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Elon Musk teases a new Twitter CEO, what is he hiding?
The energy on the part of reporters, pundits, and the public speculating who will be Twitter’s new CEO is distracting from something.
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UPDATE 5/12/2023: Musk Tweeted to confirm that Linda Yaccarino will be the new CEO.
Elon Musk sent reporters scrambling yesterday by simply Tweeting, “Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~ six weeks!
My role will transition to being exec chair & CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops.”
Charitably, Musk has an antagonistic relationship with the press. He seemingly avoids positive media coverage regardless of the costs. But he knows how to claim headlines.
With 33 words, at just 184 characters with little information, Musk garnered reports from at least 50 media outlets within hours.
Musk may revel in negative headlines, but he also uses them as a distraction
When the Twitter logo changed to an image of a Shiba Inu dog, Musk was in federal court for a $258 billion class-action lawsuit related to dogecoin.
He was accused of engaging in a pyramid scheme by promoting the cryptocurrency. Win, lose, or draw, Musk wanted a distraction, and he created one.
As Elon Musk Tweeted the words “Funding secured” in August of 2018, he and his companies faced several pending lawsuits.
In June 2018, Carlos Ramirez, a former high-level Tesla safety official, sued the company for failing to treat injured workers and misclassifying worker injuries to avoid reporting them to authorities.
Also, in June 2018, a Tesla stockholder filed an action against Musk and the members of Tesla’s board of directors, alleging a breach of their fiduciary duties in approving Musk’s unusually high stock-based compensation.
Oh yeah, also in June 2018, Martin Tripp, a Tesla employee, leaked information damaging to Tesla.
Tesla filed a civil lawsuit against the ex-employee, who, in turn, filed a lawsuit claiming Tesla’s Security team gave police a false tip that he was planning a mass shooting at the Nevada factory.
Behind the smoke and mirrors: unraveling Musk’s hidden agendas
The outcome of these cases is irrelevant to the fact that when Musk wants a distraction, he creates one.
Musk is PR savvy by only one vector, distracting people from anything he really wants to keep hidden. If the story seems a little too easy to talk about, dig deeper.
Wednesday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg criticized Tesla’s use of the word “autopilot.”
Yesterday a federal court reviewed Musk’s agreement with the SEC regarding the Funding secured Tweet from August 2018.
I don’t know what story Musk is specifically trying to distract the world from. However, the energy on the part of reporters, pundits, and the public speculating who will be Twitter’s new CEO is distracting from something.
For all we know, at this point, Elon will announce that he has two identities, one of them trans and that his trans identity is the CEO. That theory adds as much value to the discourse as any floated by the Wall Street Journal. Stop speculating.
UPDATE #1 – 5/12/2023: Musk Tweeted to confirm that Linda Yaccarino will be the new CEO.
UPDATE #2 – 5/12/2023: China orders Tesla to recall 1.1 million vehicles over braking risks, says The New York Times.
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