Twitter is now blocking Matt Taibbi from search results
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Between the API changes, the Blue-to-appear-in-For-You, and this Matt Taibbi stuff, I don't see how people will be able to excuse his blunders much longer.
One point of view is that he's just a con-artist, a marketer of his own genius, and other people do the actual work.
Another view is that he is really a genius, who has built a number of successful companies and is one of the wealthiest people in the world.
I feel that it's likely that both are partially true - he did play some important role in building up these companies, but greatly over-estimates his own abilities and understanding.
Without a mind-reader, however, we might never truly know.
First time was during the "March to 2500", where we were going from proto production on the model 3, to full ramp up on the first line.
We worked 12 hour days, but we missed that target, for a number of reasons. Mainly the GA line was this complex layer of conveyor belts with mezzanines and lifts. We couldn't get all the parts to a compact GA 3 line like envisioned.
Elon came in guns blazing. He told everyone to rip out the conveyors, lifts and equipment and build a new, completely manual GA line 'GA 3.5' in the back lot in a tent and we have two weeks to do it.
IT WAS ALL HANDS ON DECK. Senior level, to interns. I was working a saw to cut through conveyors and drag them outside next to the VP of Engineering, solar. Elon was patrolling around, helping where ever needed.... for a month. He slept on a little cot in a the 'mars' room.
Everything seemed crazy at first, and incredibly destructive... Although alot of Tesla employees are bonafide Elon fan boys, but I though the whole thing was absolutely bonkers.
When Elon was walking around and saw a group standing around, he asked why they weren't cutting. They reply'd that they didn't have the torque tools to remove the motor and were waiting on someone to bring them. Elon proceeded to gather everyone around, put on glasses and cut directly through the $30k motor. He then gave alittle speech about how it is costing to company $4m a day to not be at run rate. The speed and efectiveness of our ability to build 3.5 was of the utmost importance. It fired everyone up and we worked our asses off to get foundation, sprung structure, and GA 3.5 up in the time period. We pushed all our suppliers very hard and we picked ones that could deliver on our timelines.
I've never had a conversation with Elon, but i have been in plenty of rooms where he has spoken to employees. I would say what makes him great is his technical prowess, his ability to focus on what matters, and inspire confidence in those who work for him.
I can't support his actions with twitter, but he's always been a loose cannon.
And how long did the company wait to replace that motor? How much did that cost?
Maybe that was, in fact, the right thing to do. But it's great to be the guy who doesn't have to answer to anybody if you do it wrong.
To my knowledge no one cut through another motor, but we went and robbed the proto line of every single tool to make sure that wasn't going to be a thing going forward...
Tesla - this is the one very good bit of timing. At about the time Tesla got going, it was about electric cars' time anyway, due to battery progress (notably, after decades of car manufacturers occasionally flirting with electric cars, with useless results, the Tesla Model S, first-gen Leaf, and Renault Z-E platform all landed within a few months of each other). If Tesla had started a decade earlier, it would have failed; a decade later and it would have been too late. The self-driving stuff is also an attempt at sci-fi actualisation, and is, er, less successful.
SpaceX - reusable rockets are of course straight from the pages in sci-fi (and, like electric cars, occasionally flirted with by rocket designers over the decades). Jury's really still out on whether this one is a success, I think.
Hyperloop - pure fantasy; even where vacuum trains appear in sci-fi, it is very often in the context of being broken.
Boring company - impractical.
Neuralink - common sci-fi concept. Doesn't appear to be going very well.
Twitter is of course a major departure.
A combination of greater exposure and success going to his head is making most people realize that his skills in other areas are limited and morally he's pretty gross.
Luck of who got what jobs, and how much authority they had plays a huuuuge role.
I think genius in one place is good enough to be considered exceptional and achieve exceptional things. I don’t see why he must also be a genius in everything else… why must it be more than the money?
Elon can go do Elon things as a minority shareholder (13% ownership remaining).
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
https://cnevpost.com/2023/04/07/tom-zhu-becomes-1-of-4-key-e...
https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf
He’s just way, way out of his wheelhouse with Twitter and doesn’t have the humility or trusted advisors required to see it.
