Some More News - SMN: Elon Musk "Versus" Twitter

Episode Date: June 15, 2022

Hi. In this week's video, we discuss Elon Musk purchasing Twitter so he can impress his weird fans. Get our new BILLIONAIRES ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS merch here: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/somemorenews?ref_id=9949 Please fill out our SURVEY: HTTP://kastmedia.com/survey/ We now have a MERCH STORE! Check it out here: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/somemorenews Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA?si=5keGjCe5SxejFN1XkQlZ3w&dl_branch=1 Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/even-more-news Check out Raycon's wireless earbuds. Go to HTTP://BUYRAYCON.com/somenews TODAY to get 15% off your Raycon order! Stop wasting time and start saving money when you use HTTP://Stamps.com to mail and ship. Sign up with promo code MORENEWS for a special offer that includes a 4-week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. No long-term commitments or contracts. Athletic Greens is going to give you an immune-supporting FREE 1 year supply of Vitamin D AND 5 free travel packs with your first purchase if you visit HTTP://athleticgreens.com/morenews today. Source List: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DOu8OXEqE8hwhHqAmSbDgTtYNXaDP6AxpSC_srYNYMk/edit?usp=sharingSupport the show!: http://patreon.com.com/somemorenewsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Has it ended? Is it safe? Oh, God, there's more? He's super friendsing lawyers now? Sweet Christ, man. Just stop tweeting and go to space like you promised. No! It's actually not so bad.

I mean, his build is terrible, but whatever. Also judging by his level, he's like 60 to 90 hours into that game. But yeah, I'm sure he works very hard as the CEO of four companies. Anyway, hey news sleuths, here's some news clues for news sleuths like yous. News clues news sleuths like yous can use.

It's been a smorgasbord of Elon content the past several weeks, a relentless barrage, you might say, like the Dresden of bad takes. It's like the worst version of Groundhog Day, where a billionaire crawls out of his hole to pitch a very obvious and very public post-breakup fit, hissy style. As you all know by now, Elon Musk, the world's most famous person who looks and acts like

a Mad Magazine character of himself, made a massive bid to purchase Twitter for $44 billion, with a B, as in, bought Tesla from other dudes using money made from a company I started with my dad's apartheid emeralds. Since then, it sure appears that he's desperately trying to get out of the deal for reasons we'll definitely be forced to talk about. Anyway, Musk made the initial announcement the same way he makes every announcement, by blundering onto Twitter like Dean Norris searching for sex gifs. I hope you find them one day, buddy. Ah, you got it. All right, let's get this over with. Elon Musk forced us to do another

episode about him. You think I'm happy about this? No, I am not happy about this. The most remarkable thing about Elon Musk is how shockingly boring he is considering how much power and money he has and how cool space is. I'd be happy to never say his Star Wars sounding alien name ever again. And I think he knows that, which is why he decided to make himself the main character by trying to buy twitter.com. Musk's announcement came a little over a month after he split up with Grimes following the birth of their second child. And look, we have all made reckless post-breakup purchases. Back in college, I spent $200 on a VHS box set of every television appearance of the California

Raisins. And I know what you're thinking, but trust me, there was enough material to fill most of one video tape. The rest of the box was full of raisins. So all in all, not a great purchase. Much like Elon's proposed acquisition of Twitter, which is looking less and less like a serious business deal and more like an attention seeking bluff

that he's now become chained to. To make this very silly deal, Musk sold $8.4 billion of his shares in Tesla. He also promised to secure $33.5 billion in debt, originally borrowing around half that amount against his Tesla stock before dropping that detail entirely. Musk already had a 9% stake in the social media company,

the news of which drove the price of Tesla's shares down 20%, probably because none of this, by his design, was going to happen without Musk posting a series of shitty memes about the transaction and making the details extremely public. After all, Musk has a documented history of casual market manipulation. Like last year, when he sold $16 billion worth of Tesla's shares after conducting a Twitter poll, despite already planning on selling it because he had an upcoming $15 billion tax bill, driving Tesla stock down 12%.

Or that time he literally tweeted, "'Tesla stock price is too high, IMO," and drove the price of his own stock down 10%. Or the time he announced he had closed a deal to take Tesla stock private at $420 per share, because it's one of the two funny numbers you see, and got fined $40 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission

and removed as Tesla's chairman of the board. Should have been 420 million, right man? Cause of, yeah, all right. Or the time he called a random hero rescuing children trapped in an underwater cavern, a pedophile. Not stock related, but you know, normal CEO stuff. He's also spread COVID misinformation during the deadliest pandemic in a century, including a prediction that there would be close

to zero new COVID cases in the US by April of 2020. And has targeted two different Twitter executives in his tweets, which unleashed his army of weirdo ultra fans to harass them. The point is he's never had what you would consider a healthy relationship with Twitter. Twitter is arguably the worst thing to ever happen to him.

