Social media and discussion - A Musky odour - The Bear and Badger

monkey

He's done a lot of reorganising recently so it may have changed now, but a couple of years ago, over 99% of his wealth was stocks in Tesla and SpaceX. So all the "he should do this with his money" stuff isn't really possible. The only thing he can really do with all that bullshit wealth is leverage it against more bullshit.

Rev

Man's a prick. Nuff said. Could do anything with the money he has. Literally anything. Decides to act like a prick instead. Prick.

Rev

monkey wrote:

He's done a lot of reorganising recently so it may have changed now, but a couple of years ago, over 99% of his wealth was stocks in Tesla and SpaceX. So all the "he should do this with his money" stuff isn't really possible. The only thing he can really do with all that bullshit wealth is leverage it against more bullshit.

He could though. But doesn't. Because he's a prick.

Diluted Dante

GurtTractor wrote:

Out of curiosity if a billionaire like Musk did want to do something like help fund education on a massive scale, how could they effectively achieve that? There must be some way presumably? I'm not very clued up on these kinds of economic actions.

He could donate directly to schools.

mannaboy

My main reasons for posting in this thread is to counter the lazy throwaway lines on Musk. You don’t believe he donates to education already or charities. It doesn’t take much digging to find out.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/15/business/elon-musk-charity-donation/index.html

Queue the tax break responses.

mannaboy

Plenty of other small donations to education etc. reported too. Could he do more too right.

Rev

Apparently he's worth 246bn. So if like @monkey says, 99% of that is not liquid, he still has 2.5bn available that he could literally be changing the world with. Its absolutely obscene.

Yossarian

mannaboy wrote:

My main reasons for posting in this thread is to counter the lazy throwaway lines on Musk. You don’t believe he donates to education already or charities. It doesn’t take much digging to find out.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/15/business/elon-musk-charity-donation/index.html

Queue the tax break responses.

That donation has already been raised in this thread, as has this article about it:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/elizahaverstock/2022/02/15/elon-musk-reports-donating-57-billion-to-charity-but-there-is-no-trace-of-that-gift-yet/

Diluted Dante

Why do you feel the need to defend him at all though?

What if I throw out another billionaire? Rupert Murdoch is cunt. Are you going to mount a defence of him as well?

Rev

mannaboy wrote:

My main reasons for posting in this thread is to counter the lazy throwaway lines on Musk. You don’t believe he donates to education already or charities. It doesn’t take much digging to find out. https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/15/business/elon-musk-charity-donation/index.html Queue the tax break responses.

I never understand billionaire defenders.

monkey

GurtTractor wrote:

Out of curiosity if a billionaire like Musk did want to do something like help fund education on a massive scale, how could they effectively achieve that? There must be some way presumably? I'm not very clued up on these kinds of economic actions.

Bezos, for instance, funds his Space Penises by selling Amazon stock. But that's like a couple of billion bucks a year. It would be very hard for any of these ubercunts to substantially liquidate their holdings without it potentially crashing the price as they were doing it. And they have to find people to buy it all. At the same time as these 'visionary leaders' are cashing out.

There's probably plenty of ways of doing it but cashing it all in quickly isn't straightforward.

b0r1s

Only play for Chelsea.

Edit - bollocks.

Rev

Rupert Murdoch deserves to be pushed downstairs. He's literally evil.

Mark Zuckerberg has literally had a hands on in destabilising Western Democracy

Geoff Bezos has helped to devastate retail, ecommerce and logistics as well as pretty much bring back modern slavery.

There's nothing good here.

mannaboy

Diluted Dante wrote:

Why do you feel the need to defend him at all though?

That’s a good question, I follow SpaceX and Tesla technology a lot. I see space toys and exploding cars as padding to pile on to the indefensible of the fact that there are billionaires and Elon can be a massive cunt at times.

But in the grand scheme of things whatever positives there are never going to outweigh peoples disgust at what Elon represents and quite rightly so. So yeah fuck Elon.

(I’ll still geek out on the revolutionary stuff those two companies are doing)

With social media I’ll still question spurious claims, whether or not they fit my own views.

Escape

monkey wrote:

If it's Billionaire Wars, then I've got to go with Steve Ballmer.

Gates was a legit programmer, and at least Bezos used his existing wealth to get in early with online book-selling. Zuck did some coding once.

But Jobs had Woz (as Ive later had Rams), and Musk was arguably the luckiest of all, buying the efforts of the brains behind PayPal with inherited wealth from Errol.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9356850-they-took-one-look-at-zip2-s-code-and-began-rewriting

monkey

Jobs was legit and Woz didn't do anything Apple related since the 1980s.

Escape

Legit salesman for Woz's machines, and then hit the bigtime with Ive after the iMac G3.

Hey, we've not had Branson!

Yossarian

Steve Jobs was closer to a product manager than a salesman, a product manager who was responsible for some incredibly successful products.

Escape

Had the power to select his own wares, yes.

Armitage_Shankburn

Armitage_Shankburn wrote:

He doesn't have the dosh to do that as Griff explained and only the state can use the mechanism of leveraging to do that, and he and his libertarian mates don't want a state to do that. The man's a fucking buffoon

But I still think the histrionics on the twittersphere about him ruining Twitter are top Lolz so I reserve the right etc

Armitage_Shankburn

Ooh, I'm talking to myself ITT how FUCKING META IS THAT SPEAKING OF META THE MUSK PATCH TOTALLY RUINED THE META FML

Yossarian

Escape wrote:

Had the power to select his own wares, yes.

A product manager is an absolutely key role in tech these days. Most tech companies these days are built around small teams led by a PM, and it’s a role which Jobs helped to define and which he continues to influence to this day.

LivDiv

If we must live in a billionaire world the role of enabler is certainly preferable to the usual role of the mega wealthy which is consumer of chintz.

monkey

Even in Escape’s Corbyn-led socialist utopia, you still need managers who can get shit done.

GurtTractor

monkey wrote:

Bezos, for instance, funds his Space Penises by selling Amazon stock. But that's like a couple of billion bucks a year. It would be very hard for any of these ubercunts to substantially liquidate their holdings without it potentially crashing the price as they were doing it. And they have to find people to buy it all. At the same time as their 'visionary leaders' are cashing out. There's probably plenty of ways of doing it but cashing it all in quickly isn't straightforward.

Interesting info, thanks.

Trying to find a good economics based article that illuminates what billionaires could actually do instead of shit like buying Twitter, considering the above.

Gremill

I fucking hate Musk, and all billionaires. But what he's doing with SpaceX and his other tech ventures really appeals to the Sci-Fi geek in me. This might have been covered already, but is he just buying Twitter because of that time he was censured for calling a diver a paedo?

GurtTractor

This is really fascinating, a 'Metaverse' virtual 3D avatar chat from way back in 1996 -

The 'travelers' are interviewed about their experiences, the good and bad. Still feels very relevant in terms of how people interact with each other online.

Escape

monkey wrote:

Even in Escape’s Corbyn-led socialist utopia, you still need managers who can get shit done.

Garriott also threw millions at his spaceboy fantasy rocket, but in my circles you don't hear as much grumble about him. I guess because he made some good games.

Corbyn's Bunny Pogo was less popular.

Armitage_Shankburn

MUUUUUUSK

ILL FUCKING GET YOU BACK GOR FHIS ONE DAY

monkey

John Carmack tried rocket bollocks as well for a bit.

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