November 11, 2022

These 2 overinflated characters — Trump and Musk — are going down simultaneously.

I tried to get DALL-E to make a picture of how this looked in my head:

69 comments:

Achilles said...

Funny how the opponents of the Regime are being targeted on giant social media platforms.

Leland said...

Looks like FTX and Meta to me.

Temujin said...

How is Elon going down?

Shouting Thomas said...

I’m going to try: “Feminists worshipping at the altar of Satan.”

Will feature witches gathered around a boiling cauldron biting off butchered baby parts before tossing the remains into the pot.

“Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble!”

Kate said...

Not bad. Is that a third zeppelin in the upper left? Who's lurking that Dall-E intuited?

TreeJoe said...

Trump is going down. He has been going down since his re-election campaign and his disasterous post election efforts.

I have no idea why people think Musk is going down. I read an article yesterday that said since Musk acquired the company they are hemorrhaging money and he saddled them with debt. It was the most insane news article.

He's still the majority shareholder of a company worth $580 billion in todays market cap (Tesla) as well as a private company worth an estimated $127 billion (SpaceX). Twitter is his lowest valued major company, I believe.

Twitter, from a company value point of view, has been failing. Either Elon will turn it around, or he won't. But to say he's going down because he took on a failing communications business and is executing his well enunciated layoff plan is crazy.

gilbar said...

How many people has Tesla laid off?
How many people has facebook laid off?
How much money does Musk still have? $255.1 billion??
How much money does still Zuckerbug have? $84.3 billion??

How much money WILL Musk have?
How much money WILL Zuckerbug have?
WHO is going down in flames?

farmgirl said...

Seriously?
These are the great minds?
6th grade wishful thinking?

Good Lord.
It’s November.
Remember… remember?

Sofa King said...

How is Elon going down?

Lots of snarky stories in the media!

RoseAnne said...

Also not sure how Musk is "going down".

Could one not also question Zuckerberg's status? After spending $400 mil to "fortify" the 2020 election, he was mostly absent in this one as far as I know. Facebook is stuttering and Meta is underperforming.

Shouting Thomas said...

Men learning how to effectively say: “No!” to women is the great moral and political issue before us.

No, Althouse. Just, no.

tim maguire said...

Musk going down is wishful thinking. No sensible person would say such a thing.

Trump going down is probably also wishful thinking, but even many Trump supporters are ready to move on and are concerned about what he might do on his way out the door.

Gusty Winds said...

Picture looks to me like the two blimps are under attack but still flying. Might just hit their target.

Nothing like the Hindenburg which failed to dock at its mooring mast.

You firing up at the sky toward the Elon blimp professor? Elon is going down? They guy is going to the moon.

paminwi said...

Elon going down is wishful thinking. But he will face continual challenges.
The DOJ will do anything and everything to tie him up for YEARS looking into each and every company he owns and their foreign investors, etc. to make him spend millions and millions on lawyers. And every company will need their own set of lawyers. Question is: will there be lawyers brave enough to take on the DOJ?
Dems will do ANYTHING to shut up people who challenge them. (see Paul Clement and his guns rights case/law firm. Human scum I call firms like that.) (Or as Schumer said re: intelligence community-don't take them on - they have 6 ways to Sunday to bring you down!) The DOJ is becoming the same as the FBI & CIA.
And people wonder why we have no faith in our institutions anymore!

Lurker21 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Lurker21 said...

Too many wins can make people overconfident. When the losses start, they don't know how to handle them. Trump had the ability to come back in business and entertainment, but social media wasn't around then, so he could focus on what was important.

I finally heard heard what Trump was saying about DeSantis and now Youngkin, and yes, he's out of control. I don't see him returning to the White House. This is an old scenario, though: hoping there really is a new Nixon, hoping that Bush would grow up, hoping that Trump would find a reliable advisor and listen to that advisor. All for naught. People really don't change that much.

The consolation is that Trump's breakdown didn't start until after he left office. Another consolation may be thinking about how the Democrats took Biden off the scrap heap without even hoping he'd change, or grow up, or follow good advice. Remember the old bumper sticker, "Any Functioning Adult, 2020"? How did that work out?

