Bubble_Pop_22

Twitter competitors are not other social media platforms, they are reality shows, for Twitter is 90% nade up of people dunking on each other, backstabbing and getting revenge. It attracts narcissist at every level ranging from people having millions of followers down to those who hangon to their 10k. Nobody uses Twitter to catch up with their friends or communicate.

It's the reason why the platform has failed to make money in the first place. If you add the character limit to what I said above, you get the worst possible format and environment for pushing commerce, which is the way these big platforms finance themselves.

People are constantly in fight or flight when they use Twitter, it's the opposite for Facebook, Instagram and now TikTok. Those are environments crafted to lubricate and push commerce/branding and it shows.

When I decided to be atheist I clearly reasoned that if I had to believe in somebody without any evidence I'd rather believe in myself.

If the greatest story ever told and 2000+ years of compounding marketing and outreach had no chance of getting god in my brain and heart, I'll let you figure what are the odds for Musk self-promoting himself via bullying and cheap outreach.

> let people's accomplishments speak for themselves

Musk and all the other 2500 billionaires in the world have as much agency over their so called accomplishments as lottery winners.

When I am in SV/SF I have lots of fun acting and pretending that I am a believer brainwashed too. Musk fans especially throw the most bizzarre parties, only second to crypto-guys. Maybe they hope that the cult leader would show up. I got a private jet ride in a G3 because I "believe in Elon" whatever the fuck that means lol.

> Rocket stages that land and are reused is the opposite of vaporware.

Just because it looks cool doesn't mean they provide quality of life. Saturn V rockets were way cooler and way bigger and sane people had to pull the plug because they were a money sinkhole.

As the global population becomes increasingly urbanised the whole demand for sat-internet will drop even more, as they'll all be using fiber or 5g. Then what? Sat-TV is already dead, what's left? How many GPS satellites are really needed?

The whole space race is something that caused a huge hole in US and USSR budgets without any ROI to show for, and will bankrupt Musk for sure. Maybe Bezos and Branson will avoid the same destiny, ironically thanks to their vices and passion for trophy assets such as private islands, yachts and football teams which at least hold their value, matter of fact they appreciate and produce revenues.

> So no, those guys are smart dudes.

Von Braun was a very smart dude but he was making the Nazi salute and fawning over Hitler all the times.

When he moved to the US he was fawning over Eisenhower all the times.

Similarly this Friedman guy has 4 years worth of videos in which he fawns over Putin.

Technical abilities and critical thinking in the social realm are 2 very different sets of competences. It's very rare to find somebody who is extremely technically gifted and is also able to realize that the leader of a big organization is not a god but a regular guy like anybody else who happened to be positioned in the right spot to ride the wave of social consensus.

> no one is innovating as much as this fucking guy

The Spruce Goose is marvelous and innovative too, the Apollo rockets, the ISS, you name it.

All those things had their plug pulled or are about to be because they are giant money sinkholes which failed to pay for themselves or provide any ROI in terms of money or quality of life.

Electric Cars and rockets have not yet graduated to a point where it's safe to say that they won't be just a fad.

If people stop caring about climate then EVs have no reason to exist. Similarly as the population becomes more and more urbanised they will rely on fiber as opposed to Sat-Internet so Starlink has no reason to exist.

All those things you are enthusiastic about are mostly overhyped fads which Musk himself is pumping and self-promoting while the real innovation which is life changing for all of us will come from some small and quiet biotech company, away from all the media fanfare. Oh wait, it already happened with Moderna and people can't even comprehend it because they are busy following the last PR stunt of this fraud.

> Elon Musk does.

Elon Musk doesn't own Twitter. Twitter owns him.

That's a rather fundamental difference.

> Is there any way that I can make a large bet with the naysayers about the future of Twitter?

Make the most flattering posts about Musk on Twitter, do that for at least a month, guy loves fluffers so chances are he'll notice at least one and will retweet, from there you have a chance at getting in the special club of favorites fans like that guy from India.

It's the same of groupies showing their breasts to band members on stage, the social dynamics are incredibly similar too!

> Linux kernel was Communism

Linux IS communism. Excellent developers are humans too, they want a beach mansion in Naples and West Palm Beach, with a 45ft boat and the whole 9.

Linux offers them a mod role in some obscure online forum and a pat on their back. That formula doesn't work regardless of what Ballmer said or the legal actions.

You make it sound like Linux failed to be on 95% of desktops because of what Ballmer said, which is the same as thinking that the USSR/DDR collapsed because Reagan said "Tear down this wall!"

Microsoft signed off incredible amounts of quality of life for the consumer and minted many thoudands of millionaires among its employees, whereas they destroyed the ambitions of many other paper millionaires who should have known better, they should have understood that software is a winner take all business and should have cashed out when they could. Unless you are one of them, then I cannot possibly see how people can see Microsoft and claim that it's cancerous.

