Elon Musk Buys Twitter

[Gigantique]

IMO to make self driving really work every car needs to use it. Cars have communicate with each other.

This. Considering automation on that level is still far away in a heavily controlled environment like aviation I don't see it happening anytime soon in the comparably wild west that is roads.

[The Stormbringer]

IMO to make self driving really work every car needs to use it. Cars have communicate with each other.

Either that, or the roads themselves need to have loads of sensors and radios built-in for active communication and monitoring beyond the car's own capability. Ideally both.

[Milchshake]

The world isn't even close to ready for self driving taxis, what a dumb decision.

But Musk Fans wil eat this up. It would be great if they started "using taxis to spite the libs!"


Meanwhile, normal people might step into a Musk cab and realize they made a mistake...



Im thinking Musk hates trad cabs like he hates public transport. The thought of sharing a small space with "those people", terrifies him.

[Edge-]

Excuse me, but I automatically trust any robo-cab driven by the voice of Robert Picardo and always will. Johnnycab is a fine service and I will not tolerate others maligning it!

[VMSmith]

Excuse me, but I automatically trust any robo-cab driven by the voice of Robert Picardo and always will. Johnnycab is a fine service and I will not tolerate others maligning it!

Please state the nature of your transportation emergency.

[Benggaul]

Excuse me, but I automatically trust any robo-cab driven by the voice of Robert Picardo and always will. Johnnycab is a fine service and I will not tolerate others maligning it!

Incidentally, the eyeroll Johnny does in that scene cracks me the fuck up every time.

[Milchshake]

Who's ready for the spciy sauce!

I don't read a ton of depositions, but this is probably the most unhinged example of the genre I have ever encountered. Absolute scenes. Lol that Spiro and Musk so desperatly wanted this sealed.

Elon Musk Didn’t Want His Latest Deposition Released. Here It Is.
Musk is being sued for falsely suggesting a 22-year-old Jewish man was part of a neo-Nazi brawl.
“Do you think you did anything wrong to Ben Brody?” asked Bankston, who’s based in Houston.

Spiro interjected, saying this “isn’t a question you’re allowed to ask by the court.”

It was the start of what would be a contentious back-and-forth between two high-profile attorneys. Spiro, who has represented celebrities such as Jay-Z and Megan Thee Stallion, previously won a defamation case for Musk after the billionaire called a man who helped rescue children trapped in a cave in Thailand a “pedo guy” in 2018.

“You keep filing these silly, frivolous shake-down cases, I’ll keep trying to think of Texas lawyers to bring to your depositions,” Spiro told Bankston.

Bankston, of the Texas law firm Farrar & Ball, previously represented two Sandy Hook parents who won $45 million in damages against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones after Jones spent years falsely claiming the 2012 school shooting never happened.
...
A Billionaire’s Fact-Checking Process
Contrary to his earlier statements, Musk suggested later on in the deposition that he researches discourse before he joins it.
“If you care about the truth, you have to go look about it,” Musk said.
Musk’s own testimony reveals he did little to seek out the truth.

“Would it be fair for me to say that, other than the tweets that you interacted with, you did not secure other information about this unmasked brawler?” Bankston asked at one point.
“I don’t recall securing other information,” Musk responded.
During his testimony, Musk criticized what he called the “traditional legacy news industry” while lauding X’s Community Notes, a website tool that allows users to add corrections or additional context to misleading or untrue posts.
Musk called Community Notes “the best system on the internet” for fact-checking, and said he tagged Community Notes in his post referencing Brody as a show of “good faith,” the transcript shows.
“And I think — I think I really did this in good faith, because I would not ask for a fact-check which is what I do by adding Community Notes,” Musk said, according to the transcript.
Musk did tag Community Notes in his post about Brody, but a note was never added to the false claim. The post remains on X today without a correction.

Acutal docmuent link for the mordibly curious.

[Evil Midnight Bomber]

Watch Brennan Lee Mulligan "Defend" Elon Musk.

[Flarelaine]

So I'm wondering if Elon Musk had any specific reason for picking the 8th day of the 8th month for unveiling his robotaxis.

[Edge-]

So I'm wondering if Elon Musk had any specific reason for picking the 8th day of the 8th month for unveiling his robotaxis.

Just doing a bit of the 'ol trolling, what what.

[Milchshake]

I can only imagine.... in some middle-class-emerald-mine-owning household in Apartheid era South Africa...
"Mum! Elon is saying stupid nazi shit again"

Also, four years ago today...

[Benggaul]

I can only imagine.... in some middle-class-emerald-mine-owning household in Apartheid era South Africa...
"Mum! Elon is saying stupid nazi shit again"

Also, four years ago today...

Probably worth mentioning the 7-day average for COVID deaths a month ago was topping 40 in Florida alone...

Haven't checked recently but I'm pretty sure 4 years later he's still completely wrong.

[Rasulis]

Excuse me, but I automatically trust any robo-cab driven by the voice of Robert Picardo and always will. Johnnycab is a fine service and I will not tolerate others maligning it!

We use Waymo quite a bit. Mostly late at night when we don't want to take public transportation, and I definitely don't want to park my car in some San Francisco underground parking garage. Nor walk to and from the garage. Especially late at night.

