Turning Twitter into WeChat is probably a bigger challenge than sending a rocket to Mars, but...
Yeah that doesn't count. Stuff you don't do doesn't count.
Similarly with Tesla, legacy automakers will electrify the world. Being a cheerleader on the side doesn't count.
CEOs are people who sign off quality of life for the people who buy the products/services that the company they lead is selling. And that is all there is to it. There is nothing tough or poetic about it. Sane people are scratching their heads at how some people are falling for the cult of the founder which started with Jobs.
Ignoring the context of the article, I don’t believe that the example you’ve given here is really fair. It’s perfectly valid to review something which you could not create. If we excluded that whole category, then reviews would mostly cease to exist, and only peer review would be possible.
As someone who has been in the kitchen since childhood, I can appreciate how difficult great food is to create! If I taste something inferior I’m going to be specific with my feedback for improvement, highlighting the good points not just focus on the negatives.
Drives me nuts when at a restaurant with friends/family who haven’t put in the time in the kitchen and couldn’t hope to create a delicious meal dissing the food … if you can’t make something better, either shut up or try to be helpful with your feedback! Being critical is so easy and cliché.
The world needs more optimistic Elons not more doubters.
Um, your response is not agreement.
If you said "idk, this phone just sucks, because i feel like it does and idk how it could be made better", that would fall under "useless complaints". But saying "my phone drops calls often" is a specific complaint with a very specific (implied) improvement suggestion ("make phone not drop calls").
You don’t have to be a culinary wizard to tell when many foods are overcooked, underseasoned, etc. Sometimes chefs just screw up and a dish has outright unpleasant qualities.
Most people have hundreds or thousands of points of comparison for high-quality food even if they can’t make it themselves. If a restaurant bills itself as high-quality and then doesn’t live up to that standard I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say so.
Is peer review more valuable? Probably. But most restaurant guests aren’t chefs so pleasing non-chefs is valuable too.
Nowadays, we have every Tom, Dick and Harry commenting on anything and everything, regardless of how informed, educated or even experienced in the area they want to criticize.
I would like to hear an expert's opinion on this though.
You can go to sites or youtubers that specialise with reviewing stuff.
The problem is that it's just opinion of a single person & they can be easily bought or swayed so even if you have "experts" reviewing it that doesn't mean quality.
Also don't need an expert to tell you some piece of shit of a device fell apart after a month...
But I do wish that the reviews on sites were actually stuff people write month+ after getting the thing instead of "well, I got it, it works, I tried it for 5 minutes"
Success does breed success, but it’s not inevitable. There’s still hard work to be done and his big successes have come from hardware (batteries & rockets). Twitter is software in the social / content realm.
To use your cooking analogy, it’s like saying don’t bet against Gordon Ramsey (an expert in the cooking / media / art / experience realm) if he acquired Virgin Records. I’m sure he has connections and some knowledge that helps, but it’s a new field with new challenges.
Is there anything other than aspirational thinking behind this statement? Musk himself has said it's a cash incinerator - and that's by Musk standards (read: used to huge public subsidies and constant capital raises).
Where do you pull these numbers out of? Twitter's yearly revenue was $5.2 billion.
If you're so off base for the objective metric, want to guess how off you are on the rest of your opinion?
1) Friendster
2) MySpace
3) Facebook
4) Twitter
5) Instagram
6) TikTok
Obviously the exact list is a matter of opinion, but Twitter is definitely not current-generation, I think everyone can agree on that.
Here, have fun exploring when each one was "born" and therefore its generation:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=t...
But to say the generations are unremarkable isn't quite true -- the whole point is that previous generations are generally stagnant in growth, unlike the newest generation(s) that are still growing. This is a very valid factor in why investing in TikTok might be a smart idea while investing in Twitter is... not.
I agree it's like that but disagree there's a problem with that. Ultimately it's the consumers that are the judges if it's a business.
And the way to make it better would be to go back in time and not make the mistake of buying it.
Nilay is doing the exact right thing, in the context of his corporate job.
What you're really arguing here that Elon Musk is more capable than the previous people in charge of Twitter. I won't defend them much, but based on many of his previous actions I'm skeptical he's going to do any better and in fact think he'll probably do worse than the ex-leadership.
And don't bet against politicians wanting to affiliate with his celebrity/interact with his clout giving him subsidies.
