Haraldur Thorleifsson's Personal Site
haraldurthorleifsson.com
haraldurthorleifsson.com
The optics could not be worse. I mean this guy is literally in a wheel chair.
If you were a well-funded tech company looking for design help from say 2014-2020, Ueno was probably on your shortlist (they're basically the reason most company landing pages look the way they do today). The fact that twitter could not find something valuable for this guy to do reflects more on the current state of Twitter management than it does on him.
If Haraldur intended to bait him, it was a near-flawless execution. I'm sure there are countless labor, disability, and health info privacy lawyers lining up in Halli's DMs.
Wasn't there a recent study that suggested that mindfulness meditation is correlated with an increase in narcissism, not a reduction?
Can't say if he's on the psychopathy spectrum or not, but he has admitted to be on the autistic spectrum, and I think that alone must be enough of a hinderance to running a social medial company.
However being autistic is not an excuse for this kind of behavior. Many autistic people have sensory issues and will appear rude when they suddenly withdraw from a conversation, or have an unexplainable tantrum. However neither of these is what we are witnessing in Elon’s behavior. His is simply rude and disregarding of other people. That can be an indication of psychopathy (but doesn’t have to be). If this was a tantrum we wouldn’t be able to understand him this easily, and this is engagement—which is the opposite of withdrawal—so we can rule out over stimulation.
I think the most likely explanation here he is simply a bad person regardless of autism or other neuro-divergency.
I'm bit afraid what he is going to do now.
Reading Icelandic names like Haraldur evokes strong subconscious aura of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Curious if someone would write a novel (or a parody or a game) about Middle Earth's modern high tech corporate culture.
Considering there were entire articles by news outlets like the BBC just queued up and ready to go. My sense is this was premeditated. Elon is such an easy target.
Excessively conspiratorial imo, it isn't difficult to slap together an article about a series of tweets and the BBC article wasn't posted until about 8 hours after the first tweet and 3.5 hours after the last tweet from Elon in the original thread.
http://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://www.bbc.c...
Are you implying that journalists conspired with this guy to bait Elon into responding in a terrible manner and they pre-wrote articles about it?
Journalists use Twitter, too. They can write and publish articles quickly. There’s no conspiracy here. News articles appearing several hours after a story unfolds entirely within public Tweets is both common and normal.
A richly deserving target, too.
As somebody who was a manager at Twitter (briefly; laid off in 2017 after 7 months) I want to say that this is very much a management problem, not a worker problem.
When I started there, in my initial 1:1s with my team, each told me their story of their time at Twitter. Every single one had worked on at least one project that they were excited about and made great progress on but that at the last minute got canceled by senior execs. At least one; some had more.
So I believe that the main reason Twitter had a justified reputation for low feature velocity was executive-level chaos. Dorsey was the half-time CEO from 2015-2022. When I was there, the VP Product position was jokingly called "defense against the dark arts teacher", as a new person swapped in every year or so. I'm sure it's possible to have a half-time CEO, but for that to work you need a very clear vision and an excellent executive team that is actually working as a team, neither of which I saw during my time there.
It would not surprise me at all that Twitter ,ended up with some people who became discouraged and were just biding their time. However, during my time there I never met anybody like that. Twitter was full of smart, passionate people who loved the product.
That said, if Twitter, months after Musk's takeover and after massive layoffs still has do nothing people, that is 100% Musk's fault. All the people there have passed multiple selection filters by Musk and his goons. Musk has had months to change the culture, share his vision, and build a sense of mission. In my view, he's failed comprehensively. At this point, him publicly shitting on his workers is just him displaying his lack of basic competence as a manager.
Either no reply & cc:HR, or "Yup, HR should get on this".
With that kind of money and power, the #1 or #2 richest person in the world, you can afford to be extremely gracious and self-effacing. And it is good for your wealth.
Instead, Elon chooses to make a public show of being a smug, petty, abusive, asshat. What an impoverished emotional weakling is on display here. Almost sad and pitiful, except for his abuse of others.