I mean, ditto, but I'm not the richest man in the world yet or like ever actually. In fact, as we were writing this episode, Musk was hit with yet another probe by the SEC over the fact that he didn't divulge that he was purchasing Twitter shares for 11 days and bought them at a much lower price

than had the market known his intent, effectively stealing $150 million from Twitter shareholders. He just can't stop manipulating the market, probably on purpose, since this country doesn't actually seem too concerned about such things, and he'll probably just get a fine or like a back rub, but as a punishment. But Musk, and this will be a running theme,

isn't a genius either. For example, it sure seems like he is probably trapped in a publicity stunt to buy Twitter. His initial bid was to become a member of the board, but he abruptly turned that down and pulled out of the arrangement, causing some media outlets to speculate that perhaps Musk was nervous about the discovery period

that goes along with a billionaire joining the board of another billion dollar company. They're going to do a background check on you before they let you in their boardroom and give you your own big chair, Elon. Come on, man, you know this. You've been on boards before, you know, before the SEC made you resign.

But the idea that Musk was averse to a background check got a lot more gas thrown on it when a story broke earlier in May that Musk had paid a $250,000 settlement to a SpaceX flight attendant who claimed Musk exposed himself to her and then offered to buy her a horse in exchange for an erotic massage,

which is just a whole lot of words I suddenly have to think about. He offered her a hush horse, a hush horse. Truly, he is the greatest modern mind. And we know he's a genius because his mom told us so. Except counterpoint, maybe he's not. Maybe he's just so rich that he can easily absorb repercussions.

After all, he's the kind of guy who can make careless offers of hush horses and hostile takeovers all over town without pausing for a fraction of the time it takes for a Tesla to self-destruct with its driver trapped inside to think about the consequences of his actions. And that's typical billionaire behavior.

But in the case of making a splashy bid to buy Twitter, Elon Musk seems to have specifically ignored the consequences his actions would have for Elon Musk. He's like his own final boss, the Radagon of the Golden Order, in a game I have not actually played because I don't have the time. What do I look like, a billionaire CEO?

It's worth noting that Musk had a day long meltdown on Twitter, warning his fans that the political attacks against him from the liberal media would soon begin in earnest because he dared to try and challenge their stranglehold on free speech, which as far as Musk, his weirdo fans and the entire GOP are concerned, ostensibly means the right to say vile racist shit on Twitter and foment an insurrection.

And sure enough, the story about the quarter million dollar settlement and his alleged sexual harassment and embarrassing horse flex broke later that week. The problem is, Musk made those comments on Twitter after being contacted by a journalist attempting to verify whether the settlement story was true. Musk wasn't predicting some retaliation because of his noble efforts to purchase Twitter

and restore it to the hands of the people or because of the damn media sphere being furious that he just a few hours earlier tweeted that he was going to vote for Republicans now. He already knew exactly what story was about to come out and was trying to get ahead of it with some bad faith damage control. In fairness, we don't know much about these allegations

at the moment, except for the original article saying they have documents and email correspondences to back up that claim. Also this picture, which is not official evidence, and like, yeah, people can stand next to people. You know, it happens all the time and has nothing to do with guilt. But for the sake of the meme of it all,

some folks like to bring it up and also bring up that multiple sources told Business Insider that Jeffrey Epstein set up Musk's brother with his ex-girlfriend and reportedly got a tour of SpaceX. You know, because that stuff looks kind of, what's the word? Ah, sus, man.

That's Elon using hip young teen speak for suspicious to comment on this allegation. Because all Elon wants in this entire world is for teenagers to think he is cool because they didn't when he was a teenager and also don't now because billionaires aren't very cool. No matter how many memes they tweet

about how Johnny Rotten thinks the left is actually the establishment. Johnny Rotten being the authority on dudes who auditioned to be in a punk band that formed years after way more influential punk bands who then got old and rich and loves the queen and Trump now. Real anti-authority stuff. Yeah!

And while a serious business ghoul would perhaps just stay quiet about this story and really all his business dealings and simply let his lawyers handle it, Elon can't stop tweeting about this stuff. He's on Twitter even now, as we speak, or as I speak and you listen days, weeks, months, perhaps even years later.

I could very well be long dead at the time you are watching this and Elon would still be tweeting about this stuff. So if that's the case, then RIP me, presumably killed by a gorilla, considering how fast and loose I play it around zoos. Really, at the end of the day, the only thing you need to know about this guy, Elon Musk,

is that he desperately wants to be funny and cool. Dude has enough money to assassinate Santa Claus, but will never be a real boy until the world collectively recognizes that he is the meme king who is definitely hip and beloved. Literally every public move he makes seems based on this, whether or not it tanks his businesses. Dude is incapable of not doubling down on every failure,

even on a micro level. You probably saw the story about Elon getting absolutely bodied on Twitter by the satirical site, Hard Drive, but I'm still gonna talk about it because I love it. In short, Elon shared what he claimed to be a meme that was actually just a Hard Drive article with the credits cropped out.

And like, first of all, not a meme. It's a screenshot of a satirical article headline. It wasn't made to be a meme. I mean, technically the broad definition of a meme probably includes this, but I'm not gonna sit here and explain memes to you. No, that's Elon's job. For when hard drive pointed out

that he just stole one of their articles, Elon, let's call it fired back with quote, well, if you make something that looks like a meme and someone, not me, crops off your name, so it goes. Also, this is only a six out of 10 meme. So maybe step down from that high horse. The selfless art of anonymous meme creators is something to be admired. Of course, I'm pretty sure the selfless art of meme creators would normally refer to people who actually assemble an original meme and not people who just screenshot an article on a satirical website.