It is not bad. Late at night wait time for pick up is around 5 - 10 minutes. The experience been pretty smooth so far. The cars followed the speed limits to the T, used the turn signal, paused for pedestrians and yielded to emergency vehicles, dropped speed down in construction zone, found alternate routes around accidents/emergencies, deferred to other drivers and cyclist. The service would pick up and drop off at our front door and in front of our destinations (typically a restaurant).

From our place to China Town typically cost less than $20. Not sure how the company is going to recoup the billions that they spent on the service.

[Edge-]

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/8/24...x-than-help-it

Elon Musk admitted that his posts on the platform formerly known as Twitter may have financially harmed the company in the long run, in a March 27th deposition made public on Monday by The Huffington Post. The billionaire also admitted to have a “limited understanding” of the lawsuit for which he was being deposed.

The 22-year old Ben Brody sued Musk for defamation last fall, alleging that Musk pushed a conspiracy theory that falsely identified Brody as being involved in a fight between two far-right groups in Oregon. Musk’s attorney filed multiple requests to keep the transcript of his nearly two-hour testimony confidential, but they were denied by the judge.

At one point, Musk is asked by Brody’s attorney, Mark Bankston, about his purchase of Twitter and what impact it had on his usage of the site. Musk responded that he believed his posts had “really remained unchanged before and after the acquisition.” But he acknowledged that maintaining that attitude likely did X more harm than good.

“The — and going back to the sort of self-inflicted wounds, the Kevlar shoes, I think there’s — I’ve probably done — I may have done more to financially impair the company than to help it, but certainly I — I do not guide my posts by what is financially beneficial but by what I believe is interesting or important or entertaining to the public,” said the owner of X.

On multiple occasions, Musk expressed confusion over why Brody was pursuing litigation against him and basic details about the case. At one point he accused Bankston — Brody’s attorney — of performing a cash grab by pursuing the lawsuit. “My — what I want to think it’s really about is about you getting a lot of money,” said Musk.

Elon Musk, genius billionaire.

“The replies get 100 times less attention than a primary tweet. So this was certainly not any attempt to generate advertising revenue. In fact, generally advertisers would not want to advertise with content that is contentious,” said Musk.

Given the size of Musk’s account and his public prominence, his reply, which still remains on the site, was viewed by over a million people, Brody’s attorney estimated.

“You do understand that the amount of people who saw this, who have viewed this tweet, is equivalent to all 30 major baseball stadiums filled to capacity?” asked Bankston.

But Musk claimed that Twitter had five to eight trillion views a year, and so a million views wasn’t significant on the platform.

“No big deal?” said Bankston.

“Hit or miss, yeah,” responded Musk.

“Not a big deal that this went out to so many people?”

“Correct. And more of a — this is kind of the thing where advertisers, when it’s contentious, will not advertise, which means we do not get revenue from it,” Musk responded.

Elon Musk, like almost every "very smart rich person", phobic of any personal responsibility.

Musk also admitted that he was the owner of an account called @ermnmusk in which he role-played as his own toddler son. Motherboard and several other outlets uncovered the mysterious account last year.

Also apparently he's low-key indulging his apparent infantilization fetish. Totally normal stuff. Yes I know parents do this for their infants/toddlers, but that's still fucking weird as shit yo.

[Cthulhu 2020]

Anyone remember when Elon kept saying he'd have fully autonomous self driving cars "by the end of the year" something like 5 years in a row? And now he's just given up it seems.

[D Luniz]

Anyone remember when Elon kept saying he'd have fully autonomous self driving cars "by the end of the year" something like 5 years in a row? And now he's just given up it seems.

it's his "infrastructure week"

[Captain N]

it's his "infrastructure week"

That's going to happen in "2 weeks", right?

[Milchshake]

But but SpaceX is the good one! Don't besmirch Spacex! Reusable Rockets!

SpaceX's Starlink falls short of growth expectations despite revenue surge - WSJ
SpaceX's satellite internet venture Starlink posted a more than six-fold surge in revenue last year to $1.4 billion, but fell short of targets set by CEO Elon Musk
"SpaceX has met or exceeded revenue projections over the past three years, other people familiar with the company’s balance sheet say"

• WSJ really softballed this report. What a weird claim to frame this, given that we know Starlink is extremely not living up to revenue projections ... $1.4b in '22, instead of $12b projected.
• "All the major airlines have spurned [Starlink] in favor of sticking with established Wi-Fi providers... Analysts say SpaceX doesn’t provide the long-term contracts and exclusivity that corporate clients often want... For Delta, the memory of a failed 2022 demonstration still hasn’t faded".
• Pretty sure every major business fraud case in my lifetime has this “the accounting is more art than science” line in the first half of the documentary.

Shocked that investors let Musk get away with not accounting for "incidental" costs like launches, ground infrastructure costs, etc. when getting pitches about Starlink profitability.


.

[Cthulhu 2020]

it's his "infrastructure week"

He's moved on from "We'll have self driving cars to the end of the year" to "Let me implement features on twitter that nobody asked for and makes the site an objectively worse place"

- - - Updated - - -

One of the funnier twitter revelations of the past few days is that Elon admitted under oath that the Elon Test account where he roleplays as himself but really young is in fact his burner account.



Everyone already knew this was him, but this just officially confirmed it. Most divorced man ever.

[Edge-]

Everyone already knew this was him, but this just officially confirmed it. Most divorced man ever.

Mitt Romney still putting all these loser chuds to shame with their boring-ass sockpuppet names. Nobody can compete with Pierre Delecto.