The Fraud that Is Elon Musk
Open Letter To Elon Musk
Hey Elon, it’s your pal Geoff Schoos or as you know me @gschoos! I trust you’re having the time of your life hanging out at Mar A Lago, picking out cabinet nominees and department heads, and otherwise plotting to destroy our democracy.
Good times.
I’m writing to you that because of your revised Terms of Service, on November 15, I went to my account on the Hellscape X (formerly known as Twitter) to bid goodbye to those with whom I struck up friendships and then deactivate my account.
However, when I got there, I found that you had beat me to it. My account was suspended! Now to be clear, I wasn’t upset at what you and your minions did, just disappointed. It was my account, and you denied me the pleasure of deactivating it.
Actually, and this is a funny story, you did not totally deactivate my account. You suspended it thus preventing me from from deactivating it myself! I can’t post, follow, have no friends or followers, and I can’t kill my own account. And believe me, I really tried!
If this is the level of the techies that you hire, I fear for the future of Space X.
That said, I wanted to tell you why I was leaving. There were two reasons, really. First, there was too much garbage of your platform. Between the neo-Nazis, full blown fascists, insane MAGA trolls, and your own gross misrepresentations and outright lies (more about that below), after each session on my account I felt like I needed a hot shower and a Xanax.
When I joined in 2009, it was a platform where actual communication could take place. A person could get news articles from reputable news accounts they followed. Interactions between users while sometimes chippy, were generally civil.
But then came the Trump Era. Trump, along with the likes of Charlie Kirk, Seb Gorka, Donald Junior, Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, Roger Stone, various fascists and white nationalists, various Proud Boys, etc., used Twitter to instill fear and division by promoting lies and misinformation. Because of this, several Trump sycophants got bounced off Twitter. Shortly after the January 6, 2021, insurrection, so did Trump.
That’s when Twitter had a Civic Integrity policy. However, when you overpaid for Twitter, you evidently canceled that policy, opened the gates of hell, and let all the devils back on the platform.
The financial commentary at the time of your purchase questioned the “genius” move of paying $44 billion for Twitter, $15 billion more than the platform’s true value. In November 2024, according to Fidelity, the platform’s value currently sat at $9.6 billion.
Which raises the question of how well the great “genius” Musk would do without the billions of government contract dollars subsidizing Space X and various tax incentives undergirding Tesla? Perhaps we leave that for another time.
From the time of purchase through to the 2024 presidential election, it all began to make sense. This was a purchase to aid the republicans in wining the presidency. This multipart effort began by bringing the aforementioned devils back to, now, X. Changing X’s algorithm to dump these devil posts on the feeds of more people, many who didn’t want to hear from the reprobates, that beguiled the gullible and nauseated the rest of us.
Oh, toward the end of the 2024 election cycle you posted so often, sometimes several posts each hour, I was wondering if you had a real job.
As time went on people who supported first Biden then Harris, found themselves shadow-banned, blocked, and/or had their accounts tinkered with.
What is entirely hypocritical on your part is that all of this was done under the guise of promoting “free” speech. If X had a tagline, it would have been “free speech for me but not for thee.” Or maybe “Hypocrisy is our brand.”
You allowed the misinformation sources, the bots, the hate mongers, the white nationalists, and – this is where I place you – the fascists free reign. The rest of us had to mind our manners or else.
I must admit having a challenging time minding my manners in these kinds of situations.
Now I’m not going to be dishonest – I gave as good as I got. Nothing offensive or obscene, but I pushed back to the MAGA drivel being posted. I must have sounded hilarious when I would post that I was open to honest meaningful discussion. Sadly, the creeps on X neither had an interest nor the ability to have any discussion, let alone a meaningful one.
It’s when I directly challenged your bull pucky. The dreck you posted often failed to rise to the level of misinformation. I began to wonder if your “genius” rep was a tad overrated.
I even twice reported you to…you… about posts I found contrary to the purported “guidelines.” Maybe I flew too close to the Elon flame, or maybe I just pissed you off. I’ll never know. Nobody had the decency to tell me why I was “suspended” or allow me to appeal.
There were at least two times that I offered to engage in a discussion with you about some the issues you’d raise. For example, you said that Trump had to win the 2024 election or there would no longer be free speech in this country. I offered to discuss the First Amendment and related jurisprudence if for no other reason so you wouldn’t sound like an imbecile.
Let’s be honest, you’re not an imbecile. I mean you’re no constitutional scholar, but you’re not an imbecile. But you posted unimaginably simplistic pap that sounded like brilliance to the MAGA tribe. This is cynicism writ large.
Obviously, you embrace the admonition that goes “if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” Sadly, you did the latter to persuade low information people.
