Elon Musk and Twitter Reach Deal for Sale (Update: WSJ report details Musk’s relationship with Putin) (2 Viewers)

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    SaintForLife

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    Elon Musk struck a deal on Monday to buy Twitter for roughly $44 billion, in a victory by the world’s richest man to take over the influential social network frequented by world leaders, celebrities and cultural trendsetters.

    Twitter agreed to sell itself to Mr. Musk for $54.20 a share, a 38 percent premium over the company’s share price this month before he revealed he was the firm’s single largest shareholder. It would be the largest deal to take a company private — something Mr. Musk has said he will do with Twitter — in at least two decades, according to data compiled by Dealogic.

    “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Mr. Musk said in a statement announcing the deal. “Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”

    The deal, which has been unanimously approved by Twitter’s board, is expected to close this year, subject to a vote of Twitter shareholders and certain regulatory approvals.

    The blockbuster agreement caps what had seemed an improbable attempt by the famously mercurial Mr. Musk, 50, to buy the social media company — and immediately raises questions about what he will do with the platform and how his actions will affect online speech globally.




    If Musk does what he claims he wants to do it will be a big improvement and good for free speech.
     
    Looks like Walmart is joining the "black mail" against Moosk.

    We're constantly optimizing our marketing efforts," they added. "These decisions are made in a dynamic market and could change in the future."

    Walmart added later that it had since found other advertising platforms that work better for the value.

    "We aren’t advertising on X as we’ve found other platforms to better reach our customers," it said Dec. 1.
     
    Me on Yelp: I liked to go to Al’s Sports Pub in Sundays for NFL but now that they’re the home of the local Eagles fan club, I don’t anymore - they’re just too loud and rowdy.

    Elon Musk: Why are you trying to blackmail Al?
     
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    Me on Yelp: I liked to go to Al’s Sports Pub in Sundays for NFL but now that they’re the home of the local Eagles fan club, I don’t anymore - they’re just too loud and rowdy.

    Elon Musk: Why are you trying to blackmail Al?
    Then Al telling the people who don't like the loud and rowdy group to just F off, we don't need your money, then cry foul when they don't come back..
     
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    Musk initiated the Twitter acquisition on April 14th and it concluded on October 22nd. This letter was sent to Twitters major corporate advertisers on May 3rd.

    On May 3, a trio of so-called “advocacacy groups” sent a letter to Twitter’s major corporate advertisers, including image-conscious and regulation-sensitive heavyweights like Coca-Cola and Disney, urging them to pull their business from Twitter if Musk proves unwilling to censor speech on the platform to those organizations’ satisfaction. “Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter will further toxify our information ecosystem and be a direct threat to public safety,” began the missive, distributed under the letterhead of Media Matters for America, Accountable Tech, and UltraViolet, and co-signed by another two dozen groups, including the Women’s March, Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, and NARAL Pro-Choice America. These groups are promising to mobilize their activists, and whatever other resources they might have, to punish companies that will stick by Twitter if it junks its pre-Musk content moderation regime. The pitch was a simple one: Nice store you got there. It would be a shame if someone threw a rock through your window.

    ...Media Matters for America, Accountable Tech, and UltraViolet are all led by former senior Democratic staffers in Congress, the executive branch, and major political campaigns. They all receive funding from liberal foundations that donate widely to Democrats, or from advocacy organizations, like labor unions, that are deeply involved in Democratic Party politics. All three are creatures of the broader Democratic Party apparatus. They are the party’s attack arm.

    ...Media Matters, the David Brock-led bulwark against Fox News, is by far the best known: The organization launched in 2004 with help from the Center for American Progress, Hillary Clinton, and Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager, John Podesta, and apparently received $1 million from George Soros. With over $14.1 million in revenue reported in 2019, according to their latest available 990, Media Matters represents the mainstream face of center-left advocacy. Former Democratic National Committee Chair and Obama Labor Secretary Tom Perez, and former Planned Parenthood chief Cecile Richards, are on the group’s Board of Directors; CEO Angelo Carusone served as “deputy CEO for finance & administration of the 2016 Democratic National Convention.”

    Accountable Tech represents the Democratic Party’s online dark-money operation. Ironically for a group with the word “accountable” in its name, Accountable Tech is a 501(c)(4), meaning it doesn’t have to disclose its donors. No matter: As right-wing “investigative think tank” Capital Research Center discovered, Accountable Tech is one of the Washington, D.C.-registered alternate names of the North Fund, an advocacy group that received $19.3 million in 2020 from something called the Sixteen Thirty Fund—an outfit which The Atlantic described as the “indisputable heavyweight of Democratic dark money.” Sixteen Thirty is in turn one of several opaque and highly capitalized center-left donor organizations under the management of a nonprofit-focused consulting firm called Arabella Advisors. The North Fund paid Arabella $942,000 in fees in 2020, according to that year’s 990. Got that? Clearly “Accountable Tech” is very dedicated to accountability, as are the people who pay its bills.

