Enough Musk Spam

Gonna bet they're fired now.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1879802284546408610

Elon has been going around running his mouth about being one of the world's top Path of Exile 2 players. Then he was dumb enough to stream his gameplay to "show off his skills" and everyone saw that he doesn't even understand the basic mechanics of the game, strongly suggesting that he has been paying someone to level up his character for him.

Just one more example of Elon Musk taking credit for someone else's work.

“I would be surprised if the new administration completely dropped the case,” says Park. “It’s possible that the new administration could settle the case for a nominal sum, but that would be problematic because it would show favoritism and send that important SEC rules can be deliberately violated without sanction.”

I sure hope this is correct.

“He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” Bannon added. “Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it; I’m not prepared to tolerate it anymore.”

At the heart of the recent clash between Elon Musk and Steve Bannon is the immigration question, and specifically the H-1B visas for skilled immigrants working in “specialty occupations,” which Musk has said he supports. But for Bannon, the issue is emblematic of a bigger problem in Musk’s thinking.

“This thing of the H-1B visas, it’s about the entire immigration system is gamed by the tech overlords, they use it to their advantage, the people are furious,” Bannon said, noting that “76 percent of engineers working in Silicon Valley are non-Americans.”

“No blacks or Hispanics have any of these jobs or any access to these jobs,” Bannon said.

“Peter Thiel, David Sachs, Elon Musk, are all white South Africans,” Bannon observed. “He should go back to South Africa. Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?”

Archive

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/22559111

The Government's counter-extremism unit has been assessing the risk posed to Britain by tweets shared by Elon Musk in recent weeks, the Mirror understands.

The tech billionaire has been using his platform X/Twitter to launch a barrage of attacks on the Labour government over the grooming gangs scandal. It comes as extremism experts warn that the toxicity of social media could once again trigger violence on our streets.

The Mirror understands the Home Office has stepped up extra monitoring to assess content and the reach of what is being shared on social media site X, especially in relation to accounts with large followings - including Mr Musk's. The counterterrorism unit has been involved in content analysis and wider risk assessment.

...

It is understood monitoring has been ramped up following Mr Musk’s vile attacks on safeguarding minister Jess Phillips. Ms Phillips has admitted Mr Musk - a key aide to Donald Trump - was "endangering" her after labelling her a "rape genocide apologist" and calling for her to be jailed. She has reportedly had close protection officers assigned to her and has been advised not to go out in public alone following the increased threats to her safety.

...

Fears over Mr Musk’s interference in UK politics increased on Thursday after reports emerged that he was looking at ways to replace Keir Starmer as Prime Minister. Sources told the Financial Times Mr Musk believes that “western civilisation itself is threatened” and is examining how he can destabilise the Labour government beyond his aggressive X posts.

Joe Mulhall, director of research at campaign group Hope not hate, said “clearly this is naked foreign interference” and that Mr Musk “comfortably sits within any definition of an extremist”. He told the Mirror: “He is an international extremist and if he wasn't a billionaire and he wasn't close to the Trump administration, I imagine, probably wouldn't even be allowed into the UK at the moment.

Shocker.

This comment on Reddit said it best

From Riosin: It is so obvious he doesn't play the game it's insane. For those not familiar with POE2. This feels like a person is supposed to be rank 10 best racer / car driver and when he is supposed to showcase his skills he doesn't know how to open the car door. He can not start the car up. He doesn't know what e-brake does or what paddles are for so he just sits there, pretending to turn the car wheel while making engine noises.

Jackson changed the letters on the marquee to spell out: “Forever neighbours, never neighbors.” The message — highlighting the difference in the way Canadians and Americans spell certain words — was a swipe at U.S. president-elect Donald Trump’s repeated suggestion that Canada could become the 51st state.

Within hours, an image of the new sign posted to the strip club’s X account was flagged as potentially hateful content, resulting in the account, @ThePenthouse604, being suspended that night.

Billionaire Trump associate Elon Musk’s latest disinformation campaign is targeting the U.K. government, which Musk appears to believe is not sufficiently anti-immigrant. Musk, who has already shaped the incoming Trump administration’s economic policy by proposing cuts to government spending and tech-oriented privatization of services, signifies a “new era” in American politics, says our guest Quinn Slobodian, who is chronicling right-wing tech billionaires’ accelerating attempts to mold the world according to their “destructive” and “nihilist” beliefs. In a far-reaching conversation, Slobodian touches on Musk’s clear admiration of authoritarian strongmen, market deregulation and white supremacist rhetoric.