Maybe that's why this is only a six out of 10, I guess, because it's just a screenshot of an article that he shared because he originally liked it, despite it apparently being only six out of 10. Anywho, Hard Drive replied by posting one of their own articles, specifically making fun of Musk for needing to be liked,

to which he replied, claiming that it wasn't funny, selflessly explaining comedy by saying another quote, the reason you're not that funny is because you're woke. Humor relies on an intuitive and often awkward truth

being recognized by the audience. But wokeism is a lie, which is why nobody laughs. Now, besides the fact that Hard Drive had already buried him and Elon deleted his original meme tweet, it has to be stressed that the wokeness Elon is referring to here is a joke article about VLC media player and the Zodiac Killer.

And then one that specifically makes fun of him. And that's actually a pretty important detail because what Elon is accidentally confessing to there is that he considers woke and by extension leftist is actually just anything that criticizes him specifically. Him specifically. This doesn't just expand to his sense of humor, but entire reasoning for his recent claim that he's flipped from a Democrat to a Republican. I might never have voted for a Republican, just to be clear. Right.

Now, this election, I will. The Democrat Party is overly, overly controlled by the unions and by the trial lawyers, particularly the class action lawyers. And generally, if you if you'll see something that doesn't that is not in the interest of the people on the on the Democrat side, it's going to come because of the unions, which is just another form of monopoly. And the the trial lawyers, that's where actions will be happening from the Democrat side. They're not in the interest of the people. If identifying Democrats as the party run by unions and class action lawyers seems oddly

specific and inaccurate to you, that's because Elon Musk is literally in the middle of a battle against both unions and class action lawyers, including one lawsuit claiming the Tesla factories are fucking segregated by race. Hey, just like back home, Elon. Meaning that the moral stance Musk is taking against Democrats is just specific to his own personal experience as a rich guy being bothered by fair workplace efforts toward his terribly run company. And that, in his own words, Republicans are often the party of corporate evil and religious zealotry. Which might be worse than unions, but not to Musk, of course. It's the equivalent of someone claiming

that all movies are bad because they recently got kicked out of a showing of Top Gun or like a dude suddenly becoming right wing after their ex was seen reading Karl Marx. It is so obviously, transparently a personal vendetta as opposed to a serious political viewpoint. He's even just said as much, tweeting that he flipped

because the Democrats are mean to him specifically. And again, it's basically how Elon makes all of his decisions. And to be clear, he made this anti-union, anti-class action lawsuit, pro-corporate evil, pro-religious zealotry claim on camera. Then he tweeted that it was actually because of something about kindness and the Dems being the party of hatred and division, and then said these statements would cause a Dem media hit job, despite him knowing the unrelated reporting was already on its way. I won't go further into his claims that the lefts have gotten more left and the right has stayed the same or whatever, because we actually covered that last week. Except something we didn't point out that I will hear is that, first of all, broadly, the idea that the right has stayed the same is laughable on its face, as evidenced by

the fact that the last Republican president and his entire political movement and the current Republican Party has a clear and open hatred for moderate, dim-loving rhinos, and specifically Mitt Romney and John McCain, who an observant viewer might notice were the last two Republican presidential candidates. But more importantly, Elon Musk is furious at Bill Gates for shorting Tesla because Musk thinks that the company's done the most of any company in regards to climate change. He was also furious with Tesla being removed from the S&P's ESG index, because again, he thinks Tesla has done more for climate change than any company.

It was actually removed mostly due to poor business practices, some of which we've mentioned here already. So I guess my point here is that it's curious that this climate warrior who cares so much about climate change and thinks his company is doing the most of any company to combat it, would openly and proudly and aggressively say

that he's going out of his way to vote for the one political party on the planet that consistently denies that climate change is even real. Curious that, indeed. But again, enough about his very obvious lies about his politics. I would much rather focus on the fact that Musk is just so very obviously on tilt about

the fact that he's not very cool or funny, and that the actual funny people love to make jokes about him. And in fact, before that hard drive exchange, Musk had a similar falling out with The Onion, a publication he once loved so much he considered purchasing. The problem, however, is that The Onion is funny and knows that comedy often comes from making fun of powerful people like Elon Musk. And so when they made an apartheid joke at Elon's expense last year, playing off the fact that, according to interviews,

Elon's very rich and very fucked up father, their family co-owned an emerald mine in apartheid South Africa, and little fancy boy Elon literally walked the streets with emeralds in his pockets, and you can basically trace his success with the fact that he was born wealthy and had servants and shit. Well, when they made a joke about that, Elon Musk replied on Twitter with shame on you

onion. This is why people are switching to Babylon B. And you have to notice that in both of these cases, the onion and hard drive are only specifically making fun of Elon, to which Elon makes these broad statements acting like the people are on his side, as if insulting him specifically is like insulting a broad concept or something.

And it really needs to be noted that the site he says people are switching to is basically a toothless, let's say, satire site that when not doing the same trans joke over and over and over and over, basically run articles about how cool and great and a genius Elon Musk is. Here's one about how he saved everyone in Texas with a mech suit.

