Elon Has All the Rights

Being the richest man in the world, Elon Musk has many rights.  They include keeping Twitter advertisers after buying the company and shaking up the platform.  

One might expect companies to have the right to decide how they spend their advertising dollars, especially in a democracy.  The issue comes down to standards, the "merit" in meritocracy.

The World Federation of Advertisers set brand safety standards through the Global Alliance of Responsible Media.  That body became concerned after X lowered their expectations, allowing back people who'd been booted from the platform for undesirable behavior.  Musk also:

removed contract content moderators, the company's human rights team and investigators tasked with curbing political manipulation and child sexual abuse material.

Surely Musk had some idea of advertiser expectations before he made the change.  

“I hope they stop. Don’t advertise,” Musk told interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin. “If somebody is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.”

I imagine this tantrum will show up in court.  My defense would be:

"Your honor, I followed Mr. Musk's directive and was so busy fucking myself I had no time to put my company's ads back on X.  Oh, and he said 'don't advertise', so I didn't." 

Musk wants to impugn any professional association that sets standards.  For him to get more money, why does he have to make society worse?

The man with six companies, which one might equate to full time jobs, has a seventh, heading up the Department of Greedy Executives (DOGE).  

Many U.S. workers have been through a private equity underwriter (PEU) takeover and the corresponding trauma.  DOGE employs the PEU playbook, essentially an adult version of Lord of the Flies where employees are subjected to an "anything goes" culling. 

The problems with the PEU playbook applied to government are at least twofold, conflicts of interest and confidential information.  Musk has the right to unclassified information per Trump's DOGE Executive Order.  Yet, DOGE has the computer keys to the most sensitive systems in government.

 

Musk's team is the very thing Trump II, the digital Caligula, railed against.   It's an unelected bureaucracy scampering through its most critical systems with no rules and no oversight. 

Voters are only needed every two years to decide which political team gets to steer Uncle Sam's wallet to their friends.  The Reds won and granted Elon all the rights to exercise on behalf of fellow TechGods and PEU Lords. Look away folks, otherwise you'll see "dick-ocracy" in action.  

Update:  My wise friend noted:

When you think about it, we have been conditioned to think Musk is superhuman. He tells us. The people around us tell us. They put him in movies with Tony Stark. He's impervious to SEC regulations, Federal Transportation Safety regulations, and I'm sure I left out others. He has a cult following. 

He's the Babe Ruth of dark stock market valuations. He points and everyone ponies up the cash. The fraud has gone on so long no one questions it anymore. His accounting is not up to snuff, his board rubber stamped him for so long, his biographer loves him, and the rest of us, well we're just jealous. 

Everything and every decision and every engineering technique is his alone. There was never those three guys from Tesla that he bought out, they were never engineers and physicists that worked at NASA that laid out groundwork for him to build on. Only him, god like. 

Now he's in government telling us how it's going to be? People don't see how dangerous this is, not because all of his decisions are wrong, but because there are no checks and balances. Once he gets away with this, he'll get away with everything.