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Comment by pen2l | Hacker News Reader

> A very odd set of events and no explanation regarding Elon's change of mind.

I don't know about the regulatory guidelines which would or would not have barred Elon from exercising any sort of control in the board, but my sources from Twitter are telling me that folks were not happy about the prospect of Elon wanting to change Twitter to be in his image and it's likely this that the higher-ups communicated to Musk and told him to please back away (hence the 'I believe this is for the best' affirmation line from Agrawal himself).

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>> hence the 'I believe this is for the best' affirmation line from Agrawal himself

He also says in the previous paragraph that they [had?] believed that having Musk on the board would "be the best path forward." It's sort of a Rorschach test. You could divine either opinion you wanted from the post.

The CEO's job, much like a politician's, often involves giving out statements that are a series of Rorschach tests. That's what you do to appease and assuage multiple parties simultaneously.

Maybe that’s why Dorsey left

It seems to me that Parag welcomed initially for Elon to be on the Board but then the tweetstorm Elon sent on Dying company, Twitter SF HQ, removing ads from their Subscription and accepting Doge for it, and the current Board/CEO may have thought that all this would be too much to handle so they may have pushed him out of the Board? Sounds like this tweet storm over the weekend may have contributed to this outcome.

Good thinking if they did. Letting him onto the board of Twitter would basically be like letting a cokehead run a drug cartel.

When it's Elon, you got to wonder if he did the whole thing to embarrass them. They can't stand him, but for a brief while he made them pretend to welcome him.

Elon's companies have a unique and very different culture in comparison to Twitter. Of course, Elon was not set to be CEO, but to your point, the prospect of "Elon-ification" of Twitter was going to upset a lot of employees.

The part I don't get: why is Elon still tweeting ideas for improving Twitter and shaking things up?

> The part I don't get: why is Elon still tweeting ideas for improving Twitter and shaking things up?

He's still the largest shareholder and he has a lot of soft power to sway opinions in the public sphere.

> The part I don't get: why is Elon still tweeting ideas for improving Twitter and shaking things up?

That is weird, trolling doesn't seem like Elon's thing at all.

Where have you been? The man lives to troll.

You missed the sarcasm.

I read parent as sarcasm.

I'd argue he lives to be seen as a troll.

As an actual troll he hasn't really done much but post tired memes until buying a large stake in Twitter. Time will tell whether he's actually going to do anything interesting with this stake but based on track record I'm going with no.

Most of what qualifies him as a troll could be gleaned from a ten minute crash course in /b.

Well, is 'qualifying as a troll' really about appealing to the connoisseurs, the academy of trolling experts?

Or is it about making the most people the angriest?

It's like arguing about whether McDonald's is good food.

Some people think that suggesting an Edit button is telling.

"Here is the only imaginable use of an edit button. You post a tweet saying “I love puppies” with a picture of a cute puppy. A thousand people retweet your tweet; a thousand more quote-tweet it with comments like “what a good boi!” A week later, you edit the tweet to say “I think the Nazis got a bad rap,” with a picture of Hitler. Years later, a professor is denied tenure because someone digs through her old tweets to find that she called Hitler “a good boi.” This is absolutely the only purpose for the edit button, and oh man does accomplished Twitter troll Elon Musk know that. "

(Matthew Levine last week)

There are fixes to this though.

Limit the time the tweet is editable, and postpone publishing tweets until that timer has run out.

Or show a history of what the post has looked like.

Or just make edit button append text at below tweet, immediately visible in contrast to next tweet in chain.

Why not both? If you want to edit posts after the initial deadline, that could be the next step.

Yeah, normal editing for X minutes, then append only seems to be good solution.

The former would completely negate the point of editing vs. deleting which one can already do.

The latter... perhaps, I guess? But then why bother? Are people so desperate to keep their internet points proxies by retweets and likes that they can't fathom reposting if there was an egregious error?

To me the whole exercise is one of malicious populism. It's an idea that appears liberty-generating on the surface and is used to gather a mob but has no real utility.

Enough people want the feature, whether you see the point or not.

One of the symptoms of autism is the inability to recognize sarcasm (<http://www.healthcentral.com/autism/c/1443/162610/autism-sar...>) without the help of idiotic, illiterate signals like "/s".

Elon is a massive troll, to the point that I bet he has accounts on random networks dedicated to trolling people anonymously.

The board did not want him, but he is still the majority shareholder and may actually want to accumulate more shares than would have been possible if he had joined the board.

Maybe he'll use his influence to replace the board with people who are less politically polarized. Maybe his new board will re-write the charter so he can eventually become CEO.

I don't think this game is over.

largest shareholder, not majority (51%) shareholder.

Game on!

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-14/elon-musk...

Not joining the board doesn’t change the fact he is the largest single Twitter shareholder. He didn’t buy that stake because he thought it was a great company as is.

What kind of culture do his companies have?

You'll get it if you realize he is trolling.

From an article titled "Elon Musk to address Twitter staff after internal outcry"[1]:

> Employees raged on internal message boards, expressing fears Musk will sabotage their culture and make it hard to do their jobs

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/07/musk-tw...

He also tweeted that “no one shows up” to the Twitter HQ in SF. I think the contempt is mutual.

Yup. Also he is hinting at mass layoffs: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1512974273606045702?s=21...

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