Musk’s Twitter poll says he should step down
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
- Musk has at least some level of interest in solving the fundamental problem of how to build and manage a public square, even if the purchase of twitter itself was initially presented as a joke
- despite having a clear, at least quasi-principled interest in the topic, his actual attempts to manage twitter have been juvenile and ham-handed at best and if continued are almost certain to doom the platform both financially and engagement-wise
- his recent activity indicates that he’s not oblivious to this fact - it’s a sinking ship and he openly acknowledges it - but does he view himself as some kind of uniquely-qualified savior?
At this point there are still more questions than answers. Will he actually step down? Who would replace him and what could they possibly hope to achieve at this point? Will the inevitable devaluation of Twitter stock take down Tesla with it? Will the other stakeholders in Tesla acquiesce to a humbled Musk returning to business as usual, or will this taint him forever? Has his behavior irreparably damaged the Tesla brand? Does any of this actually matter?
It’s interesting how different people can see the same thing and reach opposite conclusions. It’s crystal clear to me that Musk has no interest in solving these problems.
To me, Musk is kind of the quintessential engineering bro, who’s fundamentally motivated by wanting to be the one who solves the trickiest problems. Sometimes his actual decision-making is influenced by vanity and voyeurism, but the underlying theme seems to be rooted in problem-solving.
> My only basis for this is the private text exchange with Jack Dorsey where they discussed how Twitter should have been built. To me that’s the only true window into his intentions - all other public comms are tainted by other potential motivations.
You have to understand that text message thread in context. It's two narcissistic billionaires who think they're above everyone else talking to each other. It's a sort of billionaire pissing contest where they both also pat each other on the back. It's two people thinking they're the smartest in the room. It just so happens they were the only ones in the room.
For Dorsey, if he knew how Twitter should have been built since the beginning, then why didn't he do so? He claims to have known this from the start, but he was in full control for years. Musk was just chiming in to showcase that he gets it, whatever it is.
At every step of the way, Musk is just cosplaying as an engineer and interfering with the actual work being done.
And yet, stupid people fawned over it, saying crap like he's putting rockets in the tesla and other hyped up nonsense. Some tried to backpeddle "oh it was a joke". It wasn't a joke, elon has been spouting bullshit, often technobabble for decades and whenever somebody calls him on it he handwaves it away and sicks his fans on them. Of course he genuinely thought that was a genius idea.
It's always been laughable and disgusting to call him an engineer. It's an insult to people who actually went through school, who didn't fake their degree, who didn't shirk classes to do whatever instead. An insult to the people who sometimes have to sign their name to a structure on pain of lawsuit. He should have NO credibility in any educated field.
Of course, devs often like for exactly that reason, since they love to cosplay engineers too, as if our bubble gum and duct tape plumbing industry could be considered engineering.
He doesn't care about solving the problems. If he did, he would have better understood things before firing >50% of the workforce and several other steps he skipped because he constrained himself by massively overpaying for Twitter.
The fanclub of temporarily-embarrassed-billionaires cannot square the reality of him just being some rich idiot trust fund kid playing dressup as Serious Business Man with his dad’s apartheid emerald money with their idea that they too can become unimaginably wealthy if they just find the right amphetamine-to-shroom-microdose ratio.
The bills Twitter runs up won't pay themselves and I don't see it recovering from the tailspin that Musk has put it in. Who is at the helm may no longer be all that important.
Twitter was profitable in 2018-2019, but that was a brief blip and wasn't profitable before or afterwards. And, with a bunch of debt piled on from the acquisition, they need a fair bit of operating profit to cover it.
I must be out of touch or have a dead imagination but I have no clue what this means/what this looks like hypothetically.
It really needs a better model because the idea of scaling up the town square is just a terrible idea.
This is a talking point that got beat dead in 2020 and I am shocked that it still has any life on HackerNews. It's not only moral positioning, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes someone a publisher and what is actually covered as part of Section 230.
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-...
Weaponized speech is real, and "more speech" is zero defense against it.
Content moderation is a hard problem, in multiple dimensions, and blundering erratically from rookie mistake into rookie mistake serves by design or by accident mostly to enable and empower the worst exploitation, and the worst voices.
The pretense that there is some design and genius behind pathetic Dunning-Kruger narcissism and cognitive errors and neurological deficits has expired.
How's that anagram go, "a man, no plan, root canal: painful yawn"?
That's not even near that. It's all been hypocritical through the through. "Free speech" is "me speech".
The man doesn't even know about Section 230 and referred to Twitter as a "publisher". He is completely clueless as to what it is that he bought for $44 billion. Most of us spend more due diligence buying a coffee grinder.
1. I had friends at Twitter who were laid off
2. I actually do think Twitter has value
3. I don’t think Elon is good for public discourse
4. I don’t think Elon is good for tech culture
5. I think we’d all be better off if he STFU and went back to working on rockets and electric cars.
Now he is faced with a predicament that every time he touches, tweets, or says something (which are all tinged with the same obnoxious flavor that is his brand and has worked for him until now and one he seems to be unable and unwilling to moderate when situation calls for it) - despite the ejaculatory noises his fanbase makes - “twitter as a business” nosedives further.
So now he is looking to distance himself, however much possible that might be, as to not be associated too closely with what is looking ever more like a failure, and possibly find someone who can actually run twitter in a boring and even-keeled manner, banning the same old crowd we are all used to being banned - and if that succeeds - tweet from sidelines pretending as if things are out of his hands, and then still show up when the ‘uge success awards are being handed out.
The outcome of the poll would not have influenced his departure, but now conveniently offers a “people have spoken” excuse.
> Let me run Twitter for a bit. No salary. All in. Focus on great engineering and increasing the amount of love in the world.
But I would definitely buy into that show - Lex for CEO has my +1.
> Zatko's complaint accuses the CEO of exhibiting "absent behavior" and a "drastic loss of focus" in his last year as Twitter CEO.
> Zatko also said Dorsey was a "disengaged" leader who only "sporadically" showed up to meetings — and when he did, he sometimes didn't say a word. Sometimes he'd appear to go missing and wouldn't respond to his teams for "days or weeks," the complaint said.
> Top brass worried about his health and tried to cover up for him, but "even mid- and lower-level staff could tell that the ship was rudderless," the complaint said.