The Ballad of Twitter and that Billionaire Bumpkin, Elon Musk

The billionaire's fortunes have surged by $14 billion thanks to spiking demand for generative AI. The windfall puts him ahead of tech execs like Google cofounder Sergey Brin and former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer.

Two years later, [Larry Ellison] found himself in the headlines when stories emerged that he had joined a November 2020 conference call with Sean Hannity and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) to discuss ways to overturn Donald Trump’s election loss. Now, the Oracle cofounder and chairman is putting millions of dollars behind candidates who have cast doubt on the election.

Musk’s post, which appears to have since been deleted, had been viewed over 30 million times and liked 151,000 times, Newsweek reported.

Quit Clown

A Twitter data scientist who was set to resign reportedly told CEO Elon Musk what a lot of users are thinking these days: "I hope you’ll declare bankruptcy and let someone else run the company."

That anecdote and other eye-opening revelations are at the center of the just-released book "Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter," by New York Times reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, who take readers inside how Musk has transformed the social network, now called X, into a shambolic mess of bots and extremist hate accounts.

The departing employee was initially pleased that Musk had taken over the company, as flagged by Rolling Stone, but grew increasingly alarmed, especially after Musk shared a deranged and incorrect conspiracy theory about Nancy Pelosi's husband after a home invader attacked him with a hammer.

"It’s only really like the tenth percentile of the adult population who’d be gullible enough to fall for this," the data scientist told Musk during a face-to-face meeting.

"**** you!" Musk shouted back.

Fail Whale

There are even more bonkers revelations in the book, but you don't really need to read all these anecdotes to get a sense that X-formerly-Twitter is adrift and that Musk is a terrible manager.

If you've spent any length of time on the site, you will be inundated with sex or porn bots and dubious accounts with paid blue checks peddling conspiracy theories, with Musk as chief pusher of fake news on the app.

Not to mention arcane tech glitches, like last year when the website became unusable due to "rate limit exceeded" messages.

And because of Musk's mismanagement and his mercurial presence on the app, advertisers and users have left in droves — leading Musk to sue advertisers over this supposed mass boycott.

Here's a thought: perhaps Musk should have listened to that data scientist and left the website in more competent hands.

in the race for the White House, but employees at his collection of companies are largely donating to Trump's Democratic rival Kamala Harris.

Workers at Tesla have contributed $42,824 to Harris' presidential campaign versus $24,840 to Trump's campaign, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan nonprofit that tracks U.S. campaign contributions and lobbying data.

Employees at Musk's rocket company SpaceX have donated $34,526 to Harris versus $7,652 to Trump. Employees at the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, have donated $13,213 to Harris versus less than $500 to Trump.

The Securities and Exchange Commission intends to seek sanctions against Elon Musk over his failure to appear for testimony in an investigation related to his takeover of Twitter, now called X, the regulator said in a court filing Friday.

Earlier this year, a federal judge ordered Musk to testify as part of the SEC’s probe of the billionaire’s $44 billion acquisition. The agency is examining whether Musk followed the law when disclosing his purchases of Twitter stock and whether his statements in relation to the deal were misleading.

After some initial scheduling back-and-forth, the parties had agreed that Musk would testify on September 10, and SEC lawyers flew to Los Angeles to take Musk’s testimony, according to Friday’s court filing. But three hours before his testimony was set to begin, Musk’s lawyer told the SEC that his client, who also runs SpaceX, had to urgently travel to the East Coast for the launch of the Polaris Dawn mission and would be unable to attend the testimony or reschedule to the following day, the filing states.
The two parties then struggled to find a time to reschedule the testimony before landing on a date in early October, according to the filing.

The SEC alleges that Musk violated a court order requiring that Musk “seek ‘written consent of the SEC or order of the Court’ to modify the date of his testimony,” which it says he did not do before failing to appear on September 10.

“Musk’s excuse itself smacks of gamesmanship,” the SEC said in the filing. “SpaceX had already announced that it was targeting a Tuesday morning launch two days earlier… As the company’s Chief Technical Officer, Musk surely was already aware by then that SpaceX was targeting the morning of his SEC testimony for the launch.”