What's obvious here is that these people are drunk with power. Most of the conversations revolve around social engineering or extracting as much money as possible from Twitter. Paints a really bleak picture of everyone involved. The only one that appears sane is Jack, everyone else is pushing some agenda that has nothing to do with the product itself or its participants.

I don't know. Didn't seem so bad, aside from Jason Calacanis' gobble gobble.

It's pretty obvious none of these people care about anything other than money, power, and their personal amusement. Jack is right, Twitter needs to be a protocol. It's a mess because it is centralized and there are private and state actors trying to run influence operations on it.

Didn't seem like that to me. Mostly seemed pretty mundane.

There's this weird thing I'm seeing at the moment where every second comment about Musk (here, on Twitter, wherever) is calling him a psychopath or worse (so much name calling), but when you read what he actually writes, or watch him on video, he seems pretty sane. He's got money and Aspergers, so he's not 'normal', but he seems sane and not-evil to me.

I'm beginning to think that anyone who resorts to name-calling is not worth listening to.

> I'm beginning to think that anyone who resorts to name-calling is not worth listening to.

That includes Musk.

He’s responsible for his behavior and the image he puts out in public. The fact that he acts cruel, psychotic, and childish in public and somewhat normal to other billionaires in private says a lot about him, and it’s not good.

> He's got money and Aspergers, so he's not 'normal', but he seems sane and not-evil to me.

It's very easy to underestimate by 1000x the number of people who have an irrational hatred of Asperger's/other ND people. Only ND are in a position to really notice (for the same reason a white person in the US saying "I just don't see much racism" means nothing) but ND are uniquely deficient in identifying who has such a hatred for them.

With 30 yrs experience I have determined that at least 2% of my casual acquaintances casually harbor this particular brand of bigotry. This is likely an underestimate for the aforementioned reason. I have no idea where this stands relative to racism, etc. but it seems pretty significant.

Case in point: sibling comment asserts that Elon is "cruel, psychotic, and childish" when in fact he exhibits nothing but perfectly harmless ND-typical behavior.

Calling a hero a pedophile because he thought your toy submarine was a dumb PR stunt (which it was) is not harmless ND-typical behavior.

If only Jack had not been a part time CEO for all of those years. He should have stepped away when they had their quarters

There is a difference between free speech and lying to the masses with carefully constructed fake evidence or based on reputation.

Stuff like Russia Today or troll/disinformation armies and bots at work are not amusing. It has nothing to do with free speech, it's just dangerous for democracy, freedom and our children.

RT could be considered useful to some as you can use it as a noisy barometer for russian sentiment. When you operate at a level where geopolitics are a concern to your activities, such an input could be useful. Elon parroting russian talking points is another matter, but he went a step further and talked to Putin directly.

Moreover, speech rights granted to local individuals, and those same rights granted to foreign government-controlled media, aren't in the same ballpark.

Why are we allowing the mouthpiece of an adversarial authoritarian country to propagandize our population and sow division in our society? We need to put a stop it.

Whenever I read something from Chinese or Russian government spokespeople it always sounds so comically tone deaf. There's no need to censor them.

Not everyone is as critical-thinking as you. I've catched myself many times thinking that someone is right just to change my opinion entirely after hearing counerarguments, but I agree with you that it looks like authoritarian governments are typically not able to employ really creative and critical thinking people as their propagandists.

Whenever I read something from Christian spokespeople it always sounds so comically tone deaf.

But hey I live in a country where 55% of the population are self declared atheists. We all live in a bubble.

Same. There's no need to censor Christians either.

RT is different. They are stoking the US culture wars and there are a lot of people who watch it in earnest.

Amusement is probably the most defensive psychological posture one can take in the face of propaganda and authoritarian displays of might. It challenges the believability of these messages and the facades required to uphold them.

Without such a challenge, these messages would be taken seriously to some extent, which works to create an illusion of threats where they don’t exist… which is what the propaganda is here to do.

They pretend to amuse us, we pretend to be amused

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_political_jokes

>Satya: Thx for the chat. Will stay in touch. And will for sure follow-up on Teams feedback!

I wish I had a direct line to the CEO with my own Microsoft teams complaints...

> [2022-04-26] Larry: Since you think I should come in for at least $2B... I'm in for $2B Elon: Haha thankss:)

This got me laughing. Who are these oligarchical men and why do they have so much $$

He mentions $2 billion like it’s nothing, lol. But, when you’re worth $100b+…it really seems that way.

Larry has one tweet, ever: https://twitter.com/larryellison

> Elon: I would like to understand the technical details of the Twitter codebase. This will help me calibrate the dumbness of my suggestions.

> Parag: I wrote heavy duty software for 20 years

> Parag: I used to be CTO and have been in our codebase for a long time.

> Parag: So I can answer many many of your questions.

> Elon: I interface way better with engineers who are able to do hardcore programming than with program managero/ MBA types of people.

> Elon: ["liked" "I used to be CTO..."]

> Elon:

> Parag: in our next convo-treat me like an engineer instead of CEO and lets see where we get to. I'll know after that convo who might be the best engineer to connect you to.

> Elon: Frankly, I hate doing mgmt stuff. I kinda don't think anyone should be the boss of anyone. But I love helping solve technical/product design problems.

Later exchange which is absolutely savage:

Parag: You are free to tweet "is Twitter dying?" or anything else about Twitter -but it's my responsibility to tell you that it's not helping me make Twitter better in the current context. Next time we speak, I'd like to you provide you perspective on the level of internal distraction right now and how it hurting our ability to do work. I hope the AMA will help people get to know you, to understand why you believe in Twitter, and to trust you -and I'd like the company to get to a place where we are more resilient and don't get distracted, but we aren't there right now.

Elon: What did you get done this week?

Elon: I'm not joining the board. This is a waste of time.

Elon: Will make an offer to take Twitter private.

Parag: Can we talk?

Either Dan mistranscribed this or these screenshots are wrong. It's Elon who (dubiously) said he "wrote heavy-duty software for 20 years", not Parag.

https://twitter.com/techemails/status/1585804674170355712

SpaceX IT handling his personal Twitter account is... interesting.

Wasn't he ordered by a court or SEC or something to have someone from his company handel his account.

That was Tesla, not SpaceX.

Damn, so that's what it's like to be surrounded by yes-men. God if people approached me like that it would sketch me the hell out. How do you live like that?

This one (about half-way in) actually made me cringe: https://danluu.com/elon-twitter-texts/#86

The constant typos were quite amusing. EFON!!

Rich folks have no time to spell