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Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?


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https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/elon-musk-texts-twitter-purchase-exhibit-h/672595/

 

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As the year comes to a close, I cannot stop thinking about … a court document. Plaintiffs in Twitter, Inc. v. Elon R. Musk et al. filed Exhibit H just before sunrise on September 29 in Delaware’s Court of Chancery. If you’ve seen excerpts, you probably know it by its street name: Elon Musk’s texts.

 

 

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Exhibit H is remarkable insomuch as it is a spreadsheet containing the private messages between the (then) richest man in the world and his friends, associates, and hangers-on while they discuss buying one of the world’s most influential communications platforms—just for kicks. Leafing through Exhibit H, you will feel like you should never have seen these communications, and yet there they are, on display for the hordes of the internet, courtesy of the legal system.

 

 

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I wrote about the texts back in September, arguing that they demonstrated “just how unimpressive, unimaginative, and sycophantic the powerful men in Musk’s contacts appear to be.” I still believe that. But now, armed with three months of hindsight, I’ve begun to think of Exhibit H as a skeleton key for the final, halcyon days of the tech boom—unlocking an understanding of the cultural brain worms and low-interest-rate hubris that defined the industry in 2022. What we see in Exhibit H is only a tiny snapshot of a very important inbox, but it’s enough to make this one of the most revealing documents in a year that’s been absolutely overflowing with tech disclosures—from Peiter Zatko’s leaks, to FTX’s balance sheet, to the “Twitter Files” championed by Musk himself.

 

 

Spoiler

Beyond the obvious tabloid intrigue, what’s most striking is how Musk’s texts shed light on two of 2022’s biggest tech meltdowns. If you came out of a lengthy coma in mid-December, puzzled by headlines about collapsing crypto exchanges and once-beloved entrepreneurs behaving like villains, you could read a copy of Exhibit H and understand everything with surprising clarity. The texts are, of course, a guide to the events that ultimately led Musk to purchase Twitter—a decision that has tanked his net worth, saddled his new asset with debt, and led to the quick erosion of his reputation as a savvy businessman. But also lurking in Musk’s inbox is Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the now-collapsed crypto exchange FTX, who was arrested in the Bahamas when federal prosecutors charged him with defrauding investors and customers.

For better or worse, Musk’s Twitter takeover and SBF’s downfall are two of the most symbolically resonant tech stories of 2022. You could view them as reckonings for supposed tech visionaries and the ways in which Silicon Valley’s hype machine dashes against the rocks of reality. It’s unfair to suggest that a few personalities are behind all of tech’s troubles—which this year included layoffs at companies such as Meta and Snap and a general feeling that we may be approaching the end of the social-media era—but the Musk texts demonstrate a decadence, an unearned confidence, and a boy’s-club mentality that coincide with the cultural disillusionment regarding the genius-innovator narrative.

In June, I snarkily coined the Elon Musk School of Management to describe the petulant way that some tech founders, such as Musk and Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, seemed to use confrontational, culture-warring, Twitter-addled thought leadership as a business tactic. The Musk School revolves around two principles: running a company in an authoritarian manner, and ensuring that every management decision is optimized to make news and hijack the attention of those following along on social media. One can see this exact mentality at work in the Musk texts. In message after message, contacts urge Musk to take control of Twitter and solve its problem as only he can. This trend extends beyond Twitter: This year, Musk’s peers at companies such as Meta cracked down on employees, hoping to usher in a more authoritarian brand of management after years of free lunches, competitive perks, and remote work.

The Musk messages also reveal how some of the richest and most powerful men in the world treat actual billions of dollars with a level of care more appropriate for a 3-year-old tossing around Monopoly cash. Oracle’s founder, Larry Ellison, essentially writes Musk a blank check over text, pledging, “A billion … or whatever you recommend.” The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen unsolicitedly offers Musk “$250M with no additional work required.” And Michael Grimes, a top investment banker at Morgan Stanley, proposes a meeting with Bankman-Fried as a way to “get us $5bn equity in an hour.”

