Vocal Voices

Which looks like what Twitter is going to be turned into. One of Musk's presentations to investors has leaked and it is both illuminating and also unsurprising to those who know Musk.

- 1,100 staff to go in the first swing of the axe. Well I did mention this when I talked about idiots in Twitter on the staff boards ripping Musk to shreds. They think they are invulnerable.

- Bans to be replaced with short term Time Out's. If you think about this it means that Twitter can react faster and harder then allow the poster to back off. It also allows a graduated number of "strikes" before you finally get banned. A ban today requires some quite massive level of force behind it because it is permanent. Time out can be far more flexible.

- Advertising revenue to be no more than 46% of Twitter revenue. This means that the corporations and their Woke agenda don't take over the platform.

- Online payments. Lest anyone forget, Musk was the creator of X.com which carried out digital payments to banks. He organsed a merger with confinity which was developing digital wallet technology and the company became PayPal. Musk knows online payments. After eBay froze him out of PayPal management after the buyout, I suspect an online payments solution on Twitter would be vengeance being served very cold indeed.

- Get rid of the bots. Bots are a scourge on Twitter and humans simply can't keep up with controlling and moderating them. But Musk is the largest stock owner in a company which has some of the most cutting edge AI in the world. AI can deal with bots quite effectively allowing more time for Humans to do what they do best, think, invent and deliver.

- Change the Twitter workforce with a much more development heavy focus by employing many more developers (up to 4,000), to create new features and new experiences for Twitter users.

- Potentially accept digital payments (dogecoin etc).

- Reduce the premium twitter plan from $3 to $2 a month and push that hard to replace advertising revenue.

What else might he do with all that development stuff? My take? Go after Instagram, Whatsapp, Farcebook and whatever else pops up. Innovate, be ahead of the curve. I would expect the original SMS of Twitter to become a small part of the new whole. In the same way as I no longer recognise LinkedIn, I would expect Twitter to expand and morph into a different product. I have a badge somewhere as one of the first 1m users of LinkedIn. Yet this mail address is the second I have had on LinkedIn as I lost my first address, it was before I moved away from ISP mailboxes.

At which point people will be able to witter on to their hearts content...

Watch this space. Mean scythe coming to a company near you soon. Snowflakes and Woke agenda's to wind up being the chaff.

For those who might actually want to know a bit more about St Elon and the person who is going to take over Twitter and you have 50 minutes to spare, I suggest you listen to his TED interview.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdZZpaB2kDM

Especially the part where he talks about the truth and also the part where he talks about the SEC in the US and how he was railroaded into allowing the SEC to investigate him over his "funding secured" tweet. Essentially he calls them liars and "bastards". Making these statements, now Tesla is fully financially secure and that only Tesla are holding their own money strings, is momentous. If it were not the truth, then he could even wind up in Jail but certainly in the courts.

If you want to understand him ( I know many don't), then it is worth an hour of your time.

When talking on Twitter the most poignant part about the whole thing, for me, is when he says, of free speech; "when the person you don't like is saying things about you that you don't like and you are defending his/her right to say things about you that you don't like, That is free speech".

Unlike the mountain of Woke and Snowflake bodies currently inside Twitter in the moderation departments.

Let me be clear here. I doubt if I could work for him and, from the personality he exposes, I doubt he would fall into my circle of friends, it doesn't mean that I don't admire what he has done.

Ok, so why is being so rich and or powerful that you can say anything you like, no matter how insulting, and not worry about the consequences a good thing? Having the right to free speech is wonderful, but that shouldn't mean freedom from the consequences.

I still remember how he called one of the rescuers of those boys trapped in that cave a "pedo", in a tantrum because they turned down his submarine

Yes and he was taken to court and he won his case.

There is an awful lot more to the story than the high profile sensationalism by the UK and US press. It was buried at the very bottom of the Guardian article on the court case that the jury foreman said the jury felt the plaintiff spent too much time trying to get their sympathy and too little time trying to prove their case.

In the end it was not Musk's money which won the case or the fact that he was a high profile person. It was a lack of skill, ability or even to prove that what Musk said was not an insult but a statement of fact. In California when in a fight, you can insult, but defamation requires more evidence. As in an intent to convince others that the insult was fact and not just that, an insult.

You do, however, have to do a bit of digging to find all that went on.

Today the press can say what they want. Musk is the richest man in the world by quite some margin. What is more, he is going to become even richer, by quite some margin. People just need to get over it.

