Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is the sort of damage control id expect to see from someone only peripherally aware of or involved in their businesses accountability or strategic operations. This concern from advertisers has existed far too long for an executive action to have any meaning. the marketing conference call on november 3rd was your red flag where advertisers voiced their displeasure with firing large swaths of the content moderation team. The checkmark fiasco that wiped billions off corporate ledgers on a friday of active trading left a pretty sore spot with them as well that you never seemed to completely address. To corporations looking at this release today youre just some guy dragging a plumbing fixture through the lobby of your new office demanding hardcore work and cutting staff and --lets be honest-- at least Chainsaw Al Dunlap made stockholders rich in the process of scorching earth. So far youve just made the entire platform look like the bombing of dresden.

by the 14th most reasonable advertisers had paused their spend if not backed out entirely.

but after the bombshell office lockout and mass exodus today? to think a ToS change with a skeleton crew of H1B's and lifers that arent even allowed at their desks is going to reverse the course of decline is farcical. This is the kind of massive failure that triggers disaster recovery plans. This ship is sinking, and whatever life thats valued on it will either jump ship to a competing platform or Mastodon. You took a 44bn USD risk and managed to absolutely destroy any credibility in your leadership in under a month. At this point its best to hope markets dont start reconsidering your other companies as risky business.

> At this point its best to hope markets dont start reconsidering your other companies as risky business.

I think this is inevitable.

One, Elon is trying to prop up Twitter by using SpaceX money to buy ads. He's dipping his hand into other companies to keep his new toy afloat for a while longer. I don't know if the word "contamination" is appropriate here, but it's pretty clear that Elon doesn't see any kind of sharp boundaries between his various enterprises.

And two, I think a lot of customers are going to start rethinking Elon's offerings. Tesla used to be a status symbol. Driving one meant you were forward thinking, that you were on the bleeding edge, and probably conscientious about the environment. Now, Tesla is "that company Elon owns." There is no way this doesn't hurt Tesla's bottom line, and there's no way investors don't realize this.

All Elon had to do was shut up and bask in the accomplishments of others, but he couldn't manage to take his own ego out of it. Will it ruin him? Probably not. We he still be the richest man in the world in a year or two? Also probably not.

Elon deserves a lot of credit for Tesla. But now I'm starting to hear the term "Muskmobile" bandied about when people refer to his car. It's not like Tesla is the only game in town anymore either.

In a weird tangent, I've been thinking about the TV Show "Ted Lasso", and why it's so popular lately. Ted Lasso is the exact opposite of Elon Musk, even to a fault. People don't care if Elon succeeds anymore, but they do want Ted Lasso to.

Electric Jesus deserves credit for not firing the right people and shit a muskmobile that works eventually !

"Magamobile" is the name I've been hearing. Unfortunate timing for Tesla really given that their early mover advantage has been basically eroded at this point.

> Tesla used to be a status symbol. Driving one meant you were forward thinking, that you were on the bleeding edge, and probably conscientious about the environment.

I hate to break it to you, but generally only other Tesla owners feel that way. Otherwise, I doubt the public does. In fact, I personally feel the opposite, that's it's a symbol of a "techbro".

Correct. All of my few encounters with a Tesla in the wild were a near accident. That + the attitude I see from Tesla fans online cement a negative view.

My partner was sideswiped by a Tesla engineer testing Autopilot. Tesla's insurance did pay for the damages, FWIW.

Could we avoid participating in this? The price hikes were pretty brutal, but tesla and their charging infrastructure are still at or near the top of the list when it comes to electric cars that you can actually purchase, at least from the perspective of someone looking to replace their ancient mazda in the next year or so.

Also people don't deserve to be judged by their car unless it is a modern german luxury car in which case they obviously are the kind of person who makes bad life choices.

> Also people don't deserve to be judged by their car

In a way, that was my point, because I was responding to this: "Driving one meant you were forward thinking, that you were on the bleeding edge, and probably conscientious about the environment."

> I don't know if the word "contamination" is appropriate here, but it's pretty clear that Elon doesn't see any kind of sharp boundaries between his various enterprises.

Even without "contamination", TSLA stock price collapsed by over $100+ because Elon Musk predictably sold $Billions of stock to pay for the TWTR buyout. Its not like $33 Billion came out of nowhere. Elon had to sell TSLA to get that money.

If TWTR keeps losing money, Elon will be forced to sell more and more TSLA stock to keep it afloat.

And this is all the legal / ethical way of doing things. No "contamination" in just selling stock to support another. Even then, we can see the huge drop in TSLA stock prices (compared to the rest of the market, which rebounded in the past few weeks on good inflation data).

Random thought -- is it a conflict of interest to sell so many shares, knowing that it will have a major impact on share price? If you know your personal actions (needing to sell a lot of TSLA shares to buy Twitter) will have an impact on your professional responsibilities (keeping the TSLA share price high), when does that become a conflict? Is there a way to mitigate that conflict?

That's the board's problem. Normally, you're not supposed to have the largest shareholder, CEO, and Board Chair be the same person.

SEC forced Elon off the board chair at least. But yeah, its a well known fact that Tesla's setup is full of conflicts of interest. It doesn't seem like the shareholders (or the board) feels like fixing it though.