MadTownGuy said...

A dire prediction; let's see if it actually comes to pass.

Static Ping said...

History is full of men and women who were "going down" and ended up surviving and even triumphing over their enemies and critics. It is also littered with the inevitable that never came to pass and the eternal that proved to have surprisingly short expiration dates.

To address your meme, 60% of the passengers and crew of the Hindenburg survived. The last one died in 2019! To bring up something else thread relevant, the real life Temujin was left for dead by his own tribe as a child, and then lost his first attempt at power as an adult, surviving only because his enemies did not deem him worth the effort to chase down and finish off. Genghis Khan, ladies and gentlemen. What a failure!

Things never change until they do. Experts are always right until they are wrong. And for Trump the walls are, once again, closing in, as they have been since the 1980s.

Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of New York said...

Enemies of the climate nazi/ neocon alliance must lose. All good people will cheer their destruction!

cassandra lite said...

Two thirds of those on board survived.

Only one of the two men travels on hot air.

John henry said...

One of the things people miss is how successful our President Emeritus was in this elections. Focus has been on the people he endorsed who lost.

That was about 8.

Nobody talks about how many of his endorsements won. This was about 260.

Keep hope alive.

John LGBTQ Henry

Sally327 said...

I hear mariachi horns.

I fell into a burning ring of fire
I went down, down, down
And the flames went higher
And it burns, burns, burns
The ring of fire.

It's interesting, these men who have billions of dollars supposedly earned through work and not won in a lottery or inherited (not completely anyway in Trump's case) but yet they don't really seem to know how to manage anything or anyone effectively. Musk seems incompetent, unless it's on purpose, which I'm not really sure what the business savvy is in that. And Trump seems to be caught in some weird, dissociative loop, which makes him seem Putinesque.

Sally327 said...

I hear mariachi horns.

I fell into a burning ring of fire
I went down, down, down
And the flames went higher
And it burns, burns, burns
The ring of fire.

It's interesting, these men who have billions of dollars supposedly earned through work and not won in a lottery or inherited (not completely anyway in Trump's case) but yet they don't really seem to know how to manage anything or anyone effectively. Musk seems incompetent, unless it's on purpose, which I'm not really sure what the business savvy is in that. And Trump seems to be caught in some weird, dissociative loop, which makes him seem Putinesque.

LA_Bob said...

As a visionary and a barker is far ahead of most. As a manager, he is too far out over his skis.

John henry said...

Someone ask Kleiner Perkins what percentage of their investments fail. Returning either nothing at all or a loss.

Someone ask General Mills what percentage of their new products fail. In the sense that they get discontinued in 3 years or less

Someone ask (Pick any company) what percentage of their products/businesses fail.

In most cases it is north of 50-60%

So, PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter. IF Twitter actually fails, and it has not yet, Musk will have a 25% failure rate. That is nothing short of spectacular by any standards.

Unless we compare him to our President Emeritus. He started, bought, ran about 100 businesses since the 80s. 4 went bankrupt (though no creditors lost a nickle) several others didn't do much and were shut down. But about 90 were successful. So call it a 10% failure rate.

That is way beyond spectacular.

John Henry

Rondo said...

Another theory

President Trump Fires Back Against Ron DeSantis, Con Inc and Coordinated Narrative Midterm Effort

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/11/10/president-trump-fires-back-against-ron-desantis-con-inc-and-coordinated-narrative-midterm-effort/


Why Do You Still Hate Donald Trump?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/why_do_you_still_hate_donald_trump.html

John henry said...

The last successful car company was Chrysler, founded on the remains of Maxwell in 1930 or so. (For some values of success). A number of people/companies have tried. Dozens, perhaps scores, of car companies (Packard, Nash, Studebaker, Crosley and on) gone toes up in that time.

Nobody has built a successful electric car since the 1920s.

Yet somehow Musk was able to do it.

The very idea of a private person starting a company to launch satellites and space ships was ridiculous a dozen years ago. Boeing couldn't do it. Lockheed couldn't do it. NASA could just barely do it even with infinite resources of govt behind it.