Well clearly it is defamation of a brave man's character when he has never been charged or suspected of such a thing. It's a vile slur on a brave man, almost the worst thing you can call a man! The fact EM threw enough money at the American justice system to wriggle out of it doesn't impress me, from what I see of it the rich can get out of almost anything

Actually there are two sides to the story. A "brave man" is actually someone who happened to be there, not a rescue specialist but an investment banker who found a hobby potholing and spent a lot of time on holiday doing that. Someone who was on hand and offered his skills to help. Yes, it is scary stuff going down there, but the rescuers were going in as a team and with all the required equipment.

The actual rescue team and the leader of the rescue team were talking to Musk and SpaceX/Tesla about options. Musk had said, "what can we do to help" and talked through the equipment that could help. Musk put the entire engineering team of a multi billion $ space company and a multi Billion $ car company at the disposal of the rescue team and within only a few days produced a vehicle which, if needed, would allow the rescuers to bring the boys out without having to do "buddy breathing", something which is not easy for trained divers, let alone scared boys.

So having done the impossible and produced something which, if needed, could save lives, Musk was asking that they take the mini sub into the area and test it. Why? So he could be some saviour? No because he was aware that it might not do even though his team had worked with the rescue team (note not Unsworth, he was not the team or the team leader, he was just someone who was there and offered to help), but the team leadership; so that if they needed to modify it they could.

What is not said here, but implied, is that within 24 hours SpaceX and Tesla would have ripped out as many of these devices as needed and fast flown them to the rescue site. Testing was important so they mass produced something that worked.

Step in Unsworth. An investment banker, someone who is of a breed of people who were short selling Tesla and trying to Bankrupt Musk. Trying to stop SpaceX giving options to save lives. If he'd said what he did in a pub in front of someone trying to help he wouldn't be worrying about what was said, he'd be worrying about his dental bill.

Yes, in the end, they were able to get the boys out without loss by buddy breathing. The rescue team were very lucky, had things had to go on a bit longer or some of the boys panicked, then other options would have been needed and Unsworth was standing there trashing SpaceX and Musk and removing those other options. For what? So he could seem the Big Brave guy? Yes he got a medal, so did all the rescuers. If I had been there with the skills I'd have offered them, as would most people. Hero? I hear Hero a lot in the press today, most of it is just being a normal caring citizen.

To me he's not a hero. To me he's an opportunist who offered to help and share in the glory. The very thing he accused Musk of.

Read some more about the whole thing, not just the stuff in the UK press about how Musk is a monster. I'm not surprised that the Californian courts found for Musk. I suspect they didn't like Unsworth very much at all and Californian courts have found against millionaires and billionaires time and time again. No matter how much money they have.

Just recently Musk and SpaceX asked, again, how they could help. This time it was a country in extremis, being attacked from without, unable to communicate and coordinate, people cut off, news cut off. The ask was there, Give us Starlink Terminals they said, the Russians are cutting us off.

So Musk and SpaceX did. 10,000 of them at current count. Some given, some funded by aid agencies. They put aside their development teams and rushed in portability, car based charge adapters and when the Russians tried to block the satellites SpaceX updated the software on the satellites and the ground stations and defeated the Russian attacks.

Today Ukraine are connecting Starlink terminals to mobile phone masts and running up to 1,000 phones off the mast. Keeping people in touch, helping the military, helping the aid agencies. Making sure that they help the Ukrainians in their darkest hour.

If you want to sell the "Musk the monster and the person who disses hero's", Ukraine is not the place.

Because this is what he does. He see's disaster and asks if he can help, if his companies can help, what can he do. Unsworth? He was in one place at one time. Musk? He's helping again. No conflict here, no nasty tweets, nobody calling anyone names. Just critical help which is saving lives. Civilian lives.

Take your measure of the man from that one event if you want. I don't.

You can read a bit more about the real situation at the time here. Vox is American not British and that article was written at the time.

Since this article Musk has offered the capabilities of both Tesla (power) and SpaceX (communications and power, look up turtles in the great freeze in Texas), to situations around the world where disaster strikes.

But no, in the heat of an argument he insulted a British investment banker hero. Yep he's scum.

None of this (extremely long-winded) defence of St Elon justifies him calling someone a pedo! At best it is childish, at worst it is indefensible. Bored now

That's OK, St Unsworth is faultless and St Elon is evil.

This wasn't a defence of what Must said, it was an attempt to add context.

Realise context is not wanted.

Done.