I’ve covered this before, when Elon Musk uses the “some of my best friends are” defense. It’s wrong to use for many well known and studied reasons, including being clearly racist.

Here’s yet another example of him using it, as if he really doesn’t care.

The forthcoming book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, by New York Times reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, relates an awkward scene in which Musk tried to assure the CEO of Revolt, a media company founded by Combs, about the surge in racist content that accompanied his appointment to chief executive at Twitter. (Combs sold his stake in Revolt this summer.) Detavio Samuels, the head of that company, was worried that Black users would be assailed by hate speech. Musk deflected by saying, “I don’t know if you know this, but Puff [one of Combs’ former stage names] is an investor in Twitter.” He added, “You know, he’s a good friend of mine. We text a lot.”

As I have been saying since 2022, the Twitter takeover never was about direct revenue. It was a calculated loss — cost of disinformation — to benefit racist tyrants who almost instantly implemented targeted censorship on the global propaganda platform.

Elon Musk used billions to elevate toxic narratives for Saudis and Russians. Thus asking Musk for a Twitter profit plan is like asking who makes money when Russia drops bombs on billboards in Ukraine. Forget advertising.

The buried lede in the article is that Putin’s elites are behind the Twitter purchase and reorganization, specifically two 8VC henchmen named Petr Aven and Vadim Moshkovich.

The founder of 8VC, also known for his conflict generating Nazi-affiliated Palantir, has responded officially to criticism of these two by stating he is a “better” man than anyone else, one who trusts only his own judgement in hiring Putin’s soldiers (Source: Twitter).

That’s the unmistakable voice of tyranny. “Lesser men” are defined as those who disagree with a man who only listens to those who agree with him.

But let me be even more clear here about the horrible racism allegedly in 8VC culture. The founder literally has been saying a candidate for hire shouldn’t be accountable for their family, let alone their country politics, history or culture.

The narrative is that “lesser men” wouldn’t take the big risk to hire a Russian prince out of Putin’s inner circle of billionare jerks to land him a plumb job, because this 8VC founder doesn’t take important background stuff into consideration.

Ok? That sounds awful. Even worse, when you follow the logic presented and look at his publicly stated position on why he doesn’t hire non-whites… there’s a huge glaring racist double-standard.

Who has the courage to talk about broken Russia? Not this guy. He’ll say he hates Putin, as if Putin doesn’t lap that up, and that’s it.

Meanwhile…

He’s saying Black candidates carry a huge burden and responsibility for their entire country’s history if they expect to get hired by him. That is unless they’re Russian, in which case nothing about their father’s direct role in a oppressive dictatorship is worth talking about.

Who wants to bet hiring Putin’s henchmen’s kids is an investment loophole, where laundered coins magically get invested into American companies, to help Russia fund the invasion of Ukraine if not fund anti-American propaganda? We’ve seen this before.

Lonsdale’s Palantir people literally still promote nativist “America First” as if their shrill bugle call of racism isn’t obvious.

Palantir Technologies co-founder Joe Lonsdale… donated to a new super-political action committee supporting Donald Trump… Jacob Helberg, a Palantir executive and big Trump donor, said Vance was “a pro-technology and pro-America First pick…

We’re supposed to believe 8VC can’t hire American Black people because of so many big picture societal concerns. Palantir founder tells us he blames the big picture for his pattern of discrimination against Blacks.

Ok sure, everyone sees Elon Musk pumping babies out of wedlock to save the planet but every Black candidate has to explain why children born out of wedlock are bad for the planet?

Meanwhile, an avowed foreign enemy leader’s boy was brought into the 8VC team during high war-time sanctions because… just an America First angel unto himself.

Laundering never looked so dirty.

A case in the UK is being widely reported, as the justice system wisely is cracking down on extreme hate speech.

“Whilst your activity ceased in 2021, recent events in the United Kingdom demonstrate that there is, for the first time since the 1930s, a real risk of gross, potentially violent, antisemitism becoming normalised on our streets.

“The publication of this kind of material is corrosive to our society and highly damaging. Antisemitism, in particular, is a destructive force. It has been used before to tear at the heart of Western democracy. It must not be allowed to do so again.”

[…]

[Judge Bayliss] told the defendant: “You were engaged in a campaign of hatred against minority communities and you were, I am sure, quite deliberately trying to stir up racial hatred.” […] “How you could have thought that to distribute [white supremacist slogans] and have them plastered on public infrastructure without committing a criminal offence is impossible to believe.”

The defendant said he totally thought it was just a normal conversation to post things in public like his belief Muslim immigrants are genocidal “rape gangs“.

That’s just an admission of guilt, really, because Nazis view extreme hate speech and incitement to racist violence as normal “centrist” conversation, which it’s obviously not.

Nobody in their right mind (pun not intended) believes Nazism on Twitter is anywhere even close to center.

Or as @SmoothDunk put it on Twitter about the guy who bought Twitter using Russian and Saudi money…

Who can forget the massive fraud?

