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Is Elon Musk the greatest visionary or the greatest snake oil salesman of our age?

gosub said:

Elon Musk gave a mysterious $5.7 billion donation weeks after he dared the UN to show him its plan for solving world hunger | Fortune

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Follow up from a few months later

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If a mega-billionaire donates 2.4% of his fortune to charity but no charity gets any money, does it actually count as philanthropy?

That’s a lingering question surrounding Elon Musk, the Tesla chief executive and world’s wealthiest person, over the past month. A terse regulatory filing in mid-February disclosed that Musk, who is currently worth $235 billion according to Bloomberg, had earmarked $5.7 billion worth of his Tesla shares for charity in late November. And yes, that’s the only detail Musk has provided about where the shares have gone: “To charity,” according to the bare-bones prose in the SEC’s disclosure form. No nonprofits have recently announced receiving any money from him, and Musk did not respond to several Fortune requests for comment.

On paper, his $5.7 billion donation vaulted Musk up the ranks of the country’s most generous philanthropists in 2021—second only to the $15 billion donated by Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates to their joint foundation last year, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. But it’s also possible that Musk hasn’t yet given away a single cent of this largesse.
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Thanks.

So a few quotes from those (my bolding)...

"It’s unclear, however, where Musk will be donating that $5.74 billion. Musk sold 5,044,000 Tesla shares worth that amount and gave the money to charity between Nov. 19 and Nov. 29, according to an SEC filing. The recipient is anonymous."

"...on Nov. 15, Beasley tweeted the UN’s $6.6 billion hunger plan to Elon Musk, which outlined how the UN could distribute $6.6 billion worth of meals and vouchers to feed over 40 million people across 43 countries that are “on the brink of famine.”

“@elonmusk, you asked for a clear plan & open books. Here it is!” wrote Beasley. “We’re ready to talk with you—and anyone else—who is serious about saving lives.”

The UN’s WFP says it hasn’t received a check from Musk yet. “Whether WFP receives any of [Musk’s $5.6 billion donation] is yet to be seen, but I am excited to hear that Elon is engaged,” the organization said in a statement.

Recently uncovered financial documents reveal that last year, as Elon Musk was taunting the United Nations over his choice to withhold $6 billion that he said he would donate to solve world hunger, the right-wing billionaire gave the money to a different source: his own foundation.

* * *

so really, at best it was a tax dodge, at worst just grandstanding.
 
Sue said:
We're moving offices and there's a competition going on as we speak to come up with a naming convention for meeting rooms.

Along with all the yawnsome standards (Computing Pioneers! London Landmarks! etc), Famous Dogs is still in the running.

'I'll meet you in Lassie at 4.'

'The Finance Team are in Rin Tin Tin.'

:hmm:

(Probably insensitive to mention Laika.)
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What's that they say in Lassie? Elon has fallen into a dopamine ego wank loop of disastrous decisions?
 
BigMoaner said:
Its weird. There's a small part that feels a bit sorry for him, stress on the small. There's a slight sense of tragedy with this guy.
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I think it is, a proper tragedy, not about the individual, i don't care if he Elon feels sad at night, but the richest man in the world posting frog memes all day is something else, an iconic sort of fall of 'the public man', symptomatic.
 
JimW said:
What's that they say in Lassie? Elon has fallen into a dopamine ego wank loop of disastrous decisions?
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If sure we could have some Skippy the Bush Kangaroo/Gentle Ben getting lost in the bush/eaten by an alligator crossover episodes too.
 
Sue said:
If sure we could have some Skippy the Bush Kangaroo/Gentle Ben getting lost in the bush/eaten by an alligator crossover episodes too.
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I think if you put a dog, a kangaroo and a bear together...that's not a cross over episode that's a call out for the RSPCA. Thank fuck you have an alligator to deal with that
 
kabbes said:
Ah, attempts to be a bank by people that have no understanding of banks, have never been involved with banking operations, risk, compliance or any other banking area.

Things always look they should be easy when you conveniently ignore all the complications.

The reason why banking looks “inefficient” is because those inefficiencies are there to protect the consumer as well as prevent things like money laundering. Banks have to comply with regulations around loads of things to this end. For example:
  • operational resilience (like, how do you make sure that consumers’ transactions and accounts are protected even if software fails or a third party that the system relies on goes bankrupt)
  • conduct (making sure that consumers’ lack of knowledge about complex financial products doesn’t cause them to be taken advantage of)
  • capital and liquidity (mitigating damage from bank runs or contagion from elsewhere in the market)
  • risk management (making sure they are identifying and monitoring emerging risks)
  • communications (making sure they aren’t misleading and are clear)
Etc etc etc.