...

For more, we spend the rest of the hour with a person who’s documented the power of Big Tech billionaires and the new techs, specifically, among others, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at Boston University. His latest book is Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. He’s written several pieces for The New Statesman on Elon Musk, including one headlined “Elon Musk’s death drive.” Slobodian also recently contributed to The New York Review of Books running symposium about the reelection of Donald Trump, “The Return of Trump—II.”

...

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, it’s a pretty extraordinary situation to find ourselves in, right? I mean, if you think back to 2017, there was a lot of concern and attention to the efforts of Steve Bannon to create a kind of transatlantic coalition of far-right actors and parties. Imagine now here we are only a few years later, and there’s a Bannon-like figure but who also happens to be the wealthiest man in the world, overseeing some of the most profitable companies in the planet, who is leading that sort of effort to create a transatlantic coalition. So, the stakes are much, much higher. They are being dealt with with perhaps even less kind of care than someone like Bannon, which is an extraordinary thing to say. But Musk, I think, has entered this field of politics as a kind of scaled-up version of his video game play, with no real thought to the kind of consequences of the disruptive effects that he’s creating, from here to Britain to Germany and beyond.

...

And I think that, you know, the kind of — the horizon of what the kind of politics in real life that someone like Musk is aiming at is broadcast by him frequently on his own Twitter account. Most recently, for example, he celebrated Nayib Bukele, the leader in El Salvador, as having done something that has happened in El Salvador and will happen and must happen in the United States, which, in El Salvador, has been to imprison 2% of the adult population as an absolutely draconian way of cracking down on crime. So, this vision of sort of authoritarian strongman on politics, sort of gloves-off mass incarceration crackdowns, on the one hand, and then a deregulatory kind of unleashing of the free market, on the other hand, is — produced this kind of curious combination of, on the one hand, Elon Musk posting Milton Friedman memes all the time, on the other hand, scaremongering about the, quote-unquote, “genocidal rape tactics” of nonwhite immigrants in the U.K. So, he’s produced this sort of surreal effect, I think, of sort of the strong state and the free market turning the sort of Thatcherist vision, grafting it onto all kinds of online aesthetics and kind of video game dynamics in ways that have really, I think, blindsided, for good reason, sort of mainstream, normal politicians, like Olaf Scholz, Keir Starmer, Biden-Harris, who don’t know how to deal with this kind of chaotic energy, which, unfortunately, has a huge amount of legitimacy behind it, not only his multimillion-dollar — or, multimillion number of followers on social media.

...

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you something. I’m looking at a piece in the Financial Times. “Elon Musk lived in apartheid South Africa until he was 17. David Sacks, the venture capitalist who has become a fundraiser for Donald Trump and a troll [of] Ukraine, left aged five, and grew up in a South African diaspora family in Tennessee. Peter Thiel spent years of childhood in South Africa and Namibia, where his father was involved in uranium mining as part of the apartheid regime’s clandestine drive to acquire nuclear weapons. And Paul Furber, an obscure South African software developer and tech journalist living near Johannesburg, has been identified by two teams of forensic linguists as the originator of the QAnon conspiracy, which helped shape Trump’s Maga movement. (Furber denies being ‘Q’.) In short, four of Maga’s most influential voices are fiftysomething white men with formative experiences in apartheid South Africa.”

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/22379800

Since becoming a major force in American politics, Elon Musk has attacked the UK’s new Labour Government on multiple occasions through his social media platform X (formerly Twitter). He claimed civil war was “imminent” as riots swept across the country this summer. He has signal-boosted one of the riots’ instigators, the currently jailed convicted far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (known as ‘Tommy Robinson’). And he is now reportedly considering donating up to a $100 million to Reform UK Leader and MP Nigel Farage.

This all prompts the question: why does Musk suddenly care about what’s happening in Britain?

In my new book, published by Byline Books, Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy Democracy From Within, I explain Musk’s pivotal role in the network behind Trump’s return and the forming of a new ‘techno-utopian fascism’ that merges corporate tech power with the state.

Musk and X are part of a broader network of billionaire oligarchs with questionable views on race, tech platforms, and far-right groups that are fed up with democracy as we know it.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is an integral player in this network. And this has significant implications that the Western national security establishment ignores at everyone’s peril.

a 2022, credible reporting has suggested that Musk has engaged in multiple, direct, and secretive communications with Putin and other high-ranking Russian officials.