“Does Sam actually have $3bn liquid?” Musk asks. (It’s unclear why he got the number wrong.) Grimes says that he believes so. Musk appears nonplussed but willing to do whatever is necessary to get some quick cash: “So long as I don’t have to have a laborious blockchain debate,” he quips. (Seven months after this exchange, Bankman-Fried would claim to have no more than $100,000 to his name.)

The blitheness is the point. It is a total power move to talk about getting “$5bn in equity in an hour” the same way we mere mortals talk about Venmo-ing a friend $15 for lunch. The texts make it clear that these men are fundamentally alienated from the rest of the world by their wealth. “In one sense, the texts show that billionaires are just like us—they’re not doing advanced calculus; they’re in their DMs talking smack, making jokes, and trying desperately to get their way,” Lauren Pringle, the editor in chief of The Chancery Daily, told me recently. But she added: “These are absolutely not normal people with a normal understanding of the world.”

There is an undeniable hubris on display in Exhibit H. One could argue that a reason these men appear so nonchalant about offering no-strings-attached billions is that they’ve been conditioned by years of low interest rates and a booming tech sector to assume that their fortunes will only ever grow, regardless of the business decisions they make. The men in Musk’s phone also appear wildly confident in their own abilities and those of their peers. Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of the media conglomerate Axel Springer, infamously texted Musk his bullet-pointed plan for Twitter, which began with the line item “1.),, Solve Free Speech.”

Exhibit H also shows what happens when somebody with actual expertise questions the visionaries. The entire document is a demonstration of elite-level brownnosing, with the exception of one man: then-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. The two seem to hit it off—Musk likes that Agrawal is an engineer who can “do hardcore programming”—but then Agrawal sends Musk a text about his unhinged tweets. “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,” he says to Musk. This small suggestion appears to enrage Musk and, it seems, alters the entire history of the company forever. “What did you get done this week?” Musk shoots back. And then, less than one minute later, the billionaire writes, “I’m not joining the board. This is a waste of time. Will make an offer to take Twitter private.”

Exhibit H isn’t just revealing—the existence of the document itself may have also hastened Musk’s purchase of the company. The texts exist for us to see because Musk, in a fit of buyer’s remorse, tried to back out of the deal, and Twitter sued. Although it’s unclear exactly what triggered Musk to settle the suit and continue with the Twitter purchase (he didn’t respond to a request for comment), one popular theory is that Exhibit H may have forced his hand. “I won’t speculate on his motivations, because he’s such an enigma,” Pringle said, “but it seems likely that some of these people in Musk’s phone reached out to him saying, ‘Come on, man, this is embarrassing. Make this stop.’”

Exhibit H didn’t have to be public at all. According to The Chancery Daily’s reporting, it was initially filed under seal with no objection from Twitter’s legal team. But Musk’s team unexpectedly asked for the document to be unsealed. A leading theory is that this was a tactic from Musk’s lawyers to tie opposing counsel up in busy work. If that was the case, the move clearly backfired—yet another act, born out of hubris, that went awry.

It is not difficult to look at these texts and understand how someone like Musk could now find himself in his current, unenviable economic situationand growing ever more reactionary.

Reading through Exhibit H, it’s also easy to see how Bankman-Fried accumulated venture money with hardly any investigation into his company’s finances. In one overlooked text message, one of Musk’s friends, the former Hollywood agent Michael Kives, casually suggests, “It could be cool to [do the Twitter deal] with Sam Bankman-Fried.” Subsequent reporting showed that Kives had taken a $300 million loan from Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund, Alameda Research. You can just imagine the contents of SBF’s own phone and the fawning conversations between the former billionaire and the men looking to stay in his orbit. And it’s also quite easy, reading these text messages, to understand why venture funds are facing tough questions from investors and the public about their decisions to loan money to questionable businesses without doing due diligence.

These are, of course, lessons built off of extrapolation and hindsight. But they are important ones: They teach us what happens when a small group of people with too much money come to view that money not just as a reward for success, but as its own form of merit—a specious achievement that totally alienates them from reality.

