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


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I'm kind of surprised that a viable replacement hasn't crystallized yet - or perhaps I have missed the boat. 

Is there a good platform yet that allows the breadth and scope of pre-Elon Twitter? I want to get fart jokes and foreign policy and racecars and shitposting and BPT and everything else all in one place. Is that Mastodon? I haven't used it yet, but my general impression is that Mastodon is too polite and courteous to foster the kind Wild West/anything goes chaos that I prefer. 

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Get ready for ‘the path to a fully sustainable energy future for Earth,’ Musk tweets, teasing his third such plan, which will be revealed during the company’s Investor Day.

Tesla has already said that it would reveal concrete details about its next-generation vehicle platform during its Investor Day event. The company is working on a refreshed version of the Tesla Model 3 as well as a robotaxi designed to be a shared vehicle. 

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The first plan was publicized on August 2nd, 2006, in a blog post titled “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me).” At the time, Tesla only had one model for sale: the Tesla Roadster. But the company’s “long term plan” was to introduce a range of electric vehicles, including “affordably priced family cars.” The first plan was a detailed look at how Tesla would move from a niche maker of electric sports cars to a mainstream automaker. 

In essence, the plan was a simplistic look at the strategy that Tesla executed over the next decade: build a sports car (the Roadster); use that money to build a more affordable car (the Model S); use that money to build an even more affordable car (the Model 3 and Model Y); and provide electric power generation options (home batteries, solar panels, etc.).

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Ten years later, on July 20th, 2016, Musk released the second plan, which focused on selling integrated energy generation and storage and an expansion into other forms of ground transportation, like trucks and buses as well as autonomous driving technology. It also touched on Tesla’s plan to allow owners of its cars to share their vehicles with others in order to have the car make money when it isn’t in use — a goal that the company has yet to achieve.

If it’s anything like his management of Twitter and throwing stuff on the production servers without thorough testing….

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Another day, another bug.  This time, you can get Twitter Blue for free:

 

https://gizmodo.com/twitter-blue-bug-verified-without-paying-elon-musk-1850090824

 

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Twitter CEO Elon Musk presented the revamped Twitter Blue subscription service as an antidote to scam content. When the service launched late last year, however, it spurred a raft of fake accounts that cost at least one pharmaceutical giant billions in stock market value. Now Twitter users say the struggling product—which has fewer than 300,000 paying subscribers worldwide—has another problem, one that points to a very basic failure: free verification badges.

 

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Multiple users whose profiles boast Twitter Blue verification checkmarks have told Gizmodo that they haven’t paid for Twitter Blue in weeks or even months. One Twitter user going by “THE Cumshot Gamer” shared a video in which they navigate to the Twitter Blue section of their account. It immediately prompts them to subscribe to Twitter Blue. Their public profile still shows a blue checkmark, which has a hover-over popup that reads “This account is verified because it’s subscribed to Twitter Blue.”

 

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The bug appears to be an oversight for Elon Musk, who has placed significant hopes in the revenue that Twitter Blue could generate in order to service the interest on the loans he took out to buy the company, though the product has borne little financial fruit. It’s unclear how widespread the problem could be. Twitter did not respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment on the issue. Since Twitter’s massive layoffs eliminated its public relations department, Elon Musk himself has handled the bulk of the company’s public relations via his own account.

 

Spoiler

THE Cumshot Gamer told Gizmodo that they were able to successfully change their profile picture and pass a re-verification check despite not having paid for the service in months.

“If you change your profile picture a week before your subscription is up, Twitter removes the check badge to ‘verify’ account details,” THE Cumshot Gamer told Gizmodo. “When I did it, the verification process lasted past my subscription end date and when they were done ‘verifying’ I got the check back, lol.”

Another Twitter user and hacker affiliated with the hacktivist group Anonymous, Aubrey “Kirtaner” Cottle, says he also has found a way to beat the system. Cottle told Gizmodo that he only paid for one month of Musk’s revamped Twitter Blue service. He said he subscribed in December, cancelled in January, and still has a Twitter Blue checkmark on his profile.

“MONTH TWO OF FREE BLUE VERIFICATION LOL,” Cottle posted on February 6.

Another Twitter user, Alex Kerker, told Gizmodo a similar story.

“My subscription expired, and I decided not to renew it,” Kerker said. “When I logged on to Twitter the day after expiration, it was still there.”