Do you get it? The joke is how great Elon Musk is. Such cutting edge comedy. so savage according to Musk, the billionaire being told he's great and cool and smart by the website he coincidentally thinks is good comedy. It's just, it's so darn embarrassing and obvious. So cringe as the kids used to say, how much Elon Musk desperately wants

to be seen as funny and cool, but becomes a little cry baby snowflake the moment anyone dares to make a joke at his expense. In fact, without revealing too much, we at the Shody actually know people who worked on projects under Musk. And according to one of those people we spoke to, anonymously, of course, they actually got fired from a project under Musk because they liked a tweet that made fun of him. This isn't their assumption. They actually got fired from a project under Musk because they liked a tweet that made fun of him. This isn't their assumption. They were specifically told it was a factor in them being let go. That's how thin his skin actually is. Or to put it in terms Elon could understand,

he's this meme all the time. And probably a terrific example of this is a satirical website called Thud. Thud was a project funded by Elon Musk that back in 2019 hired a bunch of writers from The Onion to make a unique series of comedic stunts. Because of the nature of what they were doing, Thud's business model was simply based on the fact that they were being funded by a billionaire

and was not intended to do more than break even. And honestly, I'm sure they did a lot of funny stuff based on who was making it, but thud didn't last. And the reason why is that Elon Musk almost immediately pulled his funding from the project because I shit you not, he was afraid that thud would eventually make fun of Tesla and SpaceX.

And so this is all to say that everything Musk does, at least publicly, the decisions he makes, the deals he pulls out of, the decisions he makes, the deals he pulls out of, the stock market turmoil, really appear to boil down to choices based on his personal ego and very little rational business decisions. Despite being the richest man ever, he can't get over being personally attacked, but has to pretend like that's not the problem. That's why he has claimed multiple times that referring to billionaires as a pejorative is bad, as if he's fighting for all the many

downtrodden billionaires of the world when he's actually just mad people don't like him. Like, just say that, Elon. And boy, this situation with Twitter is no different. So we're gonna talk more about that after we do some ads because we don't have a billionaire funding us yet. Bill Gates refuses to return our calls and has told us repeatedly to stay away from his kids. So we're still working on that. Also, Bill, maybe you should stay away from kids,

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Okay, we're back and we're big and strong and wet from all of the ads we've gulped down. We were talking about what a big crybaby Elon Musk really is and how this purchase of Twitter seems a lot more like an emotional decision than a logical one. And how it sure seems like Elon Musk is his own worst enemy because of this. Like, I'm no big city economics expert like Jim Cramer or the character Jim Cramer plays in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But it seems like when Musk publicly announced his intention to engage in a hostile takeover of Twitter, he was engaging in market manipulation.

When one of the world's most famous billionaires publicly announces his intention to buy one of the most popular and influential social media platforms of the past five years, it has an effect on the stock market. Specifically, it has an effect on Twitter's stock and Tesla's stock, but that's less important here. That's not some 4D chess master play,

but rather an impulsive guy shooting himself and all of Tesla's investors in the foot so he can get some likes on Twitter. And now he's hemming and hawing over the decision, insisting he wants time to comb through their books and investigate all the bots and shadow banning he has convinced himself are at work behind the scenes. Or at least he wants us all to think

that's what he believes. It's genuinely hard to tell. I mean, didn't he wanna buy Twitter to get rid of the bots? That's literally what he claimed. Why would more bots be a deal breaker than if it just confirms his claims? But of course, Elon is a man whose opinions change constantly depending on what he thinks

will make his weird fandom of extremely online billionaire worshipers happy. Oh, and by weird fandom, I mean the fraction that isn't bots since roughly 50 to 70% of his followers are bots. Interesting stuff. He'll tweet about how LGBTQ friendly Tesla is literally days after mocking corporations for pandering to Pride Month or just fucking making transphobic statements.

He mocks support for Ukraine while also showing support for Ukraine? It's almost like he doesn't believe in much. And so he's just doing it all for the dank memes and to not have to pay many taxes or allow his workers to unionize. That's all he actually wants. Twitter's board of directors accepted Musk's offer

to take the company private, meaning its shares would no longer be publicly traded. Tesla is super unhappy about all of this, and not just because the company's stock has been yo-yoing ever since Musk began his performative bid. By traditional definition, all bidding should have at least an element of performance to it, because that's what makes auctions so fun to watch. You don't wanna go to a boring auction. You wanna go to an auction where the auctioneer is dressed like a steampunk, Matri-D, and everyone signals their bids with a t-shirt cannon.

But again, in this case, it really seems like his bid for Twitter, and by extension, everyone's attention isn't some genius tactic. By all accounts, it's the worst thing Musk could be doing right now. First of all, Elon is announcing an ambitiously foolish new venture in the middle of a period of extreme

uncertainty for Tesla. In addition to recently reopening his factory in China, the company is continuing to construct gigafactories in Germany and Texas, and is poised to launch a new generation of batteries that will hopefully not explode as much. Fun fact, both of those gigafactories have been challenged by environmental groups on account of them raising forests and contaminating water supplies. Thank you, Elon Musk.

