- Elon Musk purchased shares of Twitter after unsuccessfully petitioning the CEO to remove a Twitter account tracking his private jet.
- Musk’s personal gripes played a key role in his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.
- Musk banned the account after promising not to, highlighting his prioritization of getting his way over free speech.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/ttBv9
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A particular beef involving a college student tracking his private jet was the catalyst for the billionaire purchasing shares of Twitter, commencing his takeover of the social media platform, according to a new book about the ordeal.
“Musk had also unsuccessfully petitioned Agrawal [CEO of Twitter at the time] to remove a Twitter account that was tracking his private plane,” says an excerpt from Battle for the Bird, a new book on Musk’s takeover, published by Bloomberg on Thursday.
The book seems to confirm that Musk’s personal gripes played a key role in his $44 billion acquisition of the social media platform.
Musk touts “free speech” as the main reason he bought Twitter, but the billionaire was actively trying to silence a college student he had a feud with before he was CEO.
The person behind the account, Jack Sweeney, is a college student who’s now famous for tracking the private jets of Musk and Taylor Swift.
Musk was heavily focused on promoting right-wing speech when he bought Twitter, which was lacking under Jack Dorsey’s management, but also on settling his internet beef.
The original article contains 405 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 55%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
What a snowflake
I mean, I didn’t think it needed an /s because does anyone take the term “visionary” seriously anymore?
Incidentally… https://mastodon.social/@elonjet is still going strong.
Holy shit this dude fucking lives on his plane. Like I feel guilty about the 2-3x per year I fly to see family but this fucker has flown that far already in the past week. Why? Does he not know how to do a video call?
Ugh, I feel the same. I know the top 1% of the world or whatever emits tons and tons more CO2 per year than the other 99%, but I didn’t know it was this bad. That plane is flying multiple times per day. Sure Musk is probably not in it all the time, but that doesn’t matter.
Private jets should be banned all together, let’s see how quickly they suddenly find out the internet exists.
Things like this are perfect reminders that we don’t have to change every person on the planet, just eliminate the erronneous emissions.
All air travel should have fuel and emissions tax. Normalize them to commercial airliners. That’ll incentivize larger, more efficient plane designs. It’ll also punish private jets. Also charge a fee for any planes not at least X% full. Also give discounts and waive fees for planes over X size that service under-served airports.
A bunch of regulations like this should make private planes prohibitively expensive, like 10-20x their current cost. But that’s a lot of legislation that huge corporations and billionaires would oppose.
People with private jets often charter them out when they’re not using them. The best place for an airplane is in the air. Only bad things happen when you let it sit around on the ground all the time. It’s not much different than commercial planes that spend most of their time in the air.
Sure, a private jet will have more emissions than an Airbus, but it’s a marginal increase. It’s not like rich people with their planes are producing a million times more pollution that wouldn’t exist if they didn’t have a private jet. They’re still going to fly, at least for longer trips.
It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole with this line of reasoning. Who else is using less efficient aircraft or taking unnecessary flights? Are all those police helicopter flights necessary? What about people flying to go party on an island somewhere versus some more noble purpose? Or airlines with a half empty flight? Meanwhile, it’s the oil companies producing the vast majority of carbon emissions while we squabble over travel itineraries and choice of aircraft.
You shouldn’t really feel guilty about anything like that. Asking hundreds of millions to billions of people to drastically change their lives and practice austerity is insane while billionaires do whatever they want and corporations push legislation that makes it harder to conserve. Our meager efforts won’t matter much if the biggest offenders go pollute wantonly.
Individual’s biggest efforts are pushing for legislation and politicians who will curb corporate abuses. Everything is a drop in a bucket that’s already overflowing.
There’s a limit to what is ethical when it comes to the acceptance of one’s own carbon footprint. It’s OK to use plastic bottles every now and then, but fuck flying 3 times a year. This is part of the problem, and something that we’ll need to learn to live without eventually.
Others close to him use the jet as well, but I imagine it’s still heavily Elon
Also, many of the flights are empty. The flight will be moved so it’s in position if needed, or it will drop him off and fly elsewhere.
Dude takes a 22 minute flight. My god how small do you need to feel to boost your ego to do that instead of video.
I don’t get this. What is the point? Why would anyone care where a billionaire is flying to and from? Just for kicks?
this is so astoundingly petty, it might just be true.
although i doubt that’s the only reason he bought it, i wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a major factor that got him serious about buying it.
If that’s true, Saudi Arabia probably wouldn’t have given him $22B of their dollars with no expectation of a Return on Investment. They have no horse in the “does Elon look foolish?” race.
Saudis? No interest in control over what was THE app to get world updates and news?
Twitter is really big in SA so their king wanting extra controll of it makes sense.
Butchering a reporter in Istanbul worked for them but the backlash was likely a bit of an embarrassment to these monsters.
Kashodi was murdered over countering SA bots. Easier to have a controlling interest in the platform than to fight dissidents with dirty assassin tricks. Allah forbid granting some freedom to the press.
