If anyone was ever going to get us caught in an endlessly repeating time loop of news, of course it would be Elon Musk. He created PayPal, made electric vehicles profitable, put people into space, and is planning a Mars colony as we speak. Why wouldn't he be the one to bend spacetime in such a way that we're constantly living the same recycled story? Which is, naturally, all about him. He's figured out a way to make current events recurrent.
It begins with a dramatic announcement he's all in on buying Twitter in order to restore the noble principle of free expression to the new public square:
That leads to a widespread freakout by his future employees whose idea of free speech is, to put it kindly, more limited than Musk's. Or to put it unkindly, they realize it's a lot easier to suppress, shadow ban, or straight up de-platform opinions that they don't agree with, rather than engage in healthy debate and disprove those opinions through logic, reason, and demonstrable facts backed up by evidence. Which means they get to decide that Brandi Love can post photoshopped photos that make it look like Tom Brady has his D in her V (link SFWish), but citing verified data about Myocarditis in kids the way Alex Berenson did will put you in the virtual time out chair.
And that, predictably, is the part of this news cycle we've been in all week:
Daily Mail - On Tuesday, [Musk] shocked Silicon Valley by offering to complete the buyout at his original offer price of $44 billion.
Employees were taken aback.
'Living the plot of Succession is f***ing exhausting,' said Rumman Chowdhury, the director of the META (ML Ethics, Transparency and Accountability) team on Twitter.
She added: 'I am sitting on 2023 company-wide strategy readouts and I guess we are going to collectively ignore what's going on.'
Parker Lyons, a senior financial analyst at Twitter, tweeted a series of memes, including a young girl crying captioned: 'writing my little emails today'.
He also tweeted a cartoon of someone attempting '2023 planning' and being told: 'This is worthless.'
One image featured a mock-up of Mark Zuckerberg as a priest welcoming newcomers to his flock, captioned: 'Meta recruiters for the next 48 hours'.
Another staffer, EJ Samson, tweeted a clip of a Balenciaga model angrily marching through a catwalk covered in mud.
'I encourage every Twitter employee to go outside and take a walk,' he wrote.
Some workers were venting their frustrations on the chat forum Blind, CNN reported.
'Cue the layoffs,' one anonymous staffer reportedly wrote.
If you've got even the slightest appreciation for irony, you have to admire the sheer lack of self-awareness it takes for someone who is all about policing free expression using the very platform they work for to take a dump on their new boss. I mean, imagine what their reaction would be if Musk made it a rule that you'll get banned if you go on Twitter and criticize him? They'd scream bloody murder. But he presumably no problem with it. He just wants (again, presumably) to make it so you can criticize anyone you want because it's your right. While they want to protect certain people. Just not the guy who'll be paying their salary very soon. It would be like a Barstool writer doing a hit piece on Chernin just before they took over the company and expecting to just keep working here. It's Bananaland. But we've seen this movie before.
Which brings us to the next phase of this news Ouroborus eating its own tail:
More Daily Mail - Elon Musk's deposition was delayed on Thursday as he and Twitter executives continue to negotiate the terms of his $44 billion takeover.
Among the many issues they are said to be discussing is whether the Tesla CEO will try to make the deal contingent on his original $12.5 billion debt-financing package, as banks try to weasel their way out of the agreement.
The banks could argue that Musk's antics in delaying the agreement have sufficiently damaged Twitter, enough to qualify as a material adverse effect, letting them walk away, the New York Times reports.
And Musk could even foil his own deal by refusing to sign a letter certifying Twitter is solvent, though the judge in the case is likely to force the billionaire to sue the banks for the agreed-upon money under the New York law that governs them.
Twitter executives, on the other hand, are trying to make sure Musk won't back out of his agreement again, seeking a reaffirmation of the specifics in the previously-agreed-to contract.
And here we are, back where we started. Musk wanted the company, but they didn't want him. Then he didn't want it, but they did. All the while the workers consistently don't want him, but he wants to be the one who sends them scurrying away from his employ. Which I think makes this the second or third (fourth?) go-round of this neverending cycle. It's "Twitter, I've come to bargain!" "You've come to die!"
The question now is how many more times we go through the fill-wash-rinse-spin cycle before this finally gets done. And how long the mating ritual will go on so we can finally get the totally wild, unfettered shit show that Twitter was through the first few years of our existence. And also? Whether anyone will still be working there by the time Musk finally gets this thing done.
Read the rest here:
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