Thorleifsson repeatedly inquired of HR, then made a single tweet to Musk.
As I pointed out, Musk could have 1) simply ignored it, 2) ignored it and cc'd HR to reply, or 3) publicly replied something brief and to the point, such as "Yes, terminated, cc:HR to close out paperwork".
Yet, musk chose to do none of the above, instead choosing to escalate the situation, evidently while underestimating his opponent.
This is absolutely 100% on Musk, it's his company, his response, and he's the wealthiest and one of the most powerful men in the world. He chose it, and the fact that he got publicly pwnd is entirely his own doing.
But, as usual, there's that meme about some weird nerd who always throws himself in front of a valid point to try to protect Elon. (If it matters, I also posted on HN several things defending Musk, but this is indefensible)
Somebody once pointed out to me that the reason Instagram became so much more popular with celebrities than Twitter is that Instagram has filters to make you look prettier, but Twitter doesn't have anything to make you look smarter or funnier.
Musk is clearly desperate to be The Best At Social Media. But he's just not. Which should be fine! We can't all be good at everything. But he can't let it go. So much so that he spent $44 billion to win at Twitter. And when that wasn't enough, he ordered people to fix it for him: https://www.platformer.news/p/yes-elon-musk-created-a-specia...
I saw the Twitter purchase described as "fragile narcissist buys criticism factory" and that gets truer by the day.
Its incredible to me how people are burying the lede here to somehow rehabilitate Musk's disastrous response.
What was it about Ueno's work that made it so good? I've admired it from the first time I saw Halli & Ueno's portfolio, but I've never been able to identify what it was.
Clean and bold?
"well if he's not working why is elon paying him"
for these groups of people Elon is tied to their identity and he can do no wrong
Except... of course... it's not that simple. "First-principles" thinking is a nice buzzword and it's rooted in some truth, but it's an excuse for university engineering graduates to ignore real world problems and consequences, and jump to solutions that are certainly disruptive, but often disruptively bad, and rarely overall an improvement from the status quo. It's pure naivety, and as someone with a lot of self confidence from unearned privilege, it's something I'm constantly battling against inside myself. Can I really do a better job than experts? Probably not.
Is SpaceX much better than competitors? Yes, but not entirely because of first-principles thinking, there was a lot of winning the right contracts and clever business decisions from Gwynne Shotwell. Is Telsa much better for its reinventing the car from first-principles? Not really, it was for a bit, but the vertical integration has so far borne out fairly low quality cars relative to their price. What about Twitter? Well Musk dropped in to a working business to re-evaluate everything with that first-principles thinking and look where it's got him. He was naive. He didn't value the expertise of those actually doing the job for years, and he's effectively destroyed the business.
So yeah, I get why people like him, and in moderation I think those aspects are worthy of respect. However Musk doesn't do moderation, and so it just comes across as naive.
And yet, Tesla makes like 10x the profit of German car makers per vehicle sold [1].
The established car makers still, over a decade after the first Tesla rolled on the streets, haven't come close to realizing just how screwed they are... the biggest threat to Tesla isn't the established car makers, it's Chinese BYD.
Don't get me wrong: Musk is despicable as a person. But those working under him have truly created awesome things.
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/elon-musks-guerilla-taktik...
At this point, I'm embarrassed to have done so, and seriously doubt even those accomplishments, which I now credit far more to the people around him accomplishing despite Elon rather than due to his influence (not that he deserves zero credit, but far less than he gets or wants).
Aside from the kind of recent entitled asshattery and actively promoting authoritarian propaganda while claiming it's all "centrist" (perhaps it is from an apartheid point of view..., what undid it for me was his public exchanges with Twitter engineers in late '22, just displaying brazed BS and ignorance while trying to belittle everyone. What a smug, ignorant, blustering, asshat, wasting everyone's time, all for his own inadequate ego.
