The awesome Taylor Lorenz reports this on Mastadon. Highly recommend to follow her if you like these updates about what’s going on.

  • @[email protected]
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    402 years ago

    Not that it isn’t fun to laugh at what a boondoggle Twitter X is, but why do you need a permit to change a sign on a building?

    • Echo Dot
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      32 years ago

      Presumably because he (the company) doesn’t actually own the building. So any modifications have to be approved by the building owner.

      Same way you can’t really paint the wall of your rented accommodation. It’s not your property.

    • LaFinlandia
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      2 years ago

      Normal procedure to make sure it’s within legal standards.

    • @[email protected]
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      32 years ago

      On public roads and sidewalks, you need permits and to have submitted a plan showing how much of the footpath/road will be blocked and for how long. You need to show where your bollards and rope or whatnot will be and any necessary signage (like 'pedesdrians keep left’s) that sort of thing.

      Once you get the approval, you can jam up the area with a cherry picker/crane until you’re finished and everything is packed away.

      So anyway, what I’m getting at, is this is the signage company not getting the permits - which they would have charged Twitter/X for and not an Elon oversight - UNLESS Elon decided to park that crane out there himself and to get whoever to pull down the signage.

    • @[email protected]
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      182 years ago

      Need to make sure a qualified contractor does the work, that the sidewalk is roped off, and that other construction on the same road isn’t happening. Pretty typical stuff.

    • @[email protected]
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      752 years ago

      Guessing less about the sign itself and more about the heavy equipment/traffic obstruction involved in getting it down.

          • Saik0
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            62 years ago

            But owners would probably call the police to stop the illegal work from being done to their building. They don’t want the liability. This would be reasonable to be part of an approval process with the building owners as you’d likely need their signature with the city, not just twitters.

          • @[email protected]
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            32 years ago

            Agreed. But the owner of the building would presumably be able to control modifications of his own building.

  • @[email protected]
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    2 years ago

    That man is repeatedly showing the world how stupid he actually is and how little he actually understands about running a company. He has never been in a situation like this where he wasn’t surrounded by a bunch of people playing babysitter and doing all the leg work to try to actually get his shit ideas to work. IIRC I saw somewhere this morning that he hadn’t even figured out what to call tweets and retweets, he really hadn’t thought any further than changing the logo and repeating the same lame idea he had 30 years ago.

    ABAM (All Billionaires Are Morons)

    • @[email protected]
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      42 years ago

      This is actually hilarious. It didn’t occur to me that rebranding should also concern stuff like “tweets”, mostly because I’ve never used twitter, but I’m really looking forward to what he will come up with for those terms.

    • @[email protected]
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      1182 years ago

      Or all billionaires are scum who have written the laws and ensured that the fine for this is no more than an annoyance and removing the sign without a permit was a worthwhile risk and the right call to make.

      • Bipta
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        182 years ago

        This guy gets it.

        I think “all billionaires are scum” is perhaps too harsh, but it’s far closer to the truth than the views of society at large.

          • 001100 010010
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            282 years ago

            I’m pretty sure that future billionaire me seems like a cool guy, I’m totally not biased.

            Eat the rich, except if I become rich, then I’m exempt because I am a honorary proletariat

            /s but seriously tho, if anyone becomes a billionaire, they’ll soon get corrupted by the wealth

            • Dr. Jenkem
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              2 years ago

              I think for most people, they become an asshole on the way to becoming a billionaire. You don’t make that kind of money without exploitation and plundering. The only exception I could think of would be if they inherited the money. And even so, if you inherit that kind of money and don’t give out a good chunk of it, you’re still scum imo.

            • @[email protected]
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              322 years ago

              You don’t become a billionaire without exploiting so many people and then hording those riches to yourself. You’ve already been corrupted by that point.

          • starlinguk
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            282 years ago

            Rowling became a billionaire by writing popular books and selling the movie rights. She’s a scummy person, obviously, but she didn’t become rich by being one.

            • @[email protected]
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              2 years ago

              Yeah you definitely can become a billionaire without being a scummy person, just not trough business. You need to be an artist or athlete.