    The co-founder and public face of Accountable Tech is Jesse Lehrich, who was the foreign policy spokesperson for Hillary Clinton’s defeated 2016 presidential campaign. In July of 2017, Lehrich acknowledged to Business Insider that while working for Clinton, he had “sound[ed] the alarm on these Kremlin connections” tying Moscow to the former secretary of state’s Republican opponent, “and we knew more shoes would drop.” In reality, the alleged links between Donald Trump and Russia that Lehrich peddled to the media turned out to either be trivial or false.

    Since Lehrich’s new organization became operational in mid-2020, a majority of the emails it has sent out have been aimed at one company in particular, according to the Archive of Political Emails—Facebook, with subject lines like “26% stock drop for Facebook’s birthday,” and “Congress must investigate Facebook.” Evidently, the reported $400 million that Mark Zuckerberg shelled out to Democratic Party-supported election-related causes, like targeted get-out-the-vote “voter education” and “fair balloting,” was not enough to erase the company’s refusal to kick Trump off the site during the election—which in turn recalled the company’s original sin of allowing itself to be used as a conduit by Vladimir Putin, a being of godlike power, when he mesmerized helpless and stupid American voters into electing Trump in 2016. Whatever happened, these folks argue, Trumpian fascism was clearly the direct result of an unpoliced Facebook, and it is up to someone, preferably Democratic officeholders themselves, to do the policing now.

    UltraViolet, the third member of the Let’s Break Elon’s Windows gang, is funded through groups like the American Federation of Teachers and the Libra Foundation, the donor organization for a billionaire member of the left-wing Pritzker family. UltraViolet is unique in the staid world of NGOs for sharing a name with an Andy Warhol superstar (given name: Isabelle Collin Dufresne). The group was #MeToo before #MeToo existed, getting the sneaker company Reebok to drop the rapper Rick Ross as a pitchman in 2013 over his purported support of “rape culture,” and lobbying the next year for TBS to cancel CeeLo Green’s show over his alleged misogyny.

    But the foundation does more than target successful Black musicians. The height of the hallucinatory Brett Kavanaugh sexual assault uproar saw UltraViolet-trained activists bracing then-Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., in a Capitol Hill elevator, manufacturing an instantly viral moment amid one of the most unhinged political episodes of the entire Trump era. In fact, the group had trained over 300 volunteers to walk the halls of the Senate office buildings and confront whatever lawmakers they came across, a tactic the group then openly bragged about. UltraViolet is of course founded and led by someone with a career in professional Democratic politics, in this case by the former head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ nonprofit arm, Shaunna Thomas.

    The anti-Musk triad forms a kind of unity: One leg is well-known and established, another is a recent creation of the party’s dark-money infrastructure, and the third practices a watered-down, establishment-blessed variation on direct action, specializing in guerilla tantruming tactics to get business and lawmakers to go along with whatever it is they want. They are all, in some sense, effective at what they do. Media Matters and UltraViolet have launched campaigns that got people fired and starved Fox News of corporate advertising money; Accountable Tech helped amplify Facebook “whistleblower” Frances Haugen’s well-plotted campaign against her former employer.

    What really unites these organizations isn’t an ideology or a common donor list or a shared agenda or the prominent place of the Democratic Party in the resumes of their leadership. What binds them is a project to expand the partisan battleground until nothing and no one is exempt from the end-times struggle they might sincerely believe themselves to be waging—not Elon Musk, not Coca-Cola, not Rick Ross. And not you, either.

     
    That's not blackmail. In fact, I think framing it as blackmail is quite stupid - and I'm not sure if Musk believes it's blackmail or is just using that take as rhetoric, it's not clear. I hope you don't actually believe that it's blackmail . . . because it's just plain inaccurate, at like a ninth-grade level.

    Fundamentally, to blackmail someone involves a threat of some kind in order to receive a benefit from the victim that the blackmailer wants. A brand deciding that it will no longer place advertising on X because it has determined that there is brand risk there due to poor content moderation on the site and the site's owner posting (for what appears to be purely for his own fun or ego gratification) controversial comments isn't blackmail. They're not demanding a benefit from Musk - they don't have some deep need to advertise on X. It's simply a brand-association determination and it's entirely logical and within what is clearly ordinary business prerogative.