These interactions have encompassed discussions on personal issues, business interests, and geopolitics. At one point, Putin reportedly personally requested Musk not to activate his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favour to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Musk apparently complied.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Musk has been in regular contact with Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin’s first deputy chief of staff, who holds enormous sway over the Kremlin’s war effort and control of Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.

...

To undermine the US-centric world order, Dugin advocated fostering internal discord throughout Western democracies. This implies exploiting social, political, and ethnic divisions, in order to fragment and destabilise democracies from within.

...

The second element involves targeting the UK, due to its role as a vital ally to America. The aim is to diminish Britain’s influence in Europe, and to undermine NATO and other Western alliances in which Britain plays a significant operational and leadership role.

The third element seeks to encourage divisions within the European Union and promote Eurosceptic nationalist movements – usually far-right, nativist movements – that challenge EU integration and liberal democracy.

For Dugin, ‘cultural warfare’ is a key mechanism to undermine liberalism and the ideological integrity of the Western world.

...

Having inserted himself into the 2024 Presidential Elections on behalf of Trump, Elon Musk’s sudden desire to interfere in British politics, by backing Nigel Farage, seems entirely consistent with Dugin’s strategy to destabilise the West through targeting the US, the UK, and Europe.

...

Stoking division, fighting culture wars, spreading disinformation, and sowing confusion through the weaponisation of the far-right are all part of this strategy.

Now Trump’s co-chair of the new US Department of Government Efficiency, Musk’s sudden interest in British politics aligns with Putin’s playbook.

“All I can say is that I’m in touch with him and he is very supportive of my policy positions”, Farage recently told The Times in relation to rumours of Musk donating to Reform. “We both share a friendship with Donald Trump and Trump has said good things about me in front of Musk. We’ve got a good relationship with him.”

He later told GB News: “What I do know is that Elon Musk is very supportive of me and what I’m trying to do, and he thinks that if Reform do well in the UK, we can bring about the same kind of change that he intends to do with Donald Trump in America.”

...

Any financial interest or involvement of Elon Musk with Nigel Farage is likely to signal the scale of what could be coming to the UK in the years ahead. The forces behind Donald Trump’s 2024 victory see this as merely another step in a longer-term strategy to destabilise Western democracies. They will want to urgently exploit the advantage brought about by resurgent Trumpism. Britain will be next in line. Europe is the prize.

And the entire Western world is at stake.

Over the weekend, the Spectator published a pretty compelling argument, saying that Dittman really is not Elon, and instead is just a German dude who lives in Fiji who is a huge Elon fan who just coincidentally sounds an awful lot like Elon.

Here's the deal: Adrian Dittmann is not Elon Musk, and we have concrete evidence.

Original reporting in German: https://archive.is/gWLZL

[W]hat if Elon Musk hadn't written the article himself? What if Welt am Sonntag had not printed a controversial guest article by one of the most powerful people on the planet, but an AI-generated text created in seconds? One that presumably agrees with Musk's views, but whose argumentation may have been cobbled together from millions of freely available bits and pieces about Germany and the AfD on the internet?

If one asks [Musk's] language model Grok to write an opinion piece for a conservative newspaper that shows why only the AfD can save Germany, the program spits out a text that is remarkably similar to Musk's “Welt” article. In tone, argumentation, structure - and in many places literally. Like Musk's op-ed, the AI-generated text begins with the words: “Germany is at a critical point - its future is teetering on the brink of economic and cultural collapse”. This is followed shortly afterwards in both texts by the formulation that has particularly angered many in Germany: the AfD, it says, is the last spark of hope for Germany. Dozens more overlaps follow, some of them verbatim.

Translated with DeepL.com

Speaking to the German weekly Stern, Scholz described the criticisms as nothing new. “You have to stay cool,” he said in the interview. “As Social Democrats, we have long been used to the fact that there are rich media entrepreneurs who do not appreciate social democratic politics – and do not hide their opinions.”

He said he would make no efforts to engage with Musk, who has endorsed the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in next month’s federal elections and will host a live discussion on his social media platform X with its candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel. “I don’t believe in courting Mr Musk’s favour. I’m happy to leave that to others,” he said. “The rule is: don’t feed the troll.”