"@LindaYacc will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology."
Looks like he found somebody to have the CEO title, while he keeps deciding the product strategy. So still runs Twitter while saying he kept the promise from his Twitter poll...
And to add to your comment:
> Mr. Musk, who has been CEO since buying the company in October, said his role will shift to executive chairman and chief technology officer. But Mr. Musk also made clear he wasn’t about to yield control over the platform, saying he would maintain responsibility for product, software and system operations.
From my POV, it's gotten objectively better at a rapid clip over the past 6 months and I've been seeing less off-topic stuff in my feed (which is basically anything not programming-related) or a few other accounts I follow.
Upcoming possibilities: video conferencing, micropayments á la WeChat.
I think the acquisition has opened up a lot of interesting possibilities and potential for a service that had become stale.
I didn’t say he’s very effective so far at whatever he’s doing. He caves to pressure and material realities like anyone and covers ass
Generally for me I mostly ignore the media as I find its largely distortions and half-truths. Not to mention Twitter is increasingly their competitor so unlikely to be objective anyway.
I just go on what I see with my own eyes and it seems pretty clean to me.
Can you name an actual nazi he is courting?
But his antics drove away a significant chunk of the user base I care about.
However, it's crucial to know if an account claiming to be a big company, government agency, journalist, politician, etc. is legitimate. Opening verification to subscribers is absolutely scammy, just a way to make a couple of bucks off the victims of culture war brainwashing.
EDIT: what I do think was a tremendous success is the publicity stunt. I've never seen any platform where people felt they should pay to let people know they were who they claimed to be. Kudos to the people doing the whole "twitter is filled with bots" psyop, it worked.
On HN, I'm not bothered at all. If I see the username "dang" for example, I know it's YC moderator dang also same with "patio11". I see HN as more of a private group discourse vs Twitter where it's public and where blue makes more sense. Akin to a forum, where I frequent like home-barista, the community is smaller and more focused so I don't see why having blue makes sense.
Twitter verified literally every public figure it could - regardless of politics - even those who didn't seem to need verification. However, being a niche contrarian blogger does not make you a public figure, and that's where I feel the resentment is located.
>I supported censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story because it helped Biden
>I’ve said on several occasions that I think Donald Trump is a worse person than Osama bin Laden
>Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared. There’s nothing, it’s Hunter Biden, it’s not Joe Biden. Whatever the scope of Joe Biden’s corruption is…it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in. It’s like a firefly to the sun.
That's sounds like a radical leftist to me with a severe case of TDS.
I spend less and less time on Twitter, and it's less and less enjoyable. Unless it changes drastically I won't still be there very long.
At best the quality of their recommendation system has dramatically declined. At worst they're intentionally favouring different stuff. In between there are slightly more palatable (than the worst case) options, such as that they're favouring overall popularity of content more over your individual preferences, but in any case all I know is that it's turned from a relatively pleasant experience to pushing content in my face that disgusts me.
I've also written recommendation systems. In fact, I've written one I used to run on top of Twitters API. And so I know from first-hand experience that it's trivial to get better quality recommendations more aligned with what I click on than what I'm currently getting. Something is seriously wrong, whether accidentally or intentionally.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/cat-dog-torture-video...
I also now get pushed a lot of fight and public freak out videos specifically of black people with pages of replies talking about eugenics
The app pushes me back to “for you” repeatedly where this stuff mostly is, or I get a push notification, or it shows up in following feed sometimes for people I don’t follow
Ill never forget my interview at twitter in ~2007
>"What do you think that twitter is?"
>>"Well, most people think of twitter as a social media platform, but I think its a global sentiment engine and litmus"
Yes that was my actual answer.
“Twitter is my drunk aunt and uncle who absolutely hate each other at this point at a family gathering.”
Sums up the political discourse pretty well though.
Meanwhile hell drive the company and she can be the face
You, and others like you want to paint Twitter as some huge failure because you dislike Musk, and that's fine, but in reality the biggest advertisers have come back and with her at the helm even more will.
First of all, if you want to see some real crazy racist stuff go on LinkedIn or Facebook. People there are even worse than Twitter.
All advertising companies took a hit, and Twitter is actually almost profitable at this point, so if she improves things it WILL be profitable. As soon as he can start paying down that 12 billion loan things will get even better.
References?