Kerker shared a confirmation of their Twitter Blue subscription expiration with Gizmodo. The notice was sent on January 24. He still has a Twitter Blue checkmark as of February 8.

 

How much money does Twitter Blue make?


As of this writing, Twitter Blue is projected to generate $28 million in annual revenue from fewer than 300,000 subscribers worldwide—180,000 of those are in the U.S.—which is less than 1% of the $3 billion that Musk has said he hopes the program will bring in. A list of Twitter Blue subscribers developed by programmer Travis Brown shows a similar number.

“I’ve wondered about some kind of bug,” Brown said when informed of the free badge bug by Gizmodo. “There are a lot of accounts that seem to go back and forth between subscribed and unsubscribed.”

Among those accounts was “THE Cumshot Gamer.” Brown’s analysis appears to confirm the process described by “THE Cumshot Gamer” in which they temporarily lost and later regained their verified status, despite nonpayment.

“They showed up as not-Blue for a couple of days in early January, but the other usernames you provided seem to have been continuously shown as Blue since signing up,” Brown told Gizmodo.

Initially launched by Twitter in 2021 at a price of $3 a month with limited features, Twitter Blue has never significantly contributed to the company’s bottom line. Advertising comprises the vast majority of Twitter’s revenue. After Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, he raised the price of the premium Twitter tier and promised an overhaul of the product that would introduce a number of new features. Most of the announced features have yet to materialize, but the program can boast an increase in the number of “verified” members of the Taliban on the platform.

Most recently, Musk promised a form of ad-revenue sharing with Twitter Blue subscribers, inviting comparisons with MLM schemes. In the hastily tweeted announcement of the revenue sharing program for “Twitter influencers,” Musk provided scant details on how it would actually work, leaving users with more questions than answers. Given users’ reports of free checkmarks, how will Twitter Blue know who to pay if it doesn’t even know who is paying them first?

We don’t know what percentage of Twitter Blue users have stopped paying for the service while managing to keep their checkmark, potentially inflating the total number of “paid” subscribers. Without internal data, it’s effectively impossible to confirm. But what is clear is that Musk has “big money problems” and a leaky subscription service with low uptake is unlikely to solve them.

 

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14 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

The jokes write themselves.

 

 

former twitter folks already said it was iffy to go to just Sacramento and ATL for 2 data centers.

is there any other social media site anywhere close to comparable in size that runs off of a single data center?! lol

 

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33 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Another day, another bug.  This time, you can get Twitter Blue for free:

 

https://gizmodo.com/twitter-blue-bug-verified-without-paying-elon-musk-1850090824

 

 

 

 

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THE Cumshot Gamer told Gizmodo that they were able to successfully change their profile picture and pass a re-verification check despite not having paid for the service in months.

“If you change your profile picture a week before your subscription is up, Twitter removes the check badge to ‘verify’ account details,” THE Cumshot Gamer told Gizmodo. “When I did it, the verification process lasted past my subscription end date and when they were done ‘verifying’ I got the check back, lol.”

Another Twitter user and hacker affiliated with the hacktivist group Anonymous, Aubrey “Kirtaner” Cottle, says he also has found a way to beat the system. Cottle told Gizmodo that he only paid for one month of Musk’s revamped Twitter Blue service. He said he subscribed in December, cancelled in January, and still has a Twitter Blue checkmark on his profile.

“MONTH TWO OF FREE BLUE VERIFICATION LOL,” Cottle posted on February 6.

Another Twitter user, Alex Kerker, told Gizmodo a similar story.

“My subscription expired, and I decided not to renew it,” Kerker said. “When I logged on to Twitter the day after expiration, it was still there.”

Kerker shared a confirmation of their Twitter Blue subscription expiration with Gizmodo. The notice was sent on January 24. He still has a Twitter Blue checkmark as of February 8.

 

How much money does Twitter Blue make?


As of this writing, Twitter Blue is projected to generate $28 million in annual revenue from fewer than 300,000 subscribers worldwide—180,000 of those are in the U.S.—which is less than 1% of the $3 billion that Musk has said he hopes the program will bring in. A list of Twitter Blue subscribers developed by programmer Travis Brown shows a similar number.

“I’ve wondered about some kind of bug,” Brown said when informed of the free badge bug by Gizmodo. “There are a lot of accounts that seem to go back and forth between subscribed and unsubscribed.”

