- Elon Musk purchased shares of Twitter after unsuccessfully petitioning the CEO to remove a Twitter account tracking his private jet.
- Musk’s personal gripes played a key role in his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.
- Musk banned the account after promising not to, highlighting his prioritization of getting his way over free speech.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/ttBv9
Incidentally… https://mastodon.social/@elonjet is still going strong.
Holy shit this dude fucking lives on his plane. Like I feel guilty about the 2-3x per year I fly to see family but this fucker has flown that far already in the past week. Why? Does he not know how to do a video call?
Ugh, I feel the same. I know the top 1% of the world or whatever emits tons and tons more CO2 per year than the other 99%, but I didn’t know it was this bad. That plane is flying multiple times per day. Sure Musk is probably not in it all the time, but that doesn’t matter.
Private jets should be banned all together, let’s see how quickly they suddenly find out the internet exists.
Things like this are perfect reminders that we don’t have to change every person on the planet, just eliminate the erronneous emissions.
Eliminate the erroneous emissions. Interesting take on the ol’ “eat the rich.” I like it!
All air travel should have fuel and emissions tax. Normalize them to commercial airliners. That’ll incentivize larger, more efficient plane designs. It’ll also punish private jets. Also charge a fee for any planes not at least X% full. Also give discounts and waive fees for planes over X size that service under-served airports.
A bunch of regulations like this should make private planes prohibitively expensive, like 10-20x their current cost. But that’s a lot of legislation that huge corporations and billionaires would oppose.
Planes are already pretty fuel efficient per passenger. And larger planes are unlikely, because this would mean all runways they want to use must be extended so the can start and land there.
Commercial planes with high occupancy got somewhat efficient (until you compare to other modes of transportation), but private jets with 1 ego on board are incredibly fuel inefficient.
It’s a very big ego though, so of course it needs a lot of fuel.
how much fuel would it take to burn the ego to the ground?
Carbon emissions per km:-
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Domestic flight: 240 g
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Eurostar (train): 4 g
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-footprint-travel-mode
That’s domestic flights in the UK which are stupidly short. Short and long haul flights are at 150g which is already less than ICE cars at ~170 and not far above the average bus at 100g. Though obviously no where near electrified rail.
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Planes are already pretty fuel efficient per passenger
Eh… They’re similar to cars for a similar distance. But, that still means gobs of CO2 emitted if you’re traveling from NY to LA, which would be a massive trip in a car.
And if only manufactures would make use of hydrogen turbojets.
People with private jets often charter them out when they’re not using them. The best place for an airplane is in the air. Only bad things happen when you let it sit around on the ground all the time. It’s not much different than commercial planes that spend most of their time in the air.
Sure, a private jet will have more emissions than an Airbus, but it’s a marginal increase. It’s not like rich people with their planes are producing a million times more pollution that wouldn’t exist if they didn’t have a private jet. They’re still going to fly, at least for longer trips.
It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole with this line of reasoning. Who else is using less efficient aircraft or taking unnecessary flights? Are all those police helicopter flights necessary? What about people flying to go party on an island somewhere versus some more noble purpose? Or airlines with a half empty flight? Meanwhile, it’s the oil companies producing the vast majority of carbon emissions while we squabble over travel itineraries and choice of aircraft.
If elon didn’t have a private jet and had to travel in a regular passenger plane, it would aboulutely make a difference I’m carbon emissions. Right now, we are seeing emissions from passenger planes AND private jets. Take away private jets and the passenger planes will still create the same emissions regardless. Your argument is that the addition of private jets are a “marginal increase” of emissions.
That makes no sense. Less planes = less emissions. Private jets + planes = more emissions. Just like, if most people took public transportation on the road. Busses + cars = more emissions than if there were no cars and only public transportation left. There would be less emissions if the wealthy traveled in a regular passenger plane like everyone else.
It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole with that kind of reasoning.