This is the closest thing I could find and it doesn't really back up your assertion: https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitters-advertising-busi...
How is your gut feel more relevant than the technical analysis quoted by reuters?
You literally said:
> Twitter is actually almost profitable at this point
Should that be taken at face value? The man has repeatedly lied through his teeth, exaggerated, and misled the public for reason ranging from making money selling stock, inflating a meme coin's valuation because the mascot is the same breed of dog that he owns, hyping tech fantasies, up to petty rivalry.
I know that every business leader lies and or stretches truth, but his reputation for outright deception on all levels, especially when it comes to his businesses, is fairly established.
About as much as the word of any billionaire. The issue is we’ll only ever have his word, since Twitter is private, and being honest about financials when poor is bad for business.
I’m willing to believe it’s closer to the truth than not, though. For one cutting out ~5,700 employees, or around ~75% of your work force, is a massive cost reduction. According to Payscale[0] the average salary at Twitter was ~$117,000/yr. A quick calculation shows that annually he shaves off $666.9M (which is hilarious). Alongside decommissioning unneeded offices and removing all the completely unnecessary and expensive time-wasters I can imagine he’s at least saved $1B or more annually.
[0] - https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=Twitter/Salary
Problem is he’s also loaded Twitter with significant debt to take it private. Estimated interest payments alone total to over $1.2b annually - so… we are actually losing an additional $200m annually even after firing 75% of the staff.
So 2.5 billion in expenses. In 2021 Twitter had Revenue of 5 Billion. So obviously they have lost a lot of revenue, as Elon himself has admitted. But between the cuts they are close to breakeven.
Now with a new CEO who is much more advertiser friendly they are going to get a lot more advertisers back. She will be the new face of the company. Then, likely they will start paying down that debt. Each time they do their burden will be less.
Tesla is the most profitable car company per car. Musk isn't going to have a problem making Twitter profitable, though he put himself behind the 8 ball.
As they say, at least it’s not rocket science. Except in this case apparently running a social media site is actually more difficult than rocket science.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-03/twitter-s...
Even if I take as granted the advertiser problem is solved, it seems like Twitter has still been hurt by much more than having a controversial CEO:
1. Musk took on significant debt in order to buy a company already slightly losing money. Because of this, it's not good enough for advertisers to just "come back", they need to greatly increase their ad spend on twitter.
2. Twitter's attempt to find an alternative revenue source (the significant changes to Twitter Blue) seem to have largely failed.
3. The disaster with verification is driving away some of Twitter's most important posters that generated content on the website for free.
4. Twitter's reputation as an employer has plummetted and they are presumably not attracting anywhere near the amount of talent they previously did.
2.First of all you don't really know the numbers, it's a guess at best.
3. They are getting bohemoth players who are going to be running shows on Twitter now. This is a huge deal and wasn't even possible on old Twitter.
4. People are desperate for jobs in tech right now. Besides they haven't been struggling to hire, they've been mostly laying off people.
As they run a profit they will pay that debt down (or refinance if rates go lower).
They are launching a lot of new stuff and the future looks way brighter
Who are these posters you are referring to?
I would bet advertisers like Apple got a huge sweetheart deal. The majority of advertising I see is (by volume), crappy "As Seen On TV" type products fronted by MANY different accounts (I can't block them fast enough), accounts promoting whatever thought leader angle they are working (also insta-blocked), and finally large brands that Twitter probably would like a lot more of.
This is a great listen to see both the intellectual might and capricious irrationality of Musk's leadership:
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/797/what-i-was-thinking-as-...
The ‘new features’ are basically irrelevant and much of it has been chaos or failure. The fact is there’s not much in terms of basic feature churn that’s going to make Twitter much better.
Brand Trust is incredibly hard to build easy to lose and incredibly hard to rebuild.
Musk is a stain on Twitter there is no avoiding it. He could have accomplished faster feature dev without losing half of revenue and also could have done a better job rolling out verified and blue. In fact most CEOs probably could have done that.
It’s a pretty big fail he needs to replace himself and go do something else.
Then I saw what he did to twitter, the way he stirred everybody up creating chaos for reasons that were quite explicitly personal motivations.
I used to follow a few people and topics I care about. I now get a lot of unrelated stuff I don't care about. The system is tuned so I have to see the outrage even if I don't care about it.
This is either intentional or non intentional (a bug). In either case it's a mistake that Mr. Musk bears direct responsibility for.
