from Hacker News

Elon Musk: "Don't advertise. Go f*** yourself"

by Thomashuet on 11/30/23, 7:38 AM with 147 comments

  • by trojan13 on 11/30/23, 7:56 AM

    The way he looks at the audience, expecting a positive reaction, it seems to me that the memes have really got into his head and he thinks people still love him for being so edgy and 'funny'. Instead, he comes across as a dangerous lunatic with too much power and money.

  • by lentil on 11/30/23, 7:57 AM

    He admits the company will die if advertisers pull out, and his solution is to document it and let the world know that the advertisers were the reason the company died.

    Curse you advertisers for ruining his company!

  • by kmlevitt on 11/30/23, 10:49 AM

    I think I’ve figured out what he’s doing. He knows Twitter is going to flop due to its tremendous debt, dwindling audience and the failure of his paid premium subscription scheme.

    But this way, when it happens he gets to blame all of that on “woke corporations“, rather than on himself.

  • by pr_nik2 on 11/30/23, 8:02 AM

    This is such an instructive story in how social media messes up discourse. Yes, fine-tuned shadow banning of stuff one does not like politically is BS (point taken, Musk). But promoting a bunch of randos with personal endorsement so they run important debates is also a very questionable service to democracy (see https://www.cip.uw.edu/2023/10/20/new-elites-twitter-x-most-...). Overreacting to some of the stuff that then floats to the top on the part of advertisers and commentators is again not right, but calling this reaction "blackmail" is probably a little over the top. So what have we learnt? Make time for reading paper books and sniffing the flowers sometimes maybe?

  • by Communitivity on 11/30/23, 12:20 PM

    The person I most feel sorry for is Linda Yaccarino, CEO and head of advertising at X. She was sitting in the audience when he did this. Imagine how awkward her near-term conversations with advertisers who were with X as of last week will be.

  • by ModernMech on 11/30/23, 5:28 PM

    Are we all ignoring the part of the interview where he gets the reporter's name wrong after calling him a "good friend"? Personally I think that's way more interesting. Like, who does that?

  • by huijzer on 11/30/23, 7:57 AM

    I find it sad that almost nobody is willing to take a nuanced view on Elon. I can highly recommend people to read Isaacson‘s biography of him. You don’t have to like him (you won’t), but it’s good to have a well formed opinion.

  • by wg0 on 11/30/23, 8:03 AM

    Flagged because news headline matches the headline posted which match the statement made?

  • by extheat on 11/30/23, 7:53 AM

    Nothing of interesting value comes out of these soundbite posts or discussions.

  • by threatofrain on 11/30/23, 8:48 AM

    What would happen if Twitter died tomorrow? Would its community simply reform around the next-biggest clone or fragment into many platforms? And where would people go?

  • by ranting-moth on 11/30/23, 8:55 AM

    Sounds like the classic "See what you made me do!"

  • by GaryNumanVevo on 11/30/23, 10:27 AM

    He's speaking like he's been drugged or something. Bizarre.

  • by mitaphane on 11/30/23, 7:52 PM

    Did someone forget to tell Elon that for social media platforms *advertisers are the customer*?

    Good luck building that everything app out of pure spite for your real customers.

  • by ranting-moth on 11/30/23, 7:58 AM

    >Musk responded that the advertising boycott is likely to kill the company. "What this advertising boycott is going to do is it's going to kill the company, and the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company and we will document it in great detail," Musk said.

    The level of entitlement and social disconnect this guy has is astonishing.

  • by andrelaszlo on 11/30/23, 10:08 PM

    He bought the company for 43 billion? Then he can't sell it for anything less without losing face, but now it makes him look weak since advertisers are pulling out and he can't deliver on his promises.

    This seems like him trying to turn the narrative around in order to kill the company without making it look like a failure. He was just trying to save the world, but these companies were blackmailing him and he had to put his foot down. Better scuttle the ship than to let it fall into the hands of the enemy!

