We're living in the golden age of a**holes

Elon Musk may be today's poster child for billionaires behaving badly, but he's hardly alone.

August 01, 2023

She's dead, Jim. Source: @MzSgtPepper

He finally did it.

Elon Musk finally did what no other force in the universe has succeeded in doing: He's convinced me to give up the social media platform formerly known as Twitter — for real, this time.

I think it was the logo and name change that sent me over the top. There's nothing like staring at a half-swastika in Storm Trooper colors on your phone to make you question your life choices.

When Elon Musk watches Star Wars, he roots for the Evil Empire to win. He's probably building a Death Star in his garage right now — or rather, he's shanghai'd his engineers into building it for him. Probably the same poor schlubs he forced to put this up on top of (Not) Twitter headquarters over the weekend.

He was finally forced to take this monstrosity down, after twice refusing to allow city inspectors to examine the structure for potential safety violations. [1] Now he's looking at a fine he won't pay, just as he's refused to pay the rent on his building, an art deco gem that once served as San Francisco's Furniture Mart. Just as he's ignoring the trademarks that Microsoft, Meta, and hundreds of others already own on his new company logo.

Because, hey, he's a billionaire. The rules mere mortals must obey don't apply to him. And he's far from alone in this delusion.

Rhymes with 'chump'

When your life goal is to be the biggest asshole on the planet, [2] there's no limit to how low you will go.

For example, (Not) Twitter just filed suit against researchers who've been documenting the rise of hate speech on since Musk took over last fall. The Center for Countering Digital Hate is one of a handful of organizations that have been watching the rise of white supremacism, Nazis, and other "very fine people" on social media over the last few years. Musk is accusing it of "attempting to suppress free speech." CCDH founder Imran Ahmed responded thusly:

The Center for Countering Digital Hate’s research shows that hate and disinformation is spreading like wildfire on the platform under Musk’s ownership and this lawsuit is a direct attempt to silence those efforts.... Musk is trying to ‘shoot the messenger’ who highlights the toxic content on his platform rather than deal with the toxic environment he’s created.

Let's see: Ego-maniacal billionaire who does whatever he feels like to whomever he wants with apparent impunity; commands an army of mewling sycophants; sues anyone who disagrees with him; has highly questionable hair. Remind you of anybody?

There's one place like Rome

Historian Dr. Eleanor Janega recently published a highly entertaining essay comparing the decline of (Not) Twitter to the Fall of Rome (more of a slow dismal lurch, per Janega). [3] It's really worth a full read, but here are some of the choicer bits:

[Twitter] was born as a theoretical micro-blogging site, and became eventually the place where people who write stuff hang out. It didn’t have the numbers of Facebook, but basically anyone who wrote for a living was over there, mostly because there is something wrong with us....

After being tricked into paying way more money for Twitter than it is worth [Musk] had to figure out some way to keep it ticking over and also to service all the debt that he took on to buy it. So because he is, and I cannot stress this enough, really quite stupid, he began to strip out all the load bearing members of staff who did stuff like not make the website DDOS itself.... And meanwhile, people just keep wandering off. Things keep breaking. There are suddenly significantly more bots trying to sell you t-shirts, or catfish you, and the nazi count is off the charts. It’s all just generally clunky and not particularly pleasant...

She concludes:

Of course, much like with any series of conflicts, the rich people at the top aren’t going to be the ones effected by this. They can keep being wealthy idiots wherever they want, surrounded by people who will tell them they are cool. It’s the regular people who made friends, or a living, by using Twitter that are going to be worse off.

Musk may think he's a Bond villain, but he's really just Snidely Whiplash. Sources: Reddit, Wikipedia. [4]

Then again, just as with a certain failed politician who will be spending a lot of his non-golfing time in court over the next two years, Musk may soon finally start to suffer consequences for his actions [5]. As Casey Newton of Platformer points out, the remaining 1350 or so Twitter employees were bribed with stock grants worth the $54.20 per share Musk agreed to pay for the company. The last stock grant happens today, August 1. So there may soon be a mass eXodus from X.

The dark side usually loses

In case you were not aware of it, August 1 is also the unofficial No Tweet Tuesday, at least for certain folks. It was an idea cooked up by an account with the handle @MzSgtPepper and amplified by Mark Hamill, aka Luke Skywalker.

The idea is to hurt Musk in the only place he has nerve endings (his wallet), by tanking Twitter's engagement numbers for a day. I appreciate the symbolism of this, but I doubt that it will have any tangible impact. No matter. It's a start.

Personally, I'm not going to delete my Twitter account. I'm going to hang onto my user name (@tynanwrites) for as long as I can, to make sure nobody squats on it or steals it. [6] And I may occasionally post an article I've written, just to keep my account from being declared inactive. But I've removed the app from my phone (huzzah!), so my fingers no longer stray toward it during moments of boredom and procrastination. Essentially, I'm doing what I did with Facebook in 2018, when I decided to stop sharing my personal data with another billionaire behaving badly, but maintained a shell account. [7]

I'll be spending more time on Threads and BlueSky (finally got my invite!) and anything else that comes along and offers the sense of shared community/humor/subject matter expertise that (Not) Twitter once did.

Musk is not the first or even the worst whiny rich guy to act like he is Emperor and the rest of us are just here to clean out the Praetorian stables. There are those imperious Hollywood studio executives who seem perfectly happy with keeping all the money that actual creative people generate. There are all the fascist-friendly GOP donors who never much cared for democracy and would restore feudalism in a heartbeat.

They would do well to remember that when the Visigoths finally came for Rome, they weren't carrying bouquets of posies and I <heart> Emperor Constantine signs.

Where do you plan to be when the reckoning happens? Expand on your thoughts in the comments below. And feel free to share this blog with friends and fellow travelers.

[1] Apparently the base of the 40+ foot steel structure was secured by sandbags. If God had any sense of humor, She would have caused it to fall on top of Musk, inside his Tesla, driving in Autopilot mode.

[2] Very much looking forward to the day when he's the biggest asshole on Mars.

[3] Tip of the COMYAI fedora to Eschindler for bringing this to my attention.

[4] Official Wikipedia citation: By Caricature by J.J., SVG file by Gustavb, Re-png'd by VirtualRash - This file was derived from: Villainc.svg, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29368374

[5] In addition to (Not) Twitter's advertising revenue falling off a cliff.

[6] Unlike San Francisco photographer Gene X Hwang, who registered the handle @X in March 2007 and had it stolen out from under him by You Know Who last week. They offered him "some merch" in exchange for it.

[7] Which has not stopped me from posting endless photos of trees and food on my Instagram account, also in the control of Mark Motherzucker. Do I contradict myself? Yes. I contain multitudes.

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