There’s just something fucking hilarious about laying off employees, mocking them, and being sued for improperly firing them – and then whining that your competitor hired them and that they have access to Twitter information still.
I believe this fits well under the “fuck around and find out” doctrine.
I simultaneously want Threads to fuck off and also decimate Musk’s Twitter. But ultimately I want both to fail.
Yeah, I’m on the outside hoping a gas leak takes out the entire stadium.
Let them eat eachother out
That was definitely a choice of words
To be honest I kinda want threads to crush Twitter because I despise Musk so much, a lot more than Zuckerberg. Yes, Meta is a horrible company who steals all your data but if I just look at the person behind it I would know who I would kill if I only can choose one. Threads isn’t a Lemmy competitor anyway, they work so different. I think Mastodon might get an issue because sites like Mastodon/Threads/Twitter are all about getting famous people on your site and let’s be real: Most famous people are not hardcore nerds, some of them might not even heard of Linux. If they can choose between Twitter itself, Twitter by Facebook , or Twitter for nerds (c’mon you know that’s true at the moment) I don’t know what they will choose but I DO know what they will NOT choose. I hope Twitter fails because it turns into a shit hole and threads fails because it never reaches critical mass.
Musk is not a likeable person, and I’m definitely not a fan - but he has changed the world. Not many people can say that and Reddit’s distaste for him has spilled over here recently.
Paypal - first and still biggest widely trusted online payment handler.
Tesla - Started a ground-breaking electric car market that’s changed the entire face of motorised transport, and is still the leader in the sector. Their motors and battery packs are still way ahead of anyone else.
Starnet - Bringing low latency, high speed internet to remote locations around the globe. Even in the developed western world where other technologies have deemed it unaffordable.
SpaceX - Seriously, who can fail to be impressed by seeing a rocket LANDING intact?
All areas where other companies dicked around and really achieved very little through lack of vision, drive or funding.
Yes, he’s had failures (Boring Company, Twitter) and yes he’s a category ten arsehole (accusing people of being paedophiles without grounds, manipulating stock prices illegally, pot smoking on live tv, having complete disregard for human beings’ feelings and lives, etc etc) . Does that give him a free pass to act like a knob? Of course not, but the man has actually achieved genuinely amazing things.
He didn’t start either PayPal or Tesla, he got fired as PayPal CEO because it wasn’t doing so hot and he paid his way into Tesla to be able to call himself founder. He’s not the genius. He’s the guy who started with money to throw around, did so to make even more money and put his face on the poster and started to drink his own coolaid.
To follow up: he got fired from PayPal before it was named PayPal. Another words: he never worked at PayPal.
Even better, he built a shitty banking website (X.com) that merged with the company that owned PayPal, they kicked him out of the CEO position the same year, and later they claimed to have rewritten everything Musk wrote. They rebranded as PayPal, one of their products, the following year and Musk had nothing to do with it other than sitting on the board because he got super lucky in the dot com bubble.
Here is an analysis of twitter’s legal letter by a litigation lawyer.
tldr: letter is weak
This confirms what everybody has been saying: this letter is just a PR stunt.
Elon Musk’s entire existence is a PR stunt. After all, they already fired their marketing department.
God he is such a cunt
That didn’t age well
I love how this statement is dripping with condescension for the people who built the service he’s currently driving into the ground - all while thinking of himself as some kind of super genius.
The cream on top of this cherry is that Meta claim that they don’t have any ex-twitter employees.
“Andy Stone, Meta’s communications director, told Semafor that Twitter’s accusations are baseless. “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” he said.”
It’s kind of weird that Musk assumes there’s anything special about Twitter that you couldn’t build in a few weeks with a competent dev team.
The only value Twitter has/had is its user base. There’s no patents or intellectual property that can be sold off if they lose that.
Yes, It is definitely a case of taking US$44 billion and throwing it away. But it is worse than that, because Twitter was a resource for the internet community.
And his attempts to make money after the fact are as pathetic as a World Leader using his position to spruik tins of beans.
It is almost like some sort of performance art.
I never liked that the supposed public square on the internet was in private hands, it should’ve always been a protocol like Usenet or Mastodon where anyone could spin up a server and participate.
Elon didn’t need any extra help running Twitter into the ground, but it’s already too late to put the genie back in the bottle, Threads is already going to take over, and it’s honestly 1 solid update with added features away from absolutely decimating Twitter.
I would’ve preferred more people migrate to Mastadon, but that’s over, any momentum that may have had will be sucked away by Threads until they screw up, hopefully by then Mastadon will be in a better position to capitalize on user dissent.
Threads is federated. So even if Threads absolutely takes over the microblogging market, that doesn’t kill Mastodon. Instead it guarantees the long term viability of Mastodon.
At least that is my naive hope.
That hope is indeed naive. If you want to see what threat Threads poses, look at how Google killed XMPP.
On the other hand, google didn’t kill smtp with Gmail.
First of all, SMTP was much more well-established before Google came along than XMPP was.
Second, from what I’ve heard, Gmail (and other big players like Hotmail etc.) did have a substantial detrimental effect on the proverbial “little guy’s” ability to self-host email… at least if he wants outbound messages to actually be delivered instead of blocked, anyway.
It’s difficult to predict what will happen, but that’s my hope as well. I’m going to wait and see what happens with threads federation before making any decisions.
Agree that’s my hope, that it takes the whole idea of the Fediverse into the mainstream, and that it will live on no matter what happens to Mastodon.
Musk is being an immature crybaby again, but there’s a certain pattern of Facebook/Meta hiring execs who used to work on competing products only to gain an insight perspective on their competitors’ plans by milking them for insider information.
They did the same when Google+ launched.
I love how companies can be like “you can’t have those people they belong to me”. And that’s somehow normal.
Feels very American to me.
