Tag: Elon Musk

The invisible hand gives the visible finger

I haven’t said anything about Oolong for quite a few days now, unlike the man himself who, well, said quite a lot with just a few words recently:

The funniest thing about this interview was the bit where Elon got the interviewer’s name wrong, of course, but the really important bit was where he uttered the deathless words “go fuck yourself” to those advertisers who’ve lately become sniffy about him after the Media Matters thing a few weeks ago. And then he had the nerve to post this a couple of days later:

I don’t know, are the people running those other platforms personally promoting the antisemitic shit on them like you’re doing?

The idea that if he wants advertisers on his platform maybe he should give them some sort of incentive to give him money rather than telling them to fuck off appears to have escaped him, as it appears to have done with this buffoon:

Lady Ballers looks like a horrible story unto itself, of course, but it’s not really the point here. The point is, these cunts clearly operate on the principle that they necessarily deserve advertising revenue purely by virtue of them simply being themselves? Disney should advertise on Shitter because Oolong is Oolong? No. The onus really is on him to give them a reason to. Instead he did the opposite; if there was anything he said in that debacle that he shouldn’t have said even more than “go fuck yourself”, it was “DON’T ADVERTISE”! That’s not how you do this sort of thing, you complete vacuum. It’s all about the free market for these bloody people until the free market tells them to go fuck themselves in return… and at some point I suspect he’s going to say the same thing to his investors and they’re not going to take that for an answer…

I’d better stop calling him Oolong, I suppose

So this was Oolong—sorry, I’d better call him his proper name in case he comes for me—this, I say, was Elon Reeve Musk’s latest entirely rational, carefully considered, and not at all drug-induced public statement in between his vendettas against Media Matters For America and the ADL and “anti-whiteness”. Somewhere Mark Zuckerberg is howling with laughter from within an MMA cage, and Elon’s investors who gave him the money he needed to buy Twitter must be delighted at the value they’ve got from him in return.

Honestly, someone needs to get him off the ketamine. He might not sound like quite so much of a cunt at least.

Other companies not OK with Nazism either!

X ad boycott gathers pace amid antisemitism storm

An advertising boycott of social media platform X is gathering pace amid an antisemitism storm on the site formerly known as Twitter.
Apple, Disney, Comcast and Warner Brothers Discovery have all halted advertising on X, US media report, following hot on the heels of IBM.
The European Commission, TV network Paramount and movie studio Lionsgate have also pulled ad dollars from X.
It comes after X owner Elon Musk amplified an antisemitic trope.
The corporate boycott has also been picking up steam in the wake of an investigation by a US group which flagged ads appearing next to pro-Nazi posts on X.
A spokesperson for X told the BBC on Thursday that the company does not intentionally place brands “next to this kind of content” and the platform is dedicated to combatting antisemitism.

And what do the ADL make of this?

On Friday evening, the ADL – one of the most vocal critics of how X moderates incendiary content – offered rare praise for Mr Musk’s steps to fight hate on the platform.
Mr Musk had posted on X that anyone using terms such as “from the river to the sea” – which the ADL has described as a coded call for Israel’s destruction – could be suspended from the platform.
ADL chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt replied that this was “an important and welcome move”.

I couldn’t resist posting on the Bad Place for once what Oolong had said about the ADL just the day before Greenblatt said that (not that he’ll notice):

One of the other terms Oolong is claiming implies genocide is “decolonisation”. I don’t understand that. Genocide against whom, the colonisers? And what else has the world’s favourite white South African billionaire had to say on the current matter?

Well, that’s certainly one way to get those advertisers to stop boycotting you, I suppose. But insulting the ADL has kept Stephen Greenblatt on-side, obviously, so maybe it’ll work this time too…

Cyberpiss

The latest tragic development in Oolong Husk’s increasing degeneration, apart from his endorsement of outright antisemitism, is his new… beer.

Cyberbeer. For fuck’s sake. What do you do, drink it while your Cybertruck is driving itself and crashing through other vehicles? I suppose at least the logo doesn’t appear to have 3 K’s hidden in it… But, being an Oolong product, not only is it preposterously expensive, it’s apparently shit:

Brian appears to be a Tesla fan, which I presume is what motivated the purchase in the first place. Let this be a lesson to him and all of us: just because someone you’re a fan of has merch available doesn’t mean you have to buy all of it…

Musk: the movie

Yeah, things just get stupider and stupider. I’m having flashbacks to when The Social Network was announced, cos that confused me terribly back then… the idea of a film about Facebook to be made by David Fincher struck me then as being as silly and perplexing as the idea of a film about Oolong Husk to be made by Darren Aronofsky… and I can’t escape the feeling the Oolong film will turn out to be much like the Zuck film, albeit probably without the critical plaudits the latter somehow earned; it’ll be perfectly well made but all the characters will be shit, especially the lead one. Indeed, in the review I wrote of it many years ago, I actually said this:

The film suddenly tries to humanise him near the end, but it rings false, as up to then we’ve only seen him as, basically, a charmless, graceless prick who’s kind of ultimately driven by spite over being dumped by a girl.