Ultimately, Exhibit H documents the loneliness and isolation of being the world’s richest man. As told via the texts, the seed of Musk’s Twitter purchase was planted by sycophants deferential to the billionaire who will never give him hard, truthful advice, because they wish to stay close to him. Indeed, the one time he receives actual, honest feedback from Agrawal, Musk behaves aggressively and impulsively, sealing his fate.

Sifting through the desiccated wreckage of Twitter is raising endless questions about the fate of the platform and what it means for us all. But one question we don’t need to ask is how we got here. For that, we have Exhibit H.

 

 

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On 4/14/2022 at 3:36 PM, wildcat09 said:

Speaking for me, no, I don't think he'd do that. That's why I think this is a pump and dump scheme, something he does fairly frequently.

In the spirit of striving to better myself, I'm continuing to admit things I was wrong about as this year winds to a close. Boy howdy, was this (saying in April that I didn't think he'd burn up $40 billion on a lark) wrong. Really, really wrong. I was probably more wrong on this than I was about anything else in 2022. It never even occurred to me that perhaps my greatest failing was being too optimistic about our billionaire class and their intelligence and capabilities.

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42 minutes ago, DigglerontheHoof said:

There are some very rich and powerful folks who are hell-bent on fascism.  

United States democracy:

Ralph Wiggum Danger GIF

You should read up on history some more. The Business Plot happened in 1933 as a reaction to FDR's recently-won election, and coincided with hilter's rise to power in the twilight hours of Weimar Germany. A fascist reaction to a democratically elected president, spreading lies and disinformation about his """failing health""", leveraging grievance politics to motivate violence, all funded by dark money earned through graft and grift???

Sounds completely unfamiliar to me!

Thank christ for Smedley Butler, the most decorated US Marine in history, and his sworn testimony to put all that shit onto the record as a warning for our dumb asses. 

edit: oh yeah lol just remembered too: George HW Bush's daddy Prescott Bush was one of the bankers behind the business plot. Weird how history does that sometimes

Edited by Captainant
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4 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Mothers Day Lol GIF by reactionseditor
 

Look everybody, Elon just watched The Matrix for the first time and is repeating the same stupid shit that college students were saying 20 years ago.  And holy shit he did not sleep last night.  Tweet after tweet.

 

The idiots will eat that shit up. For the bad shit that happens, it will be the matrix and the agents are going to get me 

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Some gold in that Business Insider piece:

Re SBF and FTX, we “mostly ignored the underlying issue of the unrelenting ponzification of everything — and whether "society" should maybe attempt to do something about it.”

Yep. We worship “dollars accumulated” at the expense of everything else, including how those dollars were accumulated or even asking the hard question of whether those particular dollars should have been accumulated at all. If someone accumulated billions by robbing 7-11s and shooting the clerks, we wouldn’t worship him…or actually, we probably would. Which is, you know…problematic.

Re BLM (the national “entity”)- “but the dozens of grassroots affiliates BLM had ghosted or decisively antagonized even as the group was sitting on at least $90 million in donations were a potent reminder of the fundamental hollowness of social-media activism. Garza, who left BLMGF years ago, portentously criticizing the group for caring too much about online influencers and too little about "knocking on doors" and "building a base."”

Also a bullseye. We’re real good at virtue signaling and changing our profile pic to say “I stand with [whoever].” We’re really shitty at putting in the hard and mundane work of actually affecting change. That’s because it’s mostly done on a hyper-local level, is done via unglamorous work, dialogue, and negotiation, and isn’t optimized for self-glorification and social media likes.

Re Brett Favre, “offered a sinister glimpse into the abyss of a society that had comprehensively foresworn even pretending to care about the weak and vulnerable in its midst. In one exchange Favre asks the governor if he knows anyone who might be able to work on the stadium's then-unfinished locker rooms "in their spare time" — like say, "the prison industry" — which after all, incarcerates a bigger portion of the Mississippi citizenry than any other state or country in the world.”

This goes hand in hand with our billionaire worship. The only measure of your worth is your actual dollar worth. Rich people are awesome winners to be worshipped, because look a the scoreboard! And poor people deserve their fate, they just didn’t play hard enough, look a the scoreboard!

