And yet, he's taken time to block people. So much for free speech for all.
There's a difference between blocking people so you don't see them and blocking people so no one sees them.
He spent 3 billion to purchase his 9% stake. 2.7 billion seems a bit low to buy back everything else.
Right. Apparently the numbers I based that on were common stock, which isn't everything. I was wrong.
His offer is actually $43B.
Yep.
And apparently he's already secured funding, whatever that means. I assume it has something to do with loans being easy to get when you don't need them....which makes sense when almost none of your money is liquid.
Hopefully Facebook is next!!!
Facebook is nowhere near as relevant to politics and news.
When I first started noticing him years ago, I didn't like him. Now I do. Even though he's making piles of money, I believe he actually wants to do something good for humanity. Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg and the others all appear they want to make humanity do something for them.
Yeah....that's what I'm curious about. Musk is obviously a genius. I can't figure out whether he's also a genuinely good person who takes advantages of the opportunities, makes mistakes, and spends a lot of his time on weed jokes and silly, stupid stuff....or if he's a legit Bond villain.
Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg, Brin....they're Bond villains.
Gates is no angel, but he's actually done a lot of good.
I disagree.
His foundation has done a lot to help eradicate Malaria and a handful of other diseases, mostly by writing checks. The cost, in human life, of that research has been tragic. I'm honestly not convinced that the world is a better place because of what he's done.
As for the proliferation of computers, which he often gets credit for....I'm convinced that the power available would have lead to that anyway. What he did was to fundamentally change the way people pay for them. Windows is cheap for individuals. But before he licensed it to IBM, people didn't pay for software the same way. The world would be very, very different if FoSS was normal. I don't think anyone knows (and few have any idea)
how the world would be different without Microsoft's influence.
And as much as the profit motive has lead to really awesome software....I am loathe to conclude that world would be worse.
Gates did not
create DOS. He bought it. He did not
create Windows. People who worked for him did. And he did not change the world in terms of how we use computers. Other people were working on similar ideas at the same time or earlier, and he copied the ideas. All he did was change how we paid for them.
Even if it's arguably true. No system can sustain infinite growth.
No
closed system can sustain infinite growth.
But we have science for that. I believe the current estimate for the carrying capacity of earth is around 9 billion people. That still ignores space travel. And it still somewhat ignores human ingenuity.
There have been doomsayers for a really, really long time. Their doomsdays have not come to pass, largely because people figure out ways to mitigate the doomsday before it comes.
Even if you assume that overpopulation, global warming, or any other doomsday people think we're currently facing is true...I see no reason to believe that doomsday is going to be any different from any of the previous ones.
People are pretty creative. And while we've obviously made mistakes and gone down dark and evil paths....we've also figured out a lot of solutions to previously unsolvable problems.
If people cared about avoiding these problems, we'd be using the best we have now and trying to figure out how to mitigate the problems....which, based on what I'm seeing, largely means dispersing rather than concentrating populations, building more nuclear power plants and figuring out how to deal with the waste, figuring out how to run electric cars without strip mining lithium, and globally moving away from insanely dirty fuels, which would include moving from wood burning stoves to coal or gas in the 3rd world at least as a stop-gap.
I'm going with
.... twitter who?
I fired social media a long time ago.
I won't be scrolling elons TikTok or whatever.
it's just irrelevant and exhausting.
I'm kind of with you. I think that social media is basically a cancer on society.
Twitter and YouTube are, for the time being, the exceptions.
Real political discourse happens on twitter, just like it happened in booklets rather than novels in the 1700s. Twitter also defines significant portions of the news cycle for the world. You can ignore it for yourself, but people as a whole can't, even with the relatively low signal to noise ratio.
YouTube also has a similar signal to noise problem, but real discourse and education happens on YT. And it takes just enough effort to do it well that some of the super low-effort noise gets filtered out.
You can ignore it.
People can't.