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Comment by kashprime | Hacker News Reader

In behaving this way, he is erasing a tremendous amount of the goodwill he generated from his space and electric car businesses. The world's media, political, business, scientific elite are on Twitter and watching carefully. It's all very upsetting to watch. I hope that, as you've said, he finds a better management team to fix this ongoing trainwreck.

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Elon erased his goodwill when he started his crypto pump and dump scams. Or there's the whole vaporware thing to sucker in more investors. Or there's the fact that he argued Ukraine should concede to Russia's demands.

No, I'm pretty sure this is just another in a long list of mistakes by Elon. I don't believe he knows what he's doing here.

And when Elon decided to call a rescue worker a pedophile. To me that demonstrated that Elon was willing to truly destroy people for merely offending him on social media. He later double-downed on the pedophile claim by elaborating on his reasoning for why he thought the rescue worker was a pedophile.

Elon clearly never admits mistakes involving his ego. Same with the discussion now with Kasparov where Elon clearly didn't know he was fighting the Putin regime for a long time, but still doubles down on his mistake.

This character trait will cost him a lot.

I think this turned a corner. He lost some credibility as a serious person with crypto pump and dump, and also with pedo guy, and with other shenanigans, but he had a trust fund of credibility from the other businesses.

This is one where his business acumen is under scrutiny too, that's a whole new game. But let's see, it's only the bottom of the first inning.

There’s some axiom here… something about wherever you get off the hype train, you still think the earlier stops made sense.

“It’s at X that he lost me.”

And in the process destroying so much. Twitter is going to lose most its value and be sold in a fire sale at some point. I doubt it will ever recover.

He’s destroying lives too. ~3700 Twitter employees got randomly fired. Maybe Twitter needed a haircut but 50%? Plus you know many of those people had spouses and children. Add that to the total. There are people whose entire income as software developers is for Twitter apps. If Twitter goes down they’re in trouble.

His other businesses are taking reputation hits by proxy (he doesn’t look like such a good/smart businessman anymore does he?).

And of course there are 40m daily active users. Even if only a small percentage really enjoy it that’s millions of people losing something they really like (like me).

All because he didn’t want to lose a $1B lawsuit and risk whatever would come out in discovery.

When this is over I just can’t see us ending up in anything but a net-negative for everyone.

Don't underestimate the value of witholding whatever was in those discovery text messages.

I’m not. I suspect it would have proved some kind of real fraud on his part, or more likely perjury. And he knew if that came out he’s be facing slam-dunk prison time (among other things).

I think it was the first real consequence he has had to face in a very long time and it was a BIG one. And he was so scared this was the better option.

That’s the theory that makes the most sense to me. The breakup fee of $1B was a lot of money but seems like he’ll lose way more than that in the end on this path.

> The breakup fee of $1B

There was no $1B breakup fee.

>All because he didn’t want to lose a $1B lawsuit and risk whatever would come out in discovery.

WTF are you talking about? In no world was there a $1B lawsuit. I don't know how anyone is possibly parroting that point given that it has been repeatedly debunked since it was first uttered. It's like someone read a contract, saw that $1B was mentioned somewhere in it and just decided that that would mean whatever the fuck they wanted it to mean. The lawsuit was almost certainly going to end with musk being forced to buy the company.

If he doesn't ruin twitter I will be sorely disappointed. I have no care at all for the twitter employees, you may as well ask me to sympathize with Phillip Morris workers getting laid off because cigarettes fall out of favor. The sooner he crashes that whole company into a wall, the better.

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