A narcissist has two important parts. One is a desperate hunger for status. The other is a grandiose false self that they see as sufficient to justify their importance. Narcissists put amazing time and energy into constructing and performing the false self. If you've ever met one in person, they can be amazingly compelling.
But what if somebody has the same deep emotional hunger but lacks the ability to construct the false self? One path is developing a realistic sense of self and balanced emotions. But what if they don't?
My theory is that they are prone to attaching their identity to an existing narcissist. They become fans, even superfans. They adopt their opinions. They buy their products. They identify with the narcissist's public false self.
So I think Elon's stans are the ones who, if they were big boy narcissists, would have a false self like "Elon the billionaire playboy technoking". They see themselves as brilliant first-principles thinkers who can sweep into a room and by the sheer power of their genius make vast improvements over whatever the petty mortals previously present were doing.
There but for the grace of god go I, honestly.
Making spaceflight exciting again was huge and it must have taken an incredible engineering effort to get semi-reliable high-definition live streams from multiple angles on and around rockets.
And then Twitter brain.
> for these groups of people Elon is tied to their identity and he can do no wrong
I'm not an Elon fanboy and I'm not familiar with these events. But it seems like paying someone who isn't working isn't a great use of money. It seems reasonable to end an arrangement like that. Was that really what happened?
He and Twitter agreed to structure the buyout of his firm as income for tax reasons so even if he didn't do a single ounce of work for twitter his entire tenure it would have been money well spent for no other reason than the time value of money. Common sense and reading between the lines a bit it seems like his contract stipulates that Twitter now owes a lump sum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haraldur_Ingi_%C3%9Eorleifsson
I expect most people will infer the wrong thing here. To be clear, those "tax reasons" were that he wanted to maximize the amount of tax he would pay.
> an agreement between him and Twitter, most of the purchase price was paid as salary to maximize the tax he would pay for the sale in Iceland, he chose to pay for tax out of respect to Iceland for the disability benefits he received. Per the agreement, he paid the second highest tax of an individual in Iceland in 2021.
So just because he is well known, you suddenly believe a Twitter employee. But others who Elon claims to not be working, they’re probably not working?
All Elon needed to do was to reply "thanks for bringing this to my attention, clearly the ball has been dropped somewhere. I'll make sure someone responds to your e-mail", and then take it private.
That doesn't mean most were not doing anything, but "most" is not the word used in the comment to which yours replies.
https://medium.com/darius-foroux/prices-law-why-only-a-few-p...
This translates into other parts of the economy. High income households experience high income volatility, consistent with the hypothesis that there is lots of competition at the highest levels of success—not very little competition.
... and because this is Hacker News, yes I'm aware the "alpha/beta" male thing is based on a discredited model of wolf pack hierarchy but the meme was assimilated into popular culture anyway so it's true for people now even if it was never true for canines.
I didn't know being paralyzed made you immune to criticism.
(Some capital T capital T capital S tools figure it out from flow in the same way that automated captions do comma and most open paren all question mark close paren let you dictate punctuation as well period)
It irks me so much that everyone calls him Elon like we’re all pals with him and he’s just one of us.
He isn’t. I find him to be an insufferable douche, he’s probably a psychopath, and he’s just a despicable human overall.
His companies are remarkable though but they’ve been built on the sweat tears blood and exploitation of so many people that I don’t think they’re respectable.
But sure let’s keep calling him Elon like he’s just everyone’s friendly neighbor or uncle.
/end rant
Haraldur seems like a pretty accomplished guy and I don't like what Musk did either. But none of the things you wrote about are about things Haraldur did at Twitter. Without knowing more about the situation, we're all just guessing it, but it is possible for a accomplished individual to join a company and then lose motivation and not do much.
Nobody deserves to be fired without communication, without HR being able to confirm if they work at the company, and then proceed to be publicly mocked on Twitter for their physical disability.
Speculating about the person's work at Twitter is beside the point. Thousands of Twitter employees have been let go, but mocking someone for their physical disability on the internet is something else entirely.
