Musk failed to get the necessary permits to change Twitter’s building signage to X, and the police shut it down just in time for “er” to remain.

mrmanager@lemmy.today to Technology@lemmy.ml – 1247 points – Taylor Lorenz (@taylorlorenz@mastodon.social)
mastodon.social

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

185

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)

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.

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.

You cannot become a billionaire without being a scummy person.

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.

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

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

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.

Are you saying it’s easy to become scummy?

It's always been easy for people to be scummy. It just happens to also be easy to be a CEO of a company that does nothing.

You could inherit it

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.

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.

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.

Rowling became a billionaire

Google says her net worth is £820 million. Not a billoonarrr.

Too harsh? Can you name one that isn't?

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

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.

You could exploit other billionaires, but that seems like the one thing you can go to jail for.

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.

ABAM (All Billionaires Are Morons)

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

He has not always been pleasant. Don't fall for the post-retirement PR spin

"Nowadays even pleasant" clearly implies he wasn't always pleasant though.

It's easy to act pleasant when you no longer have anything to gain from being awful

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I hope someone to graffiti “Los” in front of that “er”

Best part is that the LEDs for “twit” now shine really bright at night.

but seriously, "L0Ser" on the X building would be funny

To anyone interested about what's really like to deal with this man, I highly recommend giving this a read: https://www.tumblr.com/numberonecatwinner/701567544684855296/elon-wyd

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 :)

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.

"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.

The Police actually stopped a rich guy from doing something illegal?

He didn't pay for a permit to do so. The police are there to protect capital, but under clearly-defined rules. Anyone who isn't a fuckwit knows to pay the city its fees before doing something like this.

When JPMorgan Chase buys out a smaller bank, they apply for the permit in triplicate and pay all the fees, then make a donation to the Fraternal Order of Police. The cops then show up to attack protestors.

God damn, that's depressing to think about.

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.

I like the idea of calling it "ten".

I like the idea of never referring to it again

Oh man can you imagine how great this would be if they got hit with a 3 day eviction notice for damaging the property?

That would be so fucking funny

They haven't been paying their rent anyways, so I'm not sure why they bothered to change the sign.

I'm curious why they haven't been kicked out after not paying rent for so long. Why does the owner allow him to stay rent free?

There’s literally nobody who would replace them. The commercial real estate market in SF is in shamble. Offices go empty all the time at a discount.

Edit: to add, it’s better to let them squat and be able to sue them later for potential money than to have the offices empty.

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.

This has to be false. If only 'er' remained, the 'Twitt' would have been removed. But the twit is still in charge.

Honestly, this is a comedy that needs to be seen to be believed.

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?

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

Also possibly becathe doesn't own the building and needs approval of the owner.

Owners don't issue permits, the government does.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Slight shame that the contractors didn't start from the end. It could have been funnier if they had taken off the "er" instead.

My thoughts the same, though it should have been the "ter" to properly describe Musk.

Then again, having "twit" misspelled might have been even more on-point. Maybe they can just add the X and become Twit-X

"er" is right !

Nah, it's completely inaccurate because the "twit" is missing!

You need to have permits to change signs on your own building?

It's the heavy machinery required to do it that's the problem. This is also not Elon Musk's building, but a building Twitter rents. The building management company were the ones who called the police.

Ah that explains. Didn’t know he was renting the building.

Companions like this very rarely own property. They rent space from the property management companies that bought the land and constructed the buildings.

Yup. If you own a building, you need to pay someone to maintain it. If you rent a building, you get all of that in the contract and it's one less thing to manage.

Also, you can relatively change buildings if you need more space, whereas if you own it, you need to sell it first.

Most of those IT platform companies only rent their premises as it helps improve the balance sheet and quarterly results by moving "capital expenses" into "operational costs"

I believe part of it is that managing huge buildings is actually a pain in the ass and requires specialized experience to do efficiently, so many companies end up saving money by not owning their buildings.

Well that, and the fact it costs huge amounts of money to own land in cities.

The way I heard it elsewhere (Google should help), Twitter/Elon actually had the necessary and correct permits (for using heavy machinery on the street/sidewalk and redirecting traffic around it).

Unfortunately, that detail was not correctly communicated to building security, who called the police believing there was no permit.

By the time the misunderstanding could be cleared up, the workers & heavy machinery had... "vacated premises" already, leaving the work in its half-finished state.

It seems like this gets even more amusing about twice a day. Anyone wanna guess what might happen next?

At some point Musk will get arrested. For what I haven't decided yet.

Something sexual, I think. Even as recently as a few months ago, I would have said “he’s a jackass, but he’s not that stupid,” but now, well…

He already sexually harassed some poor flight attendant, and literally a day before made some kind of stupid announcement about being a Republican as some sort of stupid way to dodge it

I would only be very minorly surprised if Musk is arrested in the middle of a small town in Louisiana, covered in his own shit and clumsily trying to hump a crocodile. And yes, I know that crocs aren't native to Louisiana.

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.

Thanks for the heads up on Taylor. I am now following her!

Taken out of context, that sounds creepy AF.

Serious question: why do you need to get a permit to change a sign on your own building?

Yeah, if I have to choose who is worse between Musk and Taylor Lorenz, 100% Taylor Lorenz takes the cake.

Why?

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I do recall Lorenz being caught in a lie and trying to cover it with stealth-edits. She has definitely had her (and her publisher's) agenda take precedent over facts back when she was covering the Depp/Heard trial.

However, while I do try to verify her reporting from other sources, I would not classify her anywhere near the imploding egomaniac billionaire. She's way better than any billionaire, because there's no way anyone can amass that amount of resources and not be selfish, problematic, and too far removed from ordinary people to relate to them.

/edited for grammar

Okay, got it. I was like "...worse than literally right-wing, genocide supporting, actively shutting down leftist organization on Twitx Elon Musk???"

I know a lot of people don't like it. But the people who have changed the world have always been far from ordinary.He prefers to sensationalize rather than advertise.

Being born rich is almost certainly a requirement to start with. There must be a lot of non famous brilliant people without a public voice like the clowns, Musk and Trump and Zuck and all the others.

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.

Yes, Musk is responsible because it was his decision to change the name.

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.

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.

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.