Re RBG, “As the aforementioned gushing Stanford professor put it: "She gambled with the rights of my daughter and my granddaughter. And unfortunately, that's her legacy." It's also the legacy of the upper-middle-class delusion that affluent female careerism somehow constitutes a righteous political project, but perhaps that is just the hubris that makes her truly "Notorious."”

Principles and dreams are neat. But reality and pragmatism remain the rules of the world. She should have played by those. All of the “principled left” should learn from her cautionary tale. The other side is playing to win…you should, too.

And the stuff about Musk, well, it’s all the obvious stuff we’ve discussed around here.

And the Atlantic piece makes a parallel point that’s spot on about the sickness of the billionaire class and, by necessary extension, the sickness of their fanbois and cheerleaders:

“These are, of course, lessons built off of extrapolation and hindsight. But they are important ones: They teach us what happens when a small group of people with too much money come to view that money not just as a reward for success, but as its own form of merit—a specious achievement that totally alienates them from reality.”

STOP. WORSHIPPING. BILLIONAIRES.

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Under-reported bit from the Atlantic article:

"Exhibit H also shows what happens when somebody with actual expertise questions the visionaries. The entire document is a demonstration of elite-level brownnosing, with the exception of one man: then-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. The two seem to hit it off—Musk likes that Agrawal is an engineer who can “do hardcore programming”—but then Agrawal sends Musk a text about his unhinged tweets. “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,” he says to Musk. This small suggestion appears to enrage Musk and, it seems, alters the entire history of the company forever. “What did you get done this week?” Musk shoots back. And then, less than one minute later, the billionaire writes, 'I’m not joining the board. This is a waste of time. Will make an offer to take Twitter private.'

 

One simple request that went against elron's horrendous inner-nature and endless ego seemingly led to a snap decision that in turn exposed elron as a huge phony and likely cost him well over $100 Billion between the decline in value of twitter and tesla. 

Edited by Chopper
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1 minute ago, Chopper said:

One simple request that went against elron's horrendous inner-nature and endless ego seemingly led to a snap decision that has exposed elron as a huge phony and likely cost him well over $100 Billion between the decline in value of twitter and tesla. 

Narcissism at its finest.  And it’s stunning how that simple request exposed how insecure Musk is.  How the hell is a billionaire that insecure.

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I don't know the answer to your question, but I've been pondering over this for some time now. At somewhere around $650 million, Dolly Parton is nowhere near as wealthy as Musk but she has invested money and time into literacy and other projects in her hometown and beyond and the region is the better for it. Philanthropy such as that--personal and relatable--makes one feel very very good so why Elon doesn't pursue that drug baffles me.
On the other hand, were I in possession of that much money, I'd be enrolled in classes part time for fun and interest and traveling the world with loved ones the rest of it. One life to live so get out and do it.

Because you’re not a narcissist sociopath. It’s not much more complicated than that. Elon is a sick bastard, and he’s almost certainly ALWAYS been a sick bastard.
Shit, my wife and I are no saints, but when we have our fun conversations about “what would we do with $500 million Powerball money?”, there’s some selfishness (“oh lord…we could fly first class all the time! And we could travel where we want to and stay in nice places!”), but the rest of the conversation is pretty much “what good could we accomplish with that money?”
We’d enjoy our riches. We’d share them. What neither of us has an inclination to do is to leverage the money for power, prestige, or ego. Because we’re not - and follow me here…sociopathic narcissists.

25 years from now, when the books are written on this era, at least one will have a title like “The Age of the Narcissists.” It’s not just that they exist, it’s that we LOVE them. There’s never been a better time to be a narcissist, because the firehose of validation is turned all the way up.
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13 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Mothers Day Lol GIF by reactionseditor
 

Look everybody, Elon just watched The Matrix for the first time and is repeating the same stupid shit that college students were saying 20 years ago.  And holy shit he did not sleep last night.  Tweet after tweet.

