How to Make a Small Fortune in Social Media
Elon Musk is demonstrating live online how to make small fortune owning a social media company – start with a HUGE one. Making the rookie mistake of believing you can cut your way to success, Musk has wrought havoc at Twitter since acquiring it, firing half of the staff, making unreasonable demands of remaining employees, and slashing costs, even the ones that keep the platform running. In addition to these mistakes, he’s run off billions of advertising dollars with TFG-like behavior and erratic decision making. His full on MAGA management style and allowing white supremacists and hate merchants back on the platform has driven millions of normal people away. Add that to banning any journalist who dares publicly criticize him, Twitter has become the North Korean photonegative of the the company he spent $44 billion to buy.
His most recent accomplishments are stopping paying the rent in some offices, closing data centers, and even firing janitorial staff, forcing employees to bring their own toilet paper to work. He’s demanding that employees sleep at the office, and continues to run the company by online polls where millions of bots infest his platform, obviously voting in favor of his worst ideas, like allowing TFG back on.
Like others, I kept thinking that Musk is some kind of evil genius with a long-term plan to remake Twitter into a new payment platform. It’s become apparent that this was either a pipe dream or a myth – he’s now facing a serious turnaround situation with no apparent skills to actually lead a turnaround. Add his sociopathic behavior to this situation and he’s only making matters worse, not better. To fund all this, he’s been dumping his Tesla stock which has contributed to its price plummeting 70% in 2022. To be fair, blue chip and tech stocks have been pounded this year, but Musk’s goofy behavior and selling has greatly displeased investors.
All this is to say that behavior of companies’ senior management matters and the being wealthy doesn’t necessarily mean you’re smart. This multi-billion dollar soap opera is far from over, and it remains to be seen if Musk is going to be one of the surviving members of the cast.
MuskMelon is following the “Neutron Jack” Welch school of management of firing lots of employees to achieve short-term savings. Neutron Jack’s philosophy of short term profits over long term success is what made GE the powerhouse it once was into the third-string company it is today.
Continuing the beatings doesn’t help morale improve.
1RepubAnon @1, Excellent analogy, some of us remember that SOB, a BFF of Raygun and a whole spectrum of that ilk. He’s really one of the worst ever American bizmen. His reach and influence, with many others, helped nearly destroy Amerca’s manufacturing capacity, among other stuff. Disgusting POS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch
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Now for the biggest [OT] shit hitting the fan this week:
TRUMP’S TAXES!!!
You can get it all straight from the Ways and Means Committee website [link below].
Attachment E is where the personal and business tax returns are. Kind of a chore to get to the meat, but well worth the effort.
They are zipped pdfs, so you have to download them to a suitable location [folder], then extract the zip file[s]. Then you can peruse them to your heart’s content; might be heavy going.
There’s so much more that should be examined, and prosecuted, but WTF, the Rufous Ratbastard still has a teflon coating.
Ways and Means Committee dump, everything available attm; not particularly user-friendly, but be sure to read the intro stuff.:
https://waysandmeans.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/ways-and-means-committee-votes-release-investigation-irs-s-mandatory
I’m sure that many thousands of diggers are going to ferret out some juicy bits that the Committee ran out of time for. Now if we could get a bunch more years worth of Don the Con’s financial info.
If y’all follow some of the online [twit, etc.] stuff, it’s just fucking amazing how the Rethugs are contorting themselves over this issue.
The yeowls about every Democrat hiding their stuff is incredible, since virtually every Democratic politician automatically releases their taxes [without having x-thousand tax dodges either].
Of course some of this tax accounting looks dodgy, it’s baked into the federal tax code [I’ve used some of it myself]. But I doubt that anyone has abused and outright defrauded the IRS, which remember is us, like DJT.
2Remember, what people like him DO NOT FAIRLY PAY in taxes has to be made up by the rest of us…
“Never attribute to evil intent what can be charged off to sheer incompetence and stupidity.”
3RepubAnon @1, And, bingo!, Thom Hartmann just published an article on Daily Kos that dissects in painful detail one of the main strategies pioneered under Saint Ronnie with the impetus and collusion of Jack Welch and his ilk to severely distort the entire American economy: The reinstatement of corporate ‘share buybacks’, which has been a major factor in the decline of the USA.