Bezos, Branson are floundering in their efforts though they have not failed at it yet.

Yet somehow Musk was able to do it.

The idea of high speed satellite internet has always been ridiculous. The inherent latency makes it slow and wonky. Read reviews of Hughesnet for example. And Hughes is one of the biggest players in satellite communications. If they can't do it, what chance does a newbie to the industry have? (See also Motorola/Irridium)Not even Musk can break the laws of physics and distance, right?

Yet somehow Musk was able to figure out how to offer reliable, high speed, low latency, comparable to cable, internet via satellite. Other than the $599 for the antenna, the monthly rate seems reasonable. I may wind up cutting the cable service next year when it becomes available here.

Other people could not make money on Twitter.

Will Musk be able to succeed where others have failed? Maybe, maybe not. It is going to be a while before we know. Even if Twitter goes bankrupt, as people are gleefully expecting, it does not necessarily mean failure. Sears and K-Mart went bankrupt several times each. The key will be whether it continues in business with Musk at the helm.

Way too soon to tell but I would never bet against Elon.

John LGBTQ Henry

Bender said...

So today Trump is mocking Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, saying his name sounds Chinese and that he would not have won without Trump's support. Of course, Youngkin had shown that Republicans could win (and sweep all statewide seats) in a state that had been trending Democrat, all without Trump. Virginians themselves banded together and intelligently voted their own interests without needing Trump to lead them by the nose.

Bender said...

The consolation is that Trump's breakdown didn't start until after he left office.

His breakdown began no later than the debates with Biden. His obnoxiousness level was dialed up to 58 - and that simply does not attract voters, even if/though Biden was deserving of the contempt. Then right after election day, long before Jan6, he began to act as if Trump Derangement Syndrome meant that he himself should be deranged.

And that is not appealing to wavering Dems who do not want Biden, to independents who have turned against Dems, to radical leftists who don't want men in women's spaces and refused to support Dems, or to the non-NeverTrumpers, to the Trump voters who were able to overlook the "mean tweets" for policy reasons.

Well, Trump needed to grow the eff up and learn his lesson about those "mean tweets" and show the discipline that one would demand from even a teenager. He didn't. He won't. THERE IS NO PATH for Trump that gets him a majority vote of the country. And approaching 80 years old, that alone is reason for him to go away.

n.n said...

They're chanting: They are not viable. Abort! Abort! to cancel... censor them. Dead babies tell no tales.

Joe Smith said...

200 billion dollars and richest man in the world.

Fucking loser...

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Trump lit his own zeppelin on fire by repeatedly trashing Desantis and now Youngkin. I’m disappointed he didn’t stay positive and I understand his frustration in battling both parties and the media. The primary process is not going to go well for Trump it appears. I’m curious what the democrats will do without the Trump foil to concentrate their message. You KNOW they want to run against him.

Lem Vibe Bandit said...

It’s not like there’s anything like Twitter for people to go.

I wouldn’t write Twitter’s nor Musk’s epitaph yet.

Althouse is wrong here.

Rondo said...

President Trump backed 174 candidates who won their races yesterday, with only 9 candidates losing.

Rondo said...

President Trump backed 174 candidates who won their races yesterday, with only 9 candidates losing.

gilbar said...

Serious Question
Of the candidates that Trump backed; how many of the ones that lost were NOT backed by the RNC?
I'm talking about YOU Pennsylvania!

gilbar said...

Seriously...
In five years; where do you see Facebook? Or Zuckerberg?
Now..
In five years; where do you see Tesla? Or Musk?

WHO is going down in flames?

Big Mike said...

Althouse hates, loathes, and utterly de-spises conservative, self-made billionaires who do not contribute to the Democrats and/or left-wing lunatic causes.

News at 11.

Maybe Elon Musk will succeed with Twitter, maybe it is too far gone already. Whether he does or doesn’t will turn out to have nothing to do with your sensitivities. The corporate world doesn’t work the way the academic world thinks it ought to.