The perspective warp that happens in these comment threads is baffling. If someone posted the same scenario (getting fired without communication, then their CEO mocked their disability on Twitter) as an "Ask HN" thread, everyone would have their pitchforks out. Replace unknown CEO with Elon Musk, and suddenly commenters are doing mental gymnastics to ignore the real bad behavior and try to justify something else using speculation.
The only thing I was saying is that we don't know if he was a productive employee of Twitter or not. Besides that, absolutely horrible how he was treated, productive employee or not. But that doesn't remove the fact that we don't know what happen behind the scenes.
Today is my first time hearing about this scandal. Do you have a link to the mocking in question?
He also had a (now deleted) comment where he called the guy "just the worst":
https://twitter.com/JamesClayton5/status/1633155915892527104
This is rich coming from the dude that got so addicted to Twitter he bought the entire company. It looks like we're in the "there's always a tweet" period of Elmo's implosion.
I know someone who can literally only move her eyes and her neck a little, and she still manages to use software to type.
Yeah, it happened today.
I am not sure what to do, other than let go people, if the company is hemorrhaging money with not much to show for it.
At least the employees of those companies knew they were fired. Read the originating message from Haraldur to Elon...he went to twitter because he had no idea whether he was employed or not. smh
I'm not exactly sure what the "right" way is, but I'm pretty sure that Elon's way ain't it.
But that’s what he’s said he’ll pay, but in reality he’s not even paying people what they’re owed. There’s already quite a few lawsuits on how he’s not paying things.
He’s not paying anyone last year’s bonus, he’s not paying people’s buyout payments for terminating early, he’s firing people instead of laying them off because he doesn’t have to py severance, he’s not honoring anything agreed upon in the acquisition agreement. Please be informed before you actually talk about this.
This tweet rant can cost up to $100 million for Musk.
>He’s not paying anyone
It's mostly dirty tactics. Musk estimates that significant amount of employees are not smart enough to get what they are owned. He tries to get away without paying. Only those people who sue for wrongful termination, or unpaid bonuses get paid.
I honestly question Musk's sobriety at this point.
Musk, being the head of numerous companies, should know better than to respond with anything other than "I'll follow up with HR".
When alt-right weirdos ask him crap, his response is just "looking into it". That's all he needed to do here.
And not telling someone for 9 days that they are fired is simply not acceptable. I don't know the legal requirements in the relevant jurisdiction here, but firing people without telling them is usually either invalid entirely or at least a really, really shitty move. That HR is unable to confirm the employment state for 9 days is just absurd, that's no way to run a company.
>> Elon isn't mocking him.
He literally posted a meme joking about how he cant feel his legs
>> It's interesting how Halli doesn't actually defend that he did any work.
Halli needed multiple tweets to fit in the list of major projects he worked on while at the company
He expects to be paid for the company that Twitter purchased, actually. That he's taking the proceeds as income and not capital gains is an (inverted) tax strategy.
he posted an office space meme in response to him sarcastically.
> It's interesting how Halli doesn't actually defend that he did any work, because it's clear he didn't.
and that is a spurious reach.
> and that is a spurious reach.
Halli himself tweeted that he "did what his manager told him to" but didn't actually say that he did any material work, instead citing that he had been waiting forever from HR without any response. I cannot believe people are trying to defend that this dude was actually working when it's very clear he wasn't.
The meme listed is specifically referencing a car-crash of a downsizing interview a manager of software engineer has in the film Office Space which he ends by screaming that he has "people skills". Its not a valid question, its an immature means of discrediting whatever someone else says next via an inside joke that it seems neither Haraldur or yourself know.
> when it's very clear he wasn't.
Its not at all clear if he was or wasn't. There is extremely limited information in any of these sources that give us a reliable read on this. None of us know how hard Haraldur works or what metric people are using to judge that. That Haraldur is both a director-level acqui-hire as well as very open about his disability, suggests a very broad grey area that I feel you might not be respecting.