Fairly long read, but one of the best around, some of you may have suffered some consequences from just these policies [hell, many SWA passengers are still in travel hell today]:
Was the Southwest Airlines Meltdown Caused By the “Great Share-Buyback Scam”?:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/30/2144500/-Was-the-Southwest-Airlines-Meltdown-Caused-By-the-Great-Share-Buyback-Scam?
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4Mike @3, NO! None of this shit is due to “incompetence and stupidity”. They know exactly what they’re doing, and it’s always in their favor after the dust settles.
I’m sick of people saying people like Trump, Musk, et al ad infin. are fools. They aren’t, they are evil corrupt geniuses at what they do, 24/7.
Greg Abbott cut costs in Texas to give us a $27 BILLION surplus – to heck with school children, maternal care . . . Maybe Musk thought he could do the same.
5Musk has always been full of crap. All of the racial discrimination
6lawsuits coming out of his Tesla plants . . . .Mostly liberals who care about the environment owning the cars. He is a sociopath who fooled a whole lot of people.
@angela #6
I know only one Tesla owner personally. His “joke” is:
Q: How do you know if someone owns a Tesla?
A: Oh, they’ll TELL you!
A liberal but definitely an Alpha Male A-type as well. He drove me crazy but has moved out of the area.
7Sandridge was not kidding about there being a lot of ketchup-covered steak and Big Macs there. The Attachment E zip file is 1.2 Gbytes, and unzips to 1.3 Gbytes. The tax forms were filled out by Trump or one of his sycophantic leeches, so the level of truth in them is probably low. However, I’d bet a six pack of Lone Star that as soon as the Repubs take over the House, they will try to close the barn door and block acccess to the documents. [I also suspect Alfredo at the Dairy Queen is celebrating this slightly belated Christmas gift, sharpening his metaphorical financial analysis knives.]
The Joint Committee on Taxation report is only 40 pages long, however, so the summary is readable. Same for the House Ways and Means Committee’s final report; it’s 29 pages. So grab those two at least from the site Sandridge linked.
Sandridge, there’s a strange malformed file in there: ‘~$rm 1040 2015-1.pdf’. Looks like someone tried to delete something, or had a script hiccup in uploading. Still, “rm” is a command that makes me suspicious in context.
8I’m pretty sure the intent all along was to destroy Twitter.
Otherwise, Musks other investors and creditors would have stopped him.
They wanted him to do what he’s doing.
9The Surly Professor @8, Yoopers, that is a mighty delectable feast of data.
Alfredo, you, me, and untold tens/hundreds of thousands of others are going to be chowing down for a while.
A case of Shiner Bock says that the effing Rethuglikans ain’t gonna do jack shit, those horses are long gone from the barn.
But we be needing to turn a couple more herds loose, Ratbastard has more manure stashed away all over the world that needs to be converted to beneficial compost.
RE the malformed file you encountered, I didn’t get that anomaly, my dezipped 2015-1 1040 opened right up to my pdf viewer.
One muy irritating thing that I’m noticing is they’ve locked the pages down so you can’t easily copy and paste text out of them [at least from my viewer], a real drawback to actually crunching some numbers, dang.
Anyhow, for 2015, Ratbastard and Malaria already had a huuuge [$31,756,435.00] LOSS showing on Line 37, which is ‘Adjusted Gross Income’!
Don’t y’all wish that you could finagle something like that, before even getting going? Livin’ large while ‘losing’ $32 Million clams for the year.
Let’s chomp down on some tasty chowder.
Lock Them Up! Damnit!
10There’s an old question about how to you make a small fortune in farming? Start with a large fortune. And then there is the question of the farmer who won the lottery, what are you going to do with the money? Keep farming until the money runs out.
11All the best people are leaving as one of them said “I am not the captain I am not going down with the ship.”
12By Melanie Zanona and Lauren Fox, CNN
13Not long after Sunday’s call, a group of nine hardliners – who had outlined their demands to McCarthy last month – put out a new letter saying some of the concessions he announced are insufficient and making clear they’re still not sold on him, though they did say progress is being made.
My comment:
Do you think it’s time for something radical, start polling democrats for votes; secretly of course. Gaetz and company are never going to work with the rest of them as soon as they make a deal they will break it. They must isolate the 9 or this session will be the biggest disaster in the history of Congress.
I’m wondering if Musk is deliberately creating a huge loss in order to not pay taxes for the next fifty years…
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