TechScape: How Musk and crypto bros get away with it

theguardian.com:

One of the biggest advantages you can have in life is the superpower of “getting away with shit”. If you manage to play by different rules from the people you’re competing against, you can appear unstoppable.

If you’re good enough at it, you can reveal that even deeply foundational rules of the system are, in practice, just guidelines, a gentleman’s agreement, or just politeness. The rise of Donald Trump in US politics, for instance, led to half a decade of commentators insisting he couldn’t do things that he, in fact, could and did do. (Depending on how you interact with politics, I can direct you to this comment piece or this viral tweet for an elaboration of that argument.)

Tech news this week has been dominated by two things: Elon Musk’s will-he-won’t-he game with Twitter, and the collateral damage across the crypto sector of the collapse of the stablecoin TerraUSD. But really, it’s been dominated by one thing: the incredible power of getting away with shit.

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Elon Musk’s long history of acting with impunity is well documented, in part because so much of what he’s got away with directly involves the social network he’s currently (maybe) buying.

There was the time he called a British cave diver a “pedo guy”, tweeted that if he wasn’t a paedophile he would sue, sent material suggesting he was a paedophile to a reporter, and then won in court based on the argument that he hadn’t intended to imply he was really a paedophile, and said sorry anyway. There was the time he tweeted that he would be taking Tesla private at a valuation of $420 dollars a share (he didn’t) and that he had funding secured (he hadn’t).

And there was the time he bought a five per cent stake in a publicly traded company, failed to disclose the stake when