With respect to Donald Trump, it turns out that people who understand finance know more about macro- and microeconomics than even the most credentialed academics (e.g., Larry Summers). That doesn’t excuse Trump’s crappy campaign in 2020 or his dismal performance since then. But his economic policies were really outstanding for the working people closer to the bottom of the financial ladder than the place where you and I dwell.

Joe Smith said...

'President Trump backed 174 candidates who won their races yesterday, with only 9 candidates losing.'

Could be misleading.

Imagine Tiger Woods plays a match against a kid in high school.

I back Tiger.

Am I a genius?

It looked like Trump cherry-picked a lot of races that were going to be R wins anyway, although I do give him credit for Vance.

At the same time, I ding him for Oz.

The lord giveth...

Butkus51 said...

Yes but the only women that matter these days are women of color and trans women.

Youre at the back of the bus now white women.

Enjoy

Butkus51 said...

Yes but the only women that matter these days are women of color and trans women.

Youre at the back of the bus now white women.

Enjoy

Big Mike said...

@Rondo, but the 9 Trump lost included races that were very high profile and against opponents who were very beatable.

What's emanating from your penumbra said...

Let's see if I have this correct.

Going down = wealthiest man in the world; destroyer of the censorious control of malicious fascists; and owner a vital communication platform that his critics can't get enough of, not to mention several other extremely high profile and ground breaking endeavors.

Yeah, he's a losing loser who should just give up and maybe see if he can get a WFH job.

PigHelmet said...

If you can manage to overcome the hurdle of having to use Discord to enter prompts, you might try the MidJourney text-to-image AI. It just updated to v4 (still in alpha), and my experience with it has been excellent (superior to Dall-E for my purposes). I just gave MidJourney the prompt “two over-inflated blimps going down in flames” and got what I would consider good (credible, coherent, interesting composition, exciting colors) responses. One has the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, which is a neat imaginative detail not hinted at in the prompt.

D.D. Driver said...

"President Trump backed 174 candidates who won their races yesterday, with only 9 candidates losing."

Moral victories are for losers. If Hershel Walker doesn't win the Senate race none of that really matters. Blowing three (was it four?) winnable Senate races means way more than whatever nobody representative from Arkansas or whatever. Give me a break.

Jupiter said...

Althouse, I realize that you see WaPo/NYT (Waponit?) as a field of study. You observe them and critique them. But remember what Nietzsche said about gazing into the abyss.

Gunner said...

Only Trump's early endorsements should count for or against him. "Endorsing" Brian Kemp at the last minute and him winning should not be a credit for Trump

Gusty Winds said...

Funny thing about this two blimp fantasy is once Musk lets Donald Trump back on Twitter they both become more relevant [Twitter and Trump]. Trump will have 100 Million followers overnight.

Trump will bring increased traffic to Twitter. Especially his detractors and haters who always race to comment on his tweets.

I didn't get on Twitter until Trump started calling all the right people stupid douchebags in 2016. Millions hopped on because of Trump.

I am baffled by the logic of this post, unless it's supposed to be about pure emotion.

Readering said...

100 million yearning to read about Young Kin, the Chinese sounding guy.

Rondo said...

The Trump Desantis is a diversion right know, the election being fair is the only issue

Rondo said...

People should read this article it might give you a better idea of what's happening.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/11/10/president-trump-fires-back-against-ron-desantis-con-inc-and-coordinated-narrative-midterm-effort/

Readering said...

Musk an overinflated character? Maybe just inflated. Tesla stock down 52% this year. Twitter probably down 52% from what Musk paid for it just now.

Lyle Smith said...

How is Musk "going down"?

Rondo said...

Trump did fine

https://tierneyrealnewsnetwork.substack.com/p/heres-what-really-happened-in-mid?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=728707&post_id=83712830&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email

Known Unknown said...

People still thinking that Musk bought Twitter for Twitter. Ha.

FullMoon said...

Poor Musk. He gonna join J.K. Rowling in the rich and shunned arena who don't give a care.

FullMoon said...


"Blogger Gusty Winds said...