It's also been a trader's paradise given the volatility and occasional appearance of someone mysteriously placing huge OTM call purchases for that Friday in an effort to force a gamma squeeze. In a market with regulators this would be suspicious and investigated, but we're in post-GFC America.
In a world where people are increasingly living in urban areas, fiber will annihilate satellite internet.
Starlink is yet another niche thing which Musk is specialized in pursuing.
In fact all of Musck companies can be summarized with "everybody has heard of them in the financial and technology press, but not many people use them"
I would not have guessed that the satellite tv market would have gone on as long as it has, considering how many satellite customers also have access to cable. And yet, you can drive through any suburb and find plenty of dishes.
Not that many people need internet access in the middle of the ocean.
Fiber may be way better, but putting a glorified wifi router on top of a million dollars worth of kerosene and stainless steel is a great deal cheaper than digging a 1000km long trench.
There aren't many of them compared to the people in cities, but being able to serve the billion or so people that would have to pay hundreds a month for crappy microwave internet with somewhat less crappy space microwave internet sounds like a the one company he's running that isn't fleecing the taxpayers or investors.
Those hundred people can't dig a particularly long trench or put in more than a few thousand poles for $600,000.
Seems to work out unless I'm vastly over estimating the bandwidth of whatever the bottleneck in the constellation is.
Plus there's all the people in cities willing to pay extra for low latency.
So I never really got how any other place has any excuses.
The relative ease of throwing up a few satellites and selling internet across the globe vs digging trenches to each and every residence make me think it's going to be a very popular internet option very soon.
It’s impossible for Elon to accomplish his current vision because it’s not internally consistent. You can’t only moderate what is within the law and make Twitter a more friendly place and make it more attractive to advertisers and grow it to a billion users, and make it the defacto public square and make it the free speech public network and eliminate bots, and make X the everything app and fire 75% of twitter employees.
So while I think Elon Musk will succeed, it’s also interesting to point out the paradoxes and difficulty and in doing so elicit curiosity in how he will accomplish his goal. Conservatives seem to be taking a victory lap today, but it’s one of those things where compromise means no one ends up completely happy.
Bots I think is both the harder and existential problem.
Plus, you can look at most biased news sources and see the drama that they selectively cover under the guise of news. "1 person did a bad thing" and "here's another reason why this entire group is conspiring against you" are not uncommon tropes.
OK, but then it's more like blacklisting rather than banning. You're still free to show up and participate, you just can't get access to the biggest audiences.
So then the conversation turns from "why is Twitter blocking my free speech?" to "why is Twitter penalizing my free speech?".
Plus, what's legal speech is a real grey area. Free speech cases constantly go to the Supreme Court because we're talking about a near infinite number of ideas that can be expressed. And intent usually matters. So when Kanye writes his "death con 3" tweet, is it a direct threat to incite violence (not protected), an ambiguous threat that's not actionable (possibly protected), a joke (very likely protected), or as a brand new idea that hasn't been expressed yet (possibly protected)?
At the end of the day, a human has to make a decision. So, we're just swapping Jack's and Parag's vision of content moderation for Elon's, but it'll still be content moderation - perhaps better, perhaps not.
Maybe his tweet should stay up, ambiguous speech isn’t clearly illegal. Illegal speech is much easier to recognize. But Twitter probably wouldn’t want to put that tweet on the trending front page or advertise next to it but he has an audience and can continue to interact with and grow his audience.
Minimal regulation as required by law, no moderation, and maximal participation.
I don't really like him, but cancelling people exactly at the same time by all media companies shows that it's all controlled by a few people. Of course they try everything to say bad things about Elon now...it's funny to see actually.
Louie CK jerked off in front of women, got cancelled and got a Grammy last year. He's still wealthy and does shows. So is Kanye. Cancelling doesn't mean shit.
I'm having a hard time defending wealth people who lost a Twitter account because they acted like dicks. Some of them literally.
I'm a benefitor from the low interest rate environment of the last decades (most of us in tech are), but I can understand the billions of people who haven't.
It's a lot easier to dismiss someone's success when it only happens once.
No one delivers 100%, but that's a historically exceptional track record.
Nobody expects all predictions to come true -- professional futurists have a batting rate of about 10%.
Finance.
Management.
Electric cars.
Charging stations.
Satellites.
Reusable rockets.