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Jared and Nick discuss billionaire Elon Musk's attempt to buy twitter and the ramifications of his control over such an influential platform, plus they flesh out details of the Republican candidate for Senate in the Great State of Georgia.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Montclair Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates.
I'm here with Nick Kalliselman.
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And on top of that, these episodes are fantastic.
Nick, I wish I could say that made it to the weekend.
I've still got a little ways to go.
This is one of those weeks.
I don't know how you're feeling about it.
Oh, it is.
I feel that way and more, Jared.
I could use a weekend, but I don't know if the weekend's going to do it for me this time.
I completely agree.
I kind of feel like it's a working for the weekend type of weekend.
I hope everybody's doing all right on their end.
You know, I woke up this morning.
We're recording this on Thursday, April 14th.
And I woke up this morning, I gave myself a good old stretch, you know what I mean?
Said good morning to the dog, greeted the sunshine, picked up my phone, my local hell site that I like to pick up and look at, and the first thing that I'm greeted with is that Elon Musk is just flirting with the idea via Twitter, which just sounds great to me.
I could never see how this might be a problem whatsoever.
Well, maybe he should join the board first.
Oh God, what an awful situation this is.
Yeah, I mean, and by the way, correct me if I'm wrong, he was on the board for like a day and then decided not to be on the board.
He was gonna join the board, but then it turns out that to join that board they have to do a background check on you and they might find out where your money is and who you're dealing with and that might be a problem.
Yeah, so then let's just buy it instead.
So, before we get into the implications of this and some of the more interesting aspects of it, it seems like the offer at this point is just to totally buy Twitter, as is the case with shitposter Elon Musk.
We never have any idea whether or not he's serious or not.
He offered to solve world hunger and then just basically laughed about it.
Almost like one of those cartoons.
You remember those with the rich person with the top hat and they had the fishing line and the dollar?
Yeah, sure.
Remember those cartoons?
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, that's his move.
And it seems like he is now offered to buy Twitter for roughly $40 billion, which for Elon Musk is, you know, the money he finds in between his couch cushions.
He is the richest man in the world, worth $265 billion.
And while offering to buy it, he has basically said that if they do not accept his offer, he'll probably go ahead and get rid of his stock and possibly tank the value of the company.
But I've got to tell you, Nick, all the way around, this is repugnant.
This is disgusting stuff.
Hey, this is capitalism at work.
It's capitalism at work, man.
Yeah.
I mean, this is what this is what capitalism is.
And he's offering like here's the interesting thing is that, you know, Twitter has shareholders and when they realize how much he's offering in terms of, you know, price for the stock, I don't know if Twitter can turn it down.
It's in the best interest of the stockholders to make money, and he's offering a wildly higher value than what Twitter is supposed to be worth.
So this might work, I suppose, and I don't know what happens at that point.
It's a lot like being a Hollywood mogul who doesn't want to give the big part to the young Hollywood singer, and he wakes up with a horse head in his bed.
That's a lot like what we're dealing with here.
You have literally one of the most influential, powerful websites in the world.
Top five, easily, if not top two, I would say.
And Elon Musk, just on a lark at this point, is now basically holding them hostage.
And let's say he spends that $43 billion, still the richest man in the world, kind of like Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post.
It's almost Nick, and you can tell me if I'm wrong here, because maybe I'm completely off.
It's almost like having people having this much money at their disposal is a dangerous thing.
Tell me if I'm wrong.
No, you're not wrong.
I mean, here's the thing.
The influence, we have a bunch of different things.
Like, how does Twitter aggregate their stuff?
How do they display it in your timeline?
It's not very transparent.
We don't necessarily know.
And so you can shift the influence or the thought process of a lot of people on Twitter by simply playing with that algorithm a little bit.
I don't know about you, but do you get ads in threads now?
Because I've been seeing that.
And by the way, we'll give Elon Musk credit where he deserves it.
He's not wrong.
This is a poorly run company that has literally no idea what it's doing.
It basically has a tiger by the tail.
