So "X" - nothing to see here. Elon's in control - Part XXX

I'm not interested in the discussion of this, precisely due to your rather "binary" first sentence above. As for Musk himself I am ambivalent. His political views are not very sophisticated and in themselves not very interesting. There's plenty of other people criticising them. He is a very impressive entrepreneur though and I like his stance on free speech on Twitter.

I just shake my head at all this kind of stuff :-

• he gets other people to do the work and is only an investor
  
• the hatred towards Tesla from people who claim to care about the environment.
  
• websites devoted to all the mistakes and false promises (that's a new one on me)
  
• This idea that meeting a representative of a company like Tesla should be off-limits because the CEO has a negative public image. To me that is just juvenile, social media driven, "join the dots" guilt by association bs.

I've said all this before. Just zero interest in arguing about it, except to note when the social media bubble starts to impinge on the real world here.

In terms of Musk's reputation, there will be interesting history written about it, but I think it really only began to tank when he bought Twitter and restored free speech on the platform. That's what really drove the "derangement" imo.

Says he is ambivilant to and has zero interest in discussing Musk, then goes on to discuss Musk.

By 'zero interest in discussing this' what you actually mean is;

'I want to soapbox my own opinions on Musk but scoff at all of yours'.

Bully for you I suppose? Plenty of people have legitimate reasons for thinking Musk, his associations and actions are a danger and want to steer clear. Absolutely nothing wrong with political figures feeling the same way.

• he gets other people to do the work and is only an investor - You think he's sitting in a lab running calculations most days? No, he tells his scientists and engineers what he wants, and they go do it.
  
• the hatred towards Tesla from people who claim to care about the environment. - Tesla are not the only EV manufacturer. Yes, they were one of the first out of the gate and one of the most prominent in the field, but that's long gone now and they're being surpassed in many aspects.
  
• websites devoted to all the mistakes and false promises (that's a new one on me) - Accountability matters.
  
• This idea that meeting a representative of a company like Tesla should be off-limits because the CEO has a negative public image. To me that is just juvenile, social media driven, "join the dots" guilt by association bs. - Personally I'd rather not see our government ministers called paedophiles if they disagree with Musk, which is something Musk has form for doing (he literally just said Trump is in the Epstein files after falling out with Trump, which implies either he knew about it and continued working for Trump and praising him, or he made it up, and both of those are bad). His reputation began to tank when he called someone working on rescuing the children from the cave in Thailand a paedophile simply because he said Musk's idea wouldn't work. That was before he bought Twitter. At that stage, the concept and public image of Musk being a genius was shattered because the reality of Musk being a f*ckhead was laid bare for all to see.

Musk is a f*cking joke, his association with the US government has been shambolic, and overall he is not even worth meeting at this stage. He's not that important. Not to mention things like his failed Hyperloop project which ended up being a few Tesla cars self-driving through a short tunnel, all to prevent and co-opt investment in public transport. We don't need Musk to convince our politicians to waste money on frivolous, pointless things like that. They're already great at that.

There's nothing else in the article other than this.

One shining example is Musk’s willingness to silence the opponents of foreign governments. Governments often ask social media companies to take down posts or accounts they don’t like. Before Musk took over, Twitter complied with about half of these requests. The numbers shot up under his leadership; these days,

Elon’s Twitter cooperates with government censorship requests 80% of the time

I can't check that. Where are the other eight examples?

How they interact with their competitors (including Substack that you have to pay to read all of) is a different issue to censorship. You can certainly include links to substack posts though.

Same with the Bluetick revenue raising effort. Yes, you can argue strongly that it wasn't a good idea, but it's not censorship. The algorithm used to highlight one set of posts over another is not censorship, but I would agree it should be more transparent.

Taylor Lorenz seems to be still posting away there .. so she hasn't gone anywhere.

Some of the other examples I'd accept don't look great. And it isn't a great look if someone connected to the Indian govt. calls him up and complains about a particular tweet that he gets deleted. Same goes for his private jet. But, at the end of the day - is there a systematic policy enforced preventing criticism of Elon Musk or the Indian government? No, there isn't.

I just did a search on X for "Elon Musk". Here's the first post that comes up

The bottom line for me is that I (like any Joe Soap) can discuss anything I want on Twitter with fewer restrictions than before (or even on this site). Posts don't get deleted like before for using forbidden phrases or words (when in reality it was moderators enforcing their personal ideologies). And it's not like Bluesky where you can find yourself on blocked lists before you even start posting and which by all accounts also tolerates some fairly horrible posting and posters. I like it. You don't have to. So, it's all good.

Delete it, move to Bluesky. Life's too short to be listening to and reading the shite that goes on on Twitter.

If it was North Korea, the technicians "responsible" would probably already be facing the firing squad.

I just noticed this. JD vance was banned shortly after setting up an account on Blue Sky, and it seems like a lot of people on the site are okay with that. If this is what you want, then I suppose Bluesky is the place to be …. Though it looks like he was subsequently unbanned.