Taylor Lorenz (@[email protected])
mastodon.social
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Attached: 1 image 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. #twitter #tech #elonmusk #x #twittermigration #twitterlogo #elon #musk

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

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

Adramis [he/him]
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61Y

Why?

@[email protected]
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8
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1Y

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

Adramis [he/him]
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41Y

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

donuts
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151Y

er

chokidar
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581Y

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

scytale
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21Y

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.

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

Apathy Tree
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11Y

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 :)

NaN
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101Y

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.

Raltoid
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49
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1Y

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.

@[email protected]
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13
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1Y

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.

Raltoid
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9
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1Y

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.

“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.

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

Ram
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601Y

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.

Joe Breuer
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11Y

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.

Ram
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11Y

Do you have a source on that?

Joe Breuer
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11Y
@[email protected]
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121Y

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

@[email protected]
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13
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1Y

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

@[email protected]
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81Y

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.

@[email protected]
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11Y

Forgot about that shit. The guy’s such a scumbag. Hasn’t paid rent since he moved in and then tried to renovate? He seriously needs to be knocked down a few billion pegs.

@[email protected]
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31Y

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”

@[email protected]
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41Y

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.

@[email protected]
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21Y

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

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

⁧⁧⁧
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61Y

What a fucking joke lmao

fiat_lux
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571Y

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.

@[email protected]
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261Y

I call it Xitter, using the Chinese pronunciation of Xi.

6daemonbag
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91Y

Brb gotta take a xit

I like the idea of calling it “ten”.

I like the idea of never referring to it again

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

Taken out of context, that sounds creepy AF.

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.

Wren
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91Y

You can’t make this stuff up, this is hilarious and beyond apropos

At this point it sounds like intentional.

The miniseries on Twitter’s collapse is going to be epic.

It could have been a Silicon Valley whole season worth of material.

Get a black dude (or even better a black lady) to play Musk and watch the entire right spontaneously combust.

Tb0n3
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-371Y

But why though? Why the insistence on portraying people in documentaries or biographies as someone completely different? Why not do a biography on a black dude or black lady who can be played by such instead of trying to change the race of historical figures for fun?

fiat_lux
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11Y

Nobody seemed to mind when the History Channel docuseries FDR came out with a British actor without a mobility disability as FDR.

Why is it that the series produced by an black female actor starring a black female actor needs such stringent accuracy controls?

Tb0n3
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-11Y

Never heard of it. How many alien conspiracies does it contain?

But why though?

To upset you, personally.

@[email protected]
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47
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Holy shit man. That joke was strapped into a car, stuck on a rocket, and blasted so far over your head it’s circling the sun.

Tb0n3
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-241Y

“Joke”

Yeah, the joke is that it would trigger the snowflake right wingers

And it did

Yes, they made a joke. And you didn’t get it.

Ah, thank you I needed that laugh. Sometimes things make me snort or chuckle or “ha”, but that was a proper full laugh, thank you.

That’s awesome, glad to help!

@[email protected]
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341Y

He’s an African actually, look it up.

Well, it’s not the biography of whoever is going to play him either, hence the only authentic choice would be him being played by himself.

People don’t generally do that. If you’re referring to Hamilton, it was not a documentary or a biography. And historically white people did that all the time in plays/movies for entertainment, so why get all angry about it now that it’s not white people?

Netflix’s Cleopatra comes to mind.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra_race_controversy Her race is actually heavily debated by historians, so that’s not a very clear cut example.

Actually reading that article you linked it doesn’t seem that debated and there isn’t really any evidence of her being black.

You’re right, based on that article. It doesn’t matter, I’m just pointing out that it wasn’t just a random choice to make her black. I’d argue they should have made her Iranian to be more accurate, but the claim is that people are randomly just changing skin colors in documentaries all willy nilly and so far the only example is a weak one.

Tb0n3
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-31Y

Queen Cleopatra is a very recent example.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra_race_controversy Her race is actually heavily debated by historians, so that’s not a very clear cut example.

@[email protected]
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From the article you linked it seems that historians by and large agree she was of Greek descent with a bit of Persian ancestry, and a bunch of laypeople are heavily debating them on it.

I mean, if we’re talking Hamilton it’s even further, being pretty clearly a commentary on the whole “founding fathers freeing everyone while most of them owning human beings they refused freedom to” thing.

I brought up Hamilton because it’s particularly not a documentary

Non-binary black lady for the best effect

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.

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?

Wilshire
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Normal procedure to make sure it’s within legal standards.

yes that is what a permit is

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.

down daemon
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11Y

local laws

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.

Saik0
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61Y

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.

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.

Echo Dot
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31Y

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.

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

“it is my building!” – Elon, probably

Also “Permits are for dummies”.

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