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Comment by mvkel | Hacker News Reader

It's baffling to me that Elon seems to be taking the opposite of a first-principles view on Twitter.

He fails to realize _why_ Twitter uniquely has the reach that it does. It's because it's platform-agnostic in a lot of ways. It's the base-level social protocol that all other platforms are adjacent to.

By removing that connection, it completely nerfs that influence and Twitter becomes just another social network.

I also fail to see how users could think this is reasonable considering Twitter has no way to upload long-form video. So how could YouTube be a competitor?

And the policy doesn't talk about Tiktok whatsoever, which is arguably an actual threat to Twitter, since it replaced Vine.

Overall, something's fishy.

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The message over the past week has been pretty clear -- the rules change without notice and will be changed based on what pisses elon off. That make Twitter now a niche message board. All of the elaborate justifications and explanations for buying Twitter and what was going on wrong over there while it was public have been thrown out the window, no matter what your point of view was.

The fact that this most recent one targeted nearly the entire user base across nearly every interest group is probably Twitter's equivalent event of what happened to Digg and Myspace. There may be nothing he can do now to reverse a network collapse.

This should be a good thing, if the user base is able to migrant to open platforms. If they head back to Facebook and Instagram, then its a loss.

Elon might be getting margin called on Tesla right now, which could wipe him out financially. That would go a long way to explaining the poor decision making.

> Elon might be getting margin called on Tesla right now, which could wipe him out financially.

I don't think this is how margin calls work. Presuming your broker is properly managing risk, then a margin call is explicitly designed to not wipe you out financially. You have to put up more capital or sell positions in order to maintain a certain amount of equity in your account, and that required amount is never zero (again, if your broker/lender is managing risk properly).

Of course it is a stressful situation, and he may need to sell assets at "unfavorable" prices which would effectively lock-in some reduced paper wealth. But I don't think a margin call is going to wipe him out.

Elon has personal loans made using Tesla stock as collateral.

If he is asked to post more collateral on those loans, and the only way he can meet those calls is to sell even more huge amounts of Tesla stock (which is a significant “if”), then he’s going to drive the price of TSLA down non-trivially. (This, by the way, already happened once earlier this week.)

Which could spur more margin calls on other loans, as his collateral (more Tesla stock) has devalued.

It could spiral in a very nasty way, depending on how his personal finances and loans are structured, and how harshly the market views his fire-sale of TSLA.

Depends on your definition of wiped out.

In order to get the loans for this he wound up putting up a ton of Tesla stock. He won’t be poor, but he could possibly lose control of Tesla and likely by extension things like space x.

He’ll likely never be poor but he’ll lose his relevance

Fair. I guess I pedantically object to using the term "margin called" as a verb that implies it causes financial ruin. The margin call helps to avoid ruin.

But you're right, if he had to sell so much TSLA to meet margin requirements that he lost control, that would be bad.

> The margin call helps to avoid ruin.

For the bank, yes. For the investor, not necessarily.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/121515/how-s...

This appears to be an example of a failed margin call. The broker should have closed out the customer's position sooner, to maintain margin requirements. It's interesting to think about the reasons that didn't happen in this case.

But to be clear, the broker is very exposed in this situation. It reads like the customer is planning to cover the loss, but if a loss is big enough there's a strong incentive to declare bankruptcy and leave the broker with bad debt. Needless to say the broker doesn't want to be in the position of worrying about whether they will be on the hook for customers' losses. Which is why margin requirements exist.

Margin calls are designed to stop the broker from losing money, not the customer.

The broker only loses money if the customer loses money though. So their interests are aligned. The broker doesn't want a customer to get wiped out, which is exactly the point of margin requirements.

A margin call protects the broker/bank. The customer still loses everything.

> Twitter's equivalent event of what happened to Digg and Myspace.

A closer equivalent might be what happened to Freenode.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33991851

Why is it so plainly obvious to many of us and so god damn impossible for others to see it. Elon is not a genius. You got duped. Just accept it and realize he's a petty tyrant whose ego is exploding. It explains every single thing that has happened, and yet people are so desperate not to accept it.

He’s a less self aware Steve Jobs. For whatever reason people will throw themselves on the tracks for them.

