Thread by @KathrynTewson

So yes, I will obviously be talking about Elon’s dumbass lawsuit against Media Matters. Akiva and Mike have already done threads on Bluesky (hmu if you still need a way in) but I am gonna talk about it here.

But first, I want to talk about Up Goer Five. xkcd.com/1133/

Up Goer Five is an XKCD comic in which the author, Randall Munroe, describes the Saturn 5 rocket using only the thousand most commonly used words in the English language. Amusingly, “thousand” isn’t one of them, so he has to say “ten hundred.”

(He later expanded this concept into a book called Thing Explainer, which is amazing and which makes an outstanding gift for the precocious child on your holiday shopping list.) a.co/d/9XPkQv7

Much of my job, really, is Up Goer Five; I spend a lot of time trying to explain complicated concepts to people without using any of the vocabulary I would ordinarily use, because it’s confusing. Either law stuff to clients, or tech stuff to courts. I’m pretty good at it.

But it does mean that sometimes when I’m trying to explain, for example, how a bad actor is spoofing a return on a software call, or why the opposition’s evidentiary objections are nonsense, I can kind of sound like this.

I love Up Goer Five. This is my favorite part of the panel; it has become a phrase of regular use in my household. “How’s the report going, buddy?” “I am having a bad problem and I will not go to space today.”

With that in mind, here is my lawsplainer thread on Musk v. Media Matters, et al., using only the ten hundred words people use most often. I am allowing myself an exception in the form of proper nouns because otherwise I would die. You can play along here. splasho.com/upgoer5/

Elon Musk asked the people who have the power to decide right and wrong to make Media Matters pay him because he said they hurt him. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…

Almost everything about his asking is stupid and wrong. It is so stupid and wrong that his entire asking is broken.

I will start with the people he is asking, and the place he is asking it in.

Elon Musk is asking for his business, X Corp. X Corp is a business made in Nevada. It does most of its work in California.

He is asking for both a business and a person to pay him. The business is Media Matters, which was made in Delaware. It does most of its work in D.C.

The person is Eric Hananoki, who lives in Maryland.

NONE OF THESE PLACES IS TEXAS.

The Right-Wrong Deciders only have the power to decide things about people or businesses who live in the place they have power over, or who at least have a big relationship with that place. Doing most of your business in a place makes a big enough relationship to matter.

If the things that made most of the hurt were done in a place, that makes a big enough relationship to matter too. But doing only a little bit of your business or making only a little bit of the hurt usually doesn’t.

None of the people or businesses in this asking have a big enough relationship to Texas for the Texas Right-Wrong Deciders to have the power to decide things about them.

But even if they did, X Corp has a group of things you have to agree to before you are allowed to do any things with them, and one of them is that the only place you will decide things is California.

So asking the Texas Right-Wrong Deciders is already so stupid and wrong that the asking is broken. Media Matters and Eric Hananoki can each ask the Deciders to say no to the asking just because of the place.

But it gets worse.

The Right-Wrong Deciders will only make people pay you if they have hurt you in ways that the Deciders say means they have to pay you. If they hurt you in other kinds of ways, the Deciders will tell you “sorry, we will not help you.”

The Deciders have agreed on what these Ways of Hurting are. Every Way of Hurting has a group of smaller things that all have to be true in order for the Deciders to agree that those people hurt you in that way.

If even one of those things is false, the Deciders will not make the people who you say hurt you pay you. Showing that they are true is your problem. The people you say hurt you do not have to show that they are false. You have to show that they are true.

And there are some ways people can hurt you that the Deciders have already decided are always okay! If people hurt you by saying true things, that is ALWAYS OKAY. Even if the true things make you feel bad or make you lose money!

In America, we believe that it is always okay to tell the truth, and we agreed right at the start that none of our Deciders could ever lock people up or make them pay money for telling the truth.

So what is it that Elon says that Media Matters did to hurt him?

Elon says that Media Matters told lies about the way X Corp shows words from the people who pay him to show their words to other people. He says they made it look like X Corp shows those words right next to a lot of other bad mean hate words.

Elon says that the people who pay him to show their words to other people stopped paying him because they were mad that their words were shown next to Bad Mean Hate Words, and that since this is a lie, Media Matters should pay him.

Then he very carefully explains that X Corp really did show those paying people’s words next to Bad Mean Hate Words. So it was not a lie at all. It was a true thing that he wants to not be true.

Elon says that it is still a lie even though the thing Media Matters said happened really happened, because they did not say ALL of the true things that happened.

But in the US, “not saying true things” is only a Way of Hurting that the Right-Wrong Deciders will make people pay you for if saying the true things that you left out would make the meaning of the true things you said really different.

Elon says that the people who pay him to show their words to other people were only mad because they thought that this happened a lot of the time.

But to show that this was true, he pointed to something that one of the Word-Showing Paying People said. And what THAT said is that they are mad if their words get shown next to Bad Mean Hate Words more than NONE times.

One is more than none, Elon!

That thing also had words from X Corp, where they said that they had changed things so that this would never happen again. Which means that they decided before NOT to do the things that would make this never happen.

Elon's asking has TWO big problems so far:

1. The Deciders he is asking to make Media Matters and Hananoki pay him do not have the power to make them do anything.

2. The thing he is asking the Deciders to make them pay him for is a thing that is always OK.

There are more.

The first Way of Hurting that Elon wants the Right-Wrong Deciders to make Media Matters and Hananoki pay him for is "Hurting Business Relationships with Business Friends He Already Has."

Remember what I said about a group of smaller things that all have to be true?

In Texas, one of those things for Hurting Business Relationships With Business Friends He Already Has is that an agreement got broken.

Guess what Elon never said happened?

The next Way of Hurting he talks about is Saying Mean Things About My Business.

One of the smaller things for this Way of Hurting is that the things have to be not true. He says that they were not true, but like I said before, really they WERE true.

The next Way of Hurting that Elon asks about is "Hurting Business Relationships with Business Friends I Do Not Have Yet."

But in Texas, this is only a Way of Hurting that the Deciders will make people pay you for if you show that the people who hurt you did something wrong.

Elon says they did something wrong, but like I already said, telling the truth is a thing that is always okay.

So ALL of the things he is asking the Right-Wrong Deciders to make Media Matters and Hananoki pay him for have some big problems.

But Elon has AN EVEN BIGGER PROBLEM THAN THAT.

The person he said hurt him? He forgot to say how. He only said ways that the business hurt him.

You can't make someone pay for hurting you when you don't say how they hurt you, Elon!

This brings me to the end of my talking about Elon Musk asking the Texas Right-Wrong Deciders to make Media Matters and Eric Hananoki pay him because he says they hurt him.

In short: Elon is having a bad problem, and he will not go to space today.

{fin}