Elon Musk

xp - whoa, hey now, seemed like he was about to work pretty intensely on something

Why would a guy who runs a car company not want you to commute to work?

Why would the owner of Twitter not want you to spend half your day tweeting?

his point seems to be that the laptop class needs the working class to go to work (or deliver them stuff) so they can work from home?

classic "i, a billionaire who commutes by private jet, am a real american, the true avatar of the people, unlike you, the person who lives in a city" stuff.

btw it's only immoral to ask people to go to work so you can WFH if you agree that WFH is better.

obviously there are tons of inequalities between white collar and blue collar work but i fail to see how which room you go to to sit in front of a computer all day matters at all.

He's even worse at fake populism than the Josh Hawleys of the world

As with a lot of things, it seems like he's reacting mostly to the discourse and against people he perceives as his enemies rather than assessing the issue on its merits.

i fail to see how which room you go to to sit in front of a computer all day matters at all

that was the point I was clumsily trying to make with my electric car comment - technology changes, and new options become available. In the past 'work at home' probably leaned more blue collar - thinking woodworkers, daycare providers, gunsmiths, etc... it's only the last few years with VPN, Zoom, and shit that allowed a broad swath of white collar/tech folks the option

He’s a capitalist who wants to dictate the terms that workers work. At this point in history knowledge workers have the upper hand and he mad.

he also might be bummed about having a big giant empty building on Market Street, since he laid everybody off... no new subordinates to impregnate

'Where is everybody?'

the guy I know who worked at one of the non-twitter Musk ventures quit when he revoked WFH so *shrug*

the only guy i know who's still at twitter lives in semi-rural michigan 🤷🏻‍♂️

xp Barbers and hairdressers were often work-from-home as well, as was laundry work. Sweatshop piecework was often work-from-home as well.

xp Please let him be Unabomber 2 and blow up Musk

If the techserfs don't have to drive to the office, they don't have to buy Elon's shitty cars to get there.

Its not like the dude workin' 32 1/2 hours a week at Krogers or Piggly Wiggly is buying his crappy cards.

Considering how cheap a$$ these billionares come off, they must pay their help ok as they should just bludgeon them to death or set them on fire when they go to sleep. Maybe that is why the guy works like 20 hours a day... I guess that is why some are trying to come up with obedience collars for their bunker workers.

probably not great that Elon's entire worldview can be reduced to "arbeit macht frei"

How do you say that in Afrikaans? Probably about the same, I'd guess...

As John Ganz has pointed out, there's a word in Afrikaans-- baaskap, which roughly translates to "bossism". It's an explicitly Apartheid ideology that also imlies "white people on top, white bosses on top of white people".

Always wondered if he hired a voice/accent coach - he always seems to be speaking very carefully so he comes off as your typical Cali tech brah and not a South African mine owner

probably mostly organic. a few coworkers moved to the midwest from countries with distinctive accents around the same age Musk did and there's an entire spectrum of merged accents, some that sound local with a slightly noticeable inflection on some words, others with a more noticeable tone

I don't know how many lawsuits he's up to now, but this one has some good details about all the bonkers shit with their leases and unlicensed renovations.

Six former Twitter execs and longtime employees sued Twitter and Elon Musk in US district court in Delaware on Tues, alleging they violated severance agreements. The lawsuit seems to corroborate much of our & others' reporting about the co not paying billshttps://t.co/dEkOJws1o5 pic.twitter.com/UqvHez4kHk

— Ryan Mac 🙃 (@RMac18) May 18, 2023

This, just for example:

253. Killian was soon instructed to circumvent the landlord's lighting control system, which was motion- sensitive in compliance with California's Title 24 energy code, because the lights were bothering people living in the hotel rooms when their small movements at night would trigger the lights.
254. Killian submitted the service requests to the landlord, who denied them,
255. When the landlord denied Twitter's requests, Killian was instructed to disconnect the lighting himself, which was not safe and which he was not qualified to do.
256. When he objected, Hollander berated him for refusing to do the work himself.
257. She was not satisfied until he brought her in and had her look into the drop-ceiling and see what the electrical system looked like, to understand that he could not safely do the work himself
258. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Killian hired an electrician to disconnect these rooms independently, putting Twitter in violation of both the building code and their lease.
259. It got worse.
260 Killian was instructed to install space heaters in the hotel rooms in further violation of Twitter's lease.
261. Killian was also instructed to place locks on the hotel room doors, a request that betrayed the lie that these were intended to be temporary rest spaces for exhausted Tweeps.
262. California code requires locks that automatically disengage when the building's fire suppression systems are triggered.
263. Killian was repeatedly told that compliant locks were too expensive and instructed to immediately install cheaper locks that were not compliant with life safety and egress codes.
264. Again, Killian protested that no licensed tradesperson would perform work that violated the building code.
265. Killian protested that installing these locks would put lives at risk that in case of an earthquake or fire (the latter of which was made dramatically more likely by the noncompliant electrical work and the presence of the space heaters he had been instructed to install), these locks would remain locked, blocking first responders from being able to access the rooms and the Tweeps within.
266. Nobody cared.
267. On information and belief, the non-compliant locks were in fact eventually installed but not by Killian.
268. Killian quit that day.