                • @[email protected]
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                  42 years ago

                  Which means you’re born into a weird sociopathic upbringing. Very fee born into wealth see any issues with it and even then, it tends to be short lived. One of the Johnson and Johnson heirs put out a documentary, but not much after that.

              • @[email protected]
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                42 years ago

                Definitely not going to be a CEO without being a piece of shit. You need that lack of ethics to make it that high.

                • Saik0
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                  12 years ago

                  You can literally start your own company and assign yourself CEO. It’s probably all of a filing fee away. It’s easy to become a C-suite.

            • @[email protected]
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              152 years ago

              As you say, she’s a scummy person, so you have no way of knowing that she only became a billionaire because of the books.

            • themeatbridge
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              32 years ago

              Most of the Harry Potter stories are stolen/copies of either existing young adult novels or existing mythology. There’s very little original material or concepts. All writers borrow from other writers, but Rowling is just barely better than a plagiarist.

    • @[email protected]
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      2 years ago

      IIRC I saw somewhere this morning that he hadn’t even figured out what to call tweets and retweets

      Obviously Tweet -> Xeet 💩

    • godless
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      72 years ago

      ABAM (All Billionaires Are Morons)

      Bill Gates is actually a very smart, and nowadays even pleasant, man.

        • @[email protected]
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          102 years ago

          He is the best billionaire. That may not be a high bar, but it’s something. If Elon Musk decided to retire and cure Malaria like Bill did (or maybe even just get back to space exploration or autonomous driving as he was doing before his Twitter craze, hopefully without fucking other people over?) I wouldn’t mind him as much

          • Em Adespoton
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            22 years ago

            Most of Bill’s philanthropy was due completely to Melinda.

            I’m watching with interest what new things he does now that he’s on his own.

        • exscape
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          212 years ago

          “Nowadays even pleasant” clearly implies he wasn’t always pleasant though.

            • Em Adespoton
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              12 years ago

              You say that, but look at the cadre of billionaires who no longer have anything to gain from being awful… but still are.

              Old habits die hard?

              • @[email protected]
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                12 years ago

                That is a good point. I think most of them are just plain awful people who enjoy causing negatively influencing the world, while others are only awful when it benefits them.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 years ago

          I’ll take a horrible billionaire investing in malaria research over a manchild billionaire obsessed with naming everything X.

      • @[email protected]
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        132 years ago

        You do realise it was Bill Gates who made the creators of the Oxford Astra Zeneca Vaccine make it paid and keep the methods of producing it hidden? Their original plan was to make the methods of production public, so that Governments could set up their own labs to produce more of it and save lives. There were many deaths that could have been prevented if it wasn’t for this terrible human being.

    • @[email protected]
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      62 years ago

      I think we need to read between the lines here.

      I honestly think he’s intentionally driving Twitter into the ground. Thing is he can’t just fire everyone and shut down the servers or he won’t get the tax write-off. He’s burying Twitter in a way that maintains tax status. So in a way that’s smart, but also stupid he spent what he did only out of spite.

      What he’s doing to Twitter is like a jumbo jet pilot that commits suicide by crashing the plane (that’s actually happened). Why do you need to take all those innocent people with you. Just go jump off a building, same end without killing a bunch of innocents.

      Really his destruction of the platform is about control, he has some kind of personal beef with Twitter so he used his power and money to kill the whole thing. He’s taking his bat and ball and going home.

      • Dandroid
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        72 years ago

        Yeets and re-Yeets actually make sense for outgoing messages.

  • @[email protected]
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    272 years ago

    I think I read that they had permission from the city but the landlord themselves didn’t approve it.

    • Granite
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      562 years ago

      I wonder why the landlord who has been stiffed repeatedly wouldn’t sign off. Hmm…

  • @[email protected]
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    532 years ago

    I am genuinely baffled at how anyone still thinks Musk is even remotely competent. There’s absolutely no way he’s running all of these companies by himself.

    • scytale
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      22 years ago

      I’ve seen this story several times now, and it’s probably true. Unfortunately there’s nothing else but the anecdotal story and I wish we had more corroboration from other former employees.

