Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

Would be great to see you being more active on HN again!

I used to think that too, but I've since come across a story that SpaceX actually has people who's informal job is to manage him, and they present their ideas in such a way that he thinks they're his, in order to keep him happy. He's mostly there to bring money and hype.

No idea if that story is true, but honestly, it would explain some things.

The impression he's been giving me recently is that his success may have broken him. Too many people worshipping him and praising literally every crazy thing he does, may have made him believe he can do literally everything including run a social media company on his own without first learning how social media companies work. He honestly seems to be running Twitter into the ground. The mass firings he started with, followed by ruining the blue checkmark feature, really didn't make it look like he knows what he's doing. His management style sounds like hell.

They supposedly have an entire handbook on "managing Elon" for deflecting his weird requests and framing things in a way that doesn't provoke his ire. They put up with it because they only have so many opportunities to work on space.

Twitter has people dependent on their H-1B and very few true believers that are unfit to serve in their role. Ella Irwin has apparently personally ghost banned ("Hide Reply" but with lying to the user about being hidden) any mention of libsoftiktok - a stochastic terror organization just itching for a lynching of queer people - made anywhere close to TwitterSafety recently.

This argument made sense a month ago. Unfortunately he really hasn't shown any improvement since then that would lead me to agree with you on that point.

It's now a situation where he has to either find enough new people who agree with whatever his approach is or /win people back/ - both of those are quite a bit harder than keeping people who already loved the app.

I also hope he - or someone - is able to recover Twitter. But I'm not betting on it at this point.

Hypocrisy. The way people treat this man versus others who act the same, it's two faced. The who's who of silicon valley were championing him right up until a few hours ago. Everything that he says or does that is deplorable, people eat up. But I guess if he's "changing the world" he should get to be a dick right?

That's all pretty clearly in villain territory.

The "it is going to be hardcore from here" email the CEO sent to Tesla employees 'worked', but the same email to Twitter employees resulted in significant resignations. I think the CEO was shocked and this underlies pg's point.

Given that it was a forced buy, the game was always that of a corporate raider approach - go in, make the unpleasant but needed decisions, and then sell out as soon as the value uptick became realisable. pg applauded the cut to staff IIRC.

CEO should have taken a leaf out of Rupert Murdoch's book - as the owner don't write the headlines - let the editor do that. Being behind the scenes to just make the most considered accurate business decisions was the right way.

If instead you are out in front of the public, you're emotional side will kick in due to the slings-and-arrows coming from the audience. Hence the wrong decisions will be made.

You can't wear both the hats of 'eccentric' Corporate Jester and Corporate Raider at the same time. The Dave Chapelle boo-ing incident just underlies this.

Alas, I don't see something like this panning out, that future is gone.

I also admire his car and rocket businesses, but he seems to have gotten sucked deeply into the very online culture war grievance trap in the past few years, to the point that it now seems to be taking up essentially all of his time now. It's really a shame to see.

You have someone with Asperger's who is self aware enough to go on SNL and laugh about it, but for some reason also wants to spend 40B on owning and running a social platform, thinking they can "improve" by working on it part time despite having zero actual experience in the field. The ego is unbelievable.

> He could still salvage the situation

I hope so, but these billionaire ego megaprojects just don't seem to be die. Neom, Metaverse, dystopia-twitter...

That’s what I find so peculiar. I thought he made so much progress on cars and rockets by trusting experts to help him. But with Twitter there have been lots of experts who keep trying to tell him he’s seriously misunderstanding how social media works, and he will just give them a snarky tweet reply and act like he knows better. Maybe it’s the fact that on twitter everyone can see the discussion and he’s got to project this persona with bravado that he probably doesn’t do in a private meeting.

Maybe he will turn it around but for a lot of us he’s destroyed our hang out spot and we’ve embraced alternatives. Mastodon isn’t perfect but it feels really great to see a problem, open a GitHub issue, and get a genuine discussion of how to implement it.

And no one is going to come crashing in and tear it all down.

Is he simply blinded by success?

Yes you are. The smart guy that works on cars and rockets and who's not a villain and who's a political moderate and a totally reasonable guy, just made you.