You might not know what you’re talking about in the legal and constitutional spaces, but because of your aura others think you do. You wanted Trump to win, and you didn’t care if you disrespected those who trusted you.
Honestly, I don’t give a rip as I was out of there anyway. But for your noble high-minded pronouncements about free speech, it turns out that you’re a spoiled jerk with thin skin. Too bad, so sad.
I mean, you’re the champion of free speech, a modern day Alexander Mikiljon. If you don’t know who that was, look it up. If I have to do everything, I’m going to start charging you.
You rail against “legacy” media, calling them liars. You’ve even hinted at buying MSNBC, which I think is nothing more than a ruse. But maybe you could buy Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. After going down to Mar A Lago to bend the knee and kiss the ring, it’s clear they can be bought cheap.
And you champion “citizen journalism” as though anyone with a smart phone and an opinion is at least as authoritative as someone who graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism. Based on what you’ve said, anyone who’s out of work with an interest in some topic could be the equal of Bob Woodward.
Maybe some kid who read one book about physics and another kid who read an economics book are somehow the equal to your professors at the University of Pennsylvania. Perhaps you can start a companion group called “citizen professors.” The logic seems consistent.
However, it’s the generalized free speech that gets to me. I exercised my free speech, and I would assert it was non-offensive speech. But I can’t prove it. My posts are unavailable because of the suspension. As a result, even if I was informed of what offense I allegedly committed, I would’ve been unable to rebut the accusations.
Pretty petty for a free speech champion.
As it turns, I do have limited, public access to your platform. You clowns shut and locked the front door while leaving the back door wide open! What is it I said about your techies? Hmmm….
I’m limited to viewing only a few posts each day, so on November 26 I used my limited access to access your account. I even took a couple of screenshots of posts that I found moderately interesting.
The first post regards you responding to a poster telling him that the legacy media lies about what people understand so well. Seriously, I know you’re a guy with a big brain and I’m just a guy with multiple degrees, but how does that work, exactly? Why would the media lie about what could be termed common knowledge?
Evidently you caught yourself and built an off ramp. The legacy media lies about everything!
You were working overtime to shovel that bull pucky.
The second was a post from Senator Marsha Blackburn complaining about Facebook trying to silence her because she was going to reveal information about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring. She went on to challenge @meta, Big Tech and other media for not reporting Epstein’s scheme.
My first response was did she know about the numerous photos of Epstein and Donald Trump? Some of the pics taken at events where young girls were plentiful? These photos have been in the public sphere for years!
Well, nobody ever accused Marsha of being the brightest light on any Christmas tree.
Not to be judgmental but if she is hurling incriminations maybe someone should tell her that she shouldn’t expose someone on her team to collateral scrutiny.
But I’m not on her team so I’m good with her efforts!
And what did you respond? “Fortunately, X believes in free speech.” What unmitigated horse hockey.
Finally, there was this report from the 11/27 Meidas + quoting one of your posts:
“Emperor Elon Musk, who bought a president, posted on his toxic cesspool today about Alexander Vindman, who testified against Trump in the first impeachment: ‘Vindman is on the payroll of Ukrainian oligarchs and has committed treason against the United States, for which he will pay the appropriate penalty.’ Treason is punishable by death.”
I guess this is the kind of “citizen journalism” that you espouse: wild, unsourced, libelous words. If I were Congressman-elect Vindman, I’d seriously consider a defamation action against you. But since Sullivan et al, he’s a public figure so he likely can’t sue, not that you’d care. You’ve more money than Croesus so you can bury any action brought against you.
That makes you a low-life wannabe thug with a bank account.
Then there was one post I saw that while not from your page, neither was it from a “citizen journalist.” Or was it? It went,
“Elon Musk sounds like a cheap cologne you’d buy at Walgreens when you were 15.”
Sounds about right.
Believe it or not, that was one of the least offensive posts I saw. I did copy others, one a picture of your face with one-half human and the other half robotic. Clearly there were others including two “Fuck Trump” posts that you allowed to be posted.
I may have, no I did share that opinion over the past nine years, but I never posted exactly what I was thinking.
But I do have a serious question: if I paid the $8/month for a blue checkmark and forked over more money for your ancillary services, could you then lift my suspension? If you say “yes,” and I decline to rejoin, that will reveal the character of each of us. Wanna play?
Nope Elon, no question about it. You’re a fraud. You weaponized an overpaid for, underwater social media platform in service of your primary ambition: the acquisition of power. All this free speech guff was no more than smoke and mirrors for the rubes.
