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Comment by riazrizvi | Hacker News Reader

Worst thing? His influencing is central to his success.

Unfortunately for civil discourse, it’s more effective to create controversial messaging that resonates with your followers, than sanitized messaging that is generally inoffensive. Controversial messaging makes your supporters increasingly loyal and attentive, as the noise from vocal ‘haters’ just keeps feeding your base. It’s perverse, it’s toxic, it’s exhausting but it works.

Look at the price earnings ratio of Tesla. What else is it but the world’s largest meme stock? His messaging vibes very strongly with Wall Street Journal readers and the Reddit trading community.

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Eh, Warren Buffett has been doing just fine for decades now and I don't believe has ever done any shitposting on Twitter.

Where did OP say this was the only path to success? Warren Buffett took the more traditional one of just being related to influential and powerful people.

Buffett has worked the media/pr angles magically. He interviews just frequently enough. He has his homespun wisdom persona. His letters to shareholders are marketing gold.

His followers show up to the annual meeting like a pack of cult members.

None of this is to say he's a bad guy, he seems like a good guy. But he's a marketing genius too. No vitriol spewing required.

Yes, he could even be described as beloved. He is quoted constantly, and his quotes have a homey every person kind of vernacular that makes them relatable.

That's a false dichotomy. In reality, there are more options than just "be boring" or "be sensational." Those other options just aren't in fashion right now.

So in practice those aren’t really options if you have to compete with what is in fashion currently.

> Unfortunately for civil discourse, it’s more effective to create controversial messaging that resonates with your followers, than sanitized messaging that is generally inoffensive.

Those aren't the options. You can - and many do, as a matter of course - create effective, powerful messaging that is not 'sanitized' or offensive. You can see it all the time on HN.

> Worst thing? His influencing is central to his success.

Musk has been more unhinged in his online activities than ever in the past six months or so, coinciding with a 45% slide in TSLA share price. Hypothesizing that his social media addiction is central to his 'success' would be pretty easy to test by simply comparing TSLA's performance to another auto manufacturer, e.g. Ford or GM. Doing that, TSLA is not showing any advantage - all three have suffered about the same amount of share price decrease.

So just looking at the numbers, it's clear Musk could just focus entirely on productive work, skip the 'influencing' and wanton reputational damage to the businesses he manages, and it wouldn't make a bit of difference. TSLA and the others would arguably be in the same place if the average person had no idea who Elon Musk was.

Not according to BusinessInsider [1] that notes that he lashes out in the media to cover particularly bad moments for Tesla. We saw this tactic being used over and over again during the previous Presidency. It works so well because there is only so much room ‘above the fold’. So as long as you fill it with a sensational nothingburger, then damage is controlled.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-lashing-out-recess...

Tesla wouldn't have been capitalized in the first place without Musk (and, by extension) without Musk's twitter.

If anything, Musk should focus entirely on the influencing and stop making decisions about product (see [1]) -- that is what he is good at!

[1] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a15347233/musk-attributes-...

You make a good case that his real contribution is merely writing checks to smart people. I would argue, however, that this doesn't need to come along with his baggage in terms of his distracting social media activities. It's pure self indulgence on his part, and likely making a lot of smart people not interested in his money regardless of how big the checks are.

A company that brooks no criticism is no different from a Regime that does the same. It had better be involved in basic extractive activity, because more complicated ventures tend not to work if the become brittle like this.

What does SpaceX do again? Uh Oh.

This is such an astute and concise description of one of the reasons we're currently living in this bizarro world. It can be applied across American culture, to both sides of the political divide, and even brands are beginning to do this.

Tesla and SpaceX are not successful because of Twitter.

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