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Erratic Elon Musk Waves Chainsaw Around While Ranting About Memes and Fort Knox
The limited oversight and rushed nature of this project have allowed xAI to skirt environmental rules, which could impact the surrounding communities. For instance, the company’s on-site methane gas generators currently don’t have permits.
The point is, Elon Musk has been angling to become a beloved poster for a minimum of five years now. Since my brush with this want of his, the man had to buy the entire goddamn website just to win status as a poster of note, only to instantly become one for all the wrong reasons. He bought the spotlight, pointed it at himself, and almost immediately became the consensus pick for the worst user in the site’s history. It had to sting, and now everyone has seen how well he’s handling that experience:
After inflating the myth of Elon Musk, the media has a responsibility to break their dependence on him and tear him down. That doesn’t necessary mean going on the offensive, but simply giving more attention to the many ways Musk feels he’s beyond accountability and above the law. It means digging into his right-wing ideology and the false promises they once praised him for making. But even more, it means never falling for another tech grifter trying to do the same thing and applying that scrutiny to every startup founder and public company CEO in the tech industry. They owe the public nothing less.
Defense lawyers in a civil case surrounding Tesla driver Walter Huang’s fatal 2017 car crash have claimed that Musk’s apparent 2016 statements on Autopilot, and others, could have been deepfaked. And, because the statements may or may not be authentic, the company has argued that Musk shouldn’t be forced to face questions about them.
LONDON/SAN FRANCISCO, April 6 (Reuters) - Tesla Inc assures its millions of electric car owners that their privacy “is and will always be enormously important to us.” The cameras it builds into vehicles to assist driving, it notes on its website, are “designed from the ground up to protect your privacy.”
But between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras, according to interviews by Reuters with nine former employees.
Some of the recordings caught Tesla customers in embarrassing situations. One ex-employee described a video of a man approaching a vehicle completely naked.
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On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?
“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”
One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.
Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.
Musk did not take the news well.
“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer. (Platformer is withholding the engineer’s name in light of the harassment Musk has directed at former Twitter employees.)
Dissatisfied with engineers’ work so far, Musk has instructed employees to track how many times each of his tweets are recommended, according to one current worker.