Musk: We'll just need to do a total rewrite to have a high velocity of features
twitter.com
twitter.com
Bad approach from the other party though - they should have let Elon keep talking and display more ignorance instead of confronting him and pointing out that he's clueless. Just play along, and give him little nudges and more directions to take wild swings at. Keep asking questions about things he knows nothing about and let him give wrong answers with pretend-confidence.
Currently JVMs & Performance stuff at @Netflix. Previously JVMs & performative stuff at @Twitter.
So, did he buy Twitter just for the brand, and some users?
At this point maybe the best explanation for his behavior is it’s all a performance art piece to see how much damage he can do in as short a time as possible. Truly astonishing to watch in real time.
musk went with the tried and true 'who are you?'.
'total rewrite' is comedy gold.
unless you're a Tesla investor maybe.
I'm reminded of this confrontational interaction between a technical person and Steve Jobs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o -- in hindsight, Jobs was right: "You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology," not the other way around.
In Twitter's case, they've got to start with what's important -- being able to try out a lot of new ideas quickly and cheaply to find out which ones work. The exact details of how they accomplish that are of secondary importance.
He's proposing a ridiculous solution that will have the exact opposite effect of what he wants.
The only thing in common with the Steve Jobs clip is that both interactions are somewhat confrontational. Jobs is talking about how the user experience is important and engineering is secondary, Musk tries to solve Twitter's problems by asking the engineers to rewrite things that already work fine.
You don't know that.
Time will tell who is right!
Bringing up "Whatsapp only had 32 employees" seems like a lazy point to make to handwave away any actual arguments.
This is not really a problem that Twitter has, though. Or at least not a significant part of Twitter's problems; they do have to do some web-push stuff, and sure, they could use Erlang for that, why not, but it's not a big part of their problems. And as for the rest of Twitter... well, Erlang is notably bad at handling _text_, for a start.
The desire for velocity isn’t the part being criticized, Musk's proposed approach to that uncontroversial goal and the evident conplete lack of understanding on which it is based is.
> How deeply he understands the technical details does not matter that much
It does, given that he is very hands on on the tech decisions and has proposed handing over the CEO job while retaining control of “Software and Services”.
If I assume he's smart, I'd think it's (b). But to do (b) well, he probably would have experts tell him what to say.
I remember him talking about how Hyperloop is an air hockey table in a vacuum - I'm not a physicist but that doesn't seem to make sense. I know that what he says about software makes zero sense. Does nobody tell him that? Does he really not see it?