22 Comments
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Sascha Pallenberg's avatar

Still one of my favorite site for a collection of all the things he claimed in the past https://elonmusk.today/

He's doing proper "SEOngineering" because he knows too well that all of his BS will get covered bc of the traffic it gemerates for these outlets. This also means the negative articles about him (like the CCDH feauture in the Guardian) get swept away by the new ones.

"a Musk article a day keeps low traffic away"

P.S. We all know this fight is complete BS... and besides the fact that billionaires behave like Youtubers, imagine this (whatever THIS is) gets streamed on the platform formerly known as Twitter. It would go full De Santis under the load!

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Casey Newton's avatar

This is amazing, thank you!

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pandaexplosion's avatar

I wish we could all stop propping up Twitter and just let it die out quicker. In that spirit, I'd suggest doing away with the funny tweets section of platformer articles. Speaking only for myself of course, it's more sad than entertaining now.

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Casey Newton's avatar

As soon as there are good, embeddable Threads / skeets / whatevers I'm planning to do this.

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stretchdogg's avatar

As soon as I read him talk about the MRI, I knew the back-peddling was going into full gear. This 'fight' will never happen. As far as paying anyone's legal bills, from the beginning, this ploy sounded exactly like TFG saying he would pay legal bills for his supporters who got in fights. Never happened for him, and it's never gonna happen for Elon. I've read entirely too much about his machinations, no matter what he says. He needs to stop the BS, for quite a while, before I will ever have any interest in him again.

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muldowney's avatar

Jake Paul vs. Zuck and Elon vs. Nate Diaz. Live on TikTok.

Let’s just throw in the proverbial societal towel and go for the big guns here.

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Chris Messina's avatar

I had this exact same thought once I read the legal bills thing. He might pay once or twice to keep the gag going, but that'll be relatively small beans compared w/ the breathless coverage he'll continue to get for making these outlandish statements.

Basically Musk is the text-only equivalent of Mr Beast, but less scrupulous.

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Eric Hagarty's avatar

Elon thinks he’s Ric Flair but really he just has X-Pac go-away heat.

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Casey Newton's avatar

honestly so true

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Justin Cox's avatar

I’m interested in what Platformer decides about disallowing OpenAI’s web crawler. I’m also curious if Substack will allow publications to make that choice for themselves.

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Casey Newton's avatar

What should I do??

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Justin Cox's avatar

I think it’s a personal choice. For me, it seems like the right thing to do for my writing. But, on the other hand, will it really matter in the long run? I honestly don’t know.

I don’t believe Substack has any option to modify a robots.txt file and there’s no setting I’m aware of here. It’ll be interesting to see what they do. Medium is doubling down on “human writing,” so I wonder if they add a user setting in the future.

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Zach Kahn's avatar

Amen!

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The Puppet Government's avatar

I have recently found it easier to think of him as occupying a role, like a Ronald McDonald, for X and his other properties.

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Maria Petrova's avatar

So good.

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Jill Consor Beck's avatar

Since I heard of this dual, I have been having flashbacks to a specific 2-word term in the book "Liars Poker" - the 1st word is "swinging". I also realize that I am dating myself.

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Justin Cox's avatar

Sword? Banana? No, I know! Sausage?

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Jill Consor Beck's avatar

LOL. Getting warmer with sausage.

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Div's avatar

99% of what Elon Musk says IS NOT news. Why anyone who considers themself a journalist would think otherwise is simply, well, baffling.

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Casey Newton's avatar

I feel this, but I can also attest as a publisher that people love to read about him! so I think it's more about tuning what aspects of him we cover, and how.

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Div's avatar

Fair, but at least put this stuff with the Megan Markle stories, not the business section!

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christina's avatar

"In his feud with Zuckerberg, Musk is essentially playing Ric Flair without the charisma." This is golden. I haven't laughed so hard in awhile, especially not around anything Musk related. Thank you for that.

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