Among those accounts was “THE Cumshot Gamer.” Brown’s analysis appears to confirm the process described by “THE Cumshot Gamer” in which they temporarily lost and later regained their verified status, despite nonpayment.

“They showed up as not-Blue for a couple of days in early January, but the other usernames you provided seem to have been continuously shown as Blue since signing up,” Brown told Gizmodo.

Initially launched by Twitter in 2021 at a price of $3 a month with limited features, Twitter Blue has never significantly contributed to the company’s bottom line. Advertising comprises the vast majority of Twitter’s revenue. After Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, he raised the price of the premium Twitter tier and promised an overhaul of the product that would introduce a number of new features. Most of the announced features have yet to materialize, but the program can boast an increase in the number of “verified” members of the Taliban on the platform.

Most recently, Musk promised a form of ad-revenue sharing with Twitter Blue subscribers, inviting comparisons with MLM schemes. In the hastily tweeted announcement of the revenue sharing program for “Twitter influencers,” Musk provided scant details on how it would actually work, leaving users with more questions than answers. Given users’ reports of free checkmarks, how will Twitter Blue know who to pay if it doesn’t even know who is paying them first?

We don’t know what percentage of Twitter Blue users have stopped paying for the service while managing to keep their checkmark, potentially inflating the total number of “paid” subscribers. Without internal data, it’s effectively impossible to confirm. But what is clear is that Musk has “big money problems” and a leaky subscription service with low uptake is unlikely to solve them.

 

LOL at "The Cumshot Gamer"

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14 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

If you want more evidence their infrastructure is crumbling.  I don't do any of these things, but I'm sure there are people that do.

 

 

 

 

Doesn't restricting my access to people/news/follows qualify as a form of restricting my free speech? Or at the very least, restricting my freedom of information? Isn't that something he's wildly against? Shocking. 

 

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Did hovering over a blue check mark at one time show whether it was a paid account up until very recently? Now I've gotta click on it to see if it's a "paid" blue or an actual, verified person. But I don't have an account so maybe it's now different if you're not logged in? Now it's a bit more effort to determine if the person is a scammer/paid-blue or a real person.

Anyway, this is another good offshoot from the thread @NoNamelinked. The paid blue badges are so certain of themselves. "I paid $10 for this badge therefore I know everything about twitter's business" seems to be their logic.

image.thumb.png.c5c6c1f396da3c4f278c574080a93530.png

Edited by Chopper
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He clearly just wanted starlink to get the PR benefits of providing internet in Ukraine without the reality of providing internet to Ukraine. 
 

What’s a permissible purpose for SpaceX? Controlling drones is out, what about surveillance? Troop communications, access to maps? Its shitty that SpaceX gets to decide how Ukraine uses the internet. I guess there’s nothing more predictable than a billionaire siding with dictators 

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45 minutes ago, Prepuce of Doom said:
What a fucking moron. 

I still believe that he's either being used or is somehow complicit in an effort to just destroy Twitter altogether, likely at the insistence of his Saudi masters or similar. 

why would they want to run people to much more secure means of discussion and contact (IE Signal) when they can just have them all in 1 place and have  backdoor into DMs, etc?

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18 minutes ago, Pig Bellmont said:

What’s a permissible purpose for SpaceX? Controlling drones is out, what about surveillance? Troop communications, access to maps? Its shitty that SpaceX gets to decide how Ukraine uses the internet. I guess there’s nothing more predictable than a billionaire siding with dictators 

i think unless they have a lot in writing they are going to have a hard time enforcing this. what if i am out flying my DJI Phantom 4 around my RV? or my boat? is that allowed but UKR using it for "military purposes"?

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9 minutes ago, NoName said:

why would they want to run people to much more secure means of discussion and contact (IE Signal) when they can just have them all in 1 place and have  backdoor into DMs, etc?

Put on your tinfoil hats, gang, because we’re doing a conspiracy deep dive. 
 

The Saudis, with their entire modern existence tied to fossil fuels, targeted the narcissist who has been the face of the worldwide push to green energy and whose most popular and lucrative product is a direct competitor to the internal combustion engine. They back his Twitter bid knowing that he will have to put up stock to buy it, they have the psychological profile research that would indicate that he would become obsessed with Twitter and destroy his image, and simultaneously become a pariah to his target customers while potentially ruining him financially and getting removed from his own company. 
 