> I would be delighted to go back to using Twitter regularly

It's not your decision to make, apparently.

> Plus I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media.

Given his behavior and the results over the last ~month or however long he's owned Twitter, how can both of these possibly be true?

From your own feed:

“ People are rooting for him to fail because he's a rich white guy and a political moderate. “

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1593206076983635968?s=46&t=...

I really really really dislike this whole trend to feel “victimized” while being some of the most successful people in earth. People are “turning” on Elon after being hugely beloved, purely cause he’s doing idiotic things. Plain an simple.

Furthermore, we should hold someone who’s the richest person on earth to higher standards.

Would you return to a site where the owner uses his considerable power/money to promote fascism?

Calling abusive and intolerant behaviour "eccentric" is really weak.

Eccentric people buy stuff and are too busy enjoying them .

This guy searches for mentions of himself to silence critics while sitting on 200bn dollars. When that wasn’t enough to silence everybody he went on to buy the platform.

If that is the end of the road then it’s better to get lost on the way like the Dan Bilzerians , and the other truly eccentric guys

With twitter his poor performance is merely on display for the whole world in tweets. It is yet another poor decision in an entire life full of poor decisions ranging from paying a cut rate private investigator to investigate a hero spearheading the effort to save children and then publicly and falsely proclaiming that person a pedophile, then lying about pedophile just being used as a generic insult, allegedly trying to bribe an employee to have sex with him for a pony by her account, an entire series of failed relationships, abandoning his wife after their kid died by her account of the matter, spreading conspiracy theories that the psycho that attacked pelosi was a prostitute rather than a deranged conspiracy theorist.

He doesn't do anything but buy the services of people smarter and better than himself and take credit for their success while continually making poor choices and offering an example of terrible leadership.

You act as if his failure with twitter is forgivable because its a different sort of business from his other ventures but its really not. Nobody expects Elon to design a rocket either he's supposed to be an expert in leading people and he's stunningly poor at it.

There is little chance of turning twitter around with Elon at the helm. It was barely been profitable in its whole history and now its becoming a pariah to both the potential employees who could serve in that role and the advertisers who pay all of the bills. It's going to steadily lose money until Elon steps away and makes a firm commitment not to ratfuck it any longer and puts someone in charge that both sides trust. Then MAYBE it can stop hemorrhaging money. It will remain a black eye both personally to him and his business acumen.

Twitter introduced the world to the real Elon and its not a person worth knowing. If you have positive feelings towards him I would suggest its because as a fellow rich person you have more in common with him than with us even if you are a better man. I would suggest not lowering your own stock by defending those so obviously inferior to yourself.

Given that you're not giving up your Twitter account, nor something less tangible like your belief Elon is acting in good faith, nor even something the evidence keeps building against like his ability to run Twitter well - what exactly are you giving up, or giving up on?

Not to play word police, but I think that's what people meant when they said 'leaving'. But if you mean that it's not necessarily forever, I understand what you're saying.

>It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX.

If the techniques for cars and rockets don't work in social media, why were people wrong to write him off despite his Tesla and SpaceX experience?

That might come in time. Surely it can't continue to be this chaotic forever, right? At least then we'll know what this site's future is.

Or maybe he needs something of Twitter going bust magnitude to get feedback now. I hope that happens so that he can go back to making great stuff again

It's theoretically salvageable, but I don't see a version of a salvaged Twitter that is compatible with his worldview.

He is a colourful, loud, opinionated public figure. That's great for his personal Twitter and his follower count, but it's terrible if you're trying to convince the world that you're a suitable custodian of a free public square.

Mark Zuckerberg is beige as often as he's able to be on just about everything. Tim Cook speaks on issues of privacy when it's relevant and otherwise says as little as possible. Reddit is as un-opinionated on content as they can possibly be.

Having any divisive opinion by definition divides your support base. Usually in half.

I can only assume Musk-brand libertarian free-for-all social media is a niche product (potentially a large niche, but a niche nonetheless) that's very probably worth some amount significantly less than $40 billion.