    Even before last month, advertising on X was below half of total placement at the time Musk bought it - and Twitter always had problems working ads into the site, monetization was a struggle. For these brands to pull away from X isn't a big deal for them - they aren't yearning to get back on X, especially not now. It was never a big part of their ad spend.

    That isn't blackmail - calling it blackmail is stupid . . . it's whining on a false premise.
    Do you think that the ADL doesn't try to extract something from the people or groups they accuse of being antisemitic?

    When Greenblatt is asked if he was looking for a role at Twitter or a donation then he claims the question the reporter asked him was antisemitic. Are you kidding me? It's similar to the Democrat playbook of constantly accusing people of being racists, white supremacist or misogynists.





     
    Musk initiated the Twitter acquisition on April 14th and it concluded on October 22nd. This letter was sent to Twitters major corporate advertisers on May 3rd.

    On May 3, a trio of so-called “advocacacy groups” sent a letter to Twitter’s major corporate advertisers, including image-conscious and regulation-sensitive heavyweights like Coca-Cola and Disney, urging them to pull their business from Twitter if Musk proves unwilling to censor speech on the platform to those organizations’ satisfaction. “Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter will further toxify our information ecosystem and be a direct threat to public safety,” began the missive, distributed under the letterhead of Media Matters for America, Accountable Tech, and UltraViolet, and co-signed by another two dozen groups, including the Women’s March, Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, and NARAL Pro-Choice America. These groups are promising to mobilize their activists, and whatever other resources they might have, to punish companies that will stick by Twitter if it junks its pre-Musk content moderation regime. The pitch was a simple one: Nice store you got there. It would be a shame if someone threw a rock through your window.

    ...Media Matters for America, Accountable Tech, and UltraViolet are all led by former senior Democratic staffers in Congress, the executive branch, and major political campaigns. They all receive funding from liberal foundations that donate widely to Democrats, or from advocacy organizations, like labor unions, that are deeply involved in Democratic Party politics. All three are creatures of the broader Democratic Party apparatus. They are the party’s attack arm.

    ...Media Matters, the David Brock-led bulwark against Fox News, is by far the best known: The organization launched in 2004 with help from the Center for American Progress, Hillary Clinton, and Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager, John Podesta, and apparently received $1 million from George Soros. With over $14.1 million in revenue reported in 2019, according to their latest available 990, Media Matters represents the mainstream face of center-left advocacy. Former Democratic National Committee Chair and Obama Labor Secretary Tom Perez, and former Planned Parenthood chief Cecile Richards, are on the group’s Board of Directors; CEO Angelo Carusone served as “deputy CEO for finance & administration of the 2016 Democratic National Convention.”

    Accountable Tech represents the Democratic Party’s online dark-money operation. Ironically for a group with the word “accountable” in its name, Accountable Tech is a 501(c)(4), meaning it doesn’t have to disclose its donors. No matter: As right-wing “investigative think tank” Capital Research Center discovered, Accountable Tech is one of the Washington, D.C.-registered alternate names of the North Fund, an advocacy group that received $19.3 million in 2020 from something called the Sixteen Thirty Fund—an outfit which The Atlantic described as the “indisputable heavyweight of Democratic dark money.” Sixteen Thirty is in turn one of several opaque and highly capitalized center-left donor organizations under the management of a nonprofit-focused consulting firm called Arabella Advisors. The North Fund paid Arabella $942,000 in fees in 2020, according to that year’s 990. Got that? Clearly “Accountable Tech” is very dedicated to accountability, as are the people who pay its bills.

    The co-founder and public face of Accountable Tech is Jesse Lehrich, who was the foreign policy spokesperson for Hillary Clinton’s defeated 2016 presidential campaign. In July of 2017, Lehrich acknowledged to Business Insider that while working for Clinton, he had “sound[ed] the alarm on these Kremlin connections” tying Moscow to the former secretary of state’s Republican opponent, “and we knew more shoes would drop.” In reality, the alleged links between Donald Trump and Russia that Lehrich peddled to the media turned out to either be trivial or false.