Elon is a yes-man. Steve Jobs was a no-man.

Being a yes-man doesn't make you categorically stupid, but a no-man is strictly further along in some of the dimensions of intellect and creativity.

I don't think you can build tesla and spacex without being a no-man in certain fields. It's just that Elon got bored, and he entered a new realm of a social network product, not an engineering product, and he's finding out quickly how different that is.

At the same time, I do think Elon's asperger type genius is definitely more suited to engineering startups, and Job's super sensitive artist level narcissism is more suited to UX intensive startups. Elon ventured where he shouldn't have.

Yes, well put. Steve was ... scary, but at least he seemed to know it.

This is an insult to Steve Jobs.

> Why is it so plainly obvious to many of us and so god damn impossible for others to see it.

Technically? That is the nature of consciousness. Though that's no fun, so how about: some people are just stupid - the ones who have a different opinion than the observer.

I suspect many are deeply uncomfortable with the idea that a person could ascend to being the richest man on the planet without any personal merit justifying that rise.

When people get duped, it's really hard for them to admit it. Huge blow to the ego.

It's surprising to watch people turn on Trump because of this.

I just wish personal integrity mattered at any scale, anymore. I wish that people actually came to their opinions via some sort of logical process that could be easily later self-evaluated and reflected upon. There's this tendency to double-down, when "admitting a mistake" is really as simple as reflecting, realizing what assumptions were made wrong, going back to base principles and re-assessing. If you have integrity and good base values, then it's admirable to be able to see a mistake, acknowledge it and grow.

But what's frustrating is that this "double-down-at-all-costs" has worked for some at the top recently, and it seems to just be spreading, and spreading to those that don't have the money to escape the embarrassment/cost of repeating doubling down.

>I just wish personal integrity mattered at any scale, anymore.

Interestingly in the legal system, accepting responsibility is "admission against interest", and actively warned against by counsel. There are some public figures who live and breath the lessons of an adversarial legal system. Self-reflection is reflexively rejected as having no possible upside, because any correction is an admission against interest. Such a mind has mutilated itself. That anyone finds such a mind attractive, worthy of emulation, is by far the most astonishing phenomena of my life.

Fascinating points about "admission against interest". It explains some characters I have encountered on this journey through life.

I think it's because it seems to work in the long term as long as there's any kind of success waiting for them down the line. eg. If Trump wins the next election, everything up to that point is totally justified and worth it and part of the plan, etc (no matter how true or false it is, nor how lucky they may have been to have achieved the saving-their-ass success).

The cult of personality makes it so. Humanity's short memory makes it so. The media's short memory makes it so. The media's short memory is driven by the same doubling-down, new outrage distracts from previous outrage upon which it turned out our reporting was highly questionable. Layer upon layer.

The other side of the same coinj is that those who double-down and don't reach any further justifiable success rightly fade from the public consciousness (selection bias?) for the very fact they haven't done anything media-worthy since.

It feels like the double-down-at-all-costs types are increasing and spreading, but is that just because they're the ones stupidly lucky (or rich) enough to maintain a media presence?

Lastly, and related, there's always the "no news is bad news" theory. We're still discussing Elon and Trump, so they're still making the news cycle, so they're still relevant, and irrelevance makes future success (on an Elon and Trump scale) more difficult.

Although I'm no fan of the acerbity of your other comments, that's an interesting observation. Presuming you speak of the US, I think there's an interesting tension between the notion of "holding our political leaders to a higher standard" and the fact that we vote these people in! That is, it's more likely that we vote for someone with a moral character as fallible as that of the average man, e.g. see Trump, Adlai Stevenson. It's a reversal of the private sector adage: "corporate culture is from the top down."

Shit yeah. I've noticed this in Australian politics, and it may not really be there, but it does feel as if the standard the politicians are setting is a standard being followed by the... more easily-led (ie. the majority), in not taking responsibility for, literally any mistake ever in their lives.

When the public-at-large start behaving and speaking like politicians about their past actions, the truth and accountability required to progress society will take longer to establish than we've got until the heat death of the universe.

This never happened, trust me. I would figure it has gotten better.