    • @[email protected]
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      22 years ago

      “Again, I cannot stress enough how much of the company culture was oriented around managing this one guy.” I can’t decide between wanting to have a work environment like this for once for the laughs, or not wanting to act in front of him as if he’s a person to be respected. But I guess the collegial cohesion is great in this one, if you only have to tiptoe around a single person and everyone makes fun of it.

    • @[email protected]
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      222 years ago

      Man, I was strangely impressed with Tumblr these days until I scrolled two.posts down and it froze me out because I wasn’t signed in

      • Apathy Tree
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        12 years ago

        Really? It didn’t do that to me. I clicked continue reading and went pretty far down the comments.

        I’ve never even been to tumbler before so I certainly wasn’t signed in :)

      • NaN
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        122 years ago

        Ugh, I hate that. Twitter is worse, but those unclosable popups are a good way to make sure I never create an account on a site. I have no problem with the suggestion, but make it optional.

    • Raltoid
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      2 years ago

      There are multiple stories like that from several people.

      Apparently there were people at Tesla who were effectively employed to get fired when he was in one of his moods.

      And if you read enough of the stories it all comes down to basically a single PA who kept him away from important things. And that person stopped working for him shortly before the public realized what an asshole he is.


      And after learning that, I can’t stop wondering who they work for now… And I want to see a show based on their biography.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

        That’s a great thought. Are there any insane people that recently haven’t been as loud as usual? Which “important” person had lowered thier IM A GENIUS decibel level and no one noticed? That PA could be the reason.

        • Raltoid
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          2 years ago

          It wouldn’t surprise me if Zuckerberg hired them.

          The memes about him have been a lot less derisive, and recently they are semi-positive towards him/meta, people were reasonable in the response to his green screen grilling video and there are jokes about them changing the Threads logo high up on lemmy, etc. And he registered an X logo as trademark to potentially counter Musk.

          But honestly we might never know. I doubt they went to work for someone as self-destructive as Musk.

  • fiat_lux
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    582 years ago

    Can we now start pronouncing X as ‘errrr’ when referring to the company? It would be good not to taint the good name of the letter entirely.

    And it does say ‘er’ on the side of not-his-building.

  • @[email protected]
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    -392 years ago

    I’m sure Musk is personally responsibly those things. I also heard he failed to clean bathrooms in this building.

    I’m getting not liking him, but this blind brainless hate it’s ridiculous.

    • Osayidan
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      192 years ago

      A bad CEO/Company owner trickles down to everything under them in the company. They pass major decisions or budgets (or lack thereof) that work their way down to everything if not immediately then over time. Toilets not getting cleaned probably comes down to people either not getting paid or being fired to avoid having to pay them, resulting in either no custodial staff or insufficient staff. There’s no way to defend him about this.

    • @[email protected]
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      22 years ago

      I genuinely don’t get why people hate-follow these guys. If I don’t like someone I block them and move on. The last thing I want to do is talk about them all day every day with my friends and pat eachother on the back for being so smart ourselves.

    • Square Singer
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      22 years ago

      Well, if he decides on Sunday night that the logo will be changed on Monday morning and he’s not taking no for an answer, that leaves pretty little time and wiggle room for his employees to actually get permissions and stuff in time.

  • @[email protected]
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    -562 years ago

    10 cars were broken into and 5 people were robbed while the police attended this matter. What a great deployment!

    • Kichae
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      642 years ago

      Seems like a good place to remind people that the police do not prevent break-ins, robberies, or muggings. They just show up after-the-fact and do little to nothing to get people’s stuff back.

      • @[email protected]
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        342 years ago

        The only thing you can count on a cop doing after a robbery is trying to convince the victim there’s no point in filing a report.

        Because they know they won’t solve it, and if there’s no report there officially isn’t a case to count against them as unsolved.

  • Marxism-Fennekinism
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    62 years ago

    Surprised he actually got told no.

    No that’s not a joke, I’m genuinely surprised they stopped him because I fully expected him to get away with it.