Elon Musk

mickeyrat

Exclusive: Tesla board made $3 billion via stock awards that dwarfed tech peers - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/tesla-board-made-3-billion-via-stock-awards-that-dwarfed-tech-peers-2025-12-15/

mickeyrat

The FAA predicted Elon Musk’s Starship would cause “minor or minimal” disruption. Then the rockets exploded twice in three months over busy airspace.

Flight data reveals how many planes scrambled to protect passengers and avoid burning debris.

Read our full investigation: https://propub.li/4qnoFyI

mickeyrat

Brian Tyler Cohen adbook post

BREAKING: The UK, Canada, and Australia are working together to to launch a coordinated ban on Elon Musk’s X (Twitter).

Halifax2TheMax

mickeyrat said:

Brian Tyler Cohen adbook post

BREAKING: The UK, Canada, and Australia are working together to to launch a coordinated ban on Elon Musk’s X (Twitter).

* The following opinion is mine and mine alone and does not represent the views of my family, friends, government and/or my past, present or future employer. US Department of State: 1-888-407-4747.

To this point, what’s the point of respecting agreements when one country jettisons norms and believes POTUS’s “morality” is the only thing that matters and international laws don’t apply?

IP? Copyright? Say again? Reverse engineer that shit, make it your own and call it whatever you want. Thanks, CCOOTWH.

Trump may be the beginning of the end for ‘enshittification’ – this is our chance to make tech good again

It’s been 25 years since I started working for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an American nonprofit dedicated to preserving and promoting human rights on the internet. I’ve found myself in dozens of countries working with activists, politicians and civil servants to untangle the complex technical questions raised by the internet, and every one of our discussions ended in the same place. “OK,” they’d say, “you’ve definitely laid out the best way to regulate tech, but we can’t do it.”

Why not? Because – inevitably – the US trade rep had beaten me to every one of those countries and made it eye-wateringly clear that if they regulated tech in a way that favoured their own people, industries and national interests, the US would bury them in tariffs.

But deterrents are a funny thing. If someone demands that you follow their orders or they’ll burn your house down, so you do, and they burn your house down anyway … well, you’re a bit of a fool if you keep on doing what they tell you, aren’t you?

Donald Trump’s tariffs have opened up a new possibility for the technology we have become increasingly dependent on. Today, nearly all of our tech comes from US companies, and it arrives as a prix fixe meal. If you want to talk with your friends on a Meta platform, you have to let Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg eavesdrop on your conversations. If you want to have a phone that works, you have to let Apple’s Tim Cook suck 30p out of every poundyou spend and give him a veto over which software you can run. If you want to search the web, you have to let Google’s Sundar Pichai know what colour underwear you’ve got on.

This is a genuinely odd place for digital computers to have got to. Every computer in your life, from your mobile phone to your smart speaker to your laptop to your TV, is theoretically capable of running allprogrammes, including the ones the manufacturers would really prefer you stay away from. This means that there are no prix fixe menus in technology – everything can be had à la carte. Thanks to the infinite flexibility of computers, every 10-foot fence a US tech boss installs in a digital product you rely on invites a programmer to supply you with a four-metre ladder so you can scamper nimbly over it. However, we adopted laws – at the insistence of the US trade rep – that prohibit programmers from helping you alter the devices you own, in legal ways, if the manufacturer objects. This is one thing that leads to what I refer to as the enshittification of technology.

There is only one reason the world isn’t bursting with wildly profitable products and projects that disenshittify the US’s defective products: its (former) trading partners were bullied into passing an “anti-circumvention” law that bans the kind of reverse-engineering that is the necessary prelude to modifying an existing product to make it work better for its users (at the expense of its manufacturer). But the Trump tariffs change all that. The old bargain – put your own tech sector in chains, expose your people to our plunder of their data and cash, and in return, the US won’t tariff your exports – is dead.

This means digital rights activists who’ve been trying to get rid of the “anti-circumvention” laws have a new potential ally: investors and technologists who’d like to make a hell of a lot of money raiding the margins of the most profitable lines of business of the most profitable companies the world has seen.

In the UK, reverse engineering is restricted under article 6 of the European software directive of 2001. US companies have capitalised on this fact – that British companies cannot modify their products – to spy on us and whack us with sky-high fees. Now, post-Brexit, the UK is uniquely able to seize this moment. Unlike our European cousins, we needn’t wait for the copyright directive to be repealed before we can strike article 6 off our own law books and thereby salvage something good out of Brexit.

What’s more, this is a proven business. US tech platforms extract hundreds of billions in rents and junk fees from all over the world. As Jeff Bezos told publishers when he founded Amazon: “Your margin is my opportunity.” Why shouldn’t we move fast and break Jeff’s things?