    Since Lehrich’s new organization became operational in mid-2020, a majority of the emails it has sent out have been aimed at one company in particular, according to the Archive of Political Emails—Facebook, with subject lines like “26% stock drop for Facebook’s birthday,” and “Congress must investigate Facebook.” Evidently, the reported $400 million that Mark Zuckerberg shelled out to Democratic Party-supported election-related causes, like targeted get-out-the-vote “voter education” and “fair balloting,” was not enough to erase the company’s refusal to kick Trump off the site during the election—which in turn recalled the company’s original sin of allowing itself to be used as a conduit by Vladimir Putin, a being of godlike power, when he mesmerized helpless and stupid American voters into electing Trump in 2016. Whatever happened, these folks argue, Trumpian fascism was clearly the direct result of an unpoliced Facebook, and it is up to someone, preferably Democratic officeholders themselves, to do the policing now.

    UltraViolet, the third member of the Let’s Break Elon’s Windows gang, is funded through groups like the American Federation of Teachers and the Libra Foundation, the donor organization for a billionaire member of the left-wing Pritzker family. UltraViolet is unique in the staid world of NGOs for sharing a name with an Andy Warhol superstar (given name: Isabelle Collin Dufresne). The group was #MeToo before #MeToo existed, getting the sneaker company Reebok to drop the rapper Rick Ross as a pitchman in 2013 over his purported support of “rape culture,” and lobbying the next year for TBS to cancel CeeLo Green’s show over his alleged misogyny.

    But the foundation does more than target successful Black musicians. The height of the hallucinatory Brett Kavanaugh sexual assault uproar saw UltraViolet-trained activists bracing then-Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., in a Capitol Hill elevator, manufacturing an instantly viral moment amid one of the most unhinged political episodes of the entire Trump era. In fact, the group had trained over 300 volunteers to walk the halls of the Senate office buildings and confront whatever lawmakers they came across, a tactic the group then openly bragged about. UltraViolet is of course founded and led by someone with a career in professional Democratic politics, in this case by the former head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ nonprofit arm, Shaunna Thomas.

    The anti-Musk triad forms a kind of unity: One leg is well-known and established, another is a recent creation of the party’s dark-money infrastructure, and the third practices a watered-down, establishment-blessed variation on direct action, specializing in guerilla tantruming tactics to get business and lawmakers to go along with whatever it is they want. They are all, in some sense, effective at what they do. Media Matters and UltraViolet have launched campaigns that got people fired and starved Fox News of corporate advertising money; Accountable Tech helped amplify Facebook “whistleblower” Frances Haugen’s well-plotted campaign against her former employer.

    What really unites these organizations isn’t an ideology or a common donor list or a shared agenda or the prominent place of the Democratic Party in the resumes of their leadership. What binds them is a project to expand the partisan battleground until nothing and no one is exempt from the end-times struggle they might sincerely believe themselves to be waging—not Elon Musk, not Coca-Cola, not Rick Ross. And not you, either.


    So what? Large corporations receive letters from various advocacy groups all the time. That’s freedom. Corporations, especially publicly traded ones, make decisions in the executive suite and in the board room subject to the shareholders interest standard. Do you think Media Matters controls Coca-Cola and Disney? Come on.

    Do you think the “conservative” market pressure on Bud Light after the Dylan Mulvaney ads were “blackmail” on Budweiser? Was that activity “censorship” of Budweiser? Those words have meaning and they’re not being used correctly here. It’s really hard to tell what freedom means to you when what is otherwise legitimate exercise of individual or organizational prerogative is actually a sinister leftist conspiracy controlled by the Clintons.
     
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    So in a nut shell, Maedia Matters urged the companies to pull advertising if Moosk loosened the rules Twitter had in place to allow hate speech. The fast forward a year later and the thing that they warned the advertisers about happened exatly like they said it would.. sounds legit to me...
     
    So in a nut shell, Maedia Matters urged the companies to pull advertising if Moosk loosened the rules Twitter had in place to allow hate speech. The fast forward a year later and the thing that they warned the advertisers about happened exatly like they said it would.. sounds legit to me...


    its called "prescient" to be precise lol

    or prophetic
    or visionary

    whatever adjective you want to describe "they saw this coming"

    He just bigmad because it doesnt fit the narrative he wants

    i do like how he thinks spending $44B was worth what he thinks exposed some conspiracy ( just so long as it wasnt HIS $44b LOL )
     
    Advertisers blackmailing a media arm

    Private companies censoring anything

    I got the vapors from all of the false equivalency
     
    Do you think that the ADL doesn't try to extract something from the people or groups they accuse of being antisemitic?

    When Greenblatt is asked if he was looking for a role at Twitter or a donation then he claims the question the reporter asked him was antisemitic. Are you kidding me? It's similar to the Democrat playbook of constantly accusing people of being racists, white supremacist or misogynists.







    Can you just follow one line of discussion without insisting on every post being a new tangent or layer of conspiracy?