Look at the US and what was acceptable re: racist ideologies (the height of the lack of any logical thinking). US certainly is not the ONLY racist country either (have you been to Europe today? it is like going back 30 years with regards to racism, in a lot of countries!)

Explain the success of his previous companies without lying or references left wing conspiracies? I genuinely want to see an answer to this. Can't state things as fact that 5 seconds on Google can disprove

I already know the answers are going to be he uses his secret emerald mine to power the self landing rockets

So when you say “his” companies, do you mean:

PayPal (not founded by Musk) Tesla (not founded by Musk) The Boring Company (only existed to de-rail a planned road development that annoyed Musk) SpaceX (I’ll give you this one)

Yea this is a fail. Honestly be more interesting if people made more genuine arguments. He clearly paid a major role in Tesla. This is answer above is a whole lot of LARPing

Yes. He definitely did “paid” his way into a role at Tesla… Freud would be proud.

The Tesla roadster was shipping to customers before Musk became CEO.

Is there more to his story that matches exactly Elons version? He was largest shareholder and then CEO. Yes more LARPing by insecure haters. And then he slept for 7 years, right? And Tesla builds a million cars a year... somehow

Friend, your English is so poor I don’t understand what you’re saying: who are you referring to when you say “his story” besides Musk.

Pointing out that Musk has had his greatest successes working at other peoples companies (with the exception of SpaceX, which I’ll grant you) doesn’t make anyone an “LARPing insecure hater”.

Tesla was nothing before Musk. It's disingenuous to say he didn't found it, just because he bought the name, logo and a prototype from someone else

From what I've read, he bought in as an investor and forced the actual founders out.

He could just as well have founded his own company, then he'd be a founder, because that's what that word means. I don't see how you should be called a founder if you aren't, well, a founder.

Not that I see anything inherently bad or unimpressive with not being a founder.

And by nothing, you mean shipping the Tesla Roadster to customers before he became CEO.

Don’t rewrite history… it’s beneath HN. Do better.

Musk became Chairman of Tesla and largest shareholder in February 2004. He oversaw Roadster production.

The first Roadster was delivered in February 2008. To Elon, by the way.

>largest individual shareholder.

FTFY.

The rest of your comment neither refutes my point nor reinforces the earlier comment that Tesla was nothing but a name, brand and prototype: Chairmen oversee board meetings, not gnarly technical challenges on the production floors. No doubt once he became CEO (after the roadster was shipping) he became more involved in the day to day.

What does politics have to do with it?

His first principles seem be to get what he wants through brute force. He'll realize that he doesn't have the brute force to control the online communication of 450 million people.

Good observation. Dealing with non mechanical objects is not his strength

> It's baffling to me that Elon seems to be taking the opposite of a first-principles view on Twitter.

Power corrupts. The radical idealist who becomes a despotic tyrant is practically a meme.

I think power can in fact corrupt, but I think the simpler explanation in many cases (as it almost certainly is with Elon and Twitter) is that the expressed ideals were in fact complete bullshit and despotic tyranny was always the intended outcome. Noble ideals are always a good cover for less than noble goals, and while actual idealists definitely exist, everything Elon Musk has ever said or done suggests it's smart to assume he's in the former camp until proven otherwise.

I use Twitter, and most users are totally baffled, even more than they have been before with prior bans. Musk just keeps finding new ways to alienate users. It was one thing to ban links to Mastodon, but to Instagram and Facebook and link tree? That's going to piss off a lot of people...

Omission of TikTok is because the CCP has Tesla by the short and curlies

That's my reading as well.

>> It's the base-level social protocol that all other platforms are adjacent to

I have no idea what this means.

What I meant was if you were primarily on YouTube, you still had a Twitter.

On insta? You still had a Twitter.

LinkedIn? Twitter.

Blog/website? Twitter.

Everyone had a Twitter regardless of where their meat and potatoes content was.

i think: http is meant.

The "link" is one or "the" feature that makes the whole thing work. And it is not meant to be restictive. You link to whereever you want. That was the idea of the WWW (tim bernes lee).

No restrictions at all in the base of the protocol. The opposite is true: everythink is and has to be inter-linkable.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol

Long form video is a paid feature of Twitter Blue marked as 'coming soon'.