The point is that one plane can transport a large amount of passengers in one trip, compared to, transporting the same amount of passengers in a private jet would take multiple trips. Transport more people with less fuel use. This is why public transportation is so important. It actually does make a difference. Elon just likes his toys and doesn’t give a shit about the effect it has on the environment. That’s why he’s so focused on Mars.
This planet is doomed because of people like him, and he knows it. Otherwise, he would be investing his money into making the earth a better place instead of investing in trying to leave it.
You shouldn’t really feel guilty about anything like that. Asking hundreds of millions to billions of people to drastically change their lives and practice austerity is insane while billionaires do whatever they want and corporations push legislation that makes it harder to conserve. Our meager efforts won’t matter much if the biggest offenders go pollute wantonly.
Individual’s biggest efforts are pushing for legislation and politicians who will curb corporate abuses. Everything is a drop in a bucket that’s already overflowing.
That’s why capitalism is inherently incompatible with stopping Climate Change and we’re all fucked.
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Why would billions of us stop our excess pollution when we can just kid ourselves a handful of billionaires are doing it all? /s
Others close to him use the jet as well, but I imagine it’s still heavily Elon
Also, many of the flights are empty. The flight will be moved so it’s in position if needed, or it will drop him off and fly elsewhere.
That seems wasteful, of any flight really.
It’d be cool if jets doing that could partner with freight companies and move cargo if needing to reposition.
Uber for flight cargo
Every private jet flight is wasteful. But, Elon Musk’s wealth fluctuates by up to $5 billion every single day. Even if he spent $5m a day on his jet, it would be an amount he wouldn’t even notice. He could literally buy a brand new private jet every single day and not notice the cost.
Dude takes a 22 minute flight. My god how small do you need to feel to boost your ego to do that instead of video.
10 minute flight for nearly 1 ton of CO2 emissions 2 days ago.
This follows classic maritime law: You don’t have to pay taxes if you live in the air. That is what my lawyer Chareth Cutestory said. I have the best lawyers
Do your bosses (and their bosses) support work-from-home? They know how, but it’s about control for these people.
Does that also get posted to Threads or now Bluesky?
The profile is “elonjet . net” (without the space) on bluesky.
Since Threads is federated, it should be accessible from there.
Threads isn’t federated yet. It’ll be a while before fediverse accounts can be seen on threads
If Musk saw this carbon would literally be shooting out of his ears like an old bugs bunny cartoon
I don’t get this. What is the point? Why would anyone care where a billionaire is flying to and from? Just for kicks?
I think it’s mostly aboit the massive carbon footprint of a private jet and Elon has a rep for really short frequent flights.
Yeah, no. Musk bought Twitter because he HAD to. He very publicly made comments about buying Twitter at absolute meme-stock prices, but didn’t disclose that he already owned a LOT of Twitter stock. So, when his comments predictably increased the price of Twitter stock, he had two choices: Either it was just talk, and he was BLATANTLY guilty of stock manipulation and the Feds put a target on his back, or he acts like he totally meant it.
So he went with option two, acted like he was serious and wanted to buy twitter. Then he tried everything he could think of to kill the deal, accusing Twitter of all sorts of wrongdoing and lies, but Twitter was more careful than that. They got their shit right, and Musk couldn’t back out. So he bought Twitter, rather than go to prison.
The fact that he could also kill the tracking twitter account was completely incidental. Musk is an idiot, but even he isn’t that stupid. Musk initially offered $5,000 to the account holder to stop, and then balked at the return offer for $50,000. Now, I may not be a billionaire tech-bro, but I’m pretty sure that spending $50,000 to achieve a goal is preferable to spending $44,000,000,000. He’s dumb, but he’s not that dumb.
Ah so Musk was trying to increase his profits super publicly and super illegally.
I honestly don’t think he was TRYING to do anything but shitpost. It didn’t look like a well thought out plan, it looked like an idiot talking out of his ass and realizing that his memes were also crimes.
