Elon Musk reaches deal to buy Twitter for $44B - Bluesky crosses the 25 million user mark
- Thread starter Gemini
- Start date
Elon Musk's private jets took 441 flights this year
It isn't easy running six companies, but Elon Musk's fleet of private jets certainly helps.
www.businessinsider.com
Only one's favorite person, but he doesn't post in here anymore.
YouTube’s richest star, MrBeast, rejects Elon Musk’s appeal to share content on X because the platform couldn’t ‘fund a fraction’ of his costs
"My videos cost millions to make and even if they got a billion views on X it wouldn’t fund a fraction of it :/"
Elon Musk Has Used Illegal Drugs, Worrying Leaders at Tesla and SpaceX
Some executives and board members fear the billionaire’s use of drugs—including LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms and ketamine—could harm his companies.
www.wsj.com
What We Lost When Twitter Became X
As a former Twitter employee, I watched Elon Musk undermine one of the Internet’s most paradoxical, special places.
Elon Musk Has Used Illegal Drugs, Worrying Leaders at Tesla and SpaceX
Some executives and board members fear the billionaire’s use of drugs—including LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms and ketamine—could harm his companies.
Will this hurt Paypal and Square?
I doubt it. Paypal is integrated with a lot of shopping sites. I don't think anyone trusts Elon like that to do business with him. I'm not convinced the site will be here in 2 years and if it is I'm not convinced he will be in control. He seems to be doing everything he can to destroy the site and make it unreliable before the election. He has a huge following that will try anything he throws at them, but I would never link any of my financial information with his site.
It will be interesting to see if it takes on a shadow of Only Fans tho. You know sex workers are looking to get paid. In fact, if it does well, it will probably be because sex workers adopted it.
The Afrikaner just killed his own brand !
Elon Threatens to 'Build Products Outside of Tesla' Unless He Gets More Control of the Company
Musk said he “would prefer to build products outside of Tesla” unless his share of the company’s stock doubles.
gizmodo.com
They arent wanted down here.
I think folks are more concerned with the 24 jobs for $10 million tax break.
If the 24 employees were black, would you offer the tax break?
No.
Those 24 workers can drive uber. They'd be doing more for the city of Atlanta.
Shit show
You keep your nose clean ! You’re fired !
The AfriKKKaner/drug addict/so-called genius work ethic !
One day this dude gonna lose this money... woo boy.
1. These are being posted without a source that can be determined credible and unbiased.
2. If these numbers are accurate what factors have contributed to these numbers increasing so dramatically.
Instead of just blaming Biden, Trump, or whoever happens to be in office maybe there should be an effort to determine the accuracy of the report instead of using it against an opposing party.
Obviously I'm not expecting this of Elon but it still should be called out by reasonable people regardless of political affiliation.
After a year of carefully limiting sign-ups to those with invites, the Twitter-style social app Bluesky this week threw open the doors for anyone to join.
It’s a make-or-break moment. Remember when the live-audio app Clubhouse went from the most hyped-up social startup when it was hard to snag an invite, to a big old bust when anyone could join? Bluesky has managed to maintain a steady buzz so far, outlasting other up-and-coming microblogging platforms like Pebble and Parler. This week it scored 1.2 million new sign-ups in just two days after opening to all. But although Bluesky has won over some extremely-online communities, in part through a decentralized design that allows others to build on it, sustainability requires appealing to the masses. It’s something similar platforms, like Mastodon, haven’t been able to master.
WIRED spoke with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber the day after Bluesky opened up to all comers. She seemed alternately exhausted and exhilarated, but focused on trying to prove that a platform with a “federated” structure can attract users who don’t care about the tech but just want to have fun. The conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Kate Knibbs: How did Bluesky prepare for this moment?
Jay Graber: We weren't using invites to try to be exclusive. We were using them to manage growth while we built out what is essentially a foundation, the rails for this new kind of distributed network.
We had to build the app protocol beneath Bluesky, the AT Protocol, that lets different developers, companies, or people come in and modify their experiences. Some of it is going to be rolling out soon. One example of this is your feeds: When you join, we give you the default following and algorithmic feeds. But then there's over 25,000 custom feeds to choose from, most built by independent developers. One is a moss feed, which I find very calming and fun—it just shows pictures of moss and green things.
What do you think distinguishes Bluesky from other platforms, culturally?
It's very playful and chaotic. Especially over the past year, we've had a very high poster-to-lurker ratio. On most social apps, people are just looking at content. Here, there's a lot of people posting and talking.
Not all those posts will be playful, though. What’s your vision for moderation?
We have community guidelines to prevent harassment and hate speech, and we use moderation to try to create a baseline of a healthy, welcoming social space on the default Bluesky app. Then because it's built on this open protocol, anyone can set up and run their own infrastructure and start labeling or annotating content and accounts in the network. That's something that users can directly install to piece together their own community norms.
Moderation has proven to be a weak spot of just about every social network, even those that are very profitable. Do you think you’ll ever reach a point where you’re unable to moderate efficiently?
Our goal is to combine both approaches—to run a moderation service that tries to provide a baseline and to also have an open ecosystem where anyone who wants to innovate can come in and start building. I think this is particularly useful around cases where information is really fast moving and there's specialized knowledge. There are organizations out there already in the business of fact-checking, or figuring out if a verified account is actually a politician or not. They can start annotating and putting that information into the network, and we can build off that collective intelligence.
Recently there was a very high-profile incident on X where deepfake porn of Taylor Swift started spreading and the platform was not super prompt at clamping down. What’s your approach to moderating deepfakes?
From the start we've been using some AI-detection services—image labeling services—but this is an area where there's a lot of innovation and we've been looking at other alternatives.
This is also where a third-party labeling system could really come into use. We can move faster as an open collective of people—she has lots of fans who could help identify content like this very proactively.
What are the benefits of federation—where a social network is decentralized, consisting of a bunch of independent servers instead of one central hub—for the casual internet user?
The goals here are to give developers the freedom to build, and users the right to leave. The ability for people to host their own data means that users always have other alternatives, and that their experience doesn't have to just come from us. For example, if a user wants to try a wholly different app, or a whole different experience, or they want to move to a parallel social network.