Why does Elon induce such strangely bad faith takes in people? Of course he understands what Twitter's business model was. He's trying to change it. It's perfectly reasonable to criticize his choice! The direction he's taking it in might not work out. But the idea that he "doesn't know who the customer is" is absurd.

There's a bunch more strange takes in this piece, but this first one is pretty emblematic of the class. Elon very well might fail, but there are perfectly reasonable explanations for the things that he's doing, and the way that he's doing them. He's hashing this all out in public in real time because he wants to move extremely fast, and he clearly feels that most of tech, and Twitter in particular, have become fat and lazy. His remedy is to avoid the drawn out process of a "normal ceo":

> Instead of doing what any sane new CEO of a troubled entity would do (namely, determining what changes need to be made by spending a bunch of time listening to customers, users, and employees — and then carefully plotting and executing those changes)

And instead iterating rapidly, in public. This approach has obvious drawbacks, but it does have benefits in terms of iteration speed, feedback, and avoiding certain kinds of institutional bias. It might not work out, of course, but why are we pretending that it makes no sense?

The guy is clearly competent. He does some things I don't always agree with, and I think in particular he's taken a bit of a strange turn in the past few years. However, he's built more successful wildly successful companies - in very difficult industries - than nearly anyone on earth. The idea that he doesn't understand Twitter's business model is just fundamentally a non-serious thing to say.