None of this means he's a genius or a technical wizard, but he's good at selling himself as those as well and many folks bought it. It seems like the success has gone to his head to some degree and his exposure has shot up in recent years, which has not been doing his reputation any favors, to say the least.
You call out government being fascist censors, and you call out power-trip billionaires when they do it too.
It’s not like stupidly playing with leopards and having your face eaten. It’s more like being a journalist in a war zone, reporting war crimes from both sides, then being treated like a criminal by both.
Taibbi did a half-baked job at his reporting. He took one side of the story and regurgitated it, making him a useful idiot. People speculate that he did this for access. Of course, the other side (Twitter's new owners) did it because they're using him for their own narrative, and when they can't use him they screw him over just like they screwed everyone else before.
So, leopards ate his face.
"I didn't know leopards would eat my face, says woman who voted for the leopards eating people's faces party"
Yes? I mean, he has acted out of spite and whimsy on countless other issues since buying Twitter. Occam's Razor suggests that he keeps showing us who he is and we should understand that, not construct theories about some miraculously timed bug.
But I don’t think that’s what he’s trying to do right now.
Instead, he understands that the main asset of twitter is owning peoples network and relationships. If we had a simple way to migrate all our relationships elsewhere all at once, everyone would have jumped ship already.
So the biggest threat to him is other social platforms that try to replicate / copy the social graph of twitter.
That’s what substack is doing behind the scenes for years with their newsletter product, and now they announced a direct competitor to twitter.
This is an existential threat to twitter, so musk sets out to destroy them. Not because it’s best for its users, but because it will make sure they never get a good enough alternative to leave.
And in the end, people will stay on twitter because the core value isn’t the ux or who the CEO is. The value is that they invested years into relationships and network effects, and don’t want to lose them.
I don’t think musk is crazy, although he is brutal, sociopathic and ruthless. I think he’s simply making power moves to keep his advantage.
Similar to how Jobs set out to destroy Adobe by removing Flash from iPhones. How Apple set to hurt Facebook by removing ad tracking. Or how Amazon shamelessly copies successful marketplace sellers to get more profits.
Ruthless power moves, not ideal for users, but not craziness.
A lot of this can fit under existing anti-competitive laws.
> And in the end, people will stay on twitter because the core value isn’t the ux or who the CEO is. The value is that they invested years into relationships and network effects, and don’t want to lose them.
Absolutely true, which is why people are also stuck using Facebook and Instagram. Can't export those social graphs to other apps, as much as I and others would like to divest from Meta products completely.
Twitter is taking a page from their competitors, for worse.
This isn’t a correct take, and your facts are wrong. For one thing, Flash never existed on iPhones to begin with, so there was nothing to remove.
Adobe spent years talking about their plans to get Flash working on phones, but never succeeded, not on iOS or on Android. Come on — if Flash were really that great on mobile devices, why isn’t everyone still using it on Android? Answer — sucked.
Performance and stability sucked, security sucked. Apple said for years that their most commonly-reported crashes were caused by Flash. Flash was great for creators, one of the best such tools ever made, but after acquiring it from Macromedia, Adobe never improved the fundamentals.
Even more important, the interaction model didn’t work. Many Flash sites/apps depended on hover/mouseover which didn’t translate to touch screens. Neither Adobe nor anyone else has demonstrated how to make this work.
And as for destroying Adobe, well, they seem to be doing just fine, even though Flash has been gone for years. Apple never wanted Adobe to die, nor intended to. Steve Jobs made clear why Apple wasn’t supporting Flash on iOS, and his reasons still hold — https://newslang.ch/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Thoughts-on-F...
I think you’re right though, I don’t know for a fact that that’s true. Nobody can really know the deeper reasons behind this move.
But my point is that people should stop looking at Elon musk as a “fun and weird guy doing crazy things” and more as a ruthless shark who will take whatever is required to win. Which is typical of Silicon Valley CEOs
The twitter blocking substack thing spread like wildfire, but was later proven to be false.
You can easily verify this yourself.
https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Amtaibbi&src=typed_query
https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Acnn&src=typed_query
Edit: Additionally, the Substack thing was at least partially true - I saw it myself on a few links. Some worked, some didn't, so perhaps it was only on tweets after a certain date.
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