A lot like Facebook.
just these incredible world changing inventions that are basically being run by narcissistic sociopathic children who have no idea what they're doing.
And let me tell you something.
I really do believe that he could unlock something in Twitter.
And we have already seen the social media companies not only can change elections, they can change societies, they can lead to genocides.
I mean, like for someone like an Elon Musk to have control over a site like this, the ramifications are huge.
Now, the other thing is he could acquire it and then bring it private.
And then it's really not transparent at all.
And then, I mean, in theory, it could cease to be or have the influence it does going forward if Elon Musk makes it into shit.
Right?
If he does things that are draconian and clearly non-transparent, it's very possible that it could cease to be as important of a platform.
Hard to imagine, right?
Because once something is established like that, it seems like, you know, they don't go away so easily.
But it is concerning, yes.
Especially because, yes, one man could move that.
Do we even know, by the way to set aside, like where he stands politically anyway? - Well, I mean, the main political ideology of Elon Musk is Elon Musk must have all of the money and all of the resources.
- Right, the dollar. - That's it.
I mean, whatever stands in his way.
I mean, he is a classic sort of evil libertarian figure.
Like, he literally would destroy a government if he possibly could.
And I have to say, like, look what's happened in these authoritarian countries with Twitter, Facebook, Apple, you name it.
These tech companies, they're very obsessed with continuing to profit and gain their own power.
They go into these nations and they're like, what do you need?
Oh, you just want everybody cut off from everything?
Oh, you need to control and surveil people?
Absolutely, we'll do that.
Now, think about that happening in the United States of America with, and by the way, Twitter's main function, besides obviously having bad faith arguments with one another and sharing memes, the main function of Twitter is it's where people now go to get their news.
Yeah.
That is the main sort of valve of communication at this point.
And the idea that he would take control over that, I mean, you won't say Jeff Bezos taking over the Washington Post is troubling.
I mean, this is on a whole new level.
Right.
Well, did Bezos do a terrible job ever taking over the Washington Post?
I would say, and again this is one of my main critiques, I think any world in which Jeff Bezos can basically rifle around in his pocket and find the money to buy one of the largest newspapers in the world and have control over that as an organ of news, I think that's a problem.
I think that's a real, real issue.
The fact that We have not figured out the proper way to have a healthy news media that functions without these absolutely sociopathic billionaires.
Right.
Well, I mean, that said, the parallel to that is we haven't figured out how to make this work when they're dependent on revenue.
Oh, we figured out how to do it!
It's been screwed over many, many times.
I mean, it used to be you put an ad for pantyhose in there and now Now it's just a whole different ballgame.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I mean, I was kind of going through quickly what Musk's changes he wanted to do.
And a lot of them are just sort of bottom line stuff.
Like, you know, if you if you pay for Twitter Blue, which is like a subscribing thing, then you get automatically verified with a blue checkmark, like big deal.
And then he wants that, by the way, that would get rid of ads in your timeline, which I certainly wouldn't mind.
So, you know, there is a notion that maybe he could make Twitter work better, but it is... Listen, add this to the list of things that are giving everybody anxiety, at least, you know, for the time being.
Nick, he's going to open up the gates.
It's not just going to be about Twitter blue.
I mean, you're going to have the big dog coming back.
You're going to have the real Donald Trump coming back.
You're going to have the Cuban on accounts.
You're going to have the right wing provocateurs.
I mean, and for anybody who's been on this health side for a while.
And again, full disclosure, Twitter gave me the platform.
We would not be talking right now if it hadn't been for Twitter and that this wasn't a conduit.
And I think it can do a lot of good things.
But everybody who's been using it for a while, remember what it was like back in 2016.
Remember 2017?
I mean, near constant death threats, just a firehose of misinformation.
And you want to talk about growing Twitter, opening the doors and letting those people back is going to let this thing balloon out.
And all of a sudden, Nick, we're back to a point where we're like, what in the hell did Donald Trump say today?
And how did it put us all in danger?
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