Microsoft is the most consumer friendly company ever. They know billions of people are pirating their OS+Office and let them rob them blind while they recoup such lost revenues by increasing the bill on sales to Fortune500 companies and governments. Which is something extremely elegant that goes to mimic the organization of society in the West : free market Capitalism with redistributive features.

FührerBunker vibes. I guess Steiner is now in charge of the Android division?

EDIT: For those who have not seen the movie, watch "The Downfall" (2004) for a peek at what might be going on in the Trump/Musk/Putin camp right now. Applies to anyone who has a NPD really

> Oddly enough, this can be a sign of an excellent business. Microsoft originally provided some very mediocre products, but in a world fulled with absolutely shit products, being predictably mediocre was astonishing! Before 2000, when Microsoft produced a lemon, they always seemed to recognise the problem and then replace it with something that was crappily useable (and they also had a few products that were actually good).

People in here including me dream of living in an era where there is such a giant leap such as the leap to GUI provided by Win95, or even the revolution of the chip.

If you didn't like being around when Win95 was coming out, I guess living in today's timeline where innovation has reached stagnation must be pure hell! /s

Ha sorry for not getting it. You are mostly right, but I still hold out that very smart and competitive people might want to do all.

Meaning having their fingerprints on a company that achives the trifecta of being a financial success in terms of profit/FCF, marketcap valuation and also makes a trademark product/service used by everybody.

Eg. Google or Amazon or Facebook.

Valuation is meaningless from the perspective of analyzing if a company has been a success or a failure. Valuation concerns the players who sit at the poker table and how each and everyone of them managed to fare during the game. The table being the company and the players being the investors.

The OP is right in accounting funds raised vs. losses incurred as the metric to watch for.

The funds raised belong mostly to public pension/private funds and insurance companies, with the intermediation of PE/VC funds.

Wallet recovery seed generation? 12 words are needed IIRC

Maybe needs to send a message to somebody.

You don't get it. It's not about journalists vs. non-journalists.

It's about skeptics vs. easily indoctrinated.

Thankfully the proportions are about the same, there are about the same quantity of skeptics as well as easily indoctrinated people among every profession. including journalists. Skeptics however are a reationary bunch they show up with some delay compared to those who are easily indoctrinated.

Also skeptics tend to criticize from 30,000ft whereas easily indoctrinated people have a deep need to elevate a guy and blindly follow him. Journalists who are skeptics were criticizing the whole crypto movement, whereas journalists who are easily indoctrinated were busy elevating SBF, CZ, Musk and every other cult figures in the space.

That's the reason why you can't find skeptical articles on FTX and SBF, the skeptics did not write pieces on that, they were writing pieces critical of the whole movement, whereas easily indoctrinated journalists were low-key intersted in the movement but what they really wanted was to blow SBF, Musk and CZ.

Journalists, government officials, enforcement agencies are not separate from society, they are embedded within it.

Some social movements develop and the person which is perceived as the leader of that social movement becomes popular. And with popularity come free passes.

Now a smart person will make sure not to use free passes because they know that the populace is fickle, their infatuation too shall pass and as soon as it does pass then the backlash is going to be 100 times worse.

So if they do any media they'll do their best to put a stop to the ass-licking in order to make sure that they'll not be using a free pass.

Then you have those who don't care and instead try to accumulate as many free passes as they can, say because they are old and are projected not live to see the crowd turn against them, or for whatever reason.

Luck is also important. Take Nixon and JFK. One conspired against his opponents and the other stole Illinois. Both are very serious crimes, only one got to live to see the truth uncovered and crowd turn against him, the other is hailed as one of the best Presidents.

> against a private citizen who happened to be in /your/ political tribe?

I'd cheer because the first cause of defeat in politics is assholes in your team. You want to weed them out ASAP.

The electoral college is the best opium to make people forget that quality of candidates matters.

When the Electoral College is not involved bad quality candidates are hammered and humbled, especially assholes (on both sides)

This guy wants to go out as a martyr . Dems have been smart up to now not to give him this satisfaction, they should keep the same approach.

> There was a top-down decision that tech could not be covered positively, even when there was a true, newsworthy and positive story. I'd never heard anything like it.

Business shouldn't be about stories, it should be about products and services.

Journalists and editorial teams are skeptics by nature, of course they will be suspicious when they see people from SV run their mouth about politics and becoming "thought leaders".

Where are the supposedly negative pieces on Microsoft, Intel, nVidia or IBM? Nowhere to be seen because these companies and those who lead them have perfected the art of not talking about politics or any politics related matter.

> His real net worth could easily be negative. That is lower than that homeless guy living under the bridge.

Oh puh-lease. Trump's net worth was supposedly -8 billions in the 90s. He used to say that "the homeless living across Trump Tower is richer than me".