Here's the tweet [0]:
"Dear @elonmusk
9 days ago the access to my work computer was cut, along with about 200 other Twitter employees.
However your head of HR is not able to confirm if I am an employee or not. You've not answered my emails.
Maybe if enough people retweet you'll answer me here?"
[0]: https://twitter.com/iamharaldur/status/1632843191773716481?c...
[1] https://twitter.com/iamharaldur/status/1633109753890058242
Its literally just a pink background for me. Not sure if I'm missing something or if that's the joke. I'm not familiar with him and assume he's a great designer. I dont understand the reference here though.
Maybe it's a nice experience on mobile, but it's a nightmare on my laptop.
Maybe an overzealous ad blocker?
This is just an observation. I understand that some people love making lovely things, and that sometimes those things are at odds with being accessible to some people. But this is a real world example where I cannot access a restaurant website, even if the restaurant hasn't opened yet. So even now I'm still confused as to what's actually going on there.
There's a image of the dining area of the restaurant at the top of the page once you scroll enough. It's daylight, and it seems to be lit from the windows to the right. It's very white/beige. The room reminds me of the bridge of the Enterprise on Star Trek: TNG. There's a part in the center with pink-padded bench seats placed around an area full of plants. These tables have wooden chairs with soft-looking pink seats like the rest of the tables around the room. There's a nook thing at the back center with a shelf of pink cups against a frosted glass backing with a light behind it and a cluster of old-fashioned light bulbs with huge, bright filaments. The bulbs hang from white rods.
But firing someone without communication and with HR unable to confirm it is just low. Mocking them on Twitter for their well-documented physical disability is just abhorrent.
This could have been a completely different exchange if the response was a simple “Sorry for the confusion, I’ll look into it and have HR get back to you ASAP.”
> In early 2021, Haraldur sold Ueno to Twitter. In an agreement between him and Twitter, most of the purchase price was paid as salary to maximize the tax he would pay for the sale in Iceland, he chose to pay for tax out of respect to Iceland for the disability benefits he received. Per the agreement, he paid the second highest tax of an individual in Iceland in 2021.
Elon's focus on the work he was or wasn't doing is almost beside the point, because much of his salary was simply to pay off this debt. Now that he's been fired they'll either have to keep paying his salary anyway, or pay out the probably substantial amount he's owed as a lump sum. Haraldur has alluded to this in his tweets about getting "what he's owed" per his contract.
Allegedly he was on a do-not-fire list for this reason, but it's unclear if Elon knew about any of this before jumping on the opportunity to punch down at a subordinate.
IANAL, but I believe this is also highly illegal.
Nonetheless, the links you presented - I don't see how that's mocking if the person didn't actually do any work. The laughing emoji was in response to Haraldur describing what he did at the company.
I just simply wouldn't engage, period.
I agree, but we've allowed our upper class to do this since November 26, 2015.
Thread on person of the year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35056098
Thread on Twitter saga: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35055839
One test for this would be: is the discussion substantially different in that thread? The answer is clearly no.
> It has everything to do with the current rage drama, as everyone knows.
no, I didn't know that until there was a comment about it and another post on Hacker News. The discussion I saw seemed within reason.
Apparently a large subset of the community felt those posts should be removed from the front page, but didn’t feel obliged to explain why. It’s like Elon is becoming a radioactive element for this community’s health too.
Edit: This submission also briefly showed as flagged sometime in the last 20m
I get why people are exhausted, but the desensitization is dangerous on its own - when there are no consequences, people escalate their behavior... and Musk already has intervened to make Starlink less usable for Ukraine. I don't want that to continue.
and here you are perpetuating the fake shit about Elon that gets everyone engaged. Elon doesn't want Starlink to be directly used on weapons to kill people. Would you also fault the World Nuclear Association for being willing to provide uranium to power Ukraine, but refusing to provide the same material for nuclear bombs? He has a right to determine whether he wants his technology to be used directly for offensive war efforts. He is still providing Starlink for general military operations and communications. He just doesn't want it directly enabling weapons.
