing thanks to Citizens United, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. The worm will turn, though, as it always does. When the whim and whimsey of the voting public changes (again, as it always does), so too will the coffers into which the billionaire class pour their money. Musk, though, is the first to so aggressively and broadly attempt (and successfully) to shape the whim and whimsey of the voting public via his ownership of Twitter, the purchase of which increasingly seems like a strategic move for one purpose. Twitter is on the wane, but something else will surely take its place. What that will be and what it will look like is anybody's guess...

[innocentbystander]

Musk bought Twitter to make money. When Musk didn't own it, Twitter lost money. They lost money because of the 10,000 employees Twitter had, 8000 of them (give or take) would delete comments that weren't #Woke enough for them. Human beings selectively removed comments based on nothing more than politics. That is why all the Wuhan lab leak comments (which turned out to be factual) were removed by the 8000. So, Musk buys Twitter, fires the 8000 that were unnecessary, kept the 2000 to run it, and now it is profitable (maybe for the first time ever.)

As I said earlier, I do no social media. I don't want to make my friends or family feel sad. So no social media. If Twitter is on the wane, what is to replace its popularity? OnlyFans?

[eCat]

here is one influence Musk has had......

The admissions came in a letter to Jim Jordan, the House Judiciary chairman, and is a major win for the Republicans. The onetime Harvard whiz kid usually digs in defensively, with vague promises of future reform.

After the pandemic hit, Zuckerberg wrote, senior Biden administration and White House officials had "repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree."


That is an important distinction. The Biden pressure tactics didn’t always work. Facebook could, and sometimes did, say no. But much of the time, the giant social media site just caved.

And Facebook had a publicly proclaimed agenda: prodding millions of people to take Covid vaccines.

Zuckerberg said the administration pressure "was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it." His company "made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today…I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any administration in either direction — and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again."

I don’t know: How confident are you that Facebook would publicly push back on some hot-button issue today?

A Biden White House spokesman, in lawyerly language that didn’t quite respond to Zuck’s accusations, said it had "encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety…Our position has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present."

Two years ago, a Free Press reporter who examined the "Twitter Files" found that both the Trump and the Biden administrations "directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes."

One document mentioned the White House chief technology officer, who "led the Trump administration's calls for help from the tech companies to combat misinformation."

---------------------

Meta is ending its fact-checking program and lifting restrictions on speech to "restore free expression" across Facebook, Instagram and Meta platforms, admitting its current content moderation practices have "gone too far."

"We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video posted Tuesday morning. "More specifically, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the U.S."

Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, joined Fox News Channel’s "Fox & Friends" Tuesday morning for an exclusive interview to discuss the changes.

"This is a great opportunity for us to reset the balance in favor of free expression. As Mark says in that video, what we're doing is we're getting back to our roots and free expression," Kaplan told "Fox & Friends."

Meta’s third-party fact-checking program was put in place after the 2016 election and had been used to "manage content" and misinformation on its platforms, largely due to "political pressure," executives said, but admitted the system has "gone too far."

[innocentbystander]

Exactly.

Social media is getting rid of the fact checkers. If hedge is correct and Twitter's popularity is starting to wane, I am curious what he thinks is replacing it.

[sardis]

Does this mean we'll be seeing titties on Facebook now?

[hedge]

"I don't want to make my friends or family feel sad."

I've got some bad news for you...

[hedge]

"Musk bought Twitter to make money."

LOL, if that's why he bought it, he failed miserably. He paid $45 billion for Twitter, it's worth less than $10 billion now and heading lower. But that's not why he bought it...

[aTm]

Maybe? “Worth” according to who? Its a privately held company which doesn't have shares trading.

[hedge]

Check it out. I guess some Saudis or Chinese could buy it at a premium, but ain't nobody giving him $45 billion for it. Twitter is on life support...

[Tree]

That Zucker dude is right. The Liberal effort to be free and open ended in them supporting censorship worse than the cons. Don’t trust the libbies ever again, brahs.

[hedge]

[innocentbystander]

Hedge, I think for Washington, Trump should just let them go.