Slumlord Billionaire

couldn’t they just put “do not disturb” signs on the “hotel” doors or was Elon just busting in like the Kool-Aid man and they needed locks to keep him out?

Yeah, that whole section is fucking wild

I love this:

266. Nobody cared.

It's the "Jesus wept" of Elon court filings.

Needs an Elon crying/laughing pic

why are bro’s opinions about working from home being reported on like important news? :-(

I thought Elon was sleeping in a closet at Twitter headquarters, doesn't that mean he is working from home? So he is a total hypocrite who should put his head in a toilet and let people take turns flushing it (just like old times, no doubt).

why are bro’s opinions about working from home being reported on like important news? :-(

the only opinions being reported are about the loss of 'water cooler synergy' and 'team building', we never hear the 'well, our employees enjoy living in rural montana and not driving every morning, getting more sleep, spending more time with their families and pets, not polluting by commuting, saving money on lunch, crapping in their own bathrooms etc etc etc"

Feels like a vast conspiracy to pull us back into the rat race

Feels like a vast conspiracy to pull us back into the rat race

Yes it's about control.

Someone has pointed out that not only can Twitter Blue subscribers now post files up to 8GB, there's no limit on how many they can post, making Twitter effectively a piracy machine (people are posting whole movies left, right and center) and an unlimited storage service for just $8 a month. There's no way this lasts.

someone posted shrek in its entirety a day or so ago. total mess.

never cared for it much either.

how the... how is that in any biz model, it's so dumb? do i not understand it?

I mean, he's not running it like a business. I don't know what he's running it like. Like he hates Twitter and the people who use it. Seems pathological.

I think Elon genuinely wants to make it a right wing social media site like Parler or Truth but popular. Of course, by making it explicitly RW (and being a fascist anti-Semite who wants to be King of Mars) he will drive away the people (and with them the advertisers) that made Twitter actually fun and popular and thus just turn into Gab.

I think he's mostly throwing a tantrum because it became painfully obvious that he's not universally loved and respected.

Like, if he was so upset about “free speech” why didn’t he just fuck off to Parler or Truth? Because there’s no one there to torment. Everyone thinks the same. No fun!

Because he’s an idiot, he thought for some reason he could keep all the “woke” users at Twitter and keep respectable advertisers while letting the Nazis run amok. They wanted playthings.

Feels like a vast conspiracy to pull us back into the rat race

Yes it's about control.

OT but I think there is also an element of, if people aren’t commuting, they won’t care so much about gas prices, making our elections harder for OPEC to manipulate.

So it’s about control?

It's about control. Through dominance.

I was wondering since Twitter was a tool in the Arab Spring that the Saudi money backing Musk was just as much to buy it and kill it as anything. Don't exactly quite get why the oil sheiks would want in business with the battery car guy, but between Musky's hugging up to them and the Russians it sure seems that way.

Feels like a vast conspiracy to pull us back into the rat race

See also: the monthly articles from NYT about how people want to go back into the office… which only quotes managers/supervisors/CEOs. One of the few times I read the comments, since they are almost exclusively people disputing the articles’ premise and giving it the finger.

Bosses are panicking that white collar labor in the US, for a brief shining moment in this post-union age, has some leverage.

More than a little of the forcing people back into the office thing seems like it has a lot to do with trying to justify the expensive office rental contracts and business leasing agreements, doesn’t it?

Which is especially weird in Musk’s case since he apparently refuses to pay rent for office space. You’d think he’d want people to work from home — it’s basically outsourcing real estate costs to the employees.

also, MASSIVE IGNORANT GENERALIZATION ALERT, a lot of managers don’t do shit except big their employees and talk loudly and now they don’t have anything to do

bug not big

I think every single one of my posts in the past week has had a typo