You're raising an argument for why it is in your view justifiable for Elon to do this, but that doesn't make the basic elements of what the commenter above said false.
Nuclear weapons are far more destructive, and indiscriminately destructive, than the use of satcomms with conventional weapons, so I think that choice of comparison is hyperbolic and unreasonable. This seems more like Garmin sending GPS units to Ukraine but refusing them to be issued to tanks, and as much as Elon has the right to determine the use of the technology his firm is donating to Ukraine, people have the right to criticize his choice to do that. Ukrainians will die because of this decision, and it is fair for people to criticize the choices that lead to that result.
Edit: I can't reply any further so I will just reiterate in reply here. Ukraine is using starlink for war, so making starlink unusable for weapons is making it less usable for Ukraine's use case, defending their country from invasion. How you choose to morally equivocate the invaders to the defenders is your decision, but it doesn't make what the commenter above said "fake" and it doesn't insulate Elon from criticism over his own decision.
> Ukrainians will die because of this decision
And Russians would die if he made the other decision. Even if Russia is on the wrong side here, killing a bunch of 20 year old soldiers while they sit around in mud doesn't help much. They're still humans and I also wouldn't want any part in killing humans.
Ah, I can reply now. You added this to your reply after I made my edit to my own comment responding to your earlier remarks, so I'll make my additional reply directly here.
This view of war reads like naivete to me - the naivete that can develop if you've only learned about war on TV and on Wikipedia, from far away where everything is abstract. I would invite you to talk to some veterans of war, victims of invasion, refugees from combat zones, and consider revising your perspective.
My in-laws who fled century-old farms in face of an invading army would strongly disagree with your view on what would or would not help end this war. Abstract moral relativism over individual soldiers hasn't saved any children from being kidnapped to Russia.
Assuming you enjoy a comfortable existence in a first world country, you unfortunately play an indirect part in killing humans every day. Our first world system drives less fortunate humans towards death every day to operate, and the people who really, deeply do not want any part in that are spending their lives working for the less fortunate in places outside the first world. But by advocating against the measures Ukraine could use to defend itself, you are playing your own part in allowing Russia to continue mounting a bloodthirsty war of conquest.
No, because Ukraine needs to kill russians and destroy their war machine. Musk's actions prevents this.
>And Russians would die if he made the other decision.
Great!
Perhaps this is laudable if true, however I havent seen this actually used in any justification for not allowing the use of starlink (by people involved, not internet commentators). Its also a bit of a stretch to call anything the Ukrainians do here as "offensive war efforts" when they're defending themselves from annihilation. Who-invaded-who is kind of an important part of this story.
The starlink "star shield" program with the US DoD says otherwise. Every satellite company wants a piece of the DOD's many billions a year spent on geostationary and other services, launches.
Internationally he might be most known for this, but in Iceland he is known for far more. I have no doubt people will laugh with him in the next end of year comedy show about this incident, and then continue supporting him in his disability activism.
I suspect many mistakes have been made. This isn't even anywhere near the Top Ten.
[UPDATED]
> But as I told HR (I'm assuming that's the confidential health information you are sharing) I can't work as a hands on designer for the reasons outlined above.
> Or even small companies, like Twitter today.
That's gonna leave a mark.
I suspect lawyers are salivating over the possibilities. Target-rich (very rich) environment...
[UPDATE] and there's this: https://twitter.com/williamlegate/status/1633176820072816640
There will definitely be lawyers in the mix...
I saw that site and my first thought was "wow I suck at web design". My second thought was “wow this guy's work is inspiring”.
I'm generally unaware of the drama between he and Elon, and frankly I don't really care. I'm glad our world has them both.