There's also the small matter of the Cybertruck, yet another dumb as hell thing that Musk unveiled in a glossily publicized PR event. The Cybertruck was initially announced back in 2019, and it was supposed to enter production this year, but Tesla quietly removed the production date from its website last year, and Musk officially announced that the Cybertruck

wouldn't begin production until 2023 in an earnings call back in January. He's claimed to switch focus to self-driving cars in that robot he promised to make, but it should be noted that he's claimed there will be self-driving cars by next year since 2015. It sure seems like the CEO of four different companies now trying to buy Twitter can't seem to keep his attention

on one thing for very long. Also, I can't mention Musk's promise of a humanoid robot that he coincidentally says will start production next year without pointing out that his presentation was literally just Musk dressing a TikTok dancer in a robot costume and injecting them with MDMA to writhe around on stage while he rattled off a bunch of features and functions

the hypothetical robot will eventually one day have. I'm sure I've shown that clip before and will show it again. It's not unlike the boring company tunnel to Las Vegas he announced back in 2016 that was supposed to revolutionize travel and is currently just a single lane tube designed to make exclusively Tesla owners three hours late to see David Copperfield.

Or an affordable $25,000 version of the Tesla, which Musk has been promising since around 2015. Or the leftover dirt bricks he said could be used for affordable housing four years ago. Tesla also accused Musk of being detrimentally inattentive in his capacity as a CEO in their most recent earnings report. Him making a billion dollar spectacle of himself with this Twitter deal

and spending all of his time poorly playing Elden Ring doesn't do much to dispute that assessment. It does about as much as his tunnel has done to reduce traffic around the strip. So the point is, Musk is the David Copperfield of performative illusion. I don't know what you'd call that, some sort of magic expert,

a physician of magic, a magic-ition. I'll come back to that. It's not important. What is important is that Musk constantly makes ostentatious public promises and then fails to deliver on them in any meaningful way. When the boring tunnel finally does get finished, it isn't going to be a futuristic Jetsons tube plopping people out

at their preferred Vegas-themed hotel. At best, it's going to be an underground toll road that only moves in one direction with no room for emergency vehicles. More likely, it'll be one of those abandoned retro future landmarks teenagers will do drugs in. It's like the hit Sylvester Stallone movie, Daylight, if it had been seen and subsequently forgotten about by millions of more people. The point is, at the time of this writing, it's extremely uncertain whether or not Musk

will actually close the deal to purchase Twitter if you simply consider his track record with these types of projects. And honestly, I think both parties know this. For example, there's a $1 billion fee written into the deal that either party would be responsible for paying if they walk away from the deal. That's a massive amount of money to you and me, worthless normies, whose only value is the dust to which our bodies will eventually succumb, which can be harvested and used as biofuel to power the air conditioning in Jeff Bezos' super yacht. But that's an extremely low number for a deal this size,

especially for someone like Musk, who can lose $1 billion if he opens his wallet too fast. That amount of money is nothing to him. Hell, the $40 billion he's about to spend on Twitter is also nothing to him. That's walking around money billion he's about to spend on Twitter is also nothing to him. That's walking around money. Those are fuck around bucks. Fuck bucks.

Fucks. The point is, the mere fact that the bailout fee is that low suggests that neither Musk or Twitter are that optimistic about the deal actually going through. Except, here's where it gets kind of definitely hilarious, because due to the nature of the deal Musk made, he's actually in a situation where he might not be able to back out of this deal at all. You see, despite what he's saying about bots and holding off the sale and all that, Musk actually already signed a deal, this deal right here, that locks Musk into buying Twitter for $54.20 a share,

even though that's way higher than what it's worth. And when making that deal, not only did Elon waive due diligence, like buying a house and signing a paper that says, "'Lol, I'm sure it's probably fine,' but also Twitter's made it extremely clear that the number of bots could be higher than their estimate. So legally speaking, Elon knew exactly

what he was getting into with the bot situation. It's moot to the deal. He's saying it to save face with his weirdo fans. And in fact, Twitter has way more control in this situation than he does. It's right there in section 9.9, page 70. Ah, so close to the funny number, Elon, of the deal under specific performance,

which is basically a legal agreement that requires Elon to complete the deal if Twitter wants him to, which they very much do. So the business genius has locked himself into a shitty deal because he didn't read the contract, it seems. And now he might be forced to buy Twitter. No matter how many times he pretends

he can pull out because of bots, he really has no way to squirm out of this. In fact, Breaking News. Ooh, hey, it's our famous news slug with some breaking slug news. You love news slug. This just in, while we were filming this,

Twitter has actually given Elon Musk access to their spam data, a thing I'm pretty sure he didn't actually want and was hoping to use as an excuse to leave the deal. Thanks, news slug. The walls just keep closing in for him, not news slug, but for Elon. And it's something I think we can all agree

would be the most hilarious outcome. It would become an instant national holiday where we all dress up as the chef's kiss emoji, which we wouldn't be able to tweet about because jokes about Elon will be banned. Since announcing the deal, Tesla's stock has plunged as low as 36%. Twitter's stock is also down,

one casualty of a market-wide collapse in tech stock. That's a problem because Musk owns stock in both companies, which accounts for a substantial amount of his personal wealth. It's also likely why he dropped using Tesla stock as collateral and is now digging up various other investors to cover the gap, risking an unbelievable amount of personal debt

and is now desperately trying to escape Twitter's grasp, all because he can't keep his mouth shut and impulsively locked himself into a very bad deal. It's almost like he's bad at business. It really is a very bad deal for everyone. Besides his own personal debt, the amount of debt he will be foisting onto Twitter should be criminal.