 

wait until he learns what the red pill is

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Watch for scams, eveyrone!
 

I really only check Twitter when there are Elmo posts linked here. What I love is that, under the very posts by the GodKing who has “cleaned up and saved Twitter,” the replies are full of….crypto scammers and posts pushing crypto, “50,000 Ethereum giveaway!”, etc.
That the ecosystem can’t just take the TINIEST step back and see what a fucking self-absorbed, and self-consuming, joke it is, well, I find that humorous.
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2 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Musk is pissing in Mountain Dew bottles at his desk, and ordering pizza, not fucking making it.

 

I cant keep up with all this chaos. Is Musk trying to make some sort of cryptic comment regarding the whole Tate Bros incident? What does he mean exactly?

1. Better to beat up on one's own family's women and keep it in house?

2. Stay home in (dual citizenship) the US or UK and trust that one can draw out the legal issues with $$ and never face any serious stuff (ala the way politicals/wealthy do)

3. Traffic and imprison women in the US so the Romanian mafia isn't involved and one can use your bois to spin the media influencer cycle or pin it on a house aide ala Matt Gaetz.

4. One has a paid staff and one's own pizza oven so stay home and keep all the legal issues at bay by using a green screen for fooling the haters?

So much confusion.

Good pizza is good pizza however.

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1 minute ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

I cant keep up with all this chaos. Is Musk trying to make some sort of cryptic comment regarding the whole Tate Bros incident? What does he mean exactly?

Thanks to your comment, just realized that was what it was about - Tate Bros get busted because of Pizza.  Musk tweets out that one should eat pizza at home. 

The Tate Bros also made comments about the movie The Matrix (Matrix sent their agents or whatever).  Musk then tweets out The Matrix quotes.

So yeah, he's following the Tate stuff closely. 

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1 minute ago, atomheartbevo said:

Thanks to your comment, just realized that was what it was about - Tate Bros get busted because of Pizza.  Musk tweets out that one should eat pizza at home. 

The Tate Bros also made comments about the movie The Matrix (Matrix sent their agents or whatever).  Musk then tweets out The Matrix quotes.

So yeah, he's following the Tate stuff closely. 

He has the demeanor of an adolescent boy so it seemed like it fit to me. Most well adjusted adult men treat relationships with others as a partnership but Tate has monetized the myth that to be male is to possess 'things.' Cars, houses, etc. Some of those 'things' are also human beings but to them that is perhaps not worth consideration. Both men are of a similar mind set in that they exalt themselves and their views to be the way the real world works when it comes to power. In some eras, perhaps so. I don't pity those two at all at all. Boys usually mature to see that for the dangerous game it can be and how so very shallow and so very very lonely. Enjoy the cold pizza and stale beer Mr. Musk. You will never please your *dad so perhaps you ought to seek validation through healthier behaviors.

 

 

*if you've ever read an interview with his dad, there was one out there I read some time back--his dad is a piece of work.

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Musk spent $44 billion to micromanage and pinch pennies at an $8 billion company.  And he’s set it up to fail during high-traffic events.
200.gif
 
He should just go ahead and hire Sark as CEO.

He spent 20 billion give or take. The rest of it was by banks who I am sure will need another bailout to cover for their mistake.
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16 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Twitter is being sued for $136,000 in rent it refused to pay on the SF headquarters.

And it's being sued for another $200,000 in private charter flights for the week that Musk took over.

I don't understand the refusal to pay bills. I guess if you are a billionaire you can just ignore whatever bills you want to. Generally I expect that businesses pay their bills, but not Elon it seems.

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6 minutes ago, pantone159 said:

I don't understand the refusal to pay bills. I guess if you are a billionaire you can just ignore whatever bills you want to. Generally I expect that businesses pay their bills, but not Elon it seems.

Maybe he thinks he can negotiate the bill, because he's always the smartest guy in the room.

Or he's thinking if the landlord locks it up an shuts off access, that's more savings!

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  • immamac changed the title to Elon Musk: [Fraud] Official or unofficial piece of shit?
  • blacklab changed the title to Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?

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