Elon Musk vows ‘thermonuclear lawsuit’ as advertisers flee X over antisemitism::Tesla founder threatens to take action against media watchdog ‘the split second court opens on Monday’

  • Additional_Prune@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    It’s not just a lawsuit, it’s thermonuclear lawsuit! His lawyers better handle it carefully, lest they be blown into itty bitty pieces. Elon stopped maturing at about the age of fourteen.

  • bus_go_fast@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    “The split second court opens on Monday, X Corp will be filing a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and all those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company.”

    Discovery time. Let’s see what Musk is texting to his friends.

  • xantoxis@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    You can’t sue people for deciding NOT to patronize the service you sell, idiot

    • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      He’s not suing the advertisers, he’s suing a watchdog who’s pointing out all the antisemitism and whatnot, which causes the advertisers to flee because in his world, none of it is bad.

      • profdc9@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Unless Musk gets a hearing in front of a judge who exposes his own sympathy to fascism, I can’t see this case going anywhere. The truth is an absolute defense to libel.

      • olosta@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Yes advertisers are only publicly insulted not sued : “Many of the largest advertisers are the greatest oppressors of your right to free speech.”

        I suppose that’s meant to inspire confidence they will not be sued, only slightly bullied if they come back.

  • eluvatar@programming.dev
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    11 months ago

    This is one of those cases where even if he wins he loses. Who would want to sell ads anymore?

    • Ook the Librarian@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Well, even if he has no intention of winning, the simple act of filing will cost any named watchdog media group money. I doubt too many are swimming in it.

      • knotthatone@lemmy.one
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        11 months ago

        That’s why there are SLAPP-back laws.

        He’s also got a habit of ignoring legal advice and running his mouth in public, so he’s likely going to end up writing another big check for that misadventure if his lawyers can’t talk him out of going through with it

        • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          All he has to do is file in a state without SLAPP protections. There’s no federal SLAPP statute.

        • 4lan@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Planned bankruptcy. How is it that we all think he is a genius but also think he is dumb at the same time? This is all according to plan

          • usernamefactory@lemmy.ca
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            11 months ago

            There must be a better way to bankrupt a company than flushing your personal reputation down the toilet. He’s just dumb. No contradiction.

  • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Tesla founder

    Ok look The Independent, I know that the company says he’s a founder and Wikipedia lists him as a founder, but he’s not. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded the company almost a full year before Musk had anything to do with it. He had to sue them to add his name to the list officially.

    • Lianodel@ttrpg.network
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      11 months ago

      Wikipedia lists him as a founder

      Does it? I expected better of Wikipedia, so I checked, and both Musk’s page and Tesla’s avoid simply listing him as a founder by explaining the situation, i.e., that he was an early investor. Even the sidebar for Tesla, Inc. just links to a subsection rather than listing names.

      Just a note to add, addressing a related talking point that inevitably comes up:

      It’s a very common piece of misinformation that he was determined to be a founder in a court of law. That never happened. It was part of an agreement to avoid a lawsuit. It’s a lie that the relevant parties could all live with as part of a larger settlement.

      I like to ask Musk apologists, “Do you need to found a company to be that company’s founder, yes or no?” If they waffle or say “no,” there’s no point continuing in good faith, because they’re not serious people. It’s not hard to say “Okay, that’s a bit of a fib, he should be called an honorary founder, but blah blah blah…” But if they can’t even do that, then they aren’t operating based on reality.

      • weew@lemmy.ca
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        11 months ago

        I will respond to this by asking “is registering the name of a company the only thing that counts when founding a company?”

        Because that’s what the original founders did. They registered the name. No patents, no designs, no engineering, no staff. They registered the name, then went searching for VC money.

    • weew@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      Ok, it sounds like you’re trying real hard to split hairs.

      Not just the company itself and Wikipedia say so, but legally, he is a founder. That was the outcome of the lawsuit.

      It’s true that the first 2 founders legally registered the corporate entity known as “Tesla Motors”. Then for the next year, they didn’t do jack shit involving anything automotive… they were just going around looking for investors.

