2. If by "easy loans" you mean competing for contracts with the likes of BlueOrigin, Raytheon and Boeing, you ought to drop the word 'easy'
3. If the goal is getting back at the industry, one questions whether Elon Musk wouldn't have had an easier time just buying up a bunch of the papers like Bezos and Murdoch
4. Unlike the previous Twitter regime, Musk allows organisations free reign to critique anyone and anything they like. They just have to disclose who's paying for the criticism is all :)
Also take a look at what goes on in India. If I remember correctly it took under 5 days before the whole "its going to be a free speech platform" came crashing down. I honestly like Musk overall as I believe he started companies to better humanity but to claim Musk allows organizations or people free reign on twitter is crazy at this point.
You're putting this as a known fact, but it fully relies on Elon being truthful. The Substack CEO denied this, and since he doesn't have a history of lies over the last months, I don't see any reason to give Elon the benefit of the doubt.
Can we please drop the Twitter free speech façade? We all know it's not true. He's banned activists at the behest of right wing influencers. He's banned parody accounts. He banned the account posting public flight log data of his plane. He banned people for posting links to Mastodon, then unbanned (some of?) them, then prevented people from interacting with tweets linking to Substack. If you search Twitter for "substack", it searches for "newsletter" instead!
It's so tiring having to rehash this in every conversation about Twitter, so… please, let's just acknowledge that Elon doesn't care about free speech and move on with our lives.
1) They both blog, they just don't charge subscribers for the blog articles. The bias is very evident though, as they talk about themselves.
2) No, this is not what I meant. I meant easy loan terms, otherwise they would have just gone after less competitive loans in the open market.
3) Ask Elon? He gets to kill multiple birds with one Twitter purchase. Something Bezos can't do.
4) There's a distinction between "paying for something" and "paying someone who does something", and that distinction is editorial control. Ask artists and writers who sell works for hire by specification. And tell it to those who have had their accounts locked, even under Musk's ownership.
Went searching, could find a lot of In-Q-Tel investments, but nothing about an investment in SpaceX.
What I did find is that Mike Griffin, the aerospace engineer who became the top NASA administrator in 2005, had a previous job as president of In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s in-house venture-capital fund for national security tech.
He invested $500 million in commercial space, eventually $396 million eventually going to SpaceX, along with $454 million of outside capital and $100 million of Musk's own money in 2006. [0]
So, if there is in In-Q-Tel investment, it is logged behind the Crunchbase paywall. That said, In-Q-Tel is an excellent idea to produce better home-grown security technology, and I have no problem with it (not even with their publicized investment in Facebook, and I consider FB a plague on humanity — that's more of a slur on In-Q-Tel than In-Q-Tel is on FB).
Why start by labelling those entities you don't like, then changing the rules to allow for this label, and then slowly adding (or not) to other entities? It would be so easy to do it in a way that doesn't seem childish.
I think he would be much more psychology healthy if he dropped social media. From what I guess about his personality, it's bad for him, and also probably doesn't address any of his psychological needs. Bad habits can be hard to break, but man does he go all in.
You know the gaming term "whale"? They're the people who get so sucked into a pay-to-play game that they'll spend thousands of dollars trying to get those winning feelings. I have to suspect those people are not, psychologically speaking, perfectly well.
If Twitter is the game, Musk is the whale with so much money that he bought the company. He spent $44 billion trying to win the game. And the wild thing to me is that he's still failing at it. Things like "let that sink in" [1] and re-labeling the building "Titter" [2] are just not very good jokes. For a mere one billion dollars, he could have hired every good comedy writer in the world. Instead he has lost at least $24 billion while generating enormous amounts of reputation-puncturing press and very plausibly putting a famously hard-to-wreck company on the path to irrelevancy. If it's not the most spectacular own-goal in business history, I'd certainly like to hear about the worse ones.
> 56% of political contributions directly to candidates from private donors who gave over $100,000, went to Democrats.
> NPR is an ally of the preferred political party of the rich.
In order to infer the second statement from the first, first you have to demonstrate that >50% of political donors (not donations) of greater than $100,000 were from Democrats. Perhaps Democract-leaning donors were merely motivated to make a bunch of donations over $100k, while Republican-leaning donors made fewer donations per donor.
It would be even better if you demonstrated that >50% of political donors above a certain wealth threshold gave to Democrats over Republicans
The website I linked bins per-donor, not per-donation. Of donations from donors who gave over $100,000 total, more went to Democrats than to Republicans.
That is irrelevant. If there was a Nazi party, you'd want NPR to favor the other parties. You haven't considered the possibility that they are biased towards truth. Guaranteed funding from the government is like academic tenure, it lets you focus on what matters rather than chasing hype/click-bait, and lets you stand up to the powers that be.
My first thought. How much in easy loans have his companies received from the government?
This is just rich people hating on the industry that publicly critiques them.