Elon is the kinda guy to put the meme before the horse
Or however that goes
I think you’re giving him too much credit. The announcement that he owned Twitter shares already hiked the price. If he wanted to
shortpump and dump he should’ve just kept his mouth shut, get on the board and then sell his stocks. The initial hike to his 9% ownership was on par with his buy offer hike. If his plan was to pump the company he could’ve done it without the legal trouble. Also the second price hike was after he had already made a public bid for the company and the company had accepted the offer. At that point he was locked in to buying the company. There was speculation if such a deal is allowed to go through, but the reality is that unless someone else steps in Musk had two options, he either buys the company or he gets taken to court and is forced to buy the company.He had to buy the company, but not because he was risking going to jail. He had to buy it because he screwed himself over by making the bid in the first place. I don’t get the need to make him seem like an intelligent man. He didn’t have any grand schemes or ulterior motives or someone else footing the bill. He simply made a horrible move, probably because he’s a huge manchild who didn’t like that the CEO of Twitter didn’t completely lick his boot.
He wasn’t trying to short Twitter. He was trying to pump and dump. Though the dumping probably would have been done more tactfully than the standard pump and dump. Musk getting publicity for holding the stock helps to keep the value up. Tesla’s been inflated forever, and he thought he could do the same with Twitter.
Yes, the primary reason he bought Twitter is that he screwed up during his pump and dump scheme. There are several reasons he was looking at Twitter in particular, including the jet tracking, how much he loves Twitter anyway, his hate for being told what he can and can not post, etc. I also suspect he’s lost most of the people who will tell him the truth and is now surrounded by right-wing grifters (for politics and aiming his money, they’re smart enough to not try to take the money directly). All these reasons were part of why the pump and dump was plausible as something else, and why it was Twitter that it happened to. Probably not even Musk knows how much of the intent to buy was legit (though not for 44b) and how much of it was the pump and dump.
He had a scheme; I don’t know that I’d call it grand.
He could had pulled out of the bid as well me thinks. Between presenting a bid and closing the deal there should be **due diligence **.
This is what I understand Mr Musk failed to do, after that it would have been nearly impt to cancel the deal.
I don’t remember the specifics but I think it was a sort of a “no questions asked” kind of bid, where he chose to not do the due diligence. He did try to play the “My estimation of Twitter was misled because I wasn’t disclosed to vital information” card and it got him nowhere.
Yep! He explicitly waived it. Corporate equivalent of waiving a home inspection
facepalm genial
50k is a rounding error for Musk, true. I suspect his ego/feelings stopped him from doing the smart thing and taking that kid up on the offer
Yes AND he’s desperate for approval from those he sees as peers. Twitter enabled things like the Arab spring and was a useful tool for protest organizing and shining a light on horrific things - it was a lot of bullshit too, but it was also that.
The Saudis and other authoritative, fascistic dickheads with billions all over the world benefit from a useless Twitter and the decreased threat that it can be a tool used to coordinate where the guillotines get set up. And long story short, we now have a useless joke of a Twitter.
It was win win for him and the people propping him up, either his delusions that he would be successful with Twitter came true (they didn’t) or his likely failure makes all those ghouls happy and he sees indirect benefit from unrelated investment/contracts and someone telling him, “you’re the coolest, bro” and him replying, “watch, hey look, are you looking? Look how fast I can run, are you looking? I’m probably the fastest dinner ever actually” [Proceeds to run slow, trip and fall on his face]
IIRC he was fighting “tooth & nail” to get out of the deal…until they made a request for some of his e-mails.
Suddenly he’s done fighting and carried through with the purchase.
(Sorry but I’m going into an appointment so no time to look up this new event…)
I thought it was more than emails, it was all communication around it?
Really wish he’d kept fighting do we’d see that.
If he had really cared about the jet tracking thing, he wouldn’t have burned $44b buying twitter to handle it. He just would have bribed / lobbied politicians to put a “public safety” exemption into effect for public data about flights. Make it so that private jets aren’t available in the public feeds / databases. Getting a law like that passed would have cost him tens of millions rather than tens of billions.
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Yeah whatever the reason given as to why he bought it will never not be stupid or funny.