How big was the lie? It couldn’t have been any bigger.

Tesla spent a year testing the new hardware, and Musk said the company’s goal is to do “a demonstration drive of full autonomy from LA to New York by the end of next year.”

A year of testing! Done. All problems solved. Obviously. Elon Musk promised 2017 would be the last year drivers needed to touch their wheel.

For some reason the initial news release posted by Tesla has just been taken down.

But nobody forgets, right?

As some pundits have put it, the whole thing is a lie.

In 2016, Musk announced that all Tesla vehicles built going forward have “all the hardware to enable self-driving”. At one point, he even specified “level 5 self-driving”, which is the highest level and means capable of driving anywhere, anytime, under any condition.

[…]

Last year, Musk went as far as claiming that FSD will get better on HW3 first as Tesla’s “focus needs to be on getting FSD on HW3 working super well and provided internationally”. He went as fas as claiming that FSD performance on “HW4 will lag at least 6 months behind HW3” because of this.

Tesla quickly reversed this strategy. With the release of FSD v12.5, Tesla deployed the software first to the newer HW4 vehicle, and Musk said that Tesla would need more time to optimize the code to work on the older HW3.

As we previously reported, this signaled that Telsa is getting closer to reaching the limits of HW3 while FSD v12.5 is nowhere near ready for the unsupervised self-driving capability that Tesla has been promising to those HW3 owners since 2016.

What a giant mess. Perhaps the worst car maker in history, a total fraud.

Tesla has offered free upgrades to newer hardware to owners who purchased FSD, but when it started offering its FSD subscription service, it started charging owners $1,500 for hardware they already bought. After we reported on this, Tesla reduced the price to $1,000 – which is still $1,000 more than owners should have to pay for hardware they already paid for. Tesla, and its self-described “free speech absolutist” CEO Elon Musk, both retaliated against Electrek for our report on this matter.

Manufacturers of “driverless” vehicles apparently are soon to be held liable for crashes in the UK, not the owners.

British motorists will “not be liable” if their self-driving vehicle crashes while they are behind the wheel, according to experts.

Yousif Al-Ani, principal ADAS engineer at ‘automotive risk intelligence company Thatcham Research stressed a recent ruling has ended speculation over driverless shunts.

The new guidelines were published under the 2024 Automated Vehicles Act, which outlined various policies around self-driving models.

It’s believed by 2026 this may prevent Tesla from operating in the county, as the brand crashes almost constantly and always blames the owner to avoid fixing its defects. Their latest “full self driving” 12.5 AI software ignores red lights now more than ever. Not kidding, it always was bad but it’s getting far worse, repeatedly speeding through intersections without stopping despite the red signal that clearly tells it to stop.

Also, perhaps not ironically, the UK Parliament gleefully promoted the absolute worst idea of “driverless” cars as an always on surveillance robot (e.g. dalek) that removes everyone else from the roads because it reports anyone who appears for criminal activity.

…it may be that, as in the USA and Switzerland for instance, UK pedestrians should be able to walk across urban roads—I stress urban—only at certain points and when permitted. We do not want early accidents undermining the success of self-drive vehicles…

…on the assumption that all AVs will have permanently functioning all-round cameras and even black boxes, people will soon learn. Everything around a self-drive car will be recorded. You might even think twice about smacking your child near a self-drive car.

As everyone must know by now, given American jaywalk laws were racist by design to criminalize the mobility of non-whites, this is the language of an Orwellian tyranny.

In effect, if “driverless” are meant to become private surveillance robots trying to completely criminalize British life, I suspect public opposition will be provoked. Expect people to try to force the robots to crash, now that the owners aren’t liable. The new law opens the door to massive resistance going direct against the manufacturers, as the owners have been given some protection from this brewing conflict.

It’s a bit like the UK saying don’t kill our tank drivers, they should be treated as POW or even released, but feel free to destroy the tanks.

And on that note, what happens when car makers in the UK roll out horrible defects with the mindset of DGAF? Who is going intervene and force them to stop social harms?

Every day, Waymo’s driverless autonomous vehicles gather in the parking lot on 2nd and Harrison streets to park between rides and recharge. Periodically, the high-tech vehicles start honking at each other. Residents who live in apartment buildings next door said the overnight (and early morning) honking is too loud to sleep through.

Don’t worry that will be fixed in the next release. Didn’t work? Don’t worry that will be fixed in the next release… ad infinitim. Tesla is on version 12.5 and running red lights.

Catch them if you can.

Imagine thousands of “driverless” cars programmed to be a nuisance or even harmful, because liability is cleverly ignored by the manufacturer and the owner doesn’t care because not liable.

Related 2018: Arizona Rush to Adopt Driverless Cars Devolves into Pedestrian War

Related 2023: San Francisco protestors are disabling autonomous vehicles using traffic cones. “It’s a great time”

I’ve recently heard that throwing a giant blanket or tarp over a robotaxi not only disables it but also utterly terrifies passengers who become trapped inside with nobody to call for help.