IT'S CALVINBALL! - UPDATED

Questions abound as to what, exactly, is going on with Elon Musk and his “management” of his new plaything, Twitter. The best comment I have seen compared his activity to “Calvinball.” for those who never ran across the best comic strip ever, “Calvin and Hobbes,” or who may have forgotten, “Calvinball” is a game invented by Calvin, a kid of indeterminate age, but somewhere between four and probably seven, in which the “rules” are whatever Calvin says they are, whenever he needs to change them.

Muck has changed to game from Calvinball to Elonball. To sort out the latest in how the game of Elonball is played takes a bit of effort. But the easiest part to remember is, “The rules change if I say they change, and they change the way I want them to change.”

Essentially, Muck claims that people who are using publicly available tracking data, are either planning to assassinate him or one of his children, or are publishing the data regarding where he goes in his 2015 Gulfstream 650 private jet (He has two other, smaller ones, Gulfstream 500s, all owned by Space-X but paid for their flights by Tesla, unless it’s a personal flight, in which case Elon pays, but he never does because everything he does is for his companies - got that?), to give other unnamed possible assassins the information on where he had his can be found, in order to set them up for assassination. And thus, anyone who is doing this, or anyone who is talking about people doing this, or is talking about people who are talking about people who are doing this, or may talk about people doing this at some unknown future date, must be canceled from Twitter. Either for 24 hours, or maybe permanently, or something in between, depending on how Elon analyzes the results of a popular vote he put up on Twitter, and then canceled when it didn’t give him the answer he wanted, or what the result is of the revised plebiscite whose voting may come to an end at some point in the future when it gives the totals he wants.

Got all that?

At any rate, the information the assassins, or the people giving information to the assassins, or the people putting out information that assassins could use at some time, are using is the same information you might use if you want to know when the airliner your brother-in-law is flying on might arrive. This data gives all kinds of information, as long as you want to know where the flight left from, where it is going, and when it will arrive. It will not give information regarding what car parked in which airport parking lot Passenger A will be going to, that you should follow so you can assassinate him at the time and place of your choosing. and Musk’s argument that the information about his flights is not public information was disproven when two different cable TV hosts had staffers use Google to discover the ownership of Musk’s jet(s) and then plug in that information and - bingo! - up came the information.

Being worried about all this is not a new thing for Mr. Muck. There’s this teenager who set up a Twitter account back in the Before Time when Muck was just another high-profile user, that provided the information about where that 2015 Gulfstream 650 was. When Elon heard that this kid, who was doing this with other well-known rich and famous private jet users, had worked out a deal with Mark Cuban to stop following his jet in return for “serious career advice” from Mr. Cuban, Elon offered him money to stop. $5,000 to be exact. The kid said he’d stop for $50,000 and “an internship,” which was $45,000 and personal contact more than Elon was willing to pay.

So the account @ElonJet continued to let people know the comings and goings of Elon’s jet, and presumably Elon, and also Elon’s peeps.

All this high drama came to a head on Wednesday, when a “stalker” in Los Angeles followed one of Muck’s cars, in which one of his many children by multiple mothers was a passenger, and when the car was at a stop light, either hit the car, or hit the hood, or jumped on the hood, or did something that the LAPD has no record of anyone complaining about, that didn’t happen anywhere near LAX or any other airport, but it was all enough to convince Muck that someone wanted to kill his offspring and had “doxxed” his location by using the airplane following information to discover that he was in Los Angeles. And so the @ElonJet account on Twitter was closed down permanently after Muck hurriedly played “Elonball” and wrote up some regulations that allowed him to close sites of people who gave “assassination coordinates” for Muck and his peeps to people who might find out where in Los Angeles he was by knowing his airplane was parked on the south side of LAX with the other bizjets. Such nefarious activity was declared a violation of the Terms of Service.

Since none of this made any sense in any way you care to examine it, people - actual reporters - whose job it is to take note of this sort of stuff and find some method to the madness of what is being said, took note of it. And those who took note suddenly found that their Twitter accounts went dark. And then other reporters who noted that the Twitter accounts were being blocked found theirs being blocked, and then other reporters who noted that the ones who were noting people getting blocked were getting blocked, found their accounts getting blocked.

Interestingly, and certainly a complete coinkydink, trust me, all these people who got their accounts blocked for a day or a week or as long as Elon thinks they should be before he moves on to the next coinkydink, happen to be people who have pissed off this blog’s Favorite Unreconstructed Afrkaner. Independent journalist Aaron Rupar, who’s been proud of having been designated a regular thorn in Elon’s paw. Donie O’Sullivan of CNN. Drew Harwell at The Washington Post. Micah Lee of The Intercept. Ryan Mac of The New York Times. Keith Olbermann (is he still around?). Mike Binder of Mashable. And Steve Herman of Voice of America. (The Voice of America?)

