112 points

Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman for those who don’t want to click through.

And I have no idea which I would choose to face off from those four, let alone who would win.

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106 points

You could put them in a sack and hit the sack with a stick. You’d never hit the wrong guy.

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31 points

I like this idea much better than picking one of them as the worst person in tech for 2023. Can we do the stick beating instead?

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3 points
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But we definitely need to have Zuck in there too. And maybe Thiel, as a special guest.

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15 points

Could I? Yayyyy!

Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack.

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21 points
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Theil wants a techno libertarian oligarchy with no regulations ala Blade Runner.

Musk wants the rich to escape to Mars while destroying earth and dooming the poor’s.

Bezos wants to send the poor’s into space along with heavy industry and turn earth into a rich person paradise ala Black Mirror “Fifteen Million Merits”.

Altman is just a shitty rich person in tech wasting precious resources to teach a computer to create porn. Becaue we all know that’s what 99% of people do and will use AI for. He’s also a prepper which means he’s a selfish cunt.

If I had to pick just one it would be Theil. I think the man is insidious while the rest are more in your face.

Ranked choice would be Theil, Musk, Bezos then Altman.

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4 points

I love your descriptions for all of them. If you have some free time would you mind writing it for everyone in the brackets?

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2 points

I’m shocked that Sam Altman won out over SBF

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2 points

Sam Bankman-Fried is definitely bad for what he did and his belief in effective altruism, which is just another smoke screen to not properly tax rich people because they “donate to charities”. You could argue his getting into crypto also makes him bad because crypto mining is bad but he’s not on the same level as Sam Altman. Not even close.

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1 point

SBF hasn’t been in the headlines as much recently.

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20 points

No matter who wins we all lose. That’s kind of the point whenever these guys turn up.

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6 points

Well, and sadly, said.

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14 points

To make things slightly easier it’s Musk v Thiel and Bezos v Altman.

In the first matchup, I would pick Musk over Thiel for being a bigger POS in general.

In the second matchup I would pick Bezos for the larger impact he has had on the world.

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37 points

I’m with you on the second, but I would have a really hard time with the first because Musk is more overtly a piece of shit, but Thiel has had so much influence over the years, including elevating Elon Musk to the position where he is today. I guess if it’s the worst of 2023 and we’re restricting it solely to what we know they’ve said and done in 2023, it would be Musk. But I think overall, it is probably Thiel just because there wouldn’t be an Elon Musk anyone had heard about without Peter Thiel.

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3 points

This is the 2023 matchup, so I guess it would put Musk on top

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17 points

In the first matchup, I would pick Musk over Thiel for being a bigger POS in general.

But Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is in itself subservient to Theil’s overarching political goals. One has been in the limelight more, but the other has caused more harm overall.

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5 points

This is the 2023 matchup. You don’t consider Jordan’s performance at UNC when determining their championship status this year. Heck, despite the past damage done, i don’t think. Bezos, for his 2023 tech fuckery, should have made it out of the first round.

By the same metric, Musk easily tops Thiel first 2023 and is the clear shoo-in as champion of the worst.

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5 points

Why do people hate Altman? Genuinely OOTL.

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19 points
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Deleted by creator
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15 points

He’s not really as bad as the other three, but he did take a nonprofit company and turn it into a multibillion dollar profit machine which has a massive carbon and fresh water footprint.

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10 points

Also some view ChatGPT (and the other “AIs”) as massive plagiarism machines.

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2 points

What did Thiel do to make the internet hate him as much as the other three?

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31 points

So, so, so many things.

Let’s start with him saying women getting the vote was bad for democracy and we can continue on from there.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/peter-thiel-women-democracy_n_5747079be4b03ede4413f6f5

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17 points

It’s a full time job to answer completely, but from what I know he finances escape fantasies for the rich which they call seasteading. He calls it a libertarian ideal to create these new colonial city states, but what he means is liberty for his ilk from taxes, regulation and societal rules. Meanwhile his brainchild Palantir erodes the rights of the poor people who are left behind through surveillance, military technology and ICE funding. But this is all in line with his ideology, because apartheid “works” in South Africa according to Thiel

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3 points

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

liberty

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.

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0 points

Musk.

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43 points

I think I’d say Thiel is worse than Musk. He supports anti-gay politicians while being gay himself. Tax cuts are more important than having the law treat people as human beings.

It’s possible that Musk might fail to understand exactly how shitty he’s being due to his autism, I’m pretty sure Thiel knows he’s fucking people over and doesn’t care. Also the whole bloodboy thing.

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31 points

He isn’t autistic. He simply said he is. Which makes him a giant piece of shit.

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9 points

According to his biographer, he’s wildly bipolar.

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5 points

I think he is too. But neither of us is qualified to make the diagnosis officially. 😆

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11 points

At least Musk is so loud and obnoxious that it’s easy to avoid him. Lex Luthor sits over there at Amazon quietly taking over the world and almost nobody gives him a second thought.

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1 point
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25 points

…How is Bezos in the running?

Jassy is the CEO of Amazon. Outside of space cuntery and being on the chair, he’s not really in tech.

With that being said, it’s still hilarious to me that Jassy has been CEO for two years, and most people still assume Bezos is boss.

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15 points

I think if you made billions in tech, you always qualify. To some degree even more after you stop working and still can’t find time to do anything beneficial for the world.

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-3 points

Amazon is one of the biggest tech companies in the world.

There is a good chance the instance you are browsing lemmy on is using Amazon hardware.

They are one of the premier IaaS and PaaS companies, as well as the owners of tons of platforms including websites like twitch.

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20 points

I think you need to read the comment you replied to. It seems like you commented before reading anything past the first sentence.

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2 points

Bold of you to assume voters even know that Jassy is running Amazon. Most people in polls like this vote based on which name they recognize and dislike the most. The only legit competition in name recognition Jeff had on the right side bracket was Steve Jobs.

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23 points

Too bad Zuckerberg is about to feast on our data now that Threads has federated

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32 points
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-6 points
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Information is cached on servers in the fediverse through connections. You can’t just make an empty server and harvest all of the data. Now if you unleash millions of accounts on the Fediverse like threads is doing, then you have access to everything.

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14 points
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21 points

How could anyone but musk win?

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12 points

Peter Thiel is also abysmal. Elon is more visibly terrible today but Thiel has been bankrolling regressives from the shadows for 20 years. He published his first screed about diversity in academia in 1995. So he is an all-time shitstain, for sure.

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3 points

Depends on if we consider Zuccer a person.

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4 points

Zuck is bad sure, but he’s not a jackass, at least not publicly, he might not have made the best decision for meta but the company is by no means failing, Elon is just so much worse on every level.

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7 points

Not failing, but actively ignoring Metas own research that shows Facebook is directly harmful to children and teens.

I’d say actively continuing to harm children should outrank being a jackass and/or incompetence.

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3 points

At this point it’s like choosing cancer over Alzheimer’s. Die from excruciating inner torment or infuriate everyone else until you die.

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1 point

I dunno, some of these votes are like comparing stage 4 leukemia to a mere urinary tract infection, and the UTI is somehow winning.

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1 point

Go UTI!

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