As you ride high over the coming weeks and months remember to enjoy that ride. As you and Vivek, and now Marjorie Taylor Greene (talk about value subtracted) find “efficiencies” in reforming government, I can’t wait to see your face when you bump into one of the few immovable objects in the country: the American political establishment.
Before you start, maybe you should pick up Robert Michels’ book, Political Parties,” and see what he says about the “Iron Law of Oligarchy.”
I have two basic rules of life: rule one is that things exist the way they do because people in power want them that way; and rule two is, if any questions refer to rule one.
In a multi-trillion dollar government, one that multiplies trillions more in economic activity throughout the private sector, and all the various programs that government supports with its expenditures, your comparatively paltry $200-300 billion isn’t likely to impress anyone.
Look, change is hard – very hard. Aside from that simple fact, you fall into the same trap as your new Trumpy bromance. You both are the unquestioned power centers in your organizations. What you say, goes. You were even able to discharge 80% of your social media’s workforce within the first month of acquiring Twitter without so much as a by your leave.
You can get away with this because there are no countervailing power centers at X or Space X, largely because you pay them! In the executive branch of our government, there are multiple formal and informal (h/t to Max Weber) centers of power. You can try to reform the government, but $2 trillion worth?
C’mon man…I refer you to The Grace Commission. Aside the fact that their underlying assumptions were proved wrong, it never was implemented. But at least “drain the swamp” got its first political test drive.
Also, I can’t wait when Trump stabs you, in the front or back makes no difference. He does it to everyone. You’ll see it when you either outlive your usefulness or you stand too close and block his light.
I said there was a second reason for departing from the cesspool known as X. As mentioned earlier, it was your terms of service agreement, or more accurately your revision of the TOS that was implemented on November 15.
Terms of Service are the ubiquitous and sometimes the insidious prices we pay to navigate in this modern age. For instance, I couldn’t type or post this letter without agreeing to multiple TOSs, so I pay this “price.”
A TOS is essential to define the relationship between the provider and the receiver of services. Normally, we could expect a TOS to define the responsibilities of the parties, dispute resolution procedures, manner of amendments and the like. For the most part, it’s pretty banal stuff.
But on November 15, you upped the ante. In your TOS revision, you included a provision that allowed you and your crack staff to use any of our posts for AI “training.” This obviously begs the question as to why a staff that should be focused on ensuring that this hellscape platform runs smoothly (and so far, not providing world class services) would have use for any AI applications?
It couldn’t be for any diagnostic applications for the platform. You wouldn’t need to co-op our posts for that “training.” And unless you’re cross training X staff to interface with Tesla staff to figure out how to make a safe driverless car, even then it’s hard to see the efficacy of such “training.”
Put it more clearly, you want all the past and present X users to serve as techie lab rats.
No matter, I don’t care. Nor do I care if you ever read this letter. I will post this letter on my personal blog and on several other platforms, thereby placing you on constructive, if not actual notice. To wit:
If Elon Musk, in his individual or official corporate capacity, his staff, successors, or assigns appropriates my name, images, and/or words from anything I may have posted on Twitter or its successor company X, or any future iteration of the internet platform X, I will hold Elon Musk and his company, successors, or assigns liable in his/their individual and official capacities for misappropriation, invasion of privacy, and any other civil action derivative from any misappropriation of my name, images, and words, while maintaining any other legal option that I may have in law and equity.
And if you or your crack legal staff (as you know, Giuliani needs a job) argues that by agreeing to the TOS the user agrees to relinquish ownership of their words to X, maybe you should look up “adhesion clause.”
You’re on notice Elon. I urge anyone who has posted on Twitter or X before or after November 15, 2024, to post a similar notice on X or any other commonly used platform.
It’s you and your ilk who are the real dangers to our democracy and the rule of law. You and the other oligarchs believe you can do anything with impunity, believing that no law, no regulation, no restriction of any sort can impose any meaningful sanctions against you.
You and your financial contemporaries behave like Midaevil lords, treating the rest of us as vassals. You view King Donald as a modern-day King John awaiting his own Runnymede comeuppance when you force a list of demands on him.
The analogy falls apart where the Magna Carta, a first step toward equal treatment of all, does not conform in any way, shape, or manner to the list of demands you’ll present to benefit your personal fortune(s) at the expense of the rest of us.
Rest assured, we see you for what you are, the proverbial Emperor with no clothes. And it’s an ugly sight. And when those you fooled with your “brilliance” and bafflement finally see you, they will join the rest of us.
As long as our country is even a semblance of a democracy, keep in mind this one basic fact: you may have the money, but we have the numbers. And when people see you and your confederates for what you truly are, along with the stooges in public office doing your bidding, the people will wash you away, relegating you as a historical footnote.
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