It's BS that people blurt out. This guy will never be a homeless living under the bridge

How many homicides happen in West Palm Beach or San Mateo?

People who think this guy won't come out still a millionaire out of this are delusional. As I said enough money to have a mansion in West Palm Beach or San Mateo, he'd only have to party at home for a while.

> Him being the second largest donor to the Democratic Party will really test the rule of law. Does it apply to the powerful? We’ll see.

Past money only gives you leverage as long as people believe there are potentially plenty more in the future to get.

People are looking at this thing too closely. When taking the 30000ft wide view then something like this is not extraordinary , and there I say it, not even bad.

Fedex was famously down to their last 5,000$ dollars and were facing bankruptcy, and the founder quite literally went to Vegas to play blackjack and won 27,000$ to save the company.

Companies and entrepreneurs are supposed to take on risk, that's why bankruptcy laws and LLCs exists in the first place. To give entrepreneurs some peace of mind that if the risk doesn't pay off they only lose what they put in.

The world and the US was growing much faster in the 1970s and 1980s when these sort of things happened daily. Not all donuts come out with a hole.

If for every Ponzis we get a Standard Oil then it's worth it.

If for every Enron we get a Microsoft then it's worth it.

If for every FTX we get a Moderna then it's for sure worth it.

And maybe all those positive examples were just inches away from being touted as negative examples, quite like Fedex was.

Oh the irony.

> It speaks to someone too sensitive to tolerate views that deviate from those of a narrow ideological narrative

The only thing that's narrowly ideological is the blind idolization of the so called tech cult ehm...I mean thought leaders in SV.

4 times this guy went to speak at TED and 4 times he produced lies and exxagerations.

It's fair to ask that the apex individual in the public sector (the POTUS, Senators and Representatives) and the pinnacle individuals in the private sector (the Forbes 400) behave with decorum.

Musk has less decorum than Trump and it takes a whole lot to beat him in that category.

Finance is a legit use case. If you think it's not then by extension you have to write off the legacy financial system as well.

Think about something like private/public pensions, annuities etc. A cogitating being knows that they are getting older and will need money for retirement, but they also should know that there are essentially just 4 ways to make an investment grow without any labor input from the investor: the bond market, the stock market, the real estate market and private lending to companies or individuals.

Now with the possible exception of private lending a citizen can do all the above, and remember they also know that they will need money for retirement. So tell me again why do they need public/private pensions and annuities? And why we allow such actors to operate given they redundacy considering the fact that they are preying on people's fears that they won't be able to make it in the future?

If crypto preys on people's greed then the legacy financial system preys on people's fears. They are 2 equally bad behaviors.

> centralized trust and human financial fraud. Uniswap and Aave withdrawals are working just fine.

Finance always follows commerce. It’s commerce which ultimately creates an organic price floor for assets.

Given that no commerce exists in the cryptospace there is no such floor.

You are describing a decentralized casino, but it’s taboo to say it and hence the word “asset” is being thrown around

> 24x avg. daily withdraws

Something something about sudden black swans and fat tail events.

It doesn't even have to be about FTX either, can be anything, if Musk takes more drugs than usual and tweets something like: "Lost all my faith in Crypto, now is mortal enemy!" you'd go way above 24x the withdrawls happening in an avg. day.

This is pure greed. From everybody involved, and I mean the users too! How greedy you have to be that you cannot take 4 days to send/receive an international wire. Nobody trades 24/7/365, when you are done trading just take 4 days to extract the money from exchanges , let it reach you bank and park it in cash or Treasuries. Now the option became availible to also earn interest from your bank. First time in 10+ years.

If you don't do it then these people are gonna do it and put your money to work for them (not for you) and you'd never know about it unless something like this black swan happen.

Proof of Assets is valid technically speaking but it's worthless without proof of liabilities which cannot be possibly verified

In theory each and every Bitmex user should get in a telegram/slack channel and self-declare the amount they have on BitMex and finally you can add up and see if the liabilities match or exceed the assets.

Trading fees when your volume is billions? Nothing? Also what about IPO so that you can exit and enjoy 500M-1B of real net worth?

1 real billion > 20 make believe

> Yes, it is, which in practical terms means that the company behind Tether should own real-world assets that cover all the outstanding USDT.

Asset. Not assets.

There is only one asset that an operation so big and trusted by so many should hold and that is U.S. Treasuries.

If you feel frisky you could do G-8 govt. bonds but that's about it really. And you are taking a chance on the forex exchange.

FTX just imploded because they didn't realize this simple fact. If you are a custodian and you are not advertising yourself as an active asset manager you should stick to US Treasuries and even that could be considered a breach because you should keep USD in a bank.

Keep USD in a bank and you have nothing to fear.