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Comment by ryzvonusef | Hacker News Reader

> you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is

How the fuck does Elon do it then? The mf has like four concurrent organizations under his helm.

> I think the bigger issue is who gets to replace him: will it be someone with smart ideas or someone to serve as a puppet of activist investors?

The rising stock price implies yes. Elliot MG has been desperate to make twitter the next mega app. Expect payment options, return of VIne as a tiktok clone, etc

Engagement is key, afterall. Good bye to text, I guess.

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I was under the impression that, at SpaceX, Musk is the “vision guy”, and Gwynne Shotwell is doing the nitty-gritty day-to-day operations.

https://www.wired.com/story/how-elon-musk-gwynne-shotwell-jo...

As for Neuralink and The Boring Company…well, I am typing this, not using my brain-machine interface, and my friend took the Blue Line from O’Hare this morning, and not some underground supertrain.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-elon-musk-hyp...

>As for Neuralink and The Boring Company…well, I am typing this, not using my brain-machine interface, and my friend took the Blue Line from O’Hare this morning, and not some underground supertrain.

I'm not sure what point you intended to get across with this take. I don't own any Lenovo products, is Lenovo defunct?

Edit: Yikes. My analogy isn't perfect, sorry folks.

it would be closer to if Lenovo had no products.

> I don't own any Lenovo products

Exactly. Lenovo has viable and desirable products that you could purchase if you were so inclined. That's not the case for Boring and Neuralink.

Boring makes a D-grade tourist attraction and offers no viable solution to the problem they claim to be solving.

Neuralink's biggest success has been in bringing attention to the field, but has made no actual progress of its own.

And that's not to say they won't bring viable products/solutions some day, but it's clear where Musk shines (e.g. bringing in money, hype, PR) and where he's atrocious (e.g. executing, planning, people). Shotwell is a fantastic example of a CEO using Musk where he shines, and keeping him away from where he's bad. What Tesla, Boring, and Neuralink all need are their own respective Shotwells.

Only one of Elon's companies is public and there are regular calls for him to be removed, but its stock price has been on a trajectory that makes that impossible without him "canceling himself". Elon is just very good at hiring exceptionally good people to run stuff for him with a small amount of oversight and steering.

Jack is CEO of two public companies and one is arguably underperforming, that's an untenable situation.

> Elon is just very good at hiring exceptionally good people to run stuff for him with a small amount of oversight and steering

Isn't this the major part of the definition of excellent manager?

Exactly. If your responsibilities are limited to calling some shots and coming up with some wild ideas here and there, and having the money to make it happen, you don't need to focus on things as much.

Anyway the guy's a wreck and wrecking ball, I wouldn't be surprised if he disappears or takes a step back for a while soonish. Tesla's stonks will crash, etc.

He's gonna run his body into the ground before he even thinks about leaving SpaceX for anything else. It is his life's mission, that much is obvious to those who have seen enough candid interviews. He doesn't talk about anything else with the same level of importance.

Same reason SpaceX won't go public if he can help it (and why Starlink is critical for a revenue stream). He needs to maintain complete control in order to put people on Mars.

Absolutely. I have no expectation of SpaceX going public this decade at the very least. Especially once Starship will start generating revenue, SpaceX may not need outside investment for a long time.

Twitter is 3x in 5 years, while S&P 500 is 2x in 5 years...It's not awesome, but I wouldn't call it underperforming...it's the same growth as Facebook.

Elon was kept only because he didn't give away founder control. At the end outside MBAs always try to take over and destroy the companies.

Well that's a major cherry-pick. How about we use a neutral start point such as TWTR IPO date? Since Nov. 8, 2013, TWTR is up 16.8% and has paid 0 dividends. Meanwhile, SPX is up 162% since then, plus it has paid a dividend of an additional 1.5 - 2.5% per year during that time. And QQQ is up a whopping 381% in that time. Twitter has been one of the worst performers in the Nasdaq 100 over the last 8 years.

Sorry, It wasn't cherry picking, my main criteria was that this was the largest exact date range that I could set in Google finance, that's why I usually look at 5 year horizon:)

I take back my comment, 16% is awful.

Not really :). 5 years is a pretty arbitrary, flattering timeline. Twitter is +18% all time growth. Facebook doubled a billion to 2B then to 3B users. In the same time span Twitter plateaud their user growth. Love the product, but the company is horrific in building things.

The 3x growth is only because they finally figured out monetization 7-8 years post ipo and rode the rising Ad wave that lifted all CPMs across Snapchat and TradeDesk.

Overall, pretty subpar stock and pretty grim outlook.

What's your evidence that Twitter's market is significantly larger?

Non-tech people sometimes ask me whether they should get on Twitter. I ask them why they might want it, and very often my answer is, "No, don't worry about it." And that's coming from somebody who uses Twitter enough to have two separate accounts plus a Twitter bot (sfships).

Twitter, like HN, is a niche social network. [1] Twitter's niche is much larger, of course. But I don't think it makes much sense to compare it to FB, whose target market is "anybody with friends or relatives".

