ELON MUSK AND TWITTER: MUSINGS FROM AN MBA CASE STUDY POV

The Perched Eye blog is 12+ years old,  from 2009 with President Obama's election. Our focus has been eclectic ...  the styles and directions of American politics and culture, with an occasional comment on the impact of new technologies. Our observations sometimes attract a critical eye, but the 'pen' remains unblunted.

The recent Elon Musk-Twitter ‘fiasco’ was expected by some who have noted Musk’s ‘Twitter-troubles’ and moved on, but to many MSM readers this latest MSM ‘reveal’ has been a titillating new flavor experience to those who are programmed to be fed the latest MSM uncovering on just about anything, but especially juicy-ness about public notables of whatever kind...as noted in the following article:

Twitter brings Elon Musk’s genius reputation crashing down to earth

Nevertheless, the ‘roilings’ from Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media giant, Twitter, has drawn attention from even investors and techie observors to ‘Musk the person’ behind ‘Musk the inventor’.

‘Elon Musk the inventor’ seems to mask something we did not fully expect, except for some who have worked with him. That revealed ‘something’ about Musk is enlightening, yet also a bit off-putting for a ‘businessman’ who has attracted the attention of the globe, and billions of investment from Wall Street and the American defense world… as is discussed below.

Musk’s Twitter ‘chapter’ reveals he is not a business Superman, but nevertheless he still stands out in ways that should retain Wall Street’s interest, and preserve Musk’s reputation for major innovative thinking (and influence.)  Musk‘s technical talents are definitely special but his marketing of them is enhanced by public and investor perceptions and mystique…which have suffered by his erratic ‘leadership’ of Twitter.

That Musk is shown to be part perception-mystique shouldn’t alarm investors or the world at large. Musk can reliably be expected to keep generating new, innovative and world-shaping ideas, products and projects-with-spin-offs. But after Twitter’, the world sees there are border fences to the Musk ‘genius’… that Musk’s investor and staff ‘dependents’ should be aware of in order keep Musk within his skill areas…for the best interets of everyone.

Musk’s interaction with Twitter - with its internal clockworks, especially with Twitter’s human gears, etc — show he is not a people person. This is a serious gap for someone whose business pattern has been to exercise near-complete control over his projects.

That Musk is not a people-person is not a new ‘discovery’, but it hasn’t been significantly mentioned in the public media except as a somewhat amusing aspect of a recognized ‘genius’ (now seen more as a ‘savant’ with psychological overtones.)

After Twitter (and speaking as a layperson), Elon Musk seems a ‘Spectrum’ listee (DSM-5) — a tech innovator/savant overlaid with bi-polar, sociopathic ‘flavors’. (Disclaimer — this writer is not a professional mental health professional and reference is given of DSM-5 purely as background for serious reading.)

’Pre-Twitter’, the public tides generated by the newness of Musk floated his boat well above its waterline, i.e., Musk demonstrated a skill in cultivating a ‘mystique’ and using it to influence the public, the media and funding sources.

But the newness of Musk in the investor world seems to have worn off, as is historically natural, as investor needs for the ‘different’ has leaned to boredom. Musk’s Twitter flop has definitely led to investor shyness as witnessed by the resultant drop in Wall Street indices for Musk companies and projects as noted here:

Tesla gets downgraded on Wall Street over Elon Musk’s Twitter antics, banning of journalists.

But, Musk’s innovativeness is real and still stands, e.g., the ‘Tesla’ electric car and associated sub-industries (e.g., battery technology), Space-X and coming cyber products.

Musk appears to have one clear ‘flop area’, people skills — where, it seems that he has a ‘less-than’ average ability to communicte except by intimidation and non-verbal cues that are ‘understood’ by his longest and closest associates (and a few employees).

‘Elon Musk’ is no longer an enigma, it’s just that total awe of Musk has settled into seeing where he excels, and where he is just ordinary (and prone to flop just like any entrepreneur).

TRUMP'S DIGITAL 'CARDS' (A GRIFT, FOLKS): WATCH OUT NOW, HERE COME THE MARKS

 The Perched Eye blog is 12+ years old,  from 2009 with President Obama's election. Our focus has been eclectic ...  the styles and directions of American politics and culture, with an occasional comment on the impact of new technologies. Our observations sometimes attract a critical eye, but the 'pen' remains unblunted.

Trump’s Digital Cards…Hmmm, That Is, ‘Digital Grifts’

America is going thru a test. ‘Yerp’, there it is… these last 6 years is not a real thing; it’s been a dream … navigable by those who try hard to keep their head straight. But sometimes… like this week’s ‘Trump Digi-Card Joint,’ things just ….(scream — life can’t be without some horse doodoo thrown around? Can it?) 

Trump’s latest ‘Jam' is his digital card Shtick (Grift!). 

