Tesla head Elon Musk created a furor among many on the left and some of those supportive of Ukraine when he posted a poll with a proposed peace deal between Ukraine and Russia in it.

Musk said he thought that this was likely to be the outcome in the end but that it was just a question of how many die before then.

Musk indicated that he was concerned about what would happen to Ukraine if Russia went all-in. Russia is doing partial mobilization. They go to full war mobilization if Crimea is at risk. Death on both sides will be devastating. Russia has >3 times population of Ukraine, so victory for Ukraine is unlikely in total war. If you care about the people of Ukraine, seek peace.

Now, whatever you think of the poll, hes been supportive of Ukraine, even providing them with Starlink terminals which have helped them to stay digitally connected with the rest of the world. You can argue about what he says in the poll and the concepts of appeasement, but his support for Ukraine is well known.

But his posting of the poll enraged many Ukraine supporters because it wasnt just Russia should get out of Ukraine as an ultimate solution. He of course was accused of supporting Russia which wasnt what he was doing.

It stands to reason that the dumbest response would come from Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL). Because apparently, he thinks the only ones entitled to an opinion are people who agree with him. As we noted, he posted a bizarre tweetstorm about pro-lifers and Ukraine. Then he had to delete them because they were embarrassing. Hes posted multiple false things about Ukraine, but sure, lets just limit all comments to the dumbest comments.

One Ukrainian diplomat had a rather blunt response.

Musk even got a response from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

Of course, Musk wasnt supporting Russia, whatever you think of his proposal. But theres no nuance or room for discussion with anyone on social media anymore. Or appreciation for the fact that he has helped Ukraine in the past, which some noted in response.

Meet Politico’s new maverick publisher, Peter Elon Bezos Yang Musk or …

Posted: at 3:12 pm

That the rich "entrepreneurial"-styled head of an international news company might have still been backing ridiculous clownburger Donald Trumpafter transparently corrupt acts and a pandemic response that relied heavily on his clownburger son-in-law poking his nose into things before everyone lost all remaining interestis not really news. Much of the news you read comes through the filter of right-leaning corporate owners who don't give a particular damn about anything but themselves and their personal cash flows, whether it be the Post's own worker-gouging Bezos or the unmitigated malevolence of the Murdoch clan. It's baked in.

The weirder part is that Dpfner apparently insisted quite boldly he had never sent such a message, right up until the Post showed him their copy of the email in question, after which he claimed he might have sent such a thing as "an ironic, provocative statement in the circle of people that hate Donald Trump."

You know, just to get a rise out of his own executives. As one does, when one wants to be a free-spirited provocateur.

The I only did that to be an asshole defense is itself usually a pretty solid one when it comes to any profile of any chief executive who has rapidly risen through the ranks and now stands on the top of the common rabble, and Dpfner might have had a shot at selling the Ironic Asshole Defense had the email not also contained a numbered list of Trump's supposed best accomplishments, aside from the being impeached for corruption and leading a staff of incompetent mostly-crooked buffoons through a campaign of screwing up any part of government any one of them was aware of.

"No American administration in the last 50 years has done more," wrote Dpfner after listing off successes like "defending the free democracies" against Russia(?), pressuring NATO to spend more money(??) and, of course, "tax reforms."

A complete failure to respond to worldwide pandemic disaster didn't make the cut of Dpfner's concerns, and whether or not Trump instituted a policy to intentionally separate refugee children from their parents is not worth mentioning. It just couldn't compete against the powerful successof "tax reforms."

The Post's profile of Dpfner is gawdawful familiar, even to the point of being rote. We're told that Dpfner's politics are hard to pin down, but that he thinks the Post and The New York Times have gone too far left while he is not a fan of conservative media's "alternative facts." He believes there is a nonpartisan path between the two, between "predictable political camps." He is an iconoclast, spending his money on "a collection of female nudes by female artists" rather than the usual yachts. He's not a fan of racism or homophobia, but as his plaudits for Trump's alleged successes show,neither is a dealbreaker.

