Twitter likely to take idiots offer to buy them for $43 billion

[Ford]

Poor Elon.

The reality is, Last Week Tonight doesn't often take on woke topics. Unless you consider Housing Associations or corporate influencers to be woke. Elon is evidence of why celebrities or the upper-echelon should just be quiet and let the achievements they are credited with, speak for them. Tesla, SpaceX have achieved an unspeakably huge amount, even though the Mars pie in the sky idea is really stupid... and his Boring Company too... and his battery storage stuff is maddening. He took a fortune and funded a couple empires with it. But Musk is just such a sociopathic jerk. He acts like a troll, making it very hard to appreciate what he has managed to do!

Its kind of unfortunate, in a way, that Edison never failed in any of his inventions or business ventures.

I know, right? Without his genius, we might be subsisting right now on the inferior "alternating current" that that other inventor (whose name escapes me right now) was proposing. DC all the way!

Heavy sarcasm aside, it looks like Elon has joined the "just call it woke" method of stoking the clicks, and has also decided that because he happened to fund/take over some businesses created/run by other, far smarter people, he is somehow a "thought leader."

For the life of me, I can't remember exactly which part of the Tesla vehicle lineup Elon personally invented. Like, the time when he waltzed into a room of engineers banging their heads against the wall to try and come up with a scalable, marketable electric power train and when they were at their wit's end Musk said "well I've been making some sketches, and...why don't you do the motor like this?"

And they said "holy crap, Mr. Elon...we never thought of that before! You're a genius!!!"

Even if that had happened (and it most certainly did not), I would still see no reason to take Muskrat's current views on politics or social issues seriously.

 

[Shadowy Man]

Has anyone linked to this interesting view of Musk by John Oliver?

Elon appears to be taking it well.

Notice how Elon’s response didn’t say John was wrong about anything.

 

[Patooka]

Notice how Elon’s response didn’t say John was wrong about anything.

No, he implied Oliver is which even worse.

 

[Rhea]

These boomers are still resentful about not having any fun in the 60s.

I admit to being very confused about this sentence.

**ALL** of the people who had fun in the 1960s were Boomers.

Was this intended to mean that some boomers were straight-laced and they are the ones who resent missing the fun? Or are we saying all the people having fun were 30-somethings and hence Silent Generation people?

Sorry to be obtuse, I just didn’t understand..

All the crazy hippy culture that we see from the 1960s was only a small fraction of society, the media made it seem a LOT bigger than it was. The VAST majority of youth and adults at the time were way more straight-laced.

Sure the silent generation was freaked out too but they are mostly irrelevant. It is the boomers who missed out and who are promoting all these "moral" restrictions on society.

This does not match my recollection of those years.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Poor Elon.

The reality is, Last Week Tonight doesn't often take on woke topics. Unless you consider Housing Associations or corporate influencers to be woke. Elon is evidence of why celebrities or the upper-echelon should just be quiet and let the achievements they are credited with, speak for them. Tesla, SpaceX have achieved an unspeakably huge amount, even though the Mars pie in the sky idea is really stupid... and his Boring Company too... and his battery storage stuff is maddening. He took a fortune and funded a couple empires with it. But Musk is just such a sociopathic jerk. He acts like a troll, making it very hard to appreciate what he has managed to do!

Its kind of unfortunate, in a way, that Edison never failed in any of his inventions or business ventures. He left such a high bar for future inventors and entrepueners. I heard he could be kind of a jerk at times, too.

I'm glad to see you agree.

 

[Gospel]

Oliver had me laughing hard at that jacket insult. Too funny

 

[Jarhyn]

The funny thing about "Grok" is that it is a Martian word (Coined by Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land) for "understanding" that was adopted by hippies in the 60s for what we now would call "woke".

These boomers are still resentful about not having any fun in the 60s.

IKR? Like, what's stopping them from having fun now, other than the purity principle as applied by their reflections?

And the fucked up part is that people of my generation, those born in the 80's who grew up watching the acceleration of everything in real time, we use the word "grok" to mean the original Heinlein-Martian interpretation, which is "to fully understand an idea in and out of all its parts to whatever depth".

I find it funny because while Heinlein actually did have a surprising brush with enlightenment, this was then plagiarized by that hack Hubbard as one of his religious superpowers promised to his followers rather than it actually being the fruit of work to understand the concept of a thing, the sort of epiphany wholely unrelated to Hubbard's scam.

This is now co-opted to mean anti-woke. It is as offensive to good reason as any other shit appropriations of reasonable terms that were entering the lexicon.

It's an outright attack on language itself, honestly.

 

[ZiprHead]

Elon Musk told bankers they wouldn’t lose any money on Twitter purchase

Lenders unlikely to get even 60 cents on the dollar for the bonds and loans.

arstechnica.com

Large hedge funds and credit investors on Wall Street held conversations
with the banks late last year, offering to buy the senior-most portion of
the debt at roughly 65 cents on the dollar. But in recent interviews with
the Financial Times, several said there was no price at which they would
buy the bonds and loans, given their inability to gauge whether Linda
Yaccarino, X’s chief executive, could turn the business around. One
multibillion-dollar firm that specializes in distressed debt called X’s
debt “uninvestable.”