According to some estimates, if the deal goes through, Twitter's annual debt interest payments will jump from $51 million to $900 million. And Twitter is a company that does not make much money. Not exactly raking in ad dollars or super follower subscriptions. It generated about $5 billion in revenue last year, which is one ninth of the price

Musk is trying to pay for it. Couple that with estimated annual debts of nearly $1 billion, and it really doesn't make one ounce of sense or sensibility to buy the fucking thing. Seems like it's all based on pride and the other thing. But hey now, maybe he's got some really great ideas on how to make back that money.

Surely that's the case. Well, Musk unveiled his business plan for Twitter, which includes goals that could gently be called aggressive and more accurately called reckless genie wishes. For one, he claims he will quintuple Twitter's annual revenue to $26 billion in six years. How does he plan to do this? By cutting advertising. Currently, ads generate 90% of Twitter's yearly income. But Musk says he will slash that down to 45% and fill in the remaining 55% with subscriptions and data licensing,

basically selling their delicious user data, which is an area that generated about $571 million for Twitter last year. I'm not seeing $25 billion here, but I'm not the richest person in the world whose vast expertise includes inheriting an emerald mine and buying his way onto the board of an exciting electric car company, or agreeing with Ian Miles Chong of all people that if Twitter bots are 25% instead of 5%, then Elon should pay 25%

less than he originally said? Because that's how math works? He also plans to triple Twitter's user base to nearly 1 billion in six years and generate a little over a billion dollars of revenue with a payments business by 2028. Sort of like the current in-app shopping and tipping system, except he expects people to actually use it. He's also said he intends to cut the salaries of every member of Twitter's board to zero dollars and claims he will find revolutionary new ways to monetize tweets, such as charging other websites a fee to embed them in their weekly roundup of dank memes and reactions to the latest Marvel trailer.

Now, to be fair, this could be a good thing. I would love to get money for my tweets making fun of you, Elon, but also do you think websites will pay for this instead of just writing the tweet up as a quote with a source link or, you know, screenshotting it? How is he going to bring in over 600 million new users

by transforming Twitter into the no holds barred battlefield of free speech warriors it was always meant to be? Judging by his plans for Twitter's growth, he expects to earn $25 billion on half a billion Nazis tipping each other. Musk has emerged as the latest champion of free speech, despite a long career of not giving a shit about it

whatsoever until he started chasing social media clout in his 40s like the most divorced man at the Warps Tour. And he believes Twitter is being wielded by the woke liberal mob to stifle free speech. He claims to be a free speech absolutist. You know, when he's not firing or punishing people for saying mean things about him specifically or hiring firms to spy on his employees and says he plans to remove any restrictions on content and conduct that aren't

required by law. He seems to be convinced that Twitter is overwhelmingly populated by bots who manipulate engagement to favor the left. That's been a totally real and not at all fake sticking point for him in the 11th hour of the Twitter deal. The company claims that around 5% of its user base are bots at any given time. Meanwhile, Musk has stated he feels it could be as high as 80% based on absolutely no data or research. But again, even if that's true for users who aren't him, he still has to buy Twitter. Another thing he feels is true

is that Twitter is shadow banning vast swaths of users, mysterious algorithms and bots working behind the scenes to hide and suppress tweets featuring speech too real and raw and in your face for the woke brain agenda. And of course, he has stated that banning Donald Trump for, you know, inciting violence and spreading misinformation for years was a morally bad decision. It was not correct to ban Donald Trump. I think that was a mistake. I think it was a morally bad decision to be clear and foolish in the extreme. So yeah, it's pretty clear the type of people he's hoping to court with all of this. In order to squash these shadow banning robots, Musk has promised to open Twitter's source code, which would theoretically allow anyone

to see exactly how these algorithms work. And he stumbled upon something that is actually worthwhile here. Algorithmic transparency is something that many governments around the world are currently pushing for, including the United States, where Democrats proposed the Algorithmic Accountability Act back in February.

Democrats, who he hates by the way. Social media companies like Twitter and Facebook have come under fire for how their algorithms favor disinformation and hate speech because of their lucrative engagement numbers. And disinformation and hate speech on social media have been linked to everything from mass shootings to COVID-related deaths to eating disorders to a literal insurrection. It's undeniably important to know exactly how these algorithms are dictating what people are exposed to and ensuring that they're doing so responsibly. But Musk's solution isn't that helpful or nuanced.

Critics have pointed out that opening up Twitter's code won't do much to explain how their algorithms actually work and will instead do much more to expand Twitter's vulnerability to hacks and bad actors searching for exploits to game the system. By doing things like using the code to make more effective bots. Curse the fickle talons of irony! By trying to destroy the bots, Elon, you've given the bots their greatest weapon yet. But of course, Elon doesn't actually care about free speech or bots so much

as trying to appeal to the political party, most likely to help him defeat unions and run his business like a monster. And that's exactly what we're going to talk about after these totally cool and buckable ads. See you on the other side, bucko! Me, Cody, let me tell you, sport, I've tried just about everything to eat right.