Oh, and he calls Elon Musk "one of the most inspiring people" he's met, and the mans son works for the fascism-promoting white-nationalist-boosting Peter Thiel, and it just happens that the two news outlets at the top of the company's German mediaempire are a hard-right skeevy tabloid and a not-as-hard-right mostly corporatist paperan arrangement we here in America are already quite familiar with and do not find "hard to pin down" in the slightest.

By the time you're even halfway through, then, the Post story paints a picture of the sort of big-mediaiconoclast who is utterly rote at this point. Got it. He's a right-leaning new-money self-promoting entrepreneur type who wants to chart a path where rich people get lots of tax cuts, but we maybe don't burn his LGBTQ friends at the stake. He's here to revamp journalism around a version of centrism that thinks Donald Trump was doing a bang-up job when he was scooting around the world dragging his bare ass on the carpets while not giving aparticular damn about the crooked parts or the authoritarianism.

We heard this biography when it was about Musk. Or about Thiel. Or when Andrew Yang declared that all this fuss over hard-right fascism and not-fascism was super-super partisan and what the world needed instead was a new party that didn't care about such things and instead cared about whatever Andrew Yang cared aboutcryptocurrencies, maybe. We heard it when it was the Starbucks guy who wanted to run for president on the same platform.

This isn't being a maverick. This is the most bog standard of all possible Rich Person Political Stances. This is the utter, magnificent laziness of men at the top of their profession quickly coming to decide that Politics Itself is wrong and that they, uniquely and truly, are the ones who can see through the nonsense and give us a nice, semi-fascist middle ground.

Jeebus Cripes, this is Great Gatsby stuff. New Wealth Fixes The World is what Ayn Rand choked her pages with. This sort of nihilistic I-can't-be-defined-by-your-politics hokum is the essence of every "tax cuts for rich people, marijuana for the poor people" college libertarian rantand the people in charge of the world love this vapidity. Each of them is convinced they, personally, may have invented it.

We get it. The moment a certain kind of man gains elevated wealth and power, they can't rest until the rest of the world knows that it's because they have the brain to solve all problems, and the answer they come up with every last time is: A middle position! One where both sides agree that I get tax cuts and we compromise down the middle on the fascism and book-burning and whatnot!

I mean ... whatever. The Post is doing us a service in showing us that time after time, the leaders of all the stuff you watch and read are, for the most part, vapid people who rose through the ranks of other vapid people to become the new earls and dukes of vapidity, but theres not a lot of divergent thinking among any of them. Is there any question that newspapers find people to own newspapers to be the cleverest and most interesting people in the world? Are you surprised when a new network head is feted by the rest of the industry as having a bold new take on things that only looks exactly the same as the previous take to you because you aren't a media visionary?

Eh. Seriously though, to write a letter boosting Donald Trump for overseeing corporate tax cuts in the fall of 2020, with half a million American pandemic dead, a prior impeachment over corruption, and a list of accomplishments that can best be described only as a campaign of international blowhardism: The new head who will be steering Politico into yet another vision of wealth-backing neutrality seems to have spent a lot less time on his political stances than he has on his art collection. Can't all these iconoclasts follow their hearts, building space yachts shaped like naked women or whatever it is animates them without dragging the rest of us into it? Why dip yourself into politics at all? If all you want are tax breaks, sure, whoever develops a new space program gets a tax break. Whoever figures out a way to keep the state of Florida above water when Greenland's ice sheets collapse gets a tax break, and we'll rename Miami to whatever new name you want.

We'll agree to that if you all stop telling us how your own indifference to the slow dismantling of world democracies amounts, when balanced against new tax policies,to a heretofore unseen and brilliant Third Way. Gawd, just stop already.

Kanye West and Elon Musk provide a new exit path: The billionaire tantrum – TechCrunch

Posted: at 3:12 pm

This morning Kanye West announced hes buying Parler, the annoyingly named so-called free speech platform that ignores the proper French pronunciation of its moniker in service of a poor pun. The deal terms arent out there yet, but the startup has so far raised $56 million and I bet it has a tidy little exit on its hands if this goes through.