Can’t ‘get a hold of it. Shall we just Rock On … Like the cool Americans we are, or pretend to be, or wanna-be? (Why oh Why-eee, does that Tiny-fingered D..ckhead continue to do this to us?)

Stopped reaching for my wallet with time to spare as my Arm-n-hand automatically sensed ‘scam,’ cut in to overrule the brain's reflex response to “Digital Stuff.” 

(I‘ve trained them to think for themselves if the rest of ‘me’ is about to be seduced by weird attractions. This is not, of course, to say this Trump play is weird….but, personally speaking, Trump flames.)

After DT’s “Big Announcement” last Wednesday, December 14, 2002, the planet (cum passengers) shook for a 'split nano-second' (a really short period of time), nevertheless most of us wearily continued on our ways except for the rabid Trumpians, viz.:

Trump's "major announcement" of NFT collection draws ridicule but sells out

After that “tremendous’ announcement, I had to sit, uncross my eyes, and…think. 

I mused ‘About Trump.’ About how America is truly diverse …with perhaps three top-level divisions — the Sane, the Often Sane, and the ‘Marks.’  

(Pets are exempt from these categorizations since our furry friends are super-sensitive to villains, card sharks, and all... ever wonder why Trump has no pets? I don't.)

We can safely let be the Sane and Often Sane…they can mostly take care of business…at least enough to survive. But, the Marks?

The ‘Marks’ are so far-gone lost in the American rat race that they are like the mushy detritus seen floating at the surface of a stormy sea …or a boiling pot of soup…or on America’s growing number of polluted rivers, lakes, sewer spillage. (The castaways.)

American Culture wind blows us here and there, wherever the latest con person leads…during the short time he/she captures media attention. And capturing media attention does require skills … of a kind that self-adjust in a split-second with changing social-media preferences. 

In other words, the Modern Survivor must cultivate, and be quickly able to learn, the skills to harbor the kind of inattention to reality characteristic of the deranged, or at least mildly deranged (erratically so)! (Trump seems to ‘qualify’ per the latter requirements.) Also, American Culture seems to provide nurturing soil for the Trumpian grifter type.

‘American ‘Culture’?

Is American Culture real? Is it imaginary? Seems all one can say is our culture is what one sees from split second-to-split second…a kind of drifting quantum foam.

American Culture is now truly entered the Quantum Age. 

With Trump catching so much media attention, we've ‘crossed over’ and are in a quantized mirror world where ‘Up’ is ‘Down’… or at least sometimes it is, and for short periods. ( ‘Alice’s” message all along.)

‘‘Yerp’, it’s happened folks, we are imaginary quantum states. (And Trump is the random-walk, quantum demon that brought us here — Trump, the ephemeral, erratic nuisance.)

But there is a ‘Way’…a ‘new way of walking’ ...in a quantized dream world. 

Just hold on tight and surf the imaginary, Schroedinger-foamed wavetops of THE CULTURE. Rock ON!

‘HANG TEN”, Dudes. Check the sun and waves. But keep one eye on the shore…if you can.

GUNS AT VOTING PLACES: WE MUST BAN OPEN-CARRY GUNS AT VOTING SITES, IT'S PLAIN INTIMIDATION (AS INTENDED IN THE 1876 SOUTH CAROLINA ELECTION POLL INSTRUCTIONAL FLYER TO PRE-KKK BLACK VOTER DISRUPTERS)

The Perched Eye blog is 12+ years old,  from 2009 with President Obama's election. Our focus has been eclectic ...  the styles and directions of American politics and culture, with an occasional comment on the impact of new technologies. Our observations sometimes attract a critical eye, but the 'pen' remains unblunted.

From the Nov 26, 2022, New York Times -"guns, protests and open-carry."

At Protests, Guns Are Doing the Talking

Armed Americans, often pushing a right-wing agenda, are increasingly using open-carry laws to intimidate opponents and shut down debate.

 the effects of more guns in public spaces have not been evenly felt. is uneven - with Democrats largely eschewing firearms and Republicans embracing them — . This has  has warped civic discourse. "Deploying the Second Amendment in service of the First has become a way to buttress a policy argument, a sort of silent, if intimidating, bullhorn."

One observer described a gathering at an LGBTQ rally.... “What I saw was described as "a group of folks who did not want to engage in any sort of dialogue and just wanted to impose their belief.”

A New York Times analysis of more than 700 armed demonstrations found that, at about 77 percent of them, people openly carrying guns represented right-wing views, such as opposition to L.G.B.T.Q. rights and abortion access, hostility to racial justice rallies and support for former President Donald J. Trump’s lie of winning the 2020 election.