It isn't baffling at all. It was entirely predictable by looking at his past behavior. The thai cave diver incident and Elon's slander. The hyperloop failure. The continual empty promises of FSD for tesla. His attempts to manipulate the market thru his posts, which the SEC slapped his write for.

Why would Elon take a first-principles approach, instead of the selfish, short-sighted approach of an insecure, lonely, overbearing billionaire with too much money and too many adoring fans?

Hyperloop wasn't a failure at all, it did exactly what it was meant to; kill off attempts to get more railway projects started in California.

This take on the Hyperloop thing is totally trumped-up.

There is no evidence it was meant to kill off new railway projects, nor any evidence that it did.

Elon was just paraphrased in a book about how he thought the particular California HSR project was a boondoggle (a view shared by many) and he published an idea for how to do it better.

Elon had explicitly stated in interviews himself the Hyperloops intentions stated above

Here's an interview from the time. It doesn't support your claim. I don't know of others.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_OffnEl-kQA

As far as I know, the origin of this claim comes from

https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990/pho...

No he didn’t, but most people think he did!

Hyperloop wasn't an idea for "how to do it better" because Hyperloop cannot do "it" at all. The nameplate capacity of Hyperloop, granting all of Musk's fantasy parameters, is in the low thousands of passengers per day. High speed rail can land a thousand people every minute.

Nit pick: About Japan's busiest high-speed rail line (Tokaido Shinkansen), Wiki says:

    At peak times, the line carries up to 16 trains per hour in each direction with 16 cars each (1,323-seat capacity and occasionally additional standing passengers) with a minimum headway of three minutes between trains.

Not exactly "a thousand people every minute", but I agree with the jist of your post. High speed rail has orders of magnitude higher capacity.

Well, the "high speed" part is largely irrelevant to the throughput. In the next 15 minutes, 25 trains will arrive at Zürich HB.

Excellent point. Shinjuku station in Tokyo is the busiest train station in the world by passengers, and it does not have high speed rail ("shinkansen").

Whether you think the idea is good is irrelevant to my point.

Isn't there a pretty solid argument to be made that hyperloop (and especially what Boring Company is actually building) is so dumb that it shouldn't seriously be treated as a good faith solution and other motivations should be considered?

I don't agree. The whole Hyperloop thing was not an alternative implementation it was a pitch for a completely different society altogether. Instead of moving everyone in California at a reasonable price, let's have a giant infrastructure that is at least as large and disruptive as rail but only serves a tiny slice of the ultra-rich, everyone else has to take a car.

It wasn't "how to do it better" it was an attempt to reframe the entire question of whether medium-distance mass transportation should exist.

I don’t know where you’re getting this from. The idea has nothing to do with only serving “a tiny slice of the ultra rich”. You’re adding all this dramatic extra stuff about society and reframing.

California does a fine job killing railway projects all by itself. It doesn't need Elon Musk.

Mind sharing your evidence that that was Hyperloop's intended effect?

With his other failures, he's gotten away with it since he always had the "genius at work" aura, and investors (and I guess people in general) just subscribed to the idea that these endeavors were works in progress. Now the vail has been lifted for all to see, and some of what made him attractive to investors is fading away

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky7DMCHQJZY

I don't understand how anyone could look at everything Elon has done around the Boring Company and still think he's some sort of genius.

IMHO you can be a genius in a few areas of expertise but you cannot be a genius at everything. There is no such thing as a person who is a genius at everything so every person we call a genius is actually a genius at a few things at most and not all things.

IMO, the only thing Musk is a genius at is using money to create a rabid cult of personality. He's very good at that.

Unfortunately there's not some kind of reward for spotting Musk for the person he really is at first glance.

I am decidedly not a genius, but TSLA put options are my most profitable investment this year.

That's great for you, congrats. But that was in like year 20 of Elon Musk being a notorious jackass. Someone who shorted Tesla early on based on Musk being a charlatan would have got their face ripped off.

For sure. I am not claiming to be first, just that I felt thar this year could be the straw that broke the camel's back.

There is; grim satisfaction. I'm enjoying it quite a bit over the last couple of weeks.

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