I made a GIF of this. Check it out here.

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I just read With outburst, Musk puts X’s survival in the balance (here).

His interview was widely reported mostly because of his liberal use of the word “fuck.”

Some publications spelled out the word while others, like The New York Times in Elon Musk Uses a Crude Insult to Slam Advertisers for Pulling Back From X used “expletive” as shown above.

It occurred to me that this gives Musk an excuse, albeit a lame excuse, for selling X and blaming it not on himself but on advertisers. He might find this a face-saving way to get out. X is the best social media platform of its kind and very useful as a way to communicate with millions of people. Threads can’t compete because you have to use it with a cellphone whereas you can use X on both a cellphone and an iPad or laptop. Whoever buys it can go back to calling it Twitter, or if Musk doesn’t allow them to do this they can call it anything, even Z. Articles would then refer to it as Z formerly known as X formerly known as Twitter.

Below is what I wrote on Nov. 18th. It now appears that I was jumping to the conclusion that there was no way Musk would sell X.

It’s wishful thinking to hope that someone will buy X from Elon Musk, so those who find it useful have to learn to live with it being a platform for hate.

Elon Musk is again making the news for things he does some of which are directly related to what, to be very generous, arise from quirks in his personality. Who am I besides a retired therapist with 40 years of experience to say he’s a malignant narcissist? He’s in the news today:

Yesterday I spent a lot of time looking at X because I was writing about Jenna Ellis and using what she posted on X and the replies to her posts as the basis for my blog. 

X didn’t go under after Musk turned it into a soapbox for hate becase there was no alternative that came anywhere near close to being an effective subsitute. The social media communication tool created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams was just too good to disappear. 

Some examples of how I use X:

This morning I was watching the Katie Phang show and in a discussion about Nikki Haley vs. Donald Trump she said either of them becoming president would represent a different form of torture. I disagreed with her and decided to take a stab and telling her something that she might read so I posted this on her X page:

Yesterday I posted a reply to something one of my favorite columnists, Chuancey DeVega of Salon posted on his X page. I’ve done this about a dozen times with him before and each time he has “liked” my post. This shows that he read it.

If you look closely at the image above you’ll see that DeVega has made over 85 thousand posts. Many of them are reposts from others. 

I’ve posted what used to be called tweets to other “name” writers (defined as anyone with a Wikipedia page), Jennifer Senior, for example, and they’ve also liked my post.

For me this is a way beyond just posting a comment to an article someone writes on an website. It is a way of, sorry for the worn out term, engagement.

While some major advertisers are expressing their objections to what Musk is doing by at least pausing their advertising there I haven’t seen any news stories about a major poster on X refusing to post there. The last person who made the news for doing this was Donald Trump after his account was reinstated by Musk. His last post there was on August 23, 2024:

Instead Trump started his own rip-off platform, Truth Social. Even so, he has many surrogates posting on X. For example:

Not only that, but someone who may or may not be officially connected with Trump himself (though it says they have no affiliation) is posting what seems to be all of his Truth Social posts:

Why despite the reprehensible Elon Musk might you want to look at X and even post or reply to posts there?

This is because just about anyone in the news who you can think of posts on X including President Biden and Taylor Swift.

X has the distinction of being very good because of what Jack Dorsey and his crew created and also very bad because of what Elon Musk turned it into, not due to his techinical genius, but because of his malevolent personality.

It would be a humilation for Musk to give up on X and sell it. He’s a mega-billionaire who doesn’t need the money. The only thing I can think of that would tempt him to sell is to find a facesaving way to unload it, and he’d only do this if he became bored with it. I have my doubts this would happen. He’s addicted to it the way Trump is addicted to Truth Social.

X has become his newsmaking playtoy and way to poke the woke world with what he sees as a sharp stick. He is in his own way as much of a sadist and narcissist as Donald Trump and like Trump controls a social media platform.

 According to Forbes Musk is the richest person in the world today, with a net worth of $214.8 billion, according to Forbes. He owns about 21% of Tesla, 74% of Twitter and 9.1% of Boring Company. 

The only way I envsion Musk selling X is for someone, or a group, to make him an offer it would be patently ridiculous to refuse, perhaps $100 billion. I can’t see him selling to anyone with that kind of money who he thinks is “woke” so that rules out Jeff Bezos. Rupert Mudoch just isn’t weathy enough. He’s worth a “mere” 20 billion.

Alas, Musk is having too much fun with X so I doubt he’ll get bored with it in the foreseeable future. 

This leaves those of us who find it useful with having to begrudgingly accept that it is run by Elon Musk.

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Read all Stressline blogs here.

Glutten for punishment? Read the blogs I posted on Habrown.org

If you’re a masochist you can read the 1700+ stories I posted on Daily Kos before I was banned. This may seem like a lot but I generally posted each day there for several years.