Incidentally... https://mastodon.social/@elonjet is still going strong.
this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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Holy shit this dude fucking lives on his plane. Like I feel guilty about the 2-3x per year I fly to see family but this fucker has flown that far already in the past week. Why? Does he not know how to do a video call?
Ugh, I feel the same. I know the top 1% of the world or whatever emits tons and tons more CO2 per year than the other 99%, but I didn't know it was this bad. That plane is flying multiple times per day. Sure Musk is probably not in it all the time, but that doesn't matter.
Private jets should be banned all together, let's see how quickly they suddenly find out the internet exists.
Things like this are perfect reminders that we don't have to change every person on the planet, just eliminate the erronneous emissions.
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All air travel should have fuel and emissions tax. Normalize them to commercial airliners. That'll incentivize larger, more efficient plane designs. It'll also punish private jets. Also charge a fee for any planes not at least X% full. Also give discounts and waive fees for planes over X size that service under-served airports.
A bunch of regulations like this should make private planes prohibitively expensive, like 10-20x their current cost. But that's a lot of legislation that huge corporations and billionaires would oppose.
Planes are already pretty fuel efficient per passenger. And larger planes are unlikely, because this would mean all runways they want to use must be extended so the can start and land there.
Commercial planes with high occupancy got somewhat efficient (until you compare to other modes of transportation), but private jets with 1 ego on board are incredibly fuel inefficient.
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You shouldn't really feel guilty about anything like that. Asking hundreds of millions to billions of people to drastically change their lives and practice austerity is insane while billionaires do whatever they want and corporations push legislation that makes it harder to conserve. Our meager efforts won't matter much if the biggest offenders go pollute wantonly.
Individual's biggest efforts are pushing for legislation and politicians who will curb corporate abuses. Everything is a drop in a bucket that's already overflowing.
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Does that also get posted to Threads or now Bluesky?
The profile is "elonjet . net" (without the space) on bluesky.
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Yeah, no. Musk bought Twitter because he HAD to. He very publicly made comments about buying Twitter at absolute meme-stock prices, but didn't disclose that he already owned a LOT of Twitter stock. So, when his comments predictably increased the price of Twitter stock, he had two choices: Either it was just talk, and he was BLATANTLY guilty of stock manipulation and the Feds put a target on his back, or he acts like he totally meant it.
So he went with option two, acted like he was serious and wanted to buy twitter. Then he tried everything he could think of to kill the deal, accusing Twitter of all sorts of wrongdoing and lies, but Twitter was more careful than that. They got their shit right, and Musk couldn't back out. So he bought Twitter, rather than go to prison.
The fact that he could also kill the tracking twitter account was completely incidental. Musk is an idiot, but even he isn't that stupid. Musk initially offered $5,000 to the account holder to stop, and then balked at the return offer for $50,000. Now, I may not be a billionaire tech-bro, but I'm pretty sure that spending $50,000 to achieve a goal is preferable to spending $44,000,000,000. He's dumb, but he's not that dumb.
Ah so Musk was trying to increase his profits super publicly and super illegally.
I honestly don't think he was TRYING to do anything but shitpost. It didn't look like a well thought out plan, it looked like an idiot talking out of his ass and realizing that his memes were also crimes.
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I think you're giving him too much credit. The announcement that he owned Twitter shares already hiked the price. If he wanted to ~~short~~ pump and dump he should've just kept his mouth shut, get on the board and then sell his stocks. The initial hike to his 9% ownership was on par with his buy offer hike. If his plan was to pump the company he could've done it without the legal trouble. Also the second price hike was after he had already made a public bid for the company and the company had accepted the offer. At that point he was locked in to buying the company. There was speculation if such a deal is allowed to go through, but the reality is that unless someone else steps in Musk had two options, he either buys the company or he gets taken to court and is forced to buy the company.
He had to buy the company, but not because he was risking going to jail. He had to buy it because he screwed himself over by making the bid in the first place. I don't get the need to make him seem like an intelligent man. He didn't have any grand schemes or ulterior motives or someone else footing the bill. He simply made a horrible move, probably because he's a huge manchild who didn't like that the CEO of Twitter didn't completely lick his boot.
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Ok. Musk offered the kid $5,000 to delete his account, the kid countered with $50,000. Musk refused so he spent $44 billion instead to get rid of the account.
Just fucking stop.
Elon Musk was forced to buy Twitter after doing several incredibly stupid things publicly.
Quit assisting this fascist dumbass in his attempt at laundering his reputation.
I don't see how claiming he bought Twitter to try and shut up a teenager does anyting to help his reputation.
It re-enforces the idea that he is a "genius" who is playing "4D Chess" and that he "has a plan" and not that he's a fucking drug addled freak who is making decisions based on his emotional state at the time.