Making hundreds of billions of dollars every year is a far superior course of action to building a bunch of datacentres in support of an AI sector that is losing billions of dollars every year and heading for a tremendous crash, and we can do it without destroying what’s left of our water supply and crashing our creaking power grid. There are plenty of technologists who have been forcibly ejected from the US and would jump at the chance to drain their former employers’ billions. There’s also plenty of investors looking for a business opportunity whose success doesn’t hinge on how many $TRUMP coinsthey buy.

It’s not just digital rights activists, investors and entrepreneurs who have a dog in this fight. Now that Trump has made it clear that the US no longer has allies or trading partners, only rivals and adversaries, everyone in the world is trying to figure out whether they can trust American tech infrastructure with their governments, businesses and personal data.

The answer is a resounding “no”. Just look at the international criminal court, which ditched Microsoft Office for a European alternative after Trump sanctioned its officials for issuing an arrest warrant for the génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu. Directly after Trump denounced the court, its justices lost access to all their Microsoft accounts – emails, documents, calendar, address book. The court was, in effect, “bricked”. Microsoft denies this, but between the justices of the international criminal court and the US tech monopolist, I know who I trust.

Trump is capable of weaponising the US’s tech companies, and there’s no telling where it will end. Remember that when Russian looters stole millions of dollars’ worth of John Deere tractors and spirited them away to Chechnya, the company was able to push a kill signal to the tractors that rendered them inoperable.

Until we repeal the anti-circumvention law, we can’t reverse-engineer the US’s cloud software, whether it’s a database, a word processor or a tractor, in order to swap out proprietary, American code for robust, open, auditable alternatives that will safeguard our digital sovereignty. The same goes for any technology tethered to servers operated by any government that might have interests adverse to ours – say, the solar inverters and batteries we buy from China.

This is the state of play at the dawn of 2026. The digital rights movement has two powerful potential coalition partners in the fight to reclaim the right of people to change how their devices work, to claw back privacy and a fair deal from tech: investors and national security hawks.

Admittedly, the door is only open a crack, but it’s been locked tight since the turn of the century. When it comes to a better technology future, “open a crack” is the most exciting proposition I’ve heard in decades.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/10/trump-beginning-of-end-enshittification-make-tech-good-again

HughFreakingDillon

This is something: 

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DTVtCzDDlOa/?igsh=MmV4ajlsM2p1bm1r

gimmesometruth27

mickeyrat said:

Brian Tyler Cohen adbook post

BREAKING: The UK, Canada, and Australia are working together to to launch a coordinated ban on Elon Musk’s X (Twitter).

wonder how musk is going to shit all over those countries if they do it.

Halifax2TheMax

gimmesometruth27 said:

mickeyrat said:

Brian Tyler Cohen adbook post

BREAKING: The UK, Canada, and Australia are working together to to launch a coordinated ban on Elon Musk’s X (Twitter).

wonder how musk is going to shit all over those countries if they do it.

* The following opinion is mine and mine alone and does not represent the views of my family, friends, government and/or my past, present or future employer. US Department of State: 1-888-407-4747.

Cancel Starlink.

PJ_Soul

I can't believe anyone besides the Musk fans are still using X at all. Why would you still want to go on there? 

Halifax2TheMax

* The following opinion is mine and mine alone and does not represent the views of my family, friends, government and/or my past, present or future employer. US Department of State: 1-888-407-4747.

Opinion

To anybody still using X: sexual abuse content is the final straw, it’s time to leave

Marie Le Conte

Some wars can’t be won. It can be hard to come to terms with this fact when you’re still on the battlefield, but if somehow you manage to step out for a moment, then the truth will become obvious. You have lost, the people on your side have lost, the villains have won and, if anything, you should have run away a long time ago.

My own sad epiphany about Twitter, now known as X, came in the immediate aftermath of the US election in 2024. I’d spent a lot of that year lying to myself, ignoring the increasing volume of abuse I’d been receiving and the fact that no one ever read my linked pieces any more, but that week I realised I had to stop. I had to leave X for good.

Government ministers cannot be making policy announcements in a space that hosts AI-generated, near-naked pictures of young girls

Much of the British political sphere chose to stay put, both that November and in the year that followed. Everyone had their reasons: some felt their reach would be curtailed without it, others wanted to be on all available possible platforms. Some said they relished the intensity of the debates, others didn’t believe other platforms could ever be quite as thrilling or all encompassing.

Most of those justifications were, of course, nonsense. Humans are creatures of habit and ego. If there is an app you have used every day for years, it will be tough for you to quit it, especially if it provided you with both adrenaline and dopamine. If you have a number of followers on that app, and that makes you feel important, it will be hard for you to willingly leave.

I say this not to judge, but in recognition of my own behaviour. There were months and months when I kept lying to myself, pithily saying: “We’re not stuck in here with Elon Musk – he’s stuck in here with us!” when I knew I was just shuffling my feet. Being in Washington DC when Donald Trump won the election was such a shock to the system that I had no choice but to do something drastic. Would I have stayed if I hadn’t been in the thick of it on that one awful night? Maybe. It’s hard to say.

