Wednesday 14 August 2024

Musk is out of control

The hour-long live-streamed love-in between Donald Trump and Elon Musk has become the butt of a lot of jokes on social media. It’s the counterbalance to Biden’s terrible performance in the debate with Trump at the end of June and ought to prompt Republicans to dump Trump, but it won’t. It was essentially a typically whiny Trumpesque rant in response to a series of easy questions from Musk who came across almost as deranged as the former president. It was like listening to the inane private ramblings of two of the world’s richest imbeciles.  The whole thing was crazy.

I don't believe I have ever heard a political 'discussion' that sank to such a depth - and after eight years of Trump that really says something.

The event which took place on Twitter was delayed for 40 minutes at the start. Musk blamed this on a DDS attack (a distributed denial of service attack where a site is bombarded with requests that overwhelm servers) but provided no evidence as the BBC noted. Experts raised doubts since the attack didn’t affect Twitter, just the livestream event.

The funniest explanation for the delay came, as it often does, from Marina Hyde in The Guardian:

"In the UK, we have an expression for benchmark incompetence: we say someone couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery. But a tech boss being unable to organise a tech event on a tech platform feels like a new industry standard: the brewery’s head of piss-ups being unable to launch a piss-up in his brewery."

Trump spoke by video link using his phone but seemed to have developed a lisp, which briefly caused the hashtag #dentures to trend. The Daily Show in the US had a funny segment about the interview:

The United Auto Workers union is taking legal action against them both for suggesting striking workers at a Musk plant should be fired:

Trump is like the opinionated moaner you sometimes meet in the pub after a few pints who knows everything that’s wrong with the country but has no real idea what to do about it and somehow thinks stating and restating the problems will magically resolve everything.  I’m not sure even his own supporters want solutions, they just want to go back to some mysterious past when everything was ‘great’.

Musk is slightly better but hasn't really got it either.

Listening to Trump and his MAGA adherents you would think America is equivalent to some impoverished Central African country where the majority barely survive, living in mud huts and scraping by on a dollar a month. It is among the richest countries on Earth per capita and No 1 in straight GDP terms. Although China is a very close No 2, it needs four times the population to get there.

There is even some debate about how Britain would compare in wealth with US states. Douglas Carswell, who now lives in Mississippi, argues with some justification that citizens of America’s poorest state, are actually richer than we are.

America’s problem, like ours, is inequality. There is a relatively small number of fabulously wealthy people living in a small number of places and the Republicans and Trump want to keep it that way. The crazy thing is that they might do it.

Musk's legal problems went up another gear with The EU's commissioner on digital matters, writing publicly to Musk before the Trump interview warning him about misuse of his platform and that he needs to comply with the EU's Digital Services Act:

Musk didn't do himself any favours by Tweeting this in response:

He presumably thought it was clever to say this is something he wanted to do but wouldn't - get it? He is goading Breton and the EU into action. Twitter International is based in Dublin and has 100 million users in the EU so he may soon be finding out what powers the EU has to fine him or shut Twitter down altogether.

The former SNP First Minister of Scotland is joining the growing ranks of people contemplating legal action against Musk:

Finally, a former vice-president for Twitter Europe between 2012 and 2020 has a piece in The Guardian suggesting that "an arrest warrant for him [Musk] might produce fireworks from his fingertips, but as an international jet-setter it would have the effect of focusing his mind."

We can only hope.

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