Well…Elon founded Paypal. He owns a car tech company, and a rocket ship tech company. Both seem to be doing pretty good, since he’s the world’s richest dude. I’d say the NY Times might be the nachos-eating armchair quarterback on this one.
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Elon has had the company for barely 2 weeks. It takes a couple years to turn a financially strapped company solvent. Funny that the FTC is hammering him over the bot issue…since it proves he was right about that all along. Some advertisers left, but there are plenty of other advertisers willing to sponsor Twitter. Call me an optimist…because Truth Social sucks.
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Fact check police. No he didn’t.
Confinity, the creator of PayPal, merged with X.com, a company that was founded by Musk in 2000
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Fine…he wasn’t the founder of Paypal
I haven’t seen any articles about the FTC issuing recent warnings regarding bots, but the recent FTC statement with regards to compliance is not related to bots. It relates to compliance with existing consent decrees around privacy and security.
And personally I’ve always expected Musk to eventually turn Twitter into a version of Truth/Parler/Gettr (I think I’ve said that previously upthread). That seems like the inevitable end point of “free speech” social media. It’s definitely trending in that direction so far, but as you said he has time to do a 180.
Below article sheds a little light on the consent decrees. The fine mentioned is for violations pre-Musk.
It’s FTC 101. Companies can’t tell consumers they will use their personal information for one purpose and then use it for another. But according to the FTC, that’s the kind of digital bait-and-switch Twitter pulled on unsuspecting consumers. Twitter asked users for personal information for the express purpose of securing their accounts, but then also used it to serve targeted ads for Twitter’s financial benefit. It wasn’t Twitter’s first alleged violation of the FTC Act, but this one will cost the company $150 million in civil penalties.
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Here’s a gift link to to the article to get past the paywall. It’s by an op-ed columnist for the Times, a very smart guy.
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Excellent and balanced opinion. Thank you for posting a gift link.
Tbf, Like most tech companies, such as Meta, Twitter had over-hired and was bleeding cash. If Elon had not purchased the company, they would have had massive layoffs anyway.
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Anyone with money in the market is most likely not feeling all that smug.
H and I were at fruit company when the original guy came back and it was a bloodbath in 1995-1996. Oh and that original guy was brilliant but cared not a hoot about the small people. That original guy was a (fill in your own expletive). You can read all about him in the book written by a kid he at first refused to acknowledge and then mentally tourtured.
And look where the big fruit is now.
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I blame on the legal team at Twitter, they forced him to buy, he couldn’t back out.
The chaos continues…
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not sure if you were joking, but it was the outside investors/VC who wanted that $54 price and forced the sale.
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More “good news” for Twitter’s remaining employees:
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Another opinion from a Bloomberg writer:
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/we-may-be-watching-twitter-implode-in-real-time-commentary/
This requires subscription, which i don’t have, but an Uber employee faces federal prison.
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As I said earlier, I wish him best of luck. It is so much harder to manage a giant crowd of humans than to assemble cars or even space satellites.
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