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So Musk polled his followers. Asking whether he should as CEO of Twitter. They said no and he said he'd abide by their vote.
My sense is that Elon didn't really want to buy Twitter after thinking it through, this was likely his real reason behind the "Twitter are hiding the amount of fake accounts/bots" argument. When that didn't come through, he ended up with the platform anyway. But being the CEO of Twitter is little more than a highly paid janitor function. You don't have any real power and your primary function is to act as a piñata for vested and powerful interests. It's no fun.
The main challenge for him now is to not lose any money, but it appears to be a long-shot from where I stand. What are the lessons? Tech CEOs don't have much political power despite having loads of money. Even tech owners are surprisingly weak. It may be fun belittling government bureaucrats as do-nothing wordcels but the Twitter saga has conclusively proven they hold the whip hand when the chips are down.
While it may make more sense for most people to go for a STEM career over a humanities, this episode should serve as a warning sign to conservatives who have spent decades dismissing humanities are irrelevant (long before the "woke" era). The SJW campus liberals may be annoying, and perhaps even ridiculous, but ultimately they have more power than you in society. And that power can be leveraged even in STEM areas.
not sure...he can algorithmically suppress certain content/accounts. This can make a difference on the margins for affecting elections. He can also just outright ban anyone, like he did with the elonjet account and then create some adhoc justification for doing so.
What does it mean to have real power anyway. In the US it would seem hardly anyone has true, unalloyed power. We saw this during Covid, in which the US health authorities and experts could only make easily-ignored recommendations, unlike in China, in which people were forced to comply. Same for Europe overall. Given that politicians, the executive branch, and Congress have arguably lost power over the past decade, it means that tech companies and tech CEOs may have more relative power. Regulators complain about tech companies violating privacy or are engaging uncompetitive practices, but there isn't much they can do about it. The last time any serious action was taken was in 1998.
Agree. When people talk about how 'useless degrees' don't pay well or jokes about basket weaving, maybe people have preferences that are not aligned with the accumulation of just money, but rather things like 'social influence', which is surprisingly hard to buy. Compare the candidacies of Bloomberg, who spent $500 million and got nowhere, compared to Obama. How are these pitiful basket weavers beating you then in government or DEI if their degrees are so worthless, huh?
I think the American experience with covid rules was quite different to Europe where many of the covid rules were not easily ignored. In Ireland I remember police checkpoints at the city limits enforcing the 5km rule.
The Irish had to social distance at 5km?
In England it was 1m?!
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