What accomplishments of others? They took a simple database driven tweet index, that just showed tweets as they were posted, and turned it into a politically polarized echo chamber. They created dozens of internal social “teams” to ensure their algorithm blocked what they didn’t like and showed only what they liked, and destroyed any actual discourse that was on the site at all. Elon likes the CONCEPT of Twitter, sees how simple it is once you strip away the shackles of the algorithm, and has money to burn. He’s still unfathomly rich after the acquisition. Let him do what he wants. Let him shut it down for good. Who cares? It’s his to do so with.

I was talking about PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, and StarLink.

Why does SpaceX need to advertise on twitter? Who there is going to be buying their services?

Come to think of it, why does SpaceX need to advertise at all? Those who need to launch rockets already know who can do it.

Starlink, not rocket launches

Teslas are nice cars. Owning one is a status symbol, but I don’t think Elon Musk is the deciding factor when it comes time to buy one or go elsewhere. Until other car makers get their acts together and produce luxury EVs with charger infrastructure, consumers will overlook Elon Musk’s antics.

I agree with you though that Musk’s brands are becoming too associated with his personality, which is mercurial and irksome. Caveat emptor.

Please stop spreading the falsehood that Eli Lilly lost billions because of a fake verified tweet. https://medium.com/@westwise/did-twitter-just-take-8-billion...

is that all your evidence?

Even if it is, he's right. Although this is anecdotal, I have a friend who works in finance that said the drop in stock was coincidental to the stock price dropping. Apparently pharmaceuticals are a defensive sector in a bear market, and the market popping up last week meant the price of Eli Lilly dropped, as I understand it. In his words that tweet causing the stock to drop was "fake news"

There is never going to be a way to conclusively ascribe the drop in stock price to any one event. However, the act of pointing out the high cost of insulin to a large audience not causing a drop in stock price would be highly suspect. I personally doubt it was the Tweet itself that caused the drop. No one should/would have believed it was an actual statement by Eli Lilly.

But in a bear market, this bad publicity about the high price of a mandatory medication for a large population is likely going to have an effect.

Or it could have also been a coincidence... there's no way to know.

> bad publicity about the high price of a mandatory medication for a large population is likely going to have an effect.

I know this is orthogonal to the stock price drop, but this kind of bad publicity (gouging sick people in need of your product) actually turned out to be a good thing for the public and for overall justice.

> I personally doubt it was the Tweet itself that caused the drop. No one should/would have believed it was an actual statement by Eli Lilly.

Your second sentence is probably true, but the first one is questionable.

It's well-known that there are high-frequency stock trading bots which watch Twitter, news headlines, etc.

High frequency trader bots watch random accounts? That seems like a bad strategy. Maybe they're watching news headlines - but that seems like a media problem where a storm of articles about nothing drive the very story they are talking about.

Is it false? At most I think we can say it's unclear, but Eli Lilly seem to take it seriously since they pulled all their ad spend from twitter in response.

https://seekingalpha.com/news/3907399-fake-free-insulin-twee...

You are correct, I should have said it was unclear. I am aware of their pause in ad spend but I assumed it was to cover up for their judgement.

A discussion about viral tweets and stock price collapse that doesn't address the topic of high frequency trading bots? And written by a PhD in bioinformatics, who gives zero evidence of his claims. Why should we pay attention to his argument?

Advertisers sure have a lot of influence in what gets published. Perhaps it's time to look critically at that. They're certainly the last group of people I'd trust with... anything. Their job is literally to manipulate people, yet somehow they became the arbiters of morality and permissibility.

> Perhaps it's time to look critically at that.

What is there to look at? If you want other people's money, chances are it'll come with strings attached.

For example, we've put severe restrictions on what kind of strings employers are permitted to attach. We also look very carefully at concentration of capital and collusion.

Note that this is not necessarily a call for legislation, but certainly people should be aware of who shapes and filters their communications, and how, just as they should be aware that e.g. 90% of US media are owned by 6 companies (in 2011, down from 50 in 1983) [1].

There are entire university departments dedicated to analyzing the influence and cross-ownership of media and capital, even though one could just as easily dismiss that with "What is there to look at? It's just free markets at work."

[1] https://infographicjournal.com/media-consolidation-the-illus...

I've seen a lot of people comment, especially on Twitter, about "The checkmark fiasco that wiped billions off corporate ledgers on a friday" - but it's completely untrue.

Eli Lilly was the pharmaceutical company that attracted the most attention. Their stock was down 4% the day of a fake tweet. But pharmaceutical companies were down generally that day, some as much or more than Eli Lilly. Lots of companies had fake tweets written about them - some had good days on the stock market, some had bad - almost like stock market prices are a random walk day to day, sometimes up and sometimes down.

From a common sense perspective it's pretty implausible that an obviously fake tweet could shift market perceptions by billions of dollars. I don't think that really happened at all.

I also don't see why advertisers would care about the office lockout or layoffs. Advertisers certainly don't want their ads running next to offensive content, but if Musk can control that - why should advertisers pull out?

It has to be deliberate. I have never been on twitter, and have not even been able read incidental twits that get pushed my way since they required JS. So it is truly a non issue one way or the other for me. But I can not see any possible goal except to not only destroy the particular company but to further destroy the idea of something like it as viable.

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