Sounds like a good movie script. And in reality, it always seemed really weird that Elon Musk would want to be cozy with the Saudi Royal family. Why not shack up with Exxon and Chevron while you’re at it. As to why the Saudis want to cozy up to Elon, it’s the same reason that they get close to anyone: looking for a good place to stick a knife. 

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Elon Musk fires a top Twitter engineer over his declining view count

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For weeks now, Elon Musk has been preoccupied with worries about how many people are seeing his tweets. Last week, the Twitter CEO took his Twitter account private for a day to test whether that might boost the size of his audience. The move came after several prominent right-wing accounts that Musk interacts with complained that recent changes to Twitter had reduced their reach.

On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?

“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.  

Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

Musk did not take the news well. 

“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer. (Platformer is withholding the engineer’s name in light of the harassment Musk has directed at former Twitter employees.)

Dissatisfied with engineers’ work so far, Musk has instructed employees to track how many times each of his tweets are recommended, according to one current worker.

It has now been seven weeks since Twitter added public view counts for every tweet. At the time, Musk promised that the feature would give the world a better sense of how vibrant the platform is. 

“Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions,” he tweeted.

Almost two months later, though, view counts have had the opposite effect, emphasizing how little engagement most posts get relative to their audience size. At the same time, Twitter usage in the United States has declined almost 9 percent since Musk’s takeover, according to one recent study.

Twitter sources say the view count feature itself may be contributing to the decline in engagement, and therefore views. The like and retweet buttons were made smaller to accommodate the display of views, making them harder to easily tap.

An even more obvious reason for the decline in engagement is Twitter’s increasingly glitchy product, which has baffled users with its disappearing mentions, shifting algorithmic priorities, and tweets inserted seemingly at random from accounts they don’t follow. On Wednesday, the company suffered one of its first major outages since Musk took over, with users being told, inexplicably, “You are over the daily limit for sending tweets.”

It turns out that an employee had inadvertently deleted data for an internal service that sets rate limits for using Twitter. The team that worked on that service left the company in November.

“As the adage goes, ‘you ship your org chart,’” said one current employee. “It’s chaos here right now, so we’re shipping chaos.”

Interviews with current Twitter employees paint a picture of a deeply troubled workplace, where Musk’s whim-based approach to product management leaves workers scrambling to implement new features even as the core service falls apart. The disarray makes it less likely that Musk will ever recoup the $44 billion he spent to buy Twitter, and may hasten its decline into insolvency. 

“We haven’t seen much in the way of longer term, cogent strategy,” one employee said. “Most of our time is dedicated to three main areas: putting out fires (mostly caused by firing the wrong people and trying to recover from that), performing impossible tasks, and ‘improving efficiency’ without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. We mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire, from my perspective.”

Musk’s product feedback, which comes largely from replies to his tweets, often baffles his workers. 

“There’s times he’s just awake late at night and says all sorts of things that don’t make sense,” one employee said. “And then he’ll come to us and be like, ‘this one person says they can’t do this one thing on the platform,’ and then we have to run around chasing some outlier use case for one person. It doesn’t make any sense.”

The San Francisco headquarters, whose landlord has sued Twitter for nonpayment of rent, has a melancholy air. When people pass each other in the halls, we’re told that the standard greeting is “where are you interviewing?” and “where do you have offers?” The 8th floor is still stocked with beds, and employees have to reserve them in advance. 

“Most weeknights, they are fully booked,” another current employee said.

The perks that made Twitter an attractive place to work pre-Musk have been eradicated. Food at the office? “Sucks – and now we have to pay for it. And, I know this sounds petty, but they appear to have obtained the absolute worst coffee vendors on earth.”

Slack – once the epicenter of Twitter’s open culture, where employees discussed anything and everything – has gone dormant. One current employee described it as a “ghost town.” 

“People don’t even chat about work things anymore,” the employee said. “It’s just heartbreaking. I have more conversations with my colleagues on Signal and WhatsApp than I do on Slack. Before the transition, it was not uncommon in the team channel to talk about what everybody did that weekend. There’s none of that anymore.” 

When Musk or the goons ask questions, employees are torn between giving the right answer and the safe answer. 

“When you’re asked a question, you run it through your head and say ‘what is the least fireable response I can have to this right now?’” one employee explained.

