In order to retain Elon Musk as chief executive Tesla just granted him shares in the company worth $30 billion. The richest man in the world now has $150 billion worth and his overall wealth is estimated to be $350 billion. Just the kind of guy you want to put in charge of slashing federal aid programs.
Forbes has Donald Trump’s worth at $5.1 B, half of that coming from his $TRUMP Meme coin. I could be wrong but his inauguration gave us a glimpse of the end of the world, that scene where he was surrounded by tech giants and billionaires.
Meta posted a 36 percent quarterly increase in profit and a 22 percent jump in revenue. Not sure what happened to the Metaverse but they are now working on “super intelligence.” The A.I. will help Meta’s advertising business by improving its social media feed to keep users on its apps longer. Meta’s family of apps, which includes Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, has 3.48 billion daily users and they are going to use super intelligence to trap them in their ecosystem and increase the advertising revenue.
Peggi read “Careless People,” some of it out loud. NYT called it “genuinely shocking.” I guess that is still possible. Emotional targeting, algorithms that detect when a teenage girl starts deleting her selfies or uses the word “depression.” “It could identify when they were feeling worthless or helpless or like a failure, and would take that information and share it with advertisers.”Not to mention spreading hate speech or finding the “persuadables ” in a presidential election.
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Robert Reich was on Colbert saying all this will lead to a new progressive era. Which history indicates likely but only if we survive it, of course. The hardening of the heart when wealth is the goal and not decency.