I don’t think he would have gone to jail, he’s too rich for that and that’s not how justice works apparently but I thought there was a heap of stuff that was going to come out in discovery during the trial that was so embarrassing and damning that he preferred to pay the money
Also the part where Twitter has invested in s tier lawyers and brought and iron clad contract that heavily favored them. Which being an entitled idiot he agreed to. So when he tried to back out he literally couldn’t afford the penalties because he didn’t have enough cash and getting it would loose him control of his companies.
Definitely not him being dumb and entitled. Surely it was a petty $50k grudge.
This
Ok. Musk offered the kid $5,000 to delete his account, the kid countered with $50,000. Musk refused so he spent $44 billion instead to get rid of the account.
That’s the definition of “fuck you” money.
Yeah $50k isn’t even that much to Musk, what an idiot.
He’s still worth $200B.
Spending $44B? $88B? $100B. Doesn’t matter. The dude never, ever has to think about money again. If he lives to 85 and doesn’t earn another cent between now and then, he can splash 6 billion dollars a year every year until he dies.
To give you some understanding of that kind of money, he could roughly buy two Lamborghini Diablos every single day for the rest of his life.
Mind you that’s mostly non-liquid accounting of his stock and assets. Not that he’ll have to worry about what he spends, but it’s not cash in the bank billions.
That’s the point.
He could burn 40 billion buying Twitter just to spite a kid over 50 grand because money is meaningless for Musk. He essentially has infinite wealth.
He could spend the 50 grand the kid asked for every minute for 7 and a half years and still have 3 billion dollars.
Just fucking stop.
Elon Musk was forced to buy Twitter after doing several incredibly stupid things publicly.
Quit assisting this fascist dumbass in his attempt at laundering his reputation.
I don’t see how claiming he bought Twitter to try and shut up a teenager does anyting to help his reputation.
It re-enforces the idea that he is a “genius” who is playing “4D Chess” and that he “has a plan” and not that he’s a fucking drug addled freak who is making decisions based on his emotional state at the time.
There was no plan, there’s never a plan. Rich people just play this game where, because they have enough money to insulate themselves from their bad decisions, they pretend that “this was always their plan.”
Pretty much Musk:
Anyone who thinks spending 44 billion dollars on shutting up a teenager constitutes a “genius plan” is already fully on-board the Musk cult. I don’t think there’s really much reinforcement happening.
I agree we shouldn’t pretend he’s anything less than a dumb asshole who got caught with his pants down.
It re-enforces the idea that he is a “genius” who is playing “4D Chess” and that he “has a plan”
No, it does not. It makes him look like a kid without any kind of self control (which he probably is anyway)
And it does that on a platform where it reaches hundreds of people! :D
So just calm down, no one cares
Man child.
I dunno man. A teenager baiting a billionaire into spending a significant amount of his fortune to shut him up sounds like the most successful troll in history to me.
Elon Musk burning billions of dollars to not have his public information publicly posted is one of the biggest Ls he’s ever taken and that’s a long list to fight to the top of.
And totally on par for him.
I love that for him 🥰
And you know the worst part about it? Burning that amount of money makes basically zero difference in his life.
But you forget the best part. The tracker still exists and everyone still knows where his fucking jet is flying to because that shit is public information by air navigation regulation. There’s still bots that regularly posts the MuskJet location both in Twitter and Mastodon. So he spent all that money and still failed.
I think he was trying to get out of Twitter and wanted to do a real life version of his Dogecoin pump and dumps. You know, talk a big game, hype up how the stock is gonna go to the moon after he brings his genius to bare on the company, then dump the stock and pull out of the deal. However, during the hype phase he managed to say some legally binding things and suddenly found himself forced to honor what he thought was going to be empty hype.
He did more than say legally binding things. He signed a contract. That had a clause in it to prevent him from backing out, because the management at Twitter fully expected him to try it. I think he had made several gestures at buying before to try and get some kind of influence over how it was being run, so they drew up the contract to make him put up or shut up.