[1] Technically, I'd call it a multi-niche network, in that it gets the most publicly active segment of people in a whole bunch of social groups. For example, tech people is has are the sort most likely to write books and articles, speak at/go to conferences, etc. But if you're the sort of workaday programmer who punches a clock at a bank and pays no attention to the industry, Twitter doesn't do much for you.

You’re slightly missing my point. I’m not claiming twitter’s niche is bigger. I’m saying for a social network to plateau at 300M users for 7-8 years that’s very embarrassing. Especially when the positioning was that “we’re a Facebook alternative.” For a social network to figure out tablestakes monetization 7-8 years post-ipo, that’s equally damning. The biggest offender is actually the glacial product development that Twitter has. Several Rudimentary features non-existent or canned because of analysis paralysis.

I’ll actually challenge you on the niche point. Twitter is niche because they completely failed to elevate the product experience to the masses. Mark was able to bring Facebook beyond a college network, Spiegel built snap beyond teens and texting, but Twitter continually fails for the average mom and pop. Every single piece of user research and UX audit finds Twitter to be very confusing for new users.

So Twitter being niche isn’t a victory. It’s an admission of defeat a la segways

I agree with you that Twitter's feature velocity has been terrible. Although in the last year or so they've definitely been trying more new things, so maybe they've finally fixed the internal barriers to that.

But I'm not getting what you think "Twitter for the masses" should be. The current value prop is something like, "globe-spanning discussion around hot topics". Fewer people care about that than "keep in contact with family and friends" or "look at pretty pictures". I don't see a mom-and-pop version of Twitter in the same way that I don't see a mom-and-pop version of the WSJ or the NYT. The mom-and-pop version of the NYT is perhaps USA Today, but that's not an expanded product, just a different one.

Yep! I think they’ve slowly learned to ship over the last 1.5 years.

Gotcha, honestly what I meant by mom-and-pop, I was thinking of growing Twitter just beyond the power user. Similar to you, I don’t believe twitter’s addressable market is as big as Facebook’s. If Facebook’s TAM is N, twitter’s is n where n<N. My main issue with them is that they’re actually 3/5ths of that n. I genuinely think they have an opportunity to make the product more accessible but they really have been not good :(. And I say this as a big Twitter fan!

Twitter is a great idea ruined by terrible UI. It's clear that people do want to listen to what famous people have to say, and they want to hear it directly from the person, not a PR team.

If only the UI let you do things like follow a thread, set up proper notifications, and made at least some attempt at filtering out the spammer/scam replies.

Those all strike me as very much advanced-user features, so as much as I'd enjoy using some of them, I doubt they'd make much difference to general-audience growth.

And I think you're being unfair about the spam/scam replies. Twitter has made great improvement there in terms of downranking/hiding junk replies. It'll never be perfect, but it's at the very least much better than it was. I have to go a long way down in most threads I look at to see that stuff if it appears at all.

While I agree that Musk’s hockey stick stocks mean removing him would piss of the people who could remove him, removing Dorsey because twitter isn’t a great stock seems weird. Stock matters for fundraising and for compensation, and as long as that stuff is working, the rest of the stock considerations should be secondary. Obviously they aren’t secondary to investors and investors have disproportionate power, but it still seems stupid.

You’re right! But honestly, Twitter is one of the worst product companies I have ever seen. In the second commenter, I’ve replied with some examples of how they completely fudged it up.

My favorite example is when Twitter said “hey guys, growing users is hard. You know what our North Star from now on is? Monetizable Daily Active Users”

Imagine a social network deciding it’s entire North Star is ad dollars. Pretty damning.

> love the product

Seems to me that everything good about the product was present pre-IPO and it has only gotten worse over the years. I still use it but I find the interface/functionality strictly less pleasant with each design change.

You’re exactly on the money. Anecdotally and even talking to ex-Twitter folks, for some reason they entered a glacial period where there really wasn’t any backbone or product authority to ship or improve. I’ll give them credit that in the last 1.5 years they’re getting better, but below average is not good enough. I think Twitter can do more. I’m just not sure there’s a product leader outside of Facebook or Google who can handle that mandate

It's funny how the same people who are very pro-privacy will crap on Twitter for not taking the same aggressive anti-privacy stance as FB.

I’m really not pro-Facebook. And my slamming Twitter is because they genuinely are bad at building and improving consumer experiences. It’s always fascinating how Jack can have an innovative product org like Square and oversee a bumbling morass like Twitter. So interesting!

And FB isn't bumbling? I have a much better experience on Twitter and far less intrusive targeting of ads/following you across the web - which is where FBs monetization happens.

The growth discrepancy has a lot to do with FBs innovation on the tracking component of things - advertising is what drives profit for these companies.

I think you’re mixing two different things here.

Facebook grew not because of Ad Dollars. It grew because it built an all-star product experience for consumers. It’s easy now to look at Facebook and think of its as Fait Accompli. But when Facebook came about, they arrived in the second renaissance of social networking. You had so many competitors right from incumbents like MySpace and right to upstarts like Friendster, Friednfeed. Literally then no one could predict who would win.

Facebook’s relentless product building made big enough to earn the problems of scale. Remember, when Facebook IPO’d it literally had a blip of ads business.