(Of course, that’s not true for everyone at the company. “There are a handful of true believers that are obviously just ass-kissers and brown-nosers who are trying to take advantage of the clear vacuum that exists,” that same employee says.) 

Despite the turmoil, remaining employees say that what they call “Twitter 2.0” has managed to improve on its predecessor in at least some ways. 

“In the past, Twitter operated too often by committees that went nowhere,” one employee said. “I do appreciate the fact that if you want to do something that you think will improve something, you generally have license to do it. But that’s a double edged sword — moving that fast can lead to unintended consequences.” 

The employee cited the disastrous relaunch of Twitter Blue, which resulted in brands being impersonated and dozens of top advertisers fleeing the platform.

“If Elon can learn how to put a bit more thought into some of the decisions, and fire from the hip a bit less, it might do some good,” the employee said. “He needs to learn the areas where he just does not know things and let those that do know take over.” 

At the same time, “he really doesn’t like to believe that there is anything in technology that he doesn’t know, and that’s frustrating,” the employee said. “You can’t be the smartest person in the room about everything, all the time.”

With Musk continuing to fire people impulsively, entire teams have been wiped out, and their work is being handed to other, overstretched teams that often have little understanding of the new work that is being assigned to them. 

“They have to become code archaeologists to dig through the repo and figure out what’s going on,” one employee said.

Meanwhile, the recent wave of layoffs in the tech industry have contributed to a feeling of paralysis among those who remain at Twitter. 

“I do think the recent vibe overall in tech, and fear of not being able to find something else, is the primary factor for most folks,” an employee said. “I know for a fact that most of my team is doing hardcore interview prep, and would jump at likely any opportunity to walk away.”

There is also a sense of unease about how recent changes will be reviewed by regulators. As part of an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, Twitter committed to following a series of steps before pushing out changes, including creating a project proposal and conducting security and privacy reviews. 

Since Musk took over, those steps have become an afterthought, employees said. “His stance is basically ‘fuck you regulators,’” we’re told. 

The FTC plans to audit the company this quarter, we’re told, and employees have doubts that Twitter has the necessary documentation in place to pass inspection. “FTC compliance is concerning,” one says. 

Last year, before Musk took over, the FTC fined Twitter $150 million for breaking its agreement. Another breach would almost certainly result in millions of dollars in additional fines, and a flurry of news coverage — just the thing, perhaps, to get the views on Musk’s tweets trending up again.

Where have all the Musk fanboys gone?

Edited by wildcat09
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1 hour ago, NoName said:

why would they want to run people to much more secure means of discussion and contact (IE Signal) when they can just have them all in 1 place and have  backdoor into DMs, etc?

No idea, but this all seems far too incompetent to be anything but intentional by someone somewhere up the food chain. 

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59 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

reading that actually gave me traumatic flashbacks! i was an IT director for a few different state agencies (retired now). one in particular, we had a horrible CTO. when i finally left after two years under him (i had been there 4 years before he arrived) i started a flood of resignations. he was fired within the year. a lot of that description of the environment ring bells...

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Interviews with current Twitter employees paint a picture of a deeply troubled workplace, where Musk’s whim-based approach to product management leaves workers scrambling to implement new features even as the core service falls apart. The disarray makes it less likely that Musk will ever recoup the $44 billion he spent to buy Twitter, and may hasten its decline into insolvency. 

“We haven’t seen much in the way of longer term, cogent strategy,” one employee said. “Most of our time is dedicated to three main areas: putting out fires (mostly caused by firing the wrong people and trying to recover from that), performing impossible tasks, and ‘improving efficiency’ without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. We mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire, from my perspective.

 

this part might be the worst...

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"There’s times he’s just awake late at night and says all sorts of things that don’t make sense,” one employee said. “And then he’ll come to us and be like, ‘this one person says they can’t do this one thing on the platform,’ and then we have to run around chasing some outlier use case for one person. It doesn’t make any sense.”

i feel for the employees. morale completely in the gutter. compared to how many of them probably felt about their life/career a year ago...man, that's like clinical depression inducing. 

 

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59 minutes ago, HenryJames said:

 

I was just scrolling the @s on this and saw Texas & Okie were trending. That thread may become a where were you on on 9/11, or when Reagan got shot type of moment. Now add, I was reading Surly when Space Karen bought a website just to get viciously owned on it by a programmer, first at the office and then on his website.

Okay it's not that big. But still. Love to see all the bad shit happening to Space Karen.

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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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