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Again, simply visit athleticgreens.com slash more news to take control of your health and give AG one a try. I already drank it. Yeesh, we're back. We were talking about Elon Musk's business plan for Twitter, his free speech warrior views, and how it's all so very selective because ultimately all of Musk's efforts to buy Twitter

are performative. More specifically, he's clearly looking to gain support from the Super Smash Brothers character select screen of ghouls in conservative media. However you feel about the man, he has a terrifyingly impressive ability to inspire large groups of weird little freaks. He's a Dominic Toretto of pseudo-intellectual creeps.

No, wait! He's the Xander Cage of pseudo-intellectual creeps. Tucker Carlson, the Oprah of frightened racists, sang Elon's praises as the man who just reclaimed some power for the people, claiming that Musk has freed all of the honest, hardworking conservatives out there from the tyranny of liberal censorship. After today, you'll be able to post your dissent in a place where other people might have a

reasonable chance of seeing it. In other words, you will have a chance to change other people's minds, just like the White House does every day. So you just became a little more powerful. The people already in charge just became a little more powerful, the people already in charge just became a little less powerful. It's that simple and it's that profound. But for now, Musk's purchase of Twitter is the single biggest political development since Donald Trump's election in 2016. It is certainly the most threatening challenge to the corrupt and incompetent leadership of this country. People who want a monopoly on speech and thought hate Elon Musk.

Not because he's a racist. He's not. But because they can't control him. In the middle of that fog of embarrassing hero worship, Carlson repeated the long-held GOP talking point that Twitter is a tool of the liberal elite and that Musk's acquisition of Twitter represents the greatest threat to the Democratic Party. In fact, pretty much every available talking head on Fox News

parroted this point in the wake of Musk's proposed deal, including the breathtakingly enormous talking head attached to the neck of Charlie Kirk. The ownership might be in the hands of Elon Musk, and I didn't think he'd buy it because he would look too much like an autocrat. But the power is in the hands of every single person on that platform. They don't get it. Free speech is coming to Twitter. And not a moment too soon. Save America, Elon to the rescue.

I don't think Elon Musk is a saver- saviour for anyone. But at the same time, to allow voices to be heard that people disagree with is what Twitter was started for, to have differences of opinion shared, debated. And those debates have ended, and it has become one-party rule and effectively a tool for one party to get their message out and ensure that another party is censored and banned. And I'm just thrilled about this. This is the greatest show on earth to see the world's richest man fight for speech in the West.

And it doesn't mean you're not going to hear from people on the left. You just want to hear from all sides like it was in maybe 2015. And here's the tweet that caused so much consternation about Rachel Levine. You wrote this. Rachel Levine spent 54 years of his life as a man. He had a wife and a family. He transitioned to being a woman in 2011. Joe Biden appointed Levine to be a four-star admiral. And now USA Today has named Rachel

Levine as woman of the year. Where are the feminists? And that got you suspended? I think it's a- That's correct. It's a question one should contemplate. It's extremely telling that Charlie immediately follows up his praise of Elon Musk's crusade for free speech by defending a transphobic joke, because that's all these ghouls really care about. They just want to say horrible dehumanizing slurs and make it illegal for anyone to tell them that they suck. Musk further echoed his new gang of sycophants by dropping just the sickest meme, the dankest, the sick dankest meme, a meme so dank, it tore a hole into a dank alternate universe where dicks are still out for Harambe, which is a meme from 2016 that Elon Musk wrote an auto-tuned rap song about

in 2019. I'm of course talking about this meme that we've already mentioned. We keep bringing it up because combined with everything he said about Twitter and bots and unbanning Trump, this super sick and incredibly wrong meme pretty much sealed the deal that Musk was making with the right wing. That despite literally just claiming his Twitter changes would be totally centrist and upset people on both sides, Musk was actually just pushing to make conservative voices even louder on social media because in his views, the left have gone too far and are dominating Twitter. The problem is it's nonsense. It has never been true. He said

his actual reasoning earlier that day, and there's actually mountains of data demonstrating the exact opposite. The top 10 pages on Facebook are consistently populated by Ben Shapiro, The Daily Wire, and Fox News. An internal review found that Twitter amplifies conservative content more often than left-leaning content. Yet conservatives, including Musk, constantly complain that Twitter is censoring the right or somehow hammering down on free speech. Twitter specifically didn't use an algorithm that would crack down on white supremacy because they knew Republican politicians would be affected by it.