You can’t be a bank or anything that looks vaguely like a bank without complying with these regulations and being licensed accordingly.

Oh, and did I mention that the regulations vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction? So you’re going to have to have that compliance and the corporate governance that ensure it everywhere you want to be a bank.

TLDR: what Elon wants isn’t possible even in the medium term in the US, Europe, UK etc unless he also buys a bank that is already licensed in those jurisdictions (who will then prevent him from doing a lot of the things he thinks he wants to do).
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We do a lot of work with a bank and they have a LOT of bureaucracy, regulations, redundancy etc etc, for precisely these reasons.
Sue said:
We're moving offices and there's a competition going on as we speak to come up with a naming convention for meeting rooms.

Along with all the yawnsome standards (Computing Pioneers! London Landmarks! etc), Famous Dogs is still in the running.

'I'll meet you in Lassie at 4.'

'The Finance Team are in Rin Tin Tin.'

:hmm:

(Probably insensitive to mention Laika.)
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Yes! Do it!
 
It's the last time I will mention this dude at risk of becoming even more of a bore. But when I read Byung Chul Han's works, I see the online world so much more clearer. I was begging for a good theorist/philosophy to really grab this stuff by the balls. In my view, he's one of the most important writers around today. I see musk and his ideology in so much of his works. I see Tate too, and the desperate crypto bros,. most of all i see my own pscyce in his works. Forget Foucault's discipline society, it;s now the achievement society. Great video:



I am not tub thumper for certain philosophers etc but this dude just feels so essential at the moment. have a listen.
 
DHmkCc1.png

Linda Yaccarino, left, poses for a picture with influencer Paris Hilton earlier this week © Linda Yaccarino/Twitter

Financial Times:
Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino courts Hollywood in push for star power - (archived)
Social media app’s new chief meets with agents at leading talent agencies amid controversy over rebranding to ‘X’

Linda Yaccarino, Twitter’s chief executive, went to Hollywood this week in a bid to woo talent agencies and entertainers days after owner Elon Musk announced the social media app’s sudden corporate rebranding to X. Yaccarino met agents at Creative Artists Agency and United Talent Agency in Los Angeles, pitching her vision for X in a bid to bring stars and influencers from cooking to music and sports on to the social media platform, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. The chief executive also held meetings with Disney, one person said. (...)

One person who attended the meeting with CAA said that Yaccarino, the former advertising head at NBCUniversal, told agents on Tuesday to “dream up what they would want and that X will try to build it”.
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Reach out for the stars
And when that rainbow's shining over you
That's when your dreams will all come true
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bimble said:
Today the richest man in the world woke up and thought, I know, an open call for conspiracy theories that’s what’s needed. :(

View attachment 384863Replies so far are mostly about how climate change isn’t real. Maybe he’s a cynic doing it for clicks but I think it’s not that.
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What do you think it is then? One of my thoughts l was having before going to sleep last night, is why the fuck Musk is pushing anti-vax bullshit on his platform. The only thing I could think of is that the pathetically petulant manchild is still smarting over the Covid shutdowns, and is embracing that nuttery as a means of lashing out. Otherwise I got nothing.
 
NoXion said:
What do you think it is then? One of my thoughts l was having before going to sleep last night, is why the fuck Musk is pushing anti-vax bullshit on his platform. The only thing I could think of is that the pathetically petulant manchild is still smarting over the Covid shutdowns, and is embracing that nuttery as a means of lashing out. Otherwise I got nothing.
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While he clearly enjoys trolling, I think at least part of it is that he's in many ways a quite foolish man who spends a lot of time online and believes a lot of the stupid shit he reads - and is too arrogant to doubt his ability to tell fact from crap
 
NoXion said:
What do you think it is then? One of my thoughts l was having before going to sleep last night, is why the fuck Musk is pushing anti-vax bullshit on his platform. The only thing I could think of is that the pathetically petulant manchild is still smarting over the Covid shutdowns, and is embracing that nuttery as a means of lashing out. Otherwise I got nothing.
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Because of his feed. Remove the feed, would it be the same Musk?
 
i don't know what it is, some of all of the above probably.

Thought I was immune(ish) to being upset by this stuff but 'He's Jewish' is currently trending on twitter, and it's just wall to wall proper nazi-flavoured hate accounts, using that hashtag. Old days, pre-musk, the staff at twitter would intervene & manually stop things like that showing up as a 'trending' topic, to avoid this sort of thing happening, but no longer.
 
teuchter said:
All of us are only too aware of the fact that we only waste time posting nonsense on the internet due to not being multi mega billionaires.
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I'm pretty sure you've got it backwards here, and the only reason most of us aren't multi mega billionaires is because we waste spend so much time posting on the Internet :hmm:
 
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