And honestly, if you do want to jump into this, there's nothing better than just to start. Use something like codepen and start playing with CSS & CSS animations. Try replicating some of the text animations (there'll be lots of examples on the internet) and go from there. After CSS animations (which will get you 80% of the way), would be helpful to explore composition & color theory (from a design perspective, studying and replicating examples is good to pick up skill and find your "design voice"). From there, the sky's the limit.
I also highly recommend the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards.
Unfortunately there’s no hacks to learn draining overnight. Deliberate practice is the only way. Doodling in the margins of your notes during boring meetings is a great way to get reps in.
The thing I don't get is "why"?
Did he really have to try and fight the guy over twitter? Why couldn't he say, "thanks for letting me know, I'll look into it", and let that be the end of it?
He was being cruel and childish so his fans would think he's funny.
Can't help but notice what kind of political bend we see in the things that get flagged here.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
You seem very upset about this issue, so maybe you should read Elon's apology.[0]
>"I would like to apologise to Halli for my misunderstanding of his situation. It was based on things I was told that were untrue or, in some cases, true, but not meaningful."
You worked yourself up "compelled to correct" the people with criticisms you felt "have no basis in reality", and then space man himself admitted he was in the wrong.
I'm not trying to be rude or to attack you to say, I think you need to recalibrate your sense of what has a basis in reality. Because your behavior in this thread, as explained here, is a strong indicator you did not have an accurate view of whether the criticisms in this thread were based in reality.
Part of me thinks Elon's doing this just to be the most talked about person on twitter again, which is equally abhorrent
The 1950s-early 1970s were not exactly a golden era of non-addictive totally harmless painkillers and other psychoactive pharmaceuticals. And if you had essentially unlimited money to spend on private doctors who would do whatever you wanted...
All of that, combined with whatever underlying bipolar or other psychological conditions he might have had, and Howard's predilection towards self-medicating himself, did not turn out to be a good combination.
He seems to have less self-control due to stress and power, it's like some people become aggressive after drinking alcohol.
But for the first time I’m using Twitter more than HN , which has jumped the shark.
Elon’s accomplishments? - helped start openai
- runs the biggest rocket company that makes a new raptor engine every day.
- runs one of the biggest car companies.
- just eliminated rare earth metals for new generation of motors.
- runs Twitter which is undeniably more active and popular than ever.
No matter what you think about the dude, doing all that stuff is going to make you a dick.
But then again, it’s the dicks that make the world we live in.
That would be Boeing Defense, Space & Security (50,000 employees and $23.3 billion in revenue vs 12,000 employees and $2 billion revenue)
runs one of the biggest car companies.
Tesla, with it's $81 billion in revenue, doesn't even crack the the top ten.
just eliminated rare earth metals for new generation of motor
Just announced it would eliminate rare earth metals. This will be a great thing if/when it happens, but it hasn't happened yet.
runs Twitter which is undeniably more active and popular than ever.
Annual users appears to be up, but down in the US [0]. But if we use annual users as a proxy for "active and popular" then I'll give this to you.
So, 1 for 4.
[0] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
Edit: taking chroma’s post at face value, you’re at 50%.
But employee count and revenue aren't the most accurate way to compare the two companies. The best metric is, "How much payload did you launch to orbit?" Last year SpaceX sent twice as much mass to orbit as the rest of the world combined. They have landed more rockets than ULA has launched. SpaceX also holds the record for most consecutive orbital launches without a partial or complete mission failure. This year they have averaged one orbital launch every 4.5 days. ULA has not launched a single time this year.
There are many good criticisms of Elon's companies, but it's silly to claim that SpaceX isn't the biggest rocket company.
As an example, Iceland’s 2022 person of the year also founded an agency that was hugely influential for tech messaging and branding over the last few years, and he has a reputation as being a really great guy.
The fact the he's screwing someone who instead of letting the fact they were dealt a bad hand stop them but instead pushed to be the top and what they could do (so like the highest idea of a man and what is impressive in a person) makes the contrast even sharper.
Will he? Musk is currently stiffing Twitter's contractors and vendors, as he has done in the past at Tesla.