Both things can be true. But what I’m saying is, Facebook absolutely lights out built an incredible product experience and moat.

Now, they’re finally dealing with problems of scale. Which honestly aren’t due to bumbling per se, but really just come with the territory. Twitter haven’t even gotten their cowboy pants on

> At the end outside MBAs always try to take over and destroy the companies.

Yup. Many once great companies, for one reason or the other, believes they have to at some point bring these people in. Who then of course bring more in, who bring more in, etc. And the people that built the company from nothing to something huge are slowly runout and all the leaders from engineer and technology backgrounds are replaced by the "business people". And the culture dies as the company becomes one of abstract "deals" and "efficiencies" and growth stops and it is sold off.

> At the end outside MBAs always try to take over and destroy the companies.

Hyperbole. De-risk companies is the right word, MBAs unlike wide eyed founders understand that odds are against companies and survival is the priority.

They understand that a company like Yahoo! which in 20 years produced lots of value for shareholders, customers, users and employed so many people...that's a happy story.

People on HN see Yahoo! and think "failure", that's the same as saying Derrick Rose is a failure for not being Lebron, well if that's the case where's your 100M net worth for playing basketball?

Longer term, TWTR has not performed well. I got into both FB and TWTR shortly after their IPOs. In 8 years, TWTR bas gone no where, while FB is up 600%. They're not even in the same category.

>At the end outside MBAs always try to take over and destroy the companies.

Far, far more companies have been destroyed by cluesless founders than MBAs, and I don't think it's close.

> How the fuck does Elon do it then? The mf has like four concurrent organizations under his helm.

Tesla = primary concern | SpaceX = Gwynne Shotwell (Prez & COO) | Boring Company/Neuralink ["Labs" projects] = funsies

Every company he starts/runs is to enable viable Mars civilization. SpaceX = get us there. Tesla = cash cow for SpaceX + Mars ground transportation. SolarCity = energy infra for a Mars colony. Boring = radiation protection for Mars habitats. Neuralink = moonshot cash cow, advancement of neural medicine for Mars colony.

Trying to advance/safeguard humanity is the most funsies thing one can do.

If you definition of "X is for Mars" is so broad as to include "brain-computer interfaces just like on Earth, but done on Mars" then yeah I suppose pretty much everything is done in the service of Mars. For example, Google is working on having the best search engine available to use for search on Mars. Facebook wants to build the best social network, for Mars. Etc.

The reason an advanced Neuralink could be invaluable on Mars is because all the complex machinery required for diagnosis of brain-related ailments will be prohibitively difficult to set up on a Mars colony for a good while. The brain is the least understood ogran in our body - Elon is trying to accelerate development and generate awareness in the field by giving it an honest go with his own company. A BMI like Neuralink would also be a multiplier of human effort when there is a limit to how many colonists we can ferry per unit time.

Neuralink aside, you seem to not have mentioned the other companies - I wonder what you think of my theory regarding them?

I'll take two of whatever you're smoking because I want on this ride.

Elon is not CEO of SpaceX as many here have already pointed out. edit this is wrong, he is CEO. Ms. Shotwell is COO and President.

Outside of Tesla the other companies are not viable yet.

> Elon is not CEO of SpaceX

Elon is most definitely the CEO of SpaceX (and Chief Engineer, for whatever that's worth)

if you are thinking of Ms. Shotwell (what an appropriate name for a rocket scientist!) She's the COO.

Darn, not sure why I got confused. She's COO and President.

Elon actually makes major decisions on engineering too e.g. switch from carbon to steel.

Or pushing the idea of catching payload fairing and now boosters.

Especially catching boosters is the type of crazy stuff that only Elon would have stomach to try.

Shot very well by reputation!

>How the fuck does Elon do it then?

Outside of his role as a visionary and promoter, I think his affect on the day-to-day of his companies might be questionable to negative.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29380373.

From what I see, his system seems to be about focusing on one company, one problem at a time. Neuralink and Boring are side projects. And I believe he definitely doesn't recommend running two companies at a time.

> How the fuck does Elon do it then? The mf has like four concurrent organizations under his helm.

There is SpaceX (mostly run by Gwynne Shotwell) and Tesla. DeepMind/Boring Company are mostly just marketing schemes.

He has nothing to do with DeepMind. Maybe you're thinking of Neuralink?

I wouldn't demote them to "marketing schemes" -- he actually wants to bring these technologies to market (unlike Hyperloop) -- but they're pretty slow burn / almost hobby projects compared to SpaceX & Tesla. Both have started posting job reqs for Austin.

You're right it's Neuralink. Oh, I kinda believe he wants to make it work but it will be overpromised and underdelivered as always.

I think the secret is having some really stellar #2’s. Gwynne Shotwell Does wonders for space-x giving Elon the space to focus on the non-boring next-gen stuff. Jack had the same with Sarah Friar at Square but she left for Nextdoor. He also used to have Anthony Noto doing the company building at Twitter but he left for Square? But honestly, Elon’s probably an anomaly and no one else could match that ethic and sprawl

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