Interesting. And while a study by MIT and Yale found that conservatives were more likely to be suspended from Twitter than liberals during 2020, it also found that conservatives were much more likely to share and promote misinformation. In other words, conservative accounts were more likely to be banned because they were more likely to be in violation of Twitter's user agreement. Because they lied more. Interesting. Charlie Kirk hand on chin meme. And on top of all of that, it needs to be noted that Twitter has about 322 million users across the entire globe, or 4% of the world's population. One in five adult Americans use it, which is about 23%

of the adult population. Most people in this country and on the entire planet of Earth do not use Twitter. So bear with me, Elon, because I'm sure he's actually watching and we made this entire episode for you, Elon, So you're welcome. Thank you for tuning in. But it seems like buying Twitter is more of a vanity purchase designed to impress your weirdo fan base of online dweebs and also online dweebs who are also sitting members of Congress than a genuine effort to preserve free speech. If you want to throw billions of dollars around in the name of free speech, maybe ask some of your new friends in the GOP to stop banning so many fucking books. Maybe look into that high school kid who literally couldn't say the word gay during his graduation speech, you know? Considering that the First Amendment specifically says that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, you'd think

the biggest free speech concern right now would be the fact that Congress is literally trying to make laws seemingly designed to abridge the freedom of speech for teachers and LGBTQ people. Musk claims to be a free speech absolutist, except the only speech he cares about is what a bunch of turds say about him on Twitter. That's it. That's as far as it goes. He sure draws a hard line for his free speech absolutism when it involves allowing his employees to unionize or to say anything negative about their experiences working for him. Upon being fired from Tesla, Musk requires all former employees

to sign separation agreements with non-disparagement clauses. Musk infamously fired a Tesla employee named Richard Ortiz after Ortiz participated in a campaign to promote union organization at Tesla and tweeted vague threats from his personal account about everything his pro-union employees were risking by trying to organize. The National Labor Relations Board

determined that both Musk's tweets and the firing of Ortiz had violated labor laws and was forced to rehire Ortiz and compensate him for lost wages. The ruling also forced Tesla to adjust its rules that initially forbid its employees from discussing anything about their working conditions with the media without written permission from the company. Those damn

Democrat lawyers, you see. Tesla is also currently the subject of a probe by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and a lawsuit by California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing for a litany of complaints of harassment, discrimination, and unsafe working conditions. The department claims that it found evidence of a number of disturbing practices during an extensive three-year investigation into Tesla, including evidence that the company kept Black workers in low-level jobs for less pay, denied Black workers training and promotions, assigned Black workers more physically demanding work, retaliated against Black workers who made formal complaints about the commonplace use of racial slurs by both coworkers and supervisors, and took an unreasonably long time to clean up

racist graffiti, including swastikas in common areas of the workplace. In other words, it seems like Elon is only concerned with protecting people's ability to say vile, abusive shit and not their right to say anything bad about him or his companies. Also, dude might be kinda racist. You think? Yeah, like South African and United States of America style racist. But mainly, Elon Musk is a biased, thin-skinned, spiteful little baby man. He is uber divorced and taking it out on everyone by forcing us to watch him break down in real time, making impulsive emotional decisions,

midlife crisis purchases, except because he's so fucking rich, those purchases and bad choices have to involve all of us. We can't look away. I've muted him and I still have to hear about him all the time.

And while it's funny that his slow motion self-destruction might tank his business and lead to one of the silliest corporate takeovers of all time, like imagine going into debt to own a website filled with people dunking on you. That is hilarious.

But it's also a pretty good reminder that people like Elon Musk desperately need to be taxed more because despite being bad at business, he's also so rich that he still won't fail. That's why he thinks he's a genius when in reality, he's just so privileged that he still won't fail. That's why he thinks he's a genius, when in reality, he's just so privileged that he's protected from consequences.

But that doesn't mean there won't be consequences, just not for him. Because following a recent story that Musk was requiring everyone at Tesla to stop working from home, we're now learning that Elon is considering cutting around 100,000 jobs because he, quote, "'has a bad feeling about the global economy.'"

Now, maybe he really has a bad feeling, or maybe he's trying to find excuses for why he personally tanked his own company's stock. But it's a reminder that Elon's weird little meme games have extreme consequences on real people. And so we can't simply trust the judgment of someone so clueless to do the right things with their money. And honestly, nor should he be expected to. It's a free country after all. Go America, I guess. So we should really just tax the shit out of his ass.

Like not the literal shit coming out of his ass. Like a shit tax, which would be bad. You know what I mean! 9% of the $120 billion he made last year doesn't quite cut it for me, is what I'm saying. But like, can you imagine if Elon Musk never bothered with Twitter or his stupid tunnel company or even going to space and just focused on

making sustainable and affordable public transportation, not cars and batteries and solar. Imagine all the effort and money he spent on Twitter redirected into a serious effort to combat climate change, which ironically would actually make him way more cool and hip and funny if he did that. But sadly, this is the Elon we got instead, the richest man in the world posting grandma memes

he found on Reddit. And I guess I wouldn't be so annoyed by that if I knew he was paying his fair share of taxes or like if he didn't crave attention so much that he has to buy a social media company everyone uses to ensure that we'll never stop hearing about him. He's just so boring. You guys go to Mars already, Elon. Okay, back to my fort. I made a fort down here. Is it safe? Is it? Wait, that's the beginning of the episode.

End of the episode. Bye. Vroom, vroom. I'm in a self-driving Cybertruck. Oh no, I'm on fire and I'm dead. Hi, thanks for watching that video. Wasn't it fun? Be sure to like and subscribe and do all that YouTube

stuff. We've got a Patreon.com slash SomeMoreNews and a podcast called Even More News and this show as a podcast. If you just don't like my face and you only hear my voice, which you do like. Anyway, I don't know. We got merch.

Wormbo's on it it there's a new shirt with other stuff and another thing