      Musk was basically their first, and biggest, investor. They didn’t actually hire any engineers or, you know, actually start doing anything until Musk’s money came into play.

      • JohnDoe@lemmy.myserv.one
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        11 months ago

        The rule of law in a specific geographic area in a specific period of time isn’t nearly as important as the meaning conveyed which is misleading.

        Rather than missing the forest for the trees, why might he push for the title of founder? Why might some discredit his efforts and tactics in assuming the founder of title in specific contexts?

        He did not play a meaningful role in the beginning of the company and is not responsible for its success. Money was responsible, the two founders’ expertise was responsible, that specific person is not special enough for their contribution to matter much. Anyone can supply capital especially during the inflated economic conditions (of which we are suffering the consequences of now) and during the time where EV and technology at large was developed enough to allow such developments to take place.

        • OrteilGenou@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          It sounds like nobody played much of a role at all until ol’ moneybags showed up. Money talks, bullshit walks as they say

          • JohnDoe@lemmy.myserv.one
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            10 months ago

            I think it’s work that does the work, a tautology, I think using money as a proxy for work is a convenient hop and skip. When it comes down to a rigorous analysis (of the kind say a climate scientist does in a life-cycle assessment money is to vague a reason. What does it represent? Some amount of gold? Well, the US dollar is no longer pegged to gold à la Bretton Woods, how then does ‘money talk’?

        • weew@lemmy.ca
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          11 months ago

          He did not play a meaningful role in the beginning of the company and is not responsible for its success. Money was responsible

          You say that, but applies just as well to the first 2 founders.

          the two founders’ expertise was responsible

          What expertise? Seriously, tell me what they actually brought to the table aside from pitching their idea for a company and attracting venture capitalist money. They registered the name of a company and had ideas. Not expertise. They hired the expertise, with Musk’s money.

          Speaking of missing the forest for the trees, tell me this: Is an automotive company “founded” as soon as someone registers the name, or when they begin actual engineering efforts towards building an automobile?

          • foofy@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Did musk hire expertise? Or do the actual engineering?

            It sounds like your actual argument is that neither he nor they founded the company.

            I guess it just sprang into existence on its own…

          • I_dont_believe_it@lemmynsfw.com
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            11 months ago

            See I’d tend to think that founding a company has to be more than just registering a name. Like maybe that’s the dictionary definition, but it seems a bit weak if that’s it.

          • wildginger@lemmy.myserv.one
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            11 months ago

            Was elon choosing who was hired, and managing the initial company team?

            Cause if writing the title and coming up with the ideas doesnt count as founding, giving up some cash doesnt either. Thats just buying a company, not founding it.

            • weew@lemmy.ca
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              11 months ago

              Yes? That’s basically what the initial 5 cofounders/investors did. Start hiring people and managing the company. They basically formed the board of directors.

              I know you’re desperate to paint Musk in a bad light in any way possible, but how do you pretend that Musk just handed over cash and did nothing else while other people are calling him a micromanaging control freak?

          • JohnDoe@lemmy.myserv.one
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            10 months ago

            I was meaning to respond but I think other’s have. I have one of those 30+ min YouTube videos or similarly ridiculously long blog posts (and a longform article somewhere…) though I think you might not be interested so I’ll keep it to myself unless you are interested in a good faith argument (argument, root word is the latin argumentum, to make clear; prove), I would rather not waste your time or my breath if that isn’t the case.

      • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        This is the entire argument Musk made in court, and honestly I don’t think I care. Tarpenning and Eberhard are both engineers with actual inventions and software attributed to their direct design long before the idea of Tesla; Eberhard wrote the company’s mission statement and guiding principles, and the two did the market research to discover that an electric vehicle could be a high-end consumer product. At its core, before the battery technology and stators were invented (neither of which Musk contributed to), that’s what Tesla was.

        While it’s true that Musk led development on the Roadster, I think we’ve seen very publicly over the past year what his “development leadership” looks like and I’m not entirely convinced it’s a value-add. (Even before his disastrous year with Twitter, his checkered past leading Paypal—and being forced out for his poor leadership—would give a similar impression.) He didn’t come up with the battery tech or the stators. He didn’t contribute to a single patent in the early days of Tesla. In fact, that first design of the Roadster probably owed more to Lotus Motors than to Musk himself.

