itty53

Last hint, this is the one Spade film with him as the lead that virtually everyone loves.

Removing his ability to play stocks at all is removing his ability to earn money. His investors will leave him and the interest on his loans will liquidate him. We've seen more than a few of his type flash up and fade away. Milken. Pickens. Belfort. And of course, Madoff. Just to name a few we know by a single name.

He would still be wealthier than 99.99% of people but then so are a lot of folks on the planet. That's 80 million people left over in that .01%. That's not all that powerful at all. It's removing him from the .00001% thats the goal. And killing his stock market abilities would do that over-night. It's why he bought Twitter, he had to because this was the alternative.

Kinda... depends on how things got him there. The thing Elon can't lose without really going off the rails is his ability to play the markets. Once the SEC kicks him out you'll see him legitimately calling for open revolt.

Twitter was purchased at 44 billion in late 2022. It did not cost Twitter 44 billion to run for the years prior. That is very much profit for those shareholders considering especially that 44 billion was a significant percentage higher than the value at the time. It cost less than half a billion to keep Twitter's lights on every quarter. They started in 2006. So assuming from the get go it cost half a billion a quarter (and you know it didn't right?) ... that's 32 billion to run Twitter the years it was open. And they sold for 44 billion, meaning 12 billion in profit in a windfall.

Still following?

And for a social media company's primary shareholders, selling that company is the ultimate goal and only way to realize true profits. That's the social media scam. Zuckerberg right? You think he wants to run Facebook? He has to, he's an employee at this rate. Well compensated sure but he doesn't pull the strings.

What's hilarious is Elon didn't understand all that. He bought Twitter for cash money. There is no way on God's green earth he manages to turn a profit with it because no social media company has been able to either - not with an entire board and public stock, so certainly not with a private company either. All the profit mechanisms they had before were contingent on the stock market, on speculation. That's all gone now. It's private. There is no public stock price to affect.

Twitter made 44 billion dollars. Pretty sure it didn't cost that much to run. Ergo Twitter made money.

That's the big hurdle. That's the big catch. Social media companies are contingent on speculation to drive profits. Facebook isn't worth what it is without speculative buying in the markets. Twitter, same story. That's where reddit is at, they want a payday and to move on. The funny thing is this same reasoning exposes just how awful a businessman Elon Musk is. Twitter is going to literally drive him from the top ten richest in the world list all on its own. Give it time.

The funnier thing is Steve Huffman is such a loser he is looking up to Elon in this past week. The guy wants so desperately to be able to buy popularity like Elon did.

David Spade...

And NMS eventually got good enough to drop a few dozen hours into.

TIL Voat shut down. Shocker.

The thing is that corporations already can't sell that data ... unless you give them permission to ... which you do just that explicitly when you agree to the EULAs.

That's the legal basis. No one absolutely must use these platforms, legally. Practically they must in many cases but that's the catch 22. The platforms literally came up on intelligence community funding. Facebook was propped up by'em for this exact reason.

And you can't make an inalienable right to privacy such that companies can't ever sell personal data but still allow people themselves to do so, and you can't stop me from selling my data myself. That would be a much bigger breach of the contract of regulatory power that defends citizens.

Privacy isn't something anyone can reasonably force you to keep. I can't go showing my dick to everyone and then scold them for checking out my package, and still maintain my honesty. If I didn't want people looking at my wangstick, I wouldn't show it to them.

Swing and a miss.

I'll give you a more direct hint about the context: "You do" implies someone said that I [verb] something. But I say that in response to someone calling me [an adjective], which doesn't make sense.

You do!

[in response to my wife calling me stupid]

Reminder that even TOR was an NSA / Naval intelligence project.