A spurned billionaire purchasing a social networking company because of perceived encroachments on their free speech rights (where none actually exist) seems somehow familiar. Oh, thats right: Elon Musk is doing basically the same thing, on a grander and more litigious scale.

Elon and Kanye have history, of course, and the Tesla founder was quick to welcome Ye back to Twitter when the latter was blocked from Instagram for antisemitic posts. Kanye quickly used Twitter to push more antisemitic trash, however, leading to him having his account locked and Musk then issuing a weak admonishment (if you can even call it that) for his pals inexcusable behavior.

Leaving aside that Musks response is a terrifying vision of what moderation on Twitter could become if the multi-CEO gets his wish and does complete the $44 billion transaction to acquire the platform, the interaction and Mondays Parler news say a lot about where we are socially and the state of the media tech industry. In particular, watching these two over-moneyed and over-indulged boys spend their way to uncancelable status illustrates a lucrative new exit path for startups looking to disrupt the status quo when it comes to letting people say things they shouldnt say.

It used to be that billionaires having a temper tantrum would result in the death of media outlets, but the new trend seems to be not attempting to quash the object of their ire, but instead spending boatloads of cash to warp a collective social viewpoint to fit their specific worldview. Whether that money is their own, or the collective wealth of their fawning retinue of deep-pocketed sycophants scarcely matters theres a lot of economic opportunity to be had for down-on-their-luck networking tools with flexible moral outlooks.

This is only half tongue-in-cheek: There really have been a lot of startups and companies cropping up to address the social media companies being allowed to control what we can and cannot see,as one extremely mistaken ex-attempted despot put it. In a sane market those would need to contend on the measures we typically use to judge startup success: User traction and engagement, revenue, etc. Now, it looks like they might be able to use a bruised ego to help their investors return the fund.

Kanye West and Elon Musk provide a new exit path: The billionaire tantrum - TechCrunch

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Elon Musk’s Management Style Is a Threat to Global Democracy – The Information

Posted: at 3:12 pm

Elon Musks management style is notoriously impulsive, toxic and cruel. Onetime employees describe being tossed to the curb like a piece of litter, the result of Musks complete lack of loyalty or human connection. This coldness hasnt been reserved just for middle management or low-level workers. In 15 years, Tesla has cycled through almost a dozen general counsels. Maybe it was calculated to keep the rest of the workforce on their toes and scared, an anonymous former Tesla employee told Musk biographer Ashlee Vance in 2015. Maybe he was just able to detach from human connection to a remarkable degree.

Anecdotes like theseand far weirderhave surrounded Musk for decades, almost always with an asterisk: Maybe this was all part of Musks master plan. Were his sociopathic actions proof of mad genius or just madness? The value of his companies kept going up, and sometimes his sociopathic management style worked. In 2013, Musk fired many of Teslas top lawyers with one sweep and promoted his divorce attorney, Todd Maron, to run the multibillion-dollar company; he turned out to be a good manager, sources inside the company say, and served as general counsel for five years.

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Elon Musk's Management Style Is a Threat to Global Democracy - The Information

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Category Archives: Elon Musk

Elon Musk says he will begin restoring previously banned Twitter accounts next week – CNN

Elon Musk has himself to blame for Twitter’s advertising woes, civil rights groups say – CNBC

Twitter boss Elon Musk gives ultimatum to employees – NPR

Elon Musk’s $50 billion payday trial: Tesla CEO testifies in his own defense – CNN

What Weve Learned From Elon Musks Tweets – The Atlantic

Elon Musk sells at least $3.95 billion worth of Tesla shares after Twitter deal – CNBC

Elon Musk Lights up the Internet With Ukraine Peace Deal Proposal …

Meet Politico’s new maverick publisher, Peter Elon Bezos Yang Musk or …

Kanye West and Elon Musk provide a new exit path: The billionaire tantrum – TechCrunch

Elon Musk’s Management Style Is a Threat to Global Democracy – The Information

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