I did leave then, however, and since then I have watched, perpetually slack jawed, as Musk has kept poisoning the well further, and people I know, love and respect keep merrily drinking from it. Some of them left when Musk publicly endorsed Tommy Robinson, the far-right activist, but many did not. Some of them realised they had to go when they saw neo-Nazi after neo-Nazi use and abuse the new monetised blue-tick system, but a lot of them stayed put.

Most recently, we Bluesky users have seen some arrivals to our little oasis, after Grok, X’s own AI assistant, was used to produce sexual abuse imagery of women and children. Still, many of them witnessed thousands and thousands of men requesting pictures of children in small bikinis, covered in “donut glaze”, and they didn’t move.

Some of them argued that people ought to stay and fight, and couldn’t just retreat to their own comfort zones – but they had it wrong. You may or may not choose to use Bluesky instead of X: as with everywhere else, it’s an app with upsides and downsides. You may head to Instagram instead, or give Threads an honest go, or start writing down your thoughts on smooth rocks then throwing them at various windows across your neighbourhood. It doesn’t matter.

What does matter is that X is drifting towards irrelevance, becoming a containment pen for jumped-up fascists. Government ministers cannot be making policy announcements in a space that hosts AI-generated, near-naked pictures of young girls. Journalists cannot share their work in a place that systematically promotes white supremacy. Regular people cannot be getting their brains slowly but surely warped by Maga propaganda.

We all love to think that we have power and agency, and that if we try hard enough we can manage to turn the tide – but X is long dead. The only winning move now is to step away from the chess board, and make our peace with it once and for all.

• Marie Le Conte is a French journalist living in London

  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/12/x-sexual-abuse-time-to-leave-elon-musk-grok-imagery-women-children
  

Gern Blansten

PJ_Soul said:

I can't believe anyone besides the Musk fans are still using X at all. Why would you still want to go on there? 

Yeah it's really bad. I admit to being a little surprised at how bad Musk let it go. And he's probably the worst part. If you haven't visited and looked at his posts recently you should check it out. Complete insanity.

OnWis97

I quit Twitter/X a little over a year ago, I think. Sometimes I wonder what everyone over there is saying...it really is (or at least was a year ago) a barometer of what America is. It's far better for me that I'm not seeing people celebrating Meagan Good's murder and the gestapo.

But the real reason was all I had to push back on Elon was my account and my usage. 

Is it really worse than it was a year ago? Because it was a sewer then.

HughFreakingDillon

I don’t like to believe any social media is a barometer of anything but the worst of the worst. 

Gern Blansten

Bluesky is nice. Kind of like twitter before Musk

Tim Simmons

I enjoy bluesky. It does need to take itself less seriously though. 

Tim Simmons

Gern Blansten said:

PJ_Soul said:

I can't believe anyone besides the Musk fans are still using X at all. Why would you still want to go on there? 

Yeah it's really bad. I admit to being a little surprised at how bad Musk let it go. 

I'd argue the way Twitter is rn is not a bug, but the feature.

Tim Simmons

I mean if you post at a site where people can just make AI pornography of any gender without consent and certainly of any age, you're part of the problem. the engagement of the large user base (if you aren't there for that sort of thing - as most probably are not) isn't worth it. certainly You don't want a hit to your reputation. 

PJ_Soul

Gern Blansten said:

PJ_Soul said:

I can't believe anyone besides the Musk fans are still using X at all. Why would you still want to go on there? 

Yeah it's really bad. I admit to being a little surprised at how bad Musk let it go. And he's probably the worst part. If you haven't visited and looked at his posts recently you should check it out. Complete insanity.

Nah, I won't add myself to the view count. But the worst of them usually make it to the news or this forum, so I still see some of them. 

Gern Blansten

Tim Simmons said:

Gern Blansten said:

PJ_Soul said:

I can't believe anyone besides the Musk fans are still using X at all. Why would you still want to go on there? 

Yeah it's really bad. I admit to being a little surprised at how bad Musk let it go. 

I'd argue the way Twitter is rn is not a bug, but the feature.

definitely...reminds me of the Breaking Bad scene where Jesse turns his house over to the meth heads

Gern Blansten

PJ_Soul said:

Gern Blansten said:

PJ_Soul said:

I can't believe anyone besides the Musk fans are still using X at all. Why would you still want to go on there? 

Yeah it's really bad. I admit to being a little surprised at how bad Musk let it go. And he's probably the worst part. If you haven't visited and looked at his posts recently you should check it out. Complete insanity.

Nah, I won't add myself to the view count. But the worst of them usually make it to the news or this forum, so I still see some of them. 

it's just complete conspiracy theory bullshit...he reposts tweets from people that do not appear to have any connection to business and/or politics

HughFreakingDillon

All that shit drives engagement, which is the financial driver, he clearly has shown no regard for business ethics, so it’s not surprising.