There was no plan, there's never a plan. Rich people just play this game where, because they have enough money to insulate themselves from their bad decisions, they pretend that "this was always their plan."
Pretty much Musk:
Anyone who thinks spending 44 billion dollars on shutting up a teenager constitutes a "genius plan" is already fully on-board the Musk cult. I don't think there's really much reinforcement happening.
I agree we shouldn't pretend he's anything less than a dumb asshole who got caught with his pants down.
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Elon Musk burning billions of dollars to not have his public information publicly posted is one of the biggest Ls he's ever taken and that's a long list to fight to the top of.
And totally on par for him.
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I think he was trying to get out of Twitter and wanted to do a real life version of his Dogecoin pump and dumps. You know, talk a big game, hype up how the stock is gonna go to the moon after he brings his genius to bare on the company, then dump the stock and pull out of the deal. However, during the hype phase he managed to say some legally binding things and suddenly found himself forced to honor what he thought was going to be empty hype.
He did more than say legally binding things. He signed a contract. That had a clause in it to prevent him from backing out, because the management at Twitter fully expected him to try it. I think he had made several gestures at buying before to try and get some kind of influence over how it was being run, so they drew up the contract to make him put up or shut up.
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I'm also convinced the entire purchase was an accident but I think he was doing the usual far-right "try and shame people for standing up to nazis".
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Muskrat bought it because he has poor impulse control. There's no "grand design," just a man child who desperately needs a mommy to protect him from himself.
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So is Taylor Swift going to buy it next?
Probably. She'll change it to eX. Tweets will be called ditty and you'll be required to sing them.
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For perspective, $30 billion would afford the food and freight to feed every human on Earth for a year.
Less than that would make him a god in Haiti (that is, elevate the nation out of crisis and put a bronze statue of Musk in every state park commemorating how awesome he is.
A few billion could provide free high-speed internet to everyone worldwide. Curiously Musk considered this, but then wondered how to get everyone to pay fees for it.
ETA I got these values when we were discussing Bloomberg's wealth in 2019 when he was trying to Secret Hitler the Democratic party, and how much could be bought with the $500 million (at the time only 200 million was declared) he spent on his campaign. The $30 billion to feed the world value came up in in one of the news articles.
Well, the economy is much different and we're dealing with considerable inflation (and our billionaires, including Bloomberg are much richer.)
I'm having trouble figuring out the math for this. My assumptions lead me to divide $30b by 8b people, which is about $4/person. I'm not confident that people can eat on $4 for a year.
What am I getting wrong?
I just did the math myself before seeing your comment and you’re right that math is fucked lmao.
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So the full story would be that Elon stayed up until 5:30 a.m playing Elden Ring in a Vancouver hotel - was very stressed, saw on Twitter that people knew he was raging in Vancouver based on the Jet Tracker - stressing him out even more -
Though "Fuck it, maybe I can't beat Malenia, but at least I can beat this asshat on Twitter tracking me!"
...If only FromSoftware had added some pay-to-win elements... Like "For A Small $1 billion Micro-Transaction you get the uber Malenia slayer sword!" -
We would be living in a totally different timeline
If they weren't doing anything wrong they shouldn't care who watches where they go, right?
Yes this makes far more sense then the brain dead “bought it to kill it” theory that’s just cope for phony stark
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LOL. There's a silicon valley bigwig jet tracker that I see pop up on my Reddit account, and I'm not even that interested in it.
this is so astoundingly petty, it might just be true.
although i doubt that's the only reason he bought it, i wouldn't be surprised if it's a major factor that got him serious about buying it.
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Or really, he wanted to talk shit and pump and dump, and he got caught by some savvy lawyers at twitter.
Then he tried to turn it into a political tool sprinkled with his narcissism, hoping foreign governments would pay him to manipulate narratives. But now nobody gives a shit, he has lawsuits left and right and is likely going to go broke, and he's scared away all the advertisers who were his life blood.
He tried to pull a trump but nobody actually backed him up, and they're likely going to let him fall.
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I've read all his texts. He definitely bought it because d-list celebrities in his chat groups begged him to.
What stopping someone from recreating this on mastodon or any other website?
There is nothing special about Twitter which allowed people to track this jet.
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Considering that...
- The Republicans encouraged him multiple times to buy it
- He quickly stopped blocking (mainly Russian) state-sponsored social manipulation campaigns
- He allowed right wing agitators back on the platform
- He almost immediately banned droves of journalists that weren't blindly Pro-Russia and Pro-GOP.
- He censored / banned all kinds of activists that pushed back against authoritarian (Russia-backed) regimes in other countries
...I have a hunch that he also served the interests of certain political actors with the acquisition. Public town square my lower backside.
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So... it was a really good call from the CEO to not remove the account?
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