  • by echelon on 11/30/23, 7:51 AM

    Does anyone have figures or estimates of Twitter's daily engagement? The people I follow seem to be as active as ever.

  • by ChrisArchitect on 11/30/23, 3:40 PM

  • by sys_64738 on 12/1/23, 12:33 AM

    He doesn't seem to be mentally all there. Is he suffering from some type of condition, as this isn't normal behavior.

  • by aniken on 11/30/23, 8:48 PM

    Elon is literally exercising his “f*ck you money” position:

    https://youtu.be/XamC7-Pt8N0?si=NlT0ZRjgLbwtZcSG

    How can a true source of truth free speech platform be anything other than a non profit model like Wikipedia? Free speech requires speaking the truth, and the truth makes most people, including companies / advertisers uncomfortable.

  • by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on 12/1/23, 3:19 AM

    This is someone who people suggest is the wealthiest person on Earth saying he cannot afford to run a personal website without others financing it. WTF.

    He is calling this a "business" but what were Twitter's profits. Perhaps it's not a business. Perhaps it's just a website having special agreements with some cellular carriers that has grown too large.

    Regardless of whether the Twitter "business" survives, the ability to run a "Twitter"-like website is never going away. And the cost of doing so should continue to decline. Website size and inclusion of other peoples' content is a separate issue.

    "I want to control a website with hundreds of millions of pages of content uploaded by other people" <--- If this is prohibitively expensive then perhaps that is rightfully so. What are the damaging effects of so-called "social media". Why are advertisers pulling out. "Blackmail". No doubt Zuckerberg is similarly delusional.

  • by seydor on 11/30/23, 7:52 AM

    Well arguably the latter is more of enjoyable

  • by thisisit on 11/30/23, 4:22 PM

    This is such a bizarre interview.

    Musk is free to run his company as he sees fit. If he decides to follow a particular ideology to run his site, that is his prerogative. And lets say left wing users find it terrible. They can't say - "Hey Musk, you are *blackmailing* us to use this site with this right wing nonsense". If they did others would kindly remind them that one, no one is forcing them to use the site. and two, if they don't like it, they can go somewhere else.

    And the left wing users can try to "document" all the right wing stuff on Twitter which they think is nonsense. Except some hardcore left wing users, no one would care.

    Same logic goes for the advertisers. They can spend their money as they see it. Saying GFY and "it is blackmail" is pure nonsense.

    Except his hardcore followers no one is going to care for his "documentation".

  • by Gud on 11/30/23, 11:10 AM

    I used to big a big Elon Musk supporter, way before it was fashionable. When SpaceX sent supplies to the ISS using their brand new dragon capsule, I was in awe. This was before the mass production of model S had started.

    I loaded up the boat with Tesla shares and made a lot of money(that I’ve since spent on drugs, alcohol and women, no regrets). I figured a man who can kickstart our space ambitions like Elon did, he can build a car, a toy in comparison to a rocket. Elon restored my hope in humanity.

    I reevaluated my views on him when he called the diver trying to help those lost boys in the Thai caves a pedo and wasted everyone’s time with some dumb contraption.

    When he purchased Twitter for $45B is when I lost faith in him as a businessman. Elon is flying too close to the sun, and I hope he makes it back on track. For all his faults, Elon Musk is a great engineer, I just hope he stops with this X nonsense and get back to working on things that matter.

    Sorry for the long rant

  • by DeathArrow on 11/30/23, 7:47 AM

    The man has guts.

  • by distracted_boy on 11/30/23, 11:10 AM

    The title does not reflect what he said.

  • by oceanplexian on 11/30/23, 7:58 AM

    Anyone with access to an internet browser can see that what Media Matters did was orchestrated and coordinated among the media and engineered as a hit piece. It was done exclusively for political reasons. Media Matters doesn’t care about anti-semitism, they’re a political lobby and their purpose is getting Democrats elected.

    My opinion: it will backfire more on the advertisers than it does for X, with so much of the country taking Elon’s side.