From this blogsite: (

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2009

President Obama's First Year, Pt 1: From The Bottom of the Pit, The Spirit of South Carolina's Zombie Racism (Red Shirt Vigilantes) Rides Again)

The history of deliberately wearing(and openly showing) guns at political gatherings...to intimidate, especially at votng sites, goes back to America's days of Reconstruction (1870s) when the former Confederate supporters sought to cancel out the votes of newly-freed slaves.

Also, the wearing of guns at the President's town meetings and the shouting of "Liar" by the South Carolina Congressman (Joe Wilson) is a strategy first laid down in print in post-Civil War Dixie in 1870 by the Dixie states in their efforts to squelch the voting of newly freed African-Americans by intimidation (showing of guns at town meetings and political rallies) and murder, if intimidation was not effective. Here is an excerpt from a  1876 South Carolina poster giving instructions to the white supremacist vigilante group, the South Carolina Red Shirts, how to intimidate and disrupt town meetings - the similarity with tactics used recently to disrupt Mr Obama's town meeting can't be denied:

2. That a Roster must be made of every white and of every Negro in the Townships and returned immediately to the County Executive Committee. 3. .... be armed with rifles and pistols and such other arms as they may command..... . . . 13. "... soon as their leaders or speakers begin to speak ..., tell them then and there to their faces, that they are liars, thieves and rascals, and are only trying to mislead the ignorant Negroes and if you get a chance get upon the platform and address the Negroes. 14. In speeches to Negroes you must remember that argument has no effect upon them; they can only be influenced by their fears, superstitions and cupidity. . . . Treat them so as to show them, you are the superior race, and that their natural position is that of subordination to the white man. . . . 16. Never threaten a man individually. If he deserves to be threatened, the necessities of the times require that he should die. . . . 29. Every club must be uniformed in a RED SHIRT and they must be sure and wear it upon all public meetings and particularly on the day of election. 30. Secrecy should shroud all of our transactions. Let not your left hand know what your right hand does.

(Source: William A. Sheppard, editor, Red Shirts Remembered: Southern Brigadiers of the Reconstruction Period (Ruralist Press, 1940), pp. 46-50, reprinted in Paul D. Escott, et al, eds., Major Problems in the History of the American South, vol. 2, second ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), pp. 37-38.) 

Post-Midterm, Republicans Look in the Mirror for Solutions to Their Lacking Performance…They blame SingleWomen For Not Supporting Them But Are Still Frightened of Diversity

  The Perched Eye blog is 12+ years old, beginning from 2009 with President Obama's election. Our focus has been eclectic ...  the shapes and directions of American politics and culture, with occasional comments on the potential impact of new technologies. Pericles21's observations sometimes attract a critical eye, but the 'pen' remains unblunted. 

‘Republicans Looking in the Mirror’ (with full-on, myopic admiration of themselves) appears to be a significant political meme for 21st century American politics. What Republicans see reflected are their own images that they approve of mightily with only minor adjustments of eyeliner, hair tint, or toupees. 

How...'Buffo' are the Republican Party (with males playing female parts.) How 'Rabelaisian' in their idiotic and farcical obstinacy. How not enjoyable yet intellectually fascinating, as a natural disaster can be sometimes.

Meanwhile, when not admiring themselves, Republicans expend an unholy effort to remold the reality of the world around them to fit their private, gender-race exclusive view of what the world ‘Should’ look like. (And they genuinely appear puzzled as to why the world does not want to kneel to their view of things.)

Republicans seem not to like the majority of Americans (as evidenced by their losing the popular vote in the last 5 or so POTUS elections, even though they ‘rigged’ 2 presidencies in that period.) 

But those voter signals haven't persuaded the Republican Party to broaden its base with more inclusive appeals and policies, even though they cry and complain why the broad American voters don't like them.

Republicans need to tap into the American voter diversity, but they shy away from diversity of all kinds and instead worship their mirrors. But ‘what the Hell’, political shannigans (and foreign campaign money, thanks to the Roberts Court) can change that, right? ‘Not’, per the last mid-terms.

The latest Republican farce is the complaint that their shockingly ‘less’ mid-term performance was because all those terrible “single women” didn’t show up to vote for a homogeneously white male political party that is singularly patriarchal, ‘retro’, misogynist, and racist (by the preferred absence of skin ‘tint’, except for burnt orange from a tube).

Owing to that ‘betrayal’ (shed a tear) by those single women, Republicans shakily ‘won’ the House but with nowhere near the ‘Red Tsunami’ they expected, and crowed about as they counted chickens that would hatch from rotten eggs.

What are those Republican, white male exclusionists to do? Why 'obviously', find other scapegoats. (Ah, there they are - single women..."that's the ticket" for sure.)

Meanwhile, America’s diverse audience has left the theater, leaving Republicans to creak open faded curtains on Act 2, mascared actors and all.