I’ve never been a big Twitter fan (or a fan at all), and I deleted my hardly used account shortly after Elon Musk took over. Still, I can’t avoid reading about his serial displays of ineptitude as he continues to do his best to destroy the platform. This article at Above the Law discusses the possibility that he has exposed Twitter to possible defamation actions by celebs like Stephen King and Lebron James by falsely stating that they have paid for or otherwise endorsed his recent move to charge users for blue checkmarks that allegedly verify that the account is the genuine account of the given user. Apparently Musk left the blue checkmarks on the accounts of the aforementioned celebrities, and presumably other celebrities, despite their refusal to pay up. Their account information states “This account is verified because they are subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number.” Neither statement is true, and Twitter knows the statements are untrue.
Whether any of the affected celebrities would bother to sue is an open question, but as with almost everything else about Musk’s Twitter acquisition, this leaves him looking very inept. It makes you think about the nature of human intelligence. It’s a multifaceted thing.
For reasons I can’t quite fathom, Musk is one of the richest people on earth, and he must have had some sort of intelligence, or a certain sort of capability, to get himself there. An obvious parallel is the person who was elected to be president in 2016, who is obviously not a very intelligent person if one were to apply the sort of definition to intelligence that one would utilize in an academic setting.
Still, Trump obviously has a deep seated understanding of a certain type of human nature. He is a born snake oil salesman, and he’s good at it. Before becoming president, he never had to worry about the folks who weren’t suckers, as he stuck to fleecing the gullible, which he did well, and evading the law, which his access to money allowed him to do. He wasn’t intelligent enough, fortunately or unfortunately, to realize that he was exposing himself by entering the political arena. Musk too, has a bit of Trump’s talent, perhaps more in some respects, as he has managed to found a profitable (Trump never really turned a profit on anything) car company even while hyping bullshit like self driving cars and tunnel boring machines that never seem to deliver the goods. We can only hope that he will crash and burn like the genius, as he too presents a clear and present danger to the nation.
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