Makes you wonder what the og twitters guys are doing now besides drinking mai tais on the beach
I’m also convinced the entire purchase was an accident but I think he was doing the usual far-right “try and shame people for standing up to nazis”.
I honestly thought this was common knowledge.
Pretty sure that’s illegal
That’s his entire business model. Just look at starship, hyper loop, solar roofs and Tesla semi. Overblown Tesla stock bubble too. All complete vaporware, but he profits greatly from the hype alone. He belongs in prison as he is a classic conman.
As much as I personally dislike Musk, Starship does not belong on that list. It is the largest and most powerful space vehicle humanity has ever launched successfully and landed! It is re-usable and can potentially carry up to 100 people or 300,000 lbs of cargo.
Nothing like that has ever been done before, and the advancements in science that will follow humanities expansion into space cannot be overstated.
100 people are, like, 19,000 lbs. Why the weight difference between 100 people and just cargo? Because of life support systems?
1 ton per person for living quarters, supplies, etc. I’m not sure if life support is part of that, and also not sure how exactly they settled on 1 ton.
SpaceX has stated that Starship, in its “baseline reuseable design”, will have a payload capacity of 100–150 t (220,000–331,000 lb)
So is racking up debt in shell companies and claiming bankruptcy on them but it didn’t stop Trump either.
When has that stopped billionaire dummasses?
People who control the organs of communication usually end up writing the laws, even if it’s at arm’s length.
It’s worse than that. The usual way of buying a company is a memorandum of understanding followed by due diligence, followed by signing a contract and then the actual completion. Elon went straight to signing the contract and then had big old shit fit when the Twitter board held him to the terms of the contract and the penalties for pulling out.
Money well spent: https://mastodon.social/@elonjet
isnt he also back on twitter?
Stop talking about this guy.
Citizens say go
Muskrat bought it because he has poor impulse control. There’s no “grand design,” just a man child who desperately needs a mommy to protect him from himself.
Made a legally binding decision to massively overpay what the company was worth, or probably ever would be. Of course the current owners are going to take it
I think the deal was so good for Twitter that it may have been illegal for them not to sell to Musk because their job is to maximize profits or value for the shareholders or whatever. As a publicly traded company, not doing the deal would be choosing to not maximize profits.
Now in hindsight the idiot is killing current stock value, but that still has nothing to do with the shareholders who had stock when Twitter was sold. Those shareholders were thrilled to sell all their stock well above market price. Corporate ethics.
So is Taylor Swift going to buy it next?
Probably. She’ll change it to eX. Tweets will be called ditty and you’ll be required to sing them.
I’d go for Swiffer.
With that name, she’d clean up!
YES
She would keep the pay to play mentality though, as that’s how she got her start after all
snap snap snap and dance fool
For perspective, $30 billion would afford the food and freight to feed every human on Earth for a year.
Less than that would make him a god in Haiti (that is, elevate the nation out of crisis and put a bronze statue of Musk in every state park commemorating how awesome he is.
A few billion could provide free high-speed internet to everyone worldwide. Curiously Musk considered this, but then wondered how to get everyone to pay fees for it.
ETA I got these values when we were discussing Bloomberg’s wealth in 2019 when he was trying to Secret Hitler the Democratic party, and how much could be bought with the $500 million (at the time only 200 million was declared) he spent on his campaign. The $30 billion to feed the world value came up in in one of the news articles.
Well, the economy is much different and we’re dealing with considerable inflation (and our billionaires, including Bloomberg are much richer.)
I’m having trouble figuring out the math for this. My assumptions lead me to divide $30b by 8b people, which is about $4/person. I’m not confident that people can eat on $4 for a year.
What am I getting wrong?
I just did the math myself before seeing your comment and you’re right that math is fucked lmao.
Maybe it’s to provide food security just for those who don’t already have it
They clearly stated
food and freight to feed every human on Earth for a year
It’s a shit load of money, but let’s be honest you need way more than that to feed everyone. If Musk decided to donate all of his fortune, then maybe that’d be true.
