Tesla and SpaceX have been wildly successful and he will forever recieve some well deserved credit for their successes but at the same time I think its pretty bad that Tesla (and SpaceX) have had multiple near death experiences and some them could have been avoided if it weren't for incompetence.
I followed the Model 3 production religiously and the amount of dumb mistakes they made even after other industry experts were yelling at them about imminent iceberg collision is just unbelievable. In fact the Model 3 production, with its horribly designed body that he wasn't keeping on top of and Musk's stupid attempts to automate all of assembly should be entirely attributed to him. It was so bad it was worse than even the shortseller's worst predictions.
I guess you can give him a pass for near bankruptcy #1(Roadster roll out) and #4(COVID lockdowns). Not sure about #2(Model S early sales woes and potential acquisition by Google)
All I am saying is that he fucks up A LOT and has thus far managed to stave off the consequences of his decisions but many occurrences have been down to luck and luck is something you should never bet on.
Stop worshipping billionaires.
This is a vapid over-generalization designed to dismiss any statements by attaching them to the wealth, not the person. Don’t do this.
Nobody is talking about the Waltons, Buffet, Larry Ellison, etc. This is a discussion about Musk specifically and his history of operating companies.
The billionaire worship is simply the secular version of this faith. X made billions of dollars by owning a business that does Y, therefore X must be an expert on Y, and businesses in general, and is a genius, and is a morally superior person. Otherwise X wouldn't be a billionaire, because - horror of all horrors - the world is just, isn't it? It couldn't be the case that X just got lucky, can it? Surely, X has earned their billions, right?
People are “worshipping” Musk because of his repeated success in making successful large innovative businesses. The wealth he has is a product of that, but the deference is to the success of the companies.
But he did change the world with his companies already, didn't he?
So at 5% interest the yearly cost is 650 million, even at some obscene and unrealistic payroll per employee (including not only developers), like let's say 400k he'd have to fire over 1600 people just to balance this out. There is no way to spin this positively. Also due to no more RSUs cash comp for remaining employee would need to increase.
Add to that the the loss in advertisement revenue do to obvious reasons.
Taking these facts into account could you please explain how is Musk NOT a liability to Twitter? He basically spent 31 billion (plus 13 billion he offload to Twitter) just to buy the trademark and the user base (and some proportion of advertisers...). From a financial standpoint that's an objectively terrible deal. Musk might have other goals and that's great but in no way this is comparable to Tesla or SpaceX.
>But he did change the world with his companies already, didn't he?
History is full of examples of extraordinary successful people who get blinded by their own success and start thinking that they are infallible. This ussually results which in pretty unhinged behavior when they get older. Musk does not seem like the most grounded person ever so he's likely at a much higher risk of this than almost every tech billionaire I can think of.
Maybe somebody with Musk track record can be seen as more credible than some random "qwytw" on the internet? I mean incentives are on his side, aren't they?
For one his famous. It's his toy, so he won't let it disappear into irrelevance without fighting for it. There are not many people currently alive with comparable track record, being recognized world wide, with deep pockets like him.
What if in few years time from now people will be stepping on each other writing posts and books on how they really knew all of that from the beginning, that obviously he was right etc. - doesn't sound unreal or alien to me, quite opposite actually.
To be honest, I don't even think anything extraordinary needs to happen for all of it to work out just fine.
For all people saying technically it's not just rendering short messages - well it is just that at the end.
Look at stackoverflow - most people don't realize it's just single monolith application running on 6 servers - all of it.
There are still thousands of people employed there, which feels like too many if anything.
Did I misrepresent any facts or figures? Did I lie? What does credibility have anything to do with anything otherwise? It's an objectively bad deal from a financial perspective, if you have any arguments against that you're free to share them.
Twitter might do "fine" as a platform. Sure, why not... Does not change the fact that he grossly overpaid and that the 13 billion in additional debt will be financially crippling for the company. He might sell some more Tesla stock to offset that. I mean it's his money, he can do whatever he wants (unless the SEC stops being a complete joke).
> that obviously he was right etc. - doesn't sound unreal or alien to me, quite opposite actually.
Right about what? Even Zuckerberg seems to have a clearer vision about the Metaverse than Musk seems to have about the future of Twitter. I might be wrong. Care to enlighten me instead of talking about some random tangentially related things?
> There are still thousands of people employed there, which feels like too many if anything.
Sure, can't really disagree. However is it better for a business to have an additional 2000 employees or so who are possibly superfluous or to fire all of them and spend ~600 million or thereabouts servicing a debt incurred for no reason? It's a pretty straightforward you chose to ignore for some reason.
Musk has successfully run companies in the past and is running two extremely successful companies right now.
In case it isn't clear, I agree with the parent comment. In the same tone as the comment above the parent, you could also write "Thing is - Elon Musk knows a thing or two about sexual harassment lawsuits. It's inevitable that he will have another at Twitter."
Stop idolizing billionaires.
>Musk has successfully run companies in the past and is running two extremely successful companies right now.
Is he actually running those companies, or is he posting selfies of whiteboards at 1:30am showing architecture diagrams of Twitter?
In these markets, after he was nearly forced by courts into completing a purchase deal for Twitter after making an overpriced offer, I'm genuinely curious to see how he pays the ~$1b in interest per year on the debt to purchase Twitter.