And all of a sudden the story was “What kind of Calvinball is Muck Playing?”

And all this affects you and me how?

Since I never saw twittering as anything I wanted to do, it won’t affect me at all personally, at least not until The World’s Not The Richest Man Anymore buys the internet.

But it does affect people who want to use Twitter as it was originally designed to be used, and it also affects people who not longer want to use Twitter since you can’t use it as it was originally designed to be used, who are now using Mastodon.

What’s Mastodon? Why is that being blocked? Well, as best I can tell, it’s a Twitter wannabe site that is run the way Twitter should have been run from the outset. And that same kid who tracked the 2015 Gulfstream 650 on Twitter is following it on Mastodon, so now if you’re a Twitterer and you try to go from there to Mastodon, Twitter will warn you that Mastodon is “unsafe.” Except it isn’t.

Later Thursday night when there was more interest in the cancellations, Muck engaged reporters in a Twitter Chat Room. When he was challenged by a one of the canceled reporters, he left the chat and then canceled all the Twitter Chat Rooms. Then a few hours later reinstituted them, but limited access to them.

Muck can do anything he wants with Twitter now, because he owns it. Like the moron who bought Pete Regina’s beautifully-restored P-51 Mustang 30 years ago and sloshed red paint all over it but you could still see the old markings underneath used to say to people who asked him why he did such a thing, “I like red airplanes, and besides, I own it.” (Eventually, it came out he had used the proceeds of illegal activity to buy the airplane, so he can no longer say that.)

Had Jack Dorsey pulled one tenth of what Muck has since he took control of Twitter in October (Was it only October? Time flies when you’re havin’ fun.), he’d have tanked Twitter’s stock by now, enraged the corporate board, and gotten himself in all kinds of difficulty. That’s w hat happens to crazy CEOs of publicly-traded companies. Muck’s gotten in difficulty too, but there is no market mechanism, no corporate governance rule, that affects him as a private owner, that can induce responsible behavior from him.

That’s right, an important component of social communication is now controlled not by a publicly-traded corporation, but by a guy who has not himself advanced beyond the worldview of the twelve-year old “weird kid” who got chased at school and as a result developed a world-class persecution complex. A guy who is still freaked out over being booed by a bunch of Dave Chapelle fans on Saturday Night Live.

This is the guy who proclaimed himself the leading defender of “free speech” on the planet when he announced he was buying Twitter.

A trending post on Twitter as of last night reads: “Muck is establishing a pattern of lashing out at people who seem to anger or offend him personally - and then changing Twitter’s official policies in order to justify it.”

That’s Calvinball, or the Elonball version of it.

This is why private control of what is effectively a “public utility” cannot stand.

UPDATE: From today’s Washington Post:

A confrontation between a member of Elon Musk’s security team and an alleged stalker that Musk blamed on a Twitter account that tracked his jet took place at a gas station 26 miles from Los Angeles International Airport and 23 hours after the @ElonJet account had last located the jet’s whereabouts.

The timing and location of the confrontation cast doubt on Musk’s assertion that the account had posted real-time “assassination coordinates” that threatened his family and led to the confrontation. Police have said little about the incident but say they’ve yet to find a link between the confrontation and the jet-tracking account.

The incident, The Washington Post’s reporting shows, occurred in South Pasadena, a Los Angeles suburb, on Tuesday at about 9:45 p.m. South Pasadena police were called to the gas station, according to the business’s manager, but made no arrests. South Pasadena police have not responded to requests for comment.

AND IN CASE YOU WONDERED IF THE GUY WAS CRAZY…

Using a video of the incident that Musk posted to Twitter, The Post identified the owner of the car involved and then the driver shown in the video who had rented it through the car-sharing service Turo.

The car’s renter, Brandon Collado, confirmed in interviews with The Post that he was the person shown in the video. He also provided The Post with videos he shot of Musk’s security guard that matched the one Musk had posted to Twitter.

In his conversations with The Post, Collado acknowledged he has an interest in Musk and the mother of two of Musk’s children, the musician known as Grimes, whose real name is Claire Elise Boucher. Boucher lives in a house near the gas station.

In his communications with The Post, Collado, who said he was a driver for Uber Eats, also made several bizarre and unsupported claims, including that he believed Boucher was sending him coded messages through her Instagram posts; that Musk was monitoring his real-time location; and that Musk could control Uber Eats to block him from receiving delivery orders. He said he was in Boucher’s neighborhood to work for Uber Eats.

What took place between the two men before they arrived at the gas station is unknown. There’s no indication in videos shared with The Post that Musk’s children were present.

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