And I already feel that if I ever watch this putative film I will be able to use that exact same sentence in a review of it at some point.

In other news, Oolong has unveiled the, er, corporate logo for Cybertruck:

Spotted on Bluesky, with the poster brilliantly describing it as “almost wholly illegible and looks like it was scratched on a wall by a tweaker”. Oof. But then someone else also noticed you can read the logo another way:

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH. Once you know, it’s impossible not to see the KKK in there. Oof again, and then some.

…And the inanity

I really hate that I have so many posts about Oolong Husk here, but… when he does shit like this, I have to be able to mock it somewhere. Anyway…

Cybertruck! For when you can’t avoid that trip through Sherwood Forest, apparently. But it’s something else he said about it in response to one of his cultists that people have picked up on:

I mean… I can understand not knowing where the title Blade Runner came from (the film just thanks Alan Nourse and William S. Burroughs for letting them use it without otherwise explaining it), but thinking “Bladerunner” was the character’s name (as Oolong apparently does) is just baffling. Like it’s the adventures of Richard Bladerunner. Luke Bladerunner and his father Anakin Bladerunner. Forrest Bladerunner. Good Will Bladerunner. Bilbo Bladerunner of Blade End. HONESTLY.

Actually, no, THIS is the ripoff for the ages

Good fucking grief.

Meta has a new plan to navigate the European Union’s tough new ad privacy rules – charge users $14 a month.
The tech giant is considering getting customers in Europe to pay monthly subscription fees to use Instagram and Facebook if they don’t agree to let Meta use their data to serve them ads, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
Users who pay the subscription fee will be able to use Meta’s products without ads.
The monthly fee would start at around €10 ($10.50) for a desktop Facebook or Instagram account, but would rise to around $14 for accounts on mobile devices thanks to the commissions charged by Apple and Google’s app stores.
The new subscription tiers, which could roll out in the next few months, are an attempt to comply with the EU’s crackdown on personalized advertising, according to The Journal.

Yeah, it’s an attempt to comply with the EU’s laws rather than a cynical attempt to screw people out of an excessive amount of money for a service that isn’t worth that much. Fourteen bucks a month? We really are trying to make Oolong’s $1-a-year-for-now deal look lightweight, aren’t we, Mark… then again at least he’s not talking about cutting off the service to Europe entirely, unlike Oolong:

In recent weeks Elon Musk has suggested Twitter could stop being accessible in Europe in order to avoid new regulation enacted by the European Commission.
Musk is increasingly frustrated with having to comply with the Digital Services Act, according to a person familiar with the company. The Tesla billionaire, who acquired Twitter, now called X, a year ago for $44 billion, has discussed simply removing the app’s availability in the region, or blocking users in the European Union from accessing it, the person said. This would be similar to the way Meta is currently blocking people in Europe from using its new app Threads.
The DSA took effect in August and requires large online platforms like X to have effective and transparent systems in place for the moderation and removal of false, misleading, and harmful information. With a wave of misinformation regarding the Israel-Hamas war quickly going viral on X, the platform is likely already in violation of the DSA.
EU Commissioner Thierry Breton said last week the Commission is officially “investigating X’s compliance” with the new law and formally requested detailed information from the platform on its actions to mitigate and remove harmful or toxic information.
Cash-strapped X could face a fine if it’s found in violation of the DSA. The Commission can impose “periodic penalty payments,” or fines, up to 6% of a company’s global revenue.

So for having the temerity to tell him to stop his platform being shitty and harmful, Husk apparently thinks he cam “punish” Europe or something by cutting off Twitter there. I mean, sure, THAT’LL work, when you’ve already blown the value of your service by 80% why not just cut off hundreds of millions of potential users, the advertisers will LOVE that… I can see him doing that in Australia too, though, now the government here is also on his back about the amount of CSA material he’s also doing nothing about. The problem is, I can’t see them actually succeeding at getting that from him, even though it’s a pissy sum (about $600,000), because as a billionaire he is clearly above all man-made laws, and for all the talk that he could be fined a further $800,000 per day if he doesn’t pay up… well if he’s not going to pay the original fine, I can’t see him paying the even bigger extra. But I can imagine him just turning the service off altogether here just for considering making him do something to protect kids. And what a loss it’d be if it happened, eh…