Stop saying this in discussions about one particular person.
It’s as useful as saying “stop idolizing millionaires” when someone says they like Hillary Clinton as a Presidential Candidate.
People who obviously know absolutely fucking nothing about coding or manufacturing or running businesses or software engineering or cars or space or rockets or emerald mines are continuously defending Musk, and their only justification is that "he's rich, so he's obviously smarter than you!"
No they are not. They are idolizing him specifically because of the success of Tesla, SpaceX, and PayPal.
> "he's rich, so he's obviously smarter than you!"
Nobody is making that argument. Its usually, “look at the success of the companies he leads”.
You can make an argument about whether or not he should get the credit he does for the success, but nobody is idolizing the wealth.
None of these people are going to defend the great insight of the winner of the last powerball because there is no repeated pattern of long term success.
He's simply regurgitating what he thinks he heard from others without really understanding how anything works. He knows less about software architecture than an intern picked at random.
1. https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/15921762028730859...
a) Twitter is atrociously slow for something that displays a mere kilobyte of text at a time.
b) Much of that is because of hundreds of client-server JavaScript requests on first load. Not technically RPCs, but just as slow and looking nearly identical on the network.
c) Most of the rest is because of a thousand microservices chatting away at each other. Not technically client-to-server, but still taking significant time.
Elon accidentally conflated the network path of (b) with the performance issues caused by (c).
They're both bad! They both need fixing! The fact that Musk mixed up doesn't matter.
Isn't this not true though? Based on the responses to his Tweet only one GraphQL request is made which batches the whole thing.
> Most of the rest is because of a thousand microservices chatting away at each other. Not technically client-to-server, but still taking significant time.
But what does this have to do with India? If the slowness is due to calls between microservices hosted on (from my understanding) their own hardware, why would it matter if the initial GraphQL request comes in from India, since all the rest of the backend requests would be the same?
Literally bang in the middle of an F12 network trace showing dozens of requests, mostly JavaScript. Not JSON RPC, per se, but still an overhead taking up seconds, especially on low-end Android devices.
> But what does this have to do with India?
Everything. Nitter uses 40KB of code & data to display the same content that takes Twitter megabytes.
People in subsequent threads have pointed to the gigabytes of "data" usage by the Twitter Android app, which is just absurd for an app that displays primarily text.
It's a bloated pig of an app that performs poorly on 5G networks in the United States, and hence terribly on slow and overloaded networks separated from Twitter's data centres by an ocean.
"It works fine for me" says the engineer connected to the WiFi in Twitter HQ.
I'm pretty sure that's my point? How are you equating "dozens" to "1200" (or even "hundreds" in your last comment) as though Elon is in the right ballpark?
As for the rest, I don't know what your point is, where did Elon say anything in that thread about how much data they were sending? He's quite literally responding to someone saying it was the amount of JavaScript being downloaded and telling them they're wrong, it's the "1200 RPC calls". I'm pretty sure the point he was attempting to make is that it's slow due to thousands of serial "RPC" calls made between the app and Twitter (which will have a higher RRT to India) but as you've demonstrated that's not what it's doing.
I'm not saying Twitter is well designed, I'm just not pretending like Elon somehow had the right idea when you've had to stretch it this far. If he had a proper technical understanding then we wouldn't have to have such a discussion of what he "actually meant".
This is not true at all. I have a look and it's not that there are many REST requests it's that the requests send back a load of data. For Example the timeline sends back a 1MB JSON response. It's heavily gzipped so comes in at 100KB over the network but it takes quite a while for the whole request.
In places like india the internet is slow and many people are using VPNs. I emulated this and I can see that over VPN on a slow internet connection it's like 10 seconds to load the home page.
But he conflated two things that he didn't really understand and reached a completely wrong conclusion. He's shared that conclusion with confidence and never admitted he was wrong. That's a fatal flaw for someone who holds a Chief Engineer title at a rocket company.
He's a CEO who is has been incredibly successful at selling a vision and getting people to do what he wants. He is not an engineer. He should stop role playing as one.
[Narrator voice] He did not.
Winning government contracts over other competitors is not the same thing as “subsidized”. Otherwise Hilton is subsidized because government employees stay there sometimes.
To be clear, I'm not implying that's a bad thing. These companies seem like an example of subsidies working as intended, i.e. driving innovation.
In January 2020, Toyota passed the milestone of more than 15 million self-charging hybrid vehicles
If every vehicle sold by Tesla since its inception up to the most recent Tesla sales figures released for Q1 of 2022 are accounted for, there are over 2,645,000 Teslas on the road worldwide
Its a matter of approach - if you focus on all his success, you can continue worshiping him as some capitalist messiah. If you focus on bad stuff, he is a fucked up mess to be polite, a bad parent and husband, an even worse human being in general, utterly horrible boss, person with deep mental issues that aren't clearly tackled in appropriate ways.
The truth, somewhere in the middle of those 2 extremes, still ain't that nice IMHO. He burned basically all good PR capital be built over the years, basically nobody sees him now as good person, just another ultra rich a-hole like Bezos that needs to be kept in check. As he will find in following years, people's opinions trickle down to cash flow. If I would be buying an electric car right now (which doesn't make much sense for another decade to me), Tesla would be off the table for example.