Musks fortune was only 340b at its peak, and the moment he tried to access 44b of it for Twitter it collapsed the price.
Even 340b is still only $41 a year for everyone.
Yea even assuming the 340b a 25 pound bag of rice was about 22 bucks when I googled it and about the same for cheap beans. Maybe between the two a person could survive a long time but it wouldn’t be pleasant. I’m sure if you buy in those bulks you could get it for way cheaper too but still, math doesn’t add up.
Based on the prices I looked up you could feed everyone on Earth 1,800 kcal of potatoes for one day for around 40 billion USD. So… lets do it! Global spud day! Don’t ask me where to get a pot that big for boiling all them taters though.
You do make a relavant point. Prices have doubled in the last couple of years and I think the statistic is from the early 2010s.
That the costs scale down the more massive the production. If you’re in the industrialized world, the money you pay for food is almost all profit. Not the cost of agriculture, not the cost of harvesting and packaging, not freight time, maintenance and fuel, not logistics and accounting. Profit.
Most of our money spent is bribes goes in the pocket of each of the capitalists along the way taking their bit of rent.
A few billion could provide free high-speed internet to everyone worldwide
Since there is about few billion people on earth, does that mean that high speed internet costs about a dollar per person? You did not think this through, did you?
There are eight billion people on earth, so it’s even cheaper. Internet access is one of those things that requires infrastructure that gets cheaper per user as it scales up. At a global level, yes, internet should be ridiculously cheap per capita.
The cost we pay here in the US is mostly profit for the oligopolies that control the last mile. Licensing fees because they control access via legal obstruction. If I were to create a community server, it could be much cheaper as a non-profit cooperative, but for the cost defending from litigation from the established chains.
In other words, cost of the internet is inflated by force, not because internet access is expensive to construct and maintain.
Internet access is one of those things that requires infrastructure that gets cheaper per user as it scales up.
that is… misleading at best. yes, it is cheaper to connect apartment building with 1000 apartments inside than solitary farm in the middle of nowhere, but it is still lot more expensive than you think. the fibers and putting them into ground costs fuckton of money. same goes for wireless technology. your one dollar per user does not even cover ethernet socket inside of the apartment.
The cost we pay here in the US is mostly profit for the oligopolies that control the last mile.
seems to me that you should start your own business, start putting fibers into ground and become ridiculously rich!
There are eight billion people on earth, so it’s even cheaper.
i will skip over the part where you decided that you can compare “few” and “eight” in size, and point out that your logic means you have less(more) money per user, not that it is cheaper(more expensive).
In other words, cost of the internet is inflated by force, not because internet access is expensive to construct and maintain.
in other words, you know about as much about building internet infrastructure as this guy knows about dealing with hurricanes.
just admit you pulled these numbers out of your ass and move on…
Yea, now $30B will buy everyone on earth a McDonald’s hash brown, including tax.
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Becase it’s false and the math severely wrong.
Funny how federation works. I deleted the comment almost immediately. And yet here we are.
i have found that deleting comment does not propagate to other instances nearly as well as creating one…
What a snowflake
A visionary snowflake.
How is he visionary, exactly?
I mean, I didn’t think it needed an /s because does anyone take the term “visionary” seriously anymore?
My bad
So the full story would be that Elon stayed up until 5:30 a.m playing Elden Ring in a Vancouver hotel - was very stressed, saw on Twitter that people knew he was raging in Vancouver based on the Jet Tracker - stressing him out even more -
Though “Fuck it, maybe I can’t beat Malenia, but at least I can beat this asshat on Twitter tracking me!”…If only FromSoftware had added some pay-to-win elements… Like “For A Small $1 billion Micro-Transaction you get the uber Malenia slayer sword!” -
We would be living in a totally different timelineIf they weren’t doing anything wrong they shouldn’t care who watches where they go, right?
Even when he wins he does it like such a loser. Fuck this guy.
Jesus Christ this is low point even for him.
