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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why Musk didn't wait a few months for things to settle down before raising hell at Twitter. Before he bought it people were saying "He's gonna destroy Twitter!" and then he buys it and behaves as if he intends to prove them right.

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There's no understanding what he's done, really. He could've pursued a traditional m&a strategy with real diligence and been able to back out when the market made it clear he was overpaying. He could've bought 10 or 15% and gotten a board seat and then gotten any information he wanted. A fun thing to think about: how much of what he accomplished in reality could he have accomplished if he'd only bought enough to get a board seat?

But he had exactly that option. He quite deliberately chose not to join the board when he learned about the obligations of corporate board members to shareholders as a whole.

No doubt he would have been influential as a board member, but there’s no way he would have been able to change as much as he’s had (or get the rest of the board to accede to the massive vaporization of equity value).

Because to him this isn't "raising hell", this is "solving Twitter". But he's still not capable of understanding that social media is actually a far, far harder problem than cars or even rocket science.

Specifically, social media does not have an end goal, like a car on the road or getting people into and back home from space safely. Social media is infinitely messy because that's what we humans are, and you can't "fix" that.

Even if he was totally right he was aware that most people thought he was wrong. It's insane to make advertisers and investors think you're a lunatic whether or not you actually are when your income is dependent on those advertisers.

Because he bought a break-even business at an elevated price, on the precipice of an industry-wide decline, and saddled it with huge interest payments. He had no lever to pull to increase revenues that much, so he had to cut costs dramatically from day one and hope the business would stabilize at a smaller size. Remains to be seen if it will.

There’s a reason he tried to get out of the purchase…

My main takeaway from watching him fumble around haplessly at Twitter is that there's not a chance in hell that I'd ever get in a car built by a company that he runs like that, let alone a rocket.

Credit where credit is due - he’s very good at manufacturing. I don’t think the software has ever been the strong point for Musks businesses. Infamous self driving mode being the most obvious example.

Twitter is pretty much just software (and a few data centers?) so not playing to his strengths. Of course he got himself in this mess with his ego

There's an awful lot of software involved in his cars and rockets too though, and what has been very obvious in his time at Twitter is that he's perfectly happy to demand a new feature be added in a stupidly short timeframe but apparently incapable of either thinking through the consequences of adding it, or listening to someone who can.

Would be interesting to know how such demands are handled at Tesla and SpaceX. Twitter, being a company he just bought, not was part of building up, may not have the same mechanism and culture to handle these things.

> he’s very good at manufacturing

Tesla's quality control is infamously bad. Rather, Musk is very good at marketing, being able to project his reality distortion field far enough to sell shoddily-manufactured cars for luxury-car prices.

>> he’s very good at manufacturing

> Tesla's quality control is infamously bad.

Also I believe SpaceX is effectively run by other (competent) people, and Musk stays out of the rocketry part.

If you believe the articles, SpaceX is very good at actively managing Musk.

>Also I believe SpaceX is effectively run by other (competent) people, and Musk stays out of the rocketry part.

This is extremely hard to believe, given interviews with him, former employees and even astronauts that trained with SpaceX.

Well the proof is in the pudding. I’m willing to wait to Dec ‘23 and see where things are.

/I would ride in a falcon9 and NASA feels the same.

He made a mistake, and an expensive one.

If he bought Twitter now, he probably only need 1/2 or 1/3 what he paid.

Truth to be told, even the richest man in the world can’t predict the market

Waiting would probably meant bigger losses in time. If you want to refactor a business, better do it quick.

I think refactor might be the wrong term here - typically if you want to refactor something you have to know what it's doing and why it's broken. In my uninformed opinion it seems like the changes happened so fast there was no time for that initial evaluation.

It's fascinating to watch him learning in real time as he is experiments and bring his own experience to it. He has been a successful executive for a tech company before, Tesla is just a tech company that sells cars. Now social media

He came in shook it up and innovated. Facebook copied his subscription idea. Other social media companies are likely to follow. He has already changed the industry, and where it goes, he probably doesn't even know

It’s an interesting turning point for social media. It’s not like Meta is doing any better and among smart people I know, no one is excited about social media and most have stopped using it in favor of smaller group communications

Meta seems to betting big on VR and failing. I'm not sure that its instrinsically about social media so much as a bad pivot.

Facebook copying his questionable subscription model is hardly evidence for "innovation". If anything it's the opposite -- it shows big corps just copy each other as a safety mechanism -- something we've already seen with the large rounds of lay-offs.

> "his subscription idea"

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/introduci...

Musk innovated at twitter years before he ever bid on twitter, amazing skills.

“Learning” is an interesting way of saying “running into the ground”

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