Selling the $12.5 billion of bonds and loans below 60 cents on the dollar
— a price many investors believe the banks would be lucky to achieve in
the current market—would imply losses before accounting for X’s interest
payments of $4 billion or more, write downs that have not yet been publicly
reported by the syndicate of lenders, according to FT calculations. The debt
is split between $6.5 billion of term loans, as well as $6 billion of senior and
junior bonds and a $500 million revolver.

 

[Rhea]

That’s gonna sting.

 

[ZiprHead]

That’s gonna sting.

Yup. Something's gotta give. It's a house of cards and it's all set to come tumbling down.

 

[ZiprHead]

SpaceX accused of unlawfully firing workers critical of CEO Elon Musk

US labor agency says eight employees were let go for circulating a letter calling the founder a ‘distraction and embarrassment’

www.theguardian.com

The rocket and satellite maker SpaceX was accused by a US labor agency of unlawfully firing eight employees for circulating a letter calling the founder and CEO, Elon Musk, a “distraction and embarrassment”.

A regional official with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a complaint claiming SpaceX violated the workers’ rights under federal labor law to band together and advocate for better working conditions, according to Kayla Blado, a spokesperson for the agency.

The letter sent to SpaceX executives in June 2022 focused on a series of tweets Musk had made since 2020, many of which were sexually suggestive. The employees claimed Musk’s statements did not align with the company’s policies on diversity and workplace misconduct and called on SpaceX to condemn them.

Blado said the complaint also accuses SpaceX of interrogating employees about the letter, disparaging the workers who were involved and threatening to fire workers who engaged in similar activity.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

That’s gonna sting.

Yup. Something's gotta give. It's a house of cards and it's all set to come tumbling down.

Well, finally... can't tax wealth comes to mean something. Musk has a fortune... in stocks. And he can't keep selling Tesla shares to pay the bills, because that is a lot of shares!

 

[blastula]

SpaceX accused of unlawfully firing workers critical of CEO Elon Musk

US labor agency says eight employees were let go for circulating a letter calling the founder a ‘distraction and embarrassment’

www.theguardian.com

The rocket and satellite maker SpaceX was accused by a US labor agency of unlawfully firing eight employees for circulating a letter calling the founder and CEO, Elon Musk, a “distraction and embarrassment”.

A regional official with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a complaint claiming SpaceX violated the workers’ rights under federal labor law to band together and advocate for better working conditions, according to Kayla Blado, a spokesperson for the agency.

The letter sent to SpaceX executives in June 2022 focused on a series of tweets Musk had made since 2020, many of which were sexually suggestive. The employees claimed Musk’s statements did not align with the company’s policies on diversity and workplace misconduct and called on SpaceX to condemn them.

Blado said the complaint also accuses SpaceX of interrogating employees about the letter, disparaging the workers who were involved and threatening to fire workers who engaged in similar activity.

The free speech warrior strikes again.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Has a feel that top heads at Tesla and SpaceX are trying to rid themselves of Musk in a corporate position

 

[lpetrich]

Elon Musk Calls Himself ‘Aspirationally Jewish’ After Visiting Auschwitz

Billionaire Elon Musk declared himself “aspirationally Jewish” after visiting the site of the former Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland on Monday, his latest effort to undo the reputational and financial fallout after he endorsed an antisemitic post on social media.

Musk traveled to Poland to tour the former death camp with the conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro, the founder of the European Jewish Association, Rabbi Menachem Margolin, and his 3-year-old son. He spoke at a conference hosted by the group later in the day in Krakow, saying he had, until recently, been “naïve” about the prevalence of antisemitism as he had seen “almost” none “in the circles that I move in.”

“And, you know, there’s this old joke ‘I’ve got like this one Jewish friend,’” Musk said during the event. “No, I have like two-thirds of my friends are Jewish. I have twice as many Jewish friends as non-Jewish friends. I’m like Jewish by association, I’m aspirationally Jewish.”

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

He has all these Jewish friends, which is why he said some BS Jews run the world Tweet was accurate.

It is interesting that his defense is he didn't realize anti-Semitism was anti-Semitism.

 

[hurtinbuckaroo]

Genius’ net worth fell by about $15 billion this morning after a disastrous Tesla investor conference call sent the stock tumbling. Banks are going to be looking for more collateral to cover his Twitter loans.

 

[ZiprHead]

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Neuralink is testing its device, Musk should shut the fuck up until there are actual findings to report.

 

[ZiprHead]

Neuralink is testing its device, Musk should shut the fuck up until there are actual findings to report.

They're looking for test subjects. Sign up at the web site.

As I understand though, it didn't go well for the macaques it was tested on.