    Are you saying that ADL is extorting money from the likes of Coca Cola and Disney by saying that if they don’t pull ads from X they’re going to accuse them of being antisemitic and then “force” them to give large donations to the ADL?

    I just don’t have the energy to keep up with this bullshirt. You agreed Musk’s tweet (the guy who owns X!) was antisemitic - like classically antisemitic. And it wasn’t the first. Even X agrees that it’s possible for mainstream corp ads to end up next to posts espousing Nazism.

    We all can see what is happening at X and has been a growing problem- it didn’t just happen overnight as the result of some ADL shakedown. Come on man.
     
    So what? Large corporations receive letters from various advocacy groups all the time. That’s freedom. Corporations, especially publicly traded ones, make decisions in the executive suite and in the board room subject to the shareholders interest standard. Do you think Media Matters controls Coca-Cola and Disney? Come on.

    Do you think the “conservative” market pressure on Bud Light after the Dylan Mulvaney ads were “blackmail” on Budweiser? Was that activity “censorship” of Budweiser? Those words have meaning and they’re not being used correctly here. It’s really hard to tell what freedom means to you when what is otherwise legitimate exercise individual or organizational prerogative is actually a sinister leftist conspiracy controlled by the Clintons.
    Obviously you approve of their campaign against X. Of course it's within their rights to do what they are doing, but let's not act like it was some kind of organic campaign against Twitter. It was a coordinated campaign by Democrat funded groups. Nobody claimed Media Matters controls Disney and Coca Cola, but they can influence them with their advertisers through their smear campaigns.

    The Budweiser boycott was mostly organic from what I saw. It wasn't lead by prominent Republican groups.

    Why don't they have the same type of campaigns towards Tik Tok and Facebook when they have antisemitic posts as well? Why does the left target the two social media companies that have resisted the censorship complex in X and Rumble?

    Are you against the censorship online of people's social media posts? Are you aware of the vast censorship apparatus that includes government cutouts and the government? Most here won't even acknowledge it and some even deny it exists despite federal judges saying it could be the the worst 1st ammendment violation by the government in our countries history.
     
    Can you just follow one line of discussion without insisting on every post being a new tangent or layer of conspiracy?

    Are you saying that ADL is extorting money from the likes of Coca Cola and Disney by saying that if they don’t pull ads from X they’re going to accuse them of being antisemitic and then “force” them to give large donations to the ADL?

    I just don’t have the energy to keep up with this bullshirt. You agreed Musk’s tweet (the guy who owns X!) was antisemitic - like classically antisemitic. And it wasn’t the first. Even X agrees that it’s possible for mainstream corp ads to end up next to posts espousing Nazism.

    We all can see what is happening at X and has been a growing problem- it didn’t just happen overnight as the result of some ADL shakedown. Come on man.
    Hey man. If you don't like how I post don't respond to me. What I posted is related despite you keeping your head in the sand about the massive censorship of people's online posts by our own government.
     
    Hey man. If you don't like how I post don't respond to me. What I posted is related despite you keeping your head in the sand about the massive censorship of people's online posts by our own government.
    Gov't has always, since its inception, has censored. hell just look at the FCC. Does it make it right, nope. Just wondering why you don't typicially care unless it happens someone you admire. They censor right and left, although your washed to think its one sided.. No one's head in th sand. asking and forcing is two completely different things, those Twitter files you cling to not once show forced..

    edit: SFL with 14 opinion Tweets and articles to follow that he veiws as fact.
     
    you just lost the shred of ANY credibity you had with this sentence..
    I said from what I saw. If I missed it then post which Republican groups were involved.

    Either way it's silly to compare an obvious 1st ammendment violation from the government censoring people posts online and the coordinated campaign to continue it to a boycott of a beer company due to its promotion of a trans influencer.
     
    Gov't has always, since its inception, has censored. hell just look at the FCC. Does it make it right, nope. Just wondering why you don't typicially care unless it happens someone you admire. They censor right and left, although your washed to think its one sided.. No one's head in th sand. asking and forcing is two completely different things, those Twitter files you cling to not once show forced..

    edit: SFL with 14 opinion Tweets and articles to follow that he veiws as fact.
    You are incorrect.

    Broadcasters – not the FCC or any other government agency – are responsible for selecting the material they air. The First Amendment and the Communications Act expressly prohibit the Commission from censoring broadcast matter. Our role in overseeing program content is very limited.



    Are you seriously claiming that the Twitter Files didn't show any government censorship? Two different federal judges said that the Biden Administration was guilty of 1st ammendment violations and it's at the Supreme Court now.
     

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