How do you reconcile this with

> I still think Elon is a smart guy

But now that he's started banning the A list of intellectually interesting people, I don't see how it can end well. This decision needs to be reversed very soon, or the network effect will be destroyed.

Your tweets are the reason I bothered to register an account in the first place, so hoping that Musk figures this out sooner than the hopefully short time that's needed for most to accrete somewhere else.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604593057676300288?s=61...

> I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media.

Hmmm...

What a shit show, as if he needed to add the managerial drama on top of getting rid of 75% of his staff.

I would say delete your account while you still can. Who knows what he will do your data.

In hindsight do you now think that Musk is not suitable anymore? He is too thin-skinned to be running a public forum and not being able to anticipate consequences that his new rules/actions have on the brand value of twitter and musk. He and Peter Theil are extremely anti-democratic as it all comes down to money and power trips. What are your thoughts?

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604329282796457984?s=46...

I agree that he may still salvage the situation, and I hope to reactivate or create a new account if/when that happens. For now, though, the best thing I can do is reinforce the signal that this was a major misstep, for a reason he should be well aware of: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1533616384747442176

If you were presented this whole debacle in an anonymized format, without Elon Musk's name attached, how would you judge these actions?

You've slowly been piecing each of them together over the past month, but clearly still don't get it. I don't know why you're still giving so much benefit of the doubt, other than the fact that he's also a billionaire.

http://paulgraham.com/fh.html

In light of recent events, have you considered updating the essay?

Being "eccentric" usually means non-mainstream clothing, music taste, a big ass selection of historic cars or similar things.

Musk? Dude literally interacts with or unbans high-profile neo-Nazis and antisemites. That's not "eccentric" by any definition, that's enabling the vilest of the vile. No, banning Kanye again doesn't excuse all the other Nazi accounts.

I get the sense that he wants to “own the libs” to build credibility with US “conservatives” — despite the fact that the libs regularly own themselves more thoroughly than he can — but he’s mostly just scoring goals against his own pocket book right now. The people I feel sorry for are TSLA investors.

Edit: oh and the rank and file Twitter employees who are either having to put up with his BS or haven’t been paid the severance they were promised. He seems to be taking a “sue me” approach to that, which is really really shitty for a typical employee who uses their income to pay rent/mortgages and buy groceries. I hope he loses another billion in back payments and penalties on that shit, because he’s setting awful examples right now.

A reputation is not like a piece of software that you fix and then re-run as though it never broke in the first place. Elon has utterly wrecked his reputation over the last couple of months (and probably longer than that) and it is getting worse, not better.

Edit: I guess Paul won't be going back to Twitter because his account just got suspended...

See for yourself: https://twitter.com/paulg/

That would involve him spending the time to learn how social media works. No doubt he's smart enough, but it seems like he may no longer have the attention span required to learn this.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616863673208832

Twitter may be bigger and more discoverable, but the discussion pales in comparison to what happens here. This is a much more special place.

Guess you are.

This aged poorly.. just 2 hours later and Paul has now been suspended on Twitter.

Against all available evidence

There's HN and Reddit. It helps to dog-food your own investments every now and then.

I wonder what's next...

How many stupid things in a row does Elon Musk have to do before you realize this guy isn't wired quite right?

Being smart also means understanding what you don't know and not surround yourself with sycophants.

So how do you explain his targetting of Fauci? Or the horrible things he said about that cave diver?

He’s 1:1 replaying the Trump playbook and there will be no salvaging, only escalation.

You mean hiring engineers to work on cars and rockets?

Repeatedly.

So eccentric.

You want to see alternatives? Here is an alternative we've been building since 2011, it's a labor of love in which we invested over $1 million and 10 years. It is far, far more extensive than Mastodon and you can see below why that matters. Would you check it out? It's free and open source: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

Not only have we built it, but we've interviewed a ton of people around the broader topics of capitalism and free speech. There is the idea that capitalism is the best system for promoting free speech, but that is not, in fact, the case. Just as one example of many, Sinclair Television told their anchors word-for-word what to say, and anyone who doesn't do what the employer says is fired and replaced by a different mouthpiece. Intellectual property, and other forms of ownership, are by their very definition designed to exclude people from using certain content / property in certain ways.

