Nowadays that guy is a joke in the same circles because it has become glowingly obvious just how much of his persona was a lie.
The one thing I can give him credit for is that he knew which companies to bet on... and apparently the damage he could do was limited by others there. Now that he is in full control his style of doing things is out there in the daylight.
And quite frankly: I don't even know why it is out in the daylight — Elon could have done the smart thing and let the company do it's thing and give them goals that they should find a route to in the next years. But Elon being Elon he just had to make it about himself and micromanage Twitter into chaos.
So if you have run out of mental energy to give the guy the benefit of the doubt, that is a bit late, but hey, better late then never.
Then Tesla and SpaceX happened and I was like, “hmm, maybe he was wrong” and then Twitter happened and I’m thinking, “no, I get it now”.
From that viewpoint, it makes sense as to how he could be successful in some venture and not so in others. The hypothesis would mean that he's very good at organizing, dealing with bureaucracy, doing PR etc. Not so much at actually building things, designing, engineering, or basically building consumer business.
Musk has no political sense whatsoever, he’s far too impulsive. But the impulsiveness does make headlines which people mistake as media savvy.
That’s how he got himself into this mess in the first place. Musk impulsively decided to offer to buy Twitter with no due diligence, then sensibly tried to back out when he came to his senses (helped a bit by the Fed), but was forced to purchase it anyway. Of course it’s a disaster. He bought it on a whim and has no idea how to run a social media company.
When Elon gets in trouble it’s for something that nobody supports (like calling that guy a pedo), and his supporters just sort of feel bad about.
Also he didn't design the SpaceX rocket. He had a hand in the first prototype, which crash and burned. Literally. That's his contribution in terms of engineering.
His overall contribution is PR and attracting capital. That's really it. I'd say sits closer to a politician.
Politicians have to answer to their constituents, engineers have to answer to the laws of physics, and entrepreneurs have to answer to the laws of economics.
Celebrities are beholden to nothing but marketing, and until recently, Musk (or someone on his team) has been doing a pretty good job of selling his image.
I'm also curious about his role in the success of Tesla and SpaceX. I personally find those to be two of the most interesting startups in a long while, and have been inclined to think that Musk being involved in both to be unlikely to be a coincidence.
So the two companies merged, and focused on just one brand: PayPal's. Reading between the lines, it wasn't an easy marriage.
>We had this merger with a company called X.com. It was a bit of a tough merger because the companies were really competitive — we were two large competitors in the same market. For a while, Peter took some time off. The guy who ran X.com [Musk] became the CEO, and I remained the CTO. He was really into Windows, and I was really into Unix. So there was this bad blood for a while between the engineering teams. He was convinced that Windows was where it's at and that we have to switch to Windows, but the platform that we used was, I thought, built really well and I wanted to keep it. I wanted to stay on Unix.
And eventually to stop Musk breaking the thing by rewriting it for windows at a time they were very busy fighting fraud on the network, Peter Thiel kicked him out as CEO.
>...I was like,"You gotta go,man."My whole argument to him was, "We can't switch to Windows now. This fraud thing is most important to the company. You can't allow any additional changes. It's one of these things where you want to change one big thing at a time, and the fraud is a pretty big thing. So introducing a new platform or doing anything major—you just don't want to do it right now." That was sort of the trigger for a fairly substantial conflict that resulted in him leaving and Peter coming back and me taking over fraud.
The issue lies with the users, as the overwhelming criticism of Elon tends to eclipse any reasonable discourse about the platform.
In my opinion, Twitter had reached a plateau and required some revitalization. As time goes on, we can expect further enhancements to emerge.
And similarly with Tesla. It's claimed he didn't start Tesla, which is technically true but misleading. He joined when it was 4 guys with some big ideas, but the "real" founders of the company would "leave" before Tesla's first product, The Roadster, hit production. Beyond that, electric cars were largely seen as a "radical" (as in dubious) idea at the time, with the status quo being hybrids which tended to look weird and be poor performing, more serving as a means of virtue signaling environmentalism than anything else.
Basically, it all gets back to Henry Ford. If you ask people what they want, they'd have said faster horses. When an innovator takes over a company, his ideas are going to look dumb to most people, which is why most people are not innovators.
All that said, censoring Substack looks dumb.
This is not the first or the last time a media company / social network is censoring links to its competitors. It’s not to the benefit of the users. It may look like it breaks with the spirit of twitter.
Ultimately and sadly, making a worse service when a competitor stands to benefit more from an organic cooperation via link sharing may be the strategic choice.
Blame silo strategies.
Given your username is “Freedom2”, I don’t understand how “longer tweets” makes it worth it. To me it’s all worthless if you can’t even post your words.
It's a net win over the previous government censorship and blue check system.
This is the last straw. I give up. You can find a link to my new Mastodon profile on my site.
Heh. Y'all are hilarious.
6 months in and countless predictions of imminent doom, site will collapse, everybody will leave for Mastodon, its all going to shit..
Meanwhile dude changes the logo to Doge and the building sign to Titter. I think you're taking a silly website way too seriously.
The amount of angst and bile and vitriol and hystrionics directed at Musk all while accusing him of losing his mind is just remarkable.
Edit: Elon silencing substack bad. Shut up HopenHeyHi!
Take a look in the mirror guys.
Note that I am not commenting on his behavior or defending him, I am commenting on yours.
If they don't immediately abandon the platform (because they want to stay connected to that community) that's presented as evidence their views are shrill whinging, that they actually consent to their mistreatment, and can again be dismissed and derided.
This is just a rhetorical device to deflect criticism.
I mean this change is something I personally oppose, but the people whinging about it would generally be cheering it on rapturously had it been done under 'Old Twitter' leadership. In other words, the criticisms are not being made in good faith.
From where I'm standing, this seems like just another empty rhetorical device to dismiss people you'd rather not engage with, to paint them with a broad brush and then hold them accountable for hypothetical scenarios you invented. (Not wanting to engage with people is fine, framing that as being about their being hysterical rather than you being disinterested isn't.)
If the previous post was the moral equivalent of telling someone to stop hitting themselves, claiming they'd have supported this policy without Musk without any evidence (which I find extremely hard to believe, people get very upset when platforms do anything like this) is the equivalent of getting upset with your spouse because you had a dream they were unfaithful.
I don't know when or why adults acting emotionally fragile and wearing it like some sort of badge of honor has become fashionable.
For the record I actually think blocking substack (if that is even what is actually happening) is lame.
> This is the moral equivalent..
Girl, bye.
What may be a silly website to you is a major revenue channel, community lifeline, platform for change, or a free and safe space for others.
Twitter is many different things to many different people. It clearly has its flaws, and always has, but dismissing it as a "silly website" does disservice to the impact and importance it has on people's lives.
Twitter isn't really the software, or the business that owns it. It's the people who use it, the community. Sadly that's been forgotten under its current ownership.
Web software that's built well is robust and survives even when things fail. Twitter's engineers clearly built a solid foundation, and we know this because it's still running without them. The only people who said Twitter would collapse were people who had no faith in Twitter's engineers. Musk himself must have believed it'd survive without them because he trusted the business wouldn't collapse when he fired 75% for the staff.
What people who understand tech said was that Twitter will find it hard to build new things with those people. Recent changes have been updating the logo and blocking retweets if the tweet has a specific domain in it. If you want evidence that Musk is crippling Twitter, it's right there. Twitter is not moving forwards.
I personally grow tired of watching the same crowd saying “go build your own Twitter” throw the world’s largest and loudest hissy fit when Twitter got bought and ran in a different direction.
And where has all this outrage been posted to? Twitter.