Funny thing about this two blimp fantasy is once Musk lets Donald Trump back on Twitter they both become more relevant [Twitter and Trump]. Trump will have 100 Million followers overnight. "

The funny thing about Twitter celebrities who quit in a huff expecting to make a difference because they are so popular, is that their thousands or millions of followers don't quit. They are still there for the advertisers to target.

Might have expected some to learn from Neil Young quitting Spotify in protest and cowardly changing his mind.

FullMoon said...

Facebook (META) stock is down more than 73% over the year and has lost $800 billion of its market cap, CNBC reported.

Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of New York said...

The problem with Twitter is that it is a platform that enables citizens to hear the other side and therefore to question the war and the right of hidden elites to rule us unaccountably.

I am trying to picture Althouse at a ‘60s anti-war demonstration telling people to shut up because the government knows best and smugly grinning as the truncheons meet the heads of the troublemakers. I can’t do it, of course, but Viet Nam would have gone differently if the government had the strict control of the narrative that it has today and was able to effortlessly destroy politicians who opposed the war.

Big Mike said...

So today Trump is mocking Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, saying his name sounds Chinese and that he would not have won without Trump's support.

I live in Virginia and am modestly active in local Republican politics. If Trump provided support to Glenn Youngkin I am unaware of that fact. In fact Youngkin pointedly distanced himself from Donald Trump, correctly perceiving that Trump’s endorsement would cost him tons of votes in the highly populated counties close to Washington where the denizens of the deep state live, like Fairfax, Loudoun, Stafford, Arlington, etc. The best thing Trump could have done was steer clear of the race, and it is to his credit (then, anyway) that the man did just that.

gilbar said...

google took the Billions they made from ads on (and payments to manipulate) their search engine; and used those Billions to make Chrome, and Android.
Now, MOST of the world uses things that make money for google.. Every minute of every day.
(well, the minutes they are awake)

Now, WHAT has facebook done, with THEIR money? Jesus Fucking Christ (That's RIGHT, his middle name is FUCKING); WHAT have they done, with their Money? Instagram? That was TWELVE years ago!!
Girls that weren't even fetuses back then, are old enough now to have their breasts chopped off!

Drago said...

Readering: "Musk an overinflated character? Maybe just inflated. Tesla stock down 52% this year. Twitter probably down 52% from what Musk paid for it just now."

OMG! All is lost! Abandon all hope ye who enter here!

On the other hand, maybe I'll give it more than 2 weeks to see what happens.

Iman said...

“Remember… remember?”

The 5th of November?

Lurker21 said...

Your graphic suggests that future wars will be fought by giant flying pickles.

If you have a big ego, you can get baited into things. All the chatter about whether Elon should take over Twitter and what a horrible thing it would be may have pushed him into doing something that on reflection, he would have rejected. Trump, likewise, is the elephant who sees a mouse rustle in the bush, tries to stop it out, and ends up hurting himself more than the mouse.

Heywood Rice said...

Twitter Poisoned - Jaron Lanier, NYT

When I compare Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and Ye, I see a convergence of personalities that were once distinct. The garish celebrity playboy, the obsessive engineer and the young artist, as different from one another as they could be, have all veered not in the direction of becoming grumpy old men, but into being bratty little boys in a schoolyard. Maybe we should look at what social media has done to these men.

Josephbleau said...

Its been a few weeks now so we can reliably predict that Musk is a dumbshit and doomed to failure. Like everyone at Pearl Harbor knew that the US would loose the Pacific war, at 8AM on Dec. 7 1941.

Beiden may need to be checking old Musk out for some crimes, but "good luck" if you try to investigate his crooked son. Lets all rally and be proud for two tiered justice. Or new nobles are free to do as they will.

Michelle Dulak Thomson said...

For the last time, peeps, it's a Zeppelin, not a blimp. Zeppelins have a rigid structure. Blimps do not.

That is all.

Mikey NTH said...

MDT: Correct!

And for any airship to go up in flames the lifting gas must be hydrogen, not helium. Hot air is something for balloons to go drifting across the summer skies.

chickelit said...

If a woman had 10 children with four different fathers, Althouse wouldn’t notice; but Musk in the equivalent position sets off her alarms. Thus will Althouse always be our favorite hypocritical contrarian.