In fact, conservatives who bristled at Obama's "you didn't build it" used to say "I built it, I own it!" In that case, they should celebrate the way that Twitter and Facebook were privately managed. But many of them instead were calling for regulations to prevent them from doing just that. So which is it? I had an interview with Noam Chomsky twice about that, here is the latest: https://qbix.com/chomsky

If you allow me to bring up a taboo for a bit, I think it's important to bring it up on Hacker News. VCs as an industry, and YCombinator as part of that, specifically try to fund platforms that end up being managed by only a few people and extract rents. Most of them avoid funding open source platforms, which end up crowdfunding from the People (thanks to the JOBS act, for instance). Or from the Knight Foundation. Or Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress funding Matrix.org

VCs specifically tell you that they want you to "focus" on one feature, to "capture" enough of the market, and some of them (e.g. Peter Thiel) unabashedly proclaimed that "competition is for losers", build a monopoly. Zuck used to be a guy who turned down a $1M acquisition offer from Microsoft, and open sourced his code. He wanted to build Wirehog as a decentralized platform for the people (https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/) Peter Thiel and Sean Parker "put a bullet in that thing" (their words) and groomed him to build a monopoly and extract rents. Zuck and Elon privately control the major PUBLIC forums we all use. And are we all better for it?

I think the work of Tim Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds, Vitalik and others has benefitted the world far more and enabled trillions in new ideas (including Google, Facebook, Amazon) precisely because it was based around open source and protocols, and didn't prevent people and organizations from using it the way they wanted! Google, Amazon etc. could have never started as "keyword: Google" on AOL, for instance. Think about it.

Over the last decade I have been steadily drawn into the open source camp. My team and I started an open source alternative to Big Tech 10 years ago. We've applied to YC probably around 8 different times, as we kept growing and reaching 10 million users. We never even got to the interview. Such general-purpose ideas are just not something interesting to most VCs. It took MySQL, NGiNX, and other platforms 7-10 years before they got funded in a capitalist manner. By then, they'd taken over the world.

I'm sure there are exceptions, and YCombinator has recently started to fund open protocols and nonprofits - I'm glad to see it. For reference, our pitch to VCs for years had been along these lines:

https://qbix.com/deck.pdf

https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/

PS: For those who downvote, please write a response. After all, I've spent a decade and $1M of my own money putting together an alternative pg is looking for, seeing the need for it way before others. I give it away for free. All I ask is that you take a minute to write your own words in the conversation about why you disagree :)

PPS: I think the rule that you can downvote on HN to signal mere disagreement (as opposed to logical issues, dishonesty, etc.) is flawed. This is also a free speech issue ... on this site, if we want to be intellectually honest, we should at least downvote and then comment.

I think the next wave of interesting questions is around the extent to which Musk contributed the apparent successes, SpaceX and Tesla. We won't know for a long time, as a lot of the people in the know have a strong incentive to keep quiet. But one possible explanation is that he is good at PR and using hype to raise money, but is not a competent manager without help. Consider, for example, this bit from someone who says they were a SpaceX intern: https://www.tumblr.com/numberonecatwinner/701567544684855296...

I asked a former SpaceX person about that and was told it seemed right, that SpaceX worked because everybody believed in the mission and worked hard at managing Elon so that they could get the actual work done.

[1] I incorrectly thought he was fired by the board from Zip2, but they just refused to make him CEO. Thanks to dontknowwhyihn for the correction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34042958

Because otherwise I can not understand the logic behind defending Musk’s reign as CEO. Ignoring the chaotic policy changes what bothers me is the treatment of Twitter’s employees. Nobody should ever have to leave their house because of death threats. And surely Parag/Jack should be ultimately held accountable for what happened at the company under their reign.

[1] And for the record I think pg indeed ignored WAY too many red flags for WAY too long in this particular case.

That is still a valid point tho. The thing is, we're not going to know who is right or wrong until it all plays out. And considering there are billions on the lines and Musk plays fast and loose with the rules, he's probably going to come out of the otherside better for it.

