My highschool days. Wouldn’t change a thing either, except I wouldn’t start smoking cigarettes.

Removing his ability to play stocks at all is removing his ability to earn money. His investors will leave him and the interest on his loans will liquidate him. We’ve seen more than a few of his type flash up and fade away. Milken. Pickens. Belfort. And of course, Madoff. Just to name a few we know by a single name.

He would still be wealthier than 99.99% of people but then so are a lot of folks on the planet. That’s 80 million people left over in that .01%. That’s not all that powerful at all. It’s removing him from the .00001% thats the goal. And killing his stock market abilities would do that over-night. It’s why he bought Twitter, he had to because this was the alternative.

Kinda… depends on how things got him there. The thing Elon can’t lose without really going off the rails is his ability to play the markets. Once the SEC kicks him out you’ll see him legitimately calling for open revolt.

I can respect the stance, kind of. Can I offer an alternative perspective on that though?

For starters, Oligarchs don’t always win. That’s defeatism, don’t do that - for your own good.

But the main thing I’m pointing out is that there’s a particularly stinky arrogance in the creation of a hypothetical “little guy helped by my words”, and I know it because when I honestly ask myself why I contributed to reddit, it’s for me, not others. I wrote because I enjoyed it. Both quality and quantity. And while many people may have been helped by my words in one way or another and I’m happy for them, I didn’t honestly write any of it for them. I did it for me. And it was me who didn’t want to see the content go off into the nether, I was the hold-up. In my view, that’s again - a particularly stinky kind of arrogance. One I recognized in myself and took action to overcome. Your comment reminded me of it is all.

so I don’t really get what this accomplishes.

It weakens reddit’s ability to use that data for their own AI models. That is the reason for the whole api kerfluffle in the first place, there’s no other way to block other AIs from crawling the data for content. OpenAI and others likely made tens if not hundreds of millions off the content in reddit in the last few years, and they paid reddit nothing for it. It’s got reddit admins and executives really pissed off.

Thing is, Reddit paid me nothing for the content too though. At the end of the day I don’t want my content propping up another fascist billionaire social media mogul with an ego problem, not even a little bit. They burned their bridge so I took my toys and left.