        It appears that he did with the Roadster, and the early years at Tesla, what he always does when leading product development: jump into an existing idea, make wild assertions and insistences, let the actual engineers figure out how to do it, and then justify a reason to exclude stuff when it turns out to be unfeasible. He did this demonstrably with SpaceX, Hyperloop, Boring Company, PayPal/Zip2, and now Twitter, and he’s done it demonstrably at Tesla with the Cybertruck, so I don’t know why it would be a surprise that he did it twenty years ago at Tesla too. He doesn’t invent things or lead teams, he just makes noise and bluster.

        Which just leaves the money. And would you credit a really loud bank with “founding” a company?

        I wouldn’t.

  • 13617@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    So much for the free market and the ability to choose 🙄🙄🙄🙄

  • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    This isn’t technology news… It’s business news, and Elon spam.

    Just look at the comment section how many comments are actually related to technology?

    Can we not put the bar on the floor?

  • Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    I’d imagine it would be rather easy to to prove wether that claim is true or not; show screenshots of said posts with these advertisements next to them.

        • fiah@discuss.tchncs.de
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          11 months ago

          screenshots from a single source don’t prove much though, they can be easily doctored. Not saying that they are, but twitter could use that angle to make the case. That’s why services like archive.org are so important IMO, having an unbiased third party take a snapshot of a site that corroborates with what you’re seeing is gold. It’s a shame though that I don’t think archive.org can actually do this with twitter in this way?

          • LinusOnLemmyWld@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            screenshots from a single source don’t prove much though

            if the source doesn’t lie they very much prove it. the number of sources doesn’t mean anything because a doctored screenshot can easily be spread by many, it’s the quality of source that matters.

          • scarabic@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Twitter is heavily heavily heavily monitored by bots day in and out. This is how we have news articles about the latest Boebert tweet that she deleted minutes after drunk posting it. These shots could be corroborated a million different ways.

      • Takatakatakatakatak@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        11 months ago

        To be clear, is he in hot water over what he said about the ADL? Or the fact that Nazi’s are proliferating on his platform and advertisers don’t like it?

        • breakfastmtn@lemmy.ca
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          11 months ago

          Short answer: yes.

          Longer answer: he’s in slightly-higher-than-warm water over his interactions with the ADL and Nazis/antisemitism on the site. He’s in hot water over his personal promotion and espousal of antisemitism and ads being displayed next to Nazi content.

  • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    Nothing to see here. He definitely isn’t suing them because he wants large advertisers like Dosney on the platform and to be able to say the worst shit imaginable at the same time. Clearly nothing to see, obviously. /s

    • 4lan@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. This is all a part of his plan to bankrupt the Twitter.

      He has to pretend he is trying to make the business profitable, while sinking the ship in the process.

      He owes more in interest than Twitter makes in profit.

      The company is worth less than a half of what it he bought it for. He can’t even sell it and break even, there would be a 20 billion dollar loss

      Yet again he is going to be bailed out on the back of the taxpayer. You and I

      • nicetomeetyouIMVEGAN@lemmings.world
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        11 months ago

        That’s just you, with intelligence, trying to explain what he, without intelligence, is doing. You’re projecting intelligence on him because he won capitalism, and Capitalism wants you to think it’s because of merit. It isn’t, he’s an idiot. Look at the name of his child… Do you think this is a person with foresight?

      • Kainsley@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by neglect, ignorance or incompetence

        • reksas@lemmings.world
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          10 months ago

          And what do you do when someone is actually doing something malicious?

          clarification edit: malicious people can easily pretend to be stupid and claim they have made a mistake when they do bad shit.

      • angrystego@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I agree with you. I think twitter was as good for progressives as it was for nazis and Elon and others couldn’t have that. The fact that we’re not discussing this on Twitter and not even on Reddit, but on this beautiful but obscure platform, showd it all works well for the nazis.

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    “Thermonuclear” you mean the word you used during one of your (many) most embarrassing public failure moments when the glass shattered?