> It's been fascinating watching so many VC types ignore so many red flags just because some of Elon's early actions validated their priors (e.g. tech companies are bloated and need to layoff staff).

Again it's still a valid point. Tech companies are bloated and need to layoff staff, that's why they're ALL doing it.

People can be right and still do dumb jackass moves.

1. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1593199305384685573

Called this a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33659020

"The emperors have no clothes"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_hand

A lot of tech folks seem to have a mindset of a 60s Soviet technocrat. "We shot a dog into space comrades, let's apply our engineering genius to all the social problems the stupid managers can't solve". Spoiler alert, it is pretty hard to govern hundreds of millions of people

But blocking links to Mastodon? That makes him leave? Like, uh, fine, but... maybe he could have not mocked us for pointing out the dysfunction weeks and weeks ago?

Between all the crypto implosions happening and this, wealthy Silicon Valley investor types and their hanger-ons are really having a "moment" these past few months. Sheesh.

You're right that assuming success at Tesla/SpaceX indicated success at Twitter ended up being wrong.

But these "priors" are still very true. Tech companies are bloated, Elon sucking at running a social network doesn't change that fact

Once again, society will be left holding the rich sociopaths' bags and dealing with the externalities of their uncontrolled gambling.

It's the sane thing to do.

> I don't think [Musk] realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media

When someone is incapable of building stuff or running a company, we (as a society, collectively) hand them shittons of money to be a VC.

[1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604557444247539712

When all external constraints are taken away, it’s probably much more of a challenge to stay grounded.

Incidentally, this latest action immediately brought to my mind a Star Wars quote:

“The more you tighten your grip, Elon, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”

Second wealthiest now…

or else just had the benefit of more time to think about them. i certainly know i say some dumb stuff, but if i write it down and think about it for a week before saying it to anybody else, i'm going to censor like 90% of the stuff that comes out of my head.

You don't have to guess, he lists the names of every person who reviews his posts at the bottom of the posts.

I wonder how much of that is down to the person themselves (judging someone else, through the lense of whatever prejudices and biases) and not their heroes.

As they say from where I am: short of meeting true evil, there's no one worse than your own self.

Do you really think twitter equates to meeting someone?

pg deleted it and posted this response: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1600122386346450944

(...after, hilariously, Matt Bruenig replied with a correction from ChatGPT - which is also deleted because he auto-deletes tweets.)

e: Reading the thread now, I love this reply from pg, who I've seen attack marxism, socialism, leftism, what-have-you, endlessly and smugly in the past:

> I freely admit I have only a superficial grasp of Marxist doctrine. I could no more debate the finer points of it with an actual Marxist than I could debate the finer points of church doctrine with a Jesuit. (Nor would I want to be able to do either.)

The finer points!!! Amazing. Something to keep in mind when the billionaires tell the ol' lefties to read econ 101!

So, yea, the agitated dad vibes get (dare I say) edited out in the process.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-01-29

I suppose you can only speak for yourself, but I find the words "insipid" and "embarrassing" particularly emotional / unscientific. Out of curiosity, what is there a connection to the article at hand or alternatively why do you feel it's important to spread awareness of his incompetence?

Until they get overloaded, and face the same issues as the "first tier" ones...

I know that what I am about to say is out of personal interest, but I really wish people took the analogy to email servers more seriously and started looking at commercial providers. I'm offering Mastodon services for about $0.50/user/month [0], and I have the infra to host 20-30k users efficiently.

For this type of case, there is nothing more sustainable, fair and efficient than letting the market figure things out. But if we keep thinking that accounts should be offered for free, there will be always market distortions.

[0] https://communick.com/packages

Disagree. Mastodon servers can be all over the place from politics to hobbies to tech. It’s not like an email handle at all your choice _matters_ because others moderate the server and who you can connect with.

Self hosting is the only way to go with Mastodon (costs the same as Twitter Blue btw if you don’t want to do your own)

He has so much wealth that, like Hughes, he could alienate every business contact and still spend the rest of his life making leftfield investments and watching movies naked in a dark hotel room. (Well, replace watching movies with tweeting, I suppose.)