Why? What happened? Was it COVID that drove him mad? That he had to close the factories and offices and whatnot? Was he already like that but I wasn't aware because I don't care about celebrities unless they literally appear in my timeline even if I unsubscribe and mute them?
Because of this, Twitter is ridiculously partisan on my feed. I’ve limited my consumption of it to very small subject matters and will likely jump ship totally to BlueSky with some Mastodon thrown in. I know a lot of people in science who have completely abandoned Twitter.
The way to seek even ground is for corporations to stop responding to media pressure, and for the press to abandon that role once society rejects it for them. Until then, the pendulum is going to swing too heavily in both directions.
Elon is still working on moonshots like Starship, but it let the core F9 product run operationally smoothly and rake in cash.
Last estimates I saw suggested they are still bleeding a lot of money every month.
So ummm who's gonna pay all of those people to make sure the robots and people make the widgets every day?
And you provided no source and narrowly scoped profitability to singular projects. This is so myopic when it comes to how a business is run.
SpaceX has the vast majority of the worldwide private launch market. It's the only company with a reusable first-stage booster. The cost-per-KG is 10-20% of the competition.
This isn't me speculating wildly, everyone with even passing familiarity with the industry knows this.
I never questioned their market dominance, I questioned their overall company profitability. The cost of building a rocket can be easily fudged to create whatever financial picture you want. Not to mention Elon Musk is notorious for doing this. Unless you have access to their financial statements, all of this conjecture.
> The cost-per-KG is 10-20% of the competition.
Uhh might wanna check your source, from Wikipedia: "These varying cost and requirements makes market analysis imprecise."...
probably some contract that will give them stability will appear from somewhere, at least until the ISS is decommissioned.
I do not believe Twitter is doing a great job or that they're somehow more profitable now.
They are different skill sets.
It’s worked remarkably well to have Gwynne Shotwell run things at SpaceX (she’s an awesome COO and also an aerospace engineer). I have wished for years that he do that at Tesla.
Having an ad exec run Twitter will take care of all the “how do we pay the bills” part of running the business while he does the “fun” stuff of focusing on product.
Update: Updated Gwynne Shotwell's title to COO, not CEO (and fixed spelling of her name).
And apparently, Twitter has millions of dollars in bills that it hasn't been paying. See this other interesting article, posted today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35918253
The reason it's such bullshit is that it's essentially hostage taking: "Why yes, I know we owe you $10 million and that's what we agreed to, but we're just not going to pay. You can sue us, but we have top notch lawyers that can drag it out for a long time, or else you can settle with us for $7 million right now."
I think there should be an equivalent of "small claims court" for cases like these where flat out missed payments are handled quickly and without the need for expensive lawyers, e.g. "Here's our contract, there is no disagreement that we delivered, so freeze their bank accounts if they don't pay us immediately."
Point being, I don't think a top notch lawyer will win, but given the cost of litigation (plus the time value of money), expensive corporate lawyers can force small vendors to settle with a sizable discount.
And wouldn't have the loosing party pay everything in such a case, making it a very expensive case for them?
For a multibillion dollar company, especially one trying to STOP using things it’s currently obligated to use, the math works out different.
After all, being evicted actually helps them, as it breaks the lease and they don’t need to keep paying.
Especially when there is a huge commercial real estate crunch looming in many of these markets.
Plenty of delay and hassle tackles can be used to get some leverage when the letter of the contract/law isn’t in your favor.
Scummy, but often effective.
Musk, CEO and “Chief Engineer”, mainly just fucks things up like causing DOD investigations into his pot use (a disagreeable government contracting clause due to the War of Drugs), and now most famously overruling the real engineers and thus overseeing the destruction of the Starship launch pad, and promoting an FAA and environmental investigation.
See also: Overruling Tesla engineers and ordering the removal of radars, directly leading to multiple preventable accidents.
He’s fuck up. Rich. But still a fuck up.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1313952039869788173?s=20
https://www.drive.com.au/news/elon-musk-overruled-tesla-engi...
> And she runs the show at SpaceX.
No she doesn't, and she wouldn't agree that this is the case. Only anti-Musk haters claim this.
> mainly just fucks things up
Funny thing to say about the most successful space company in history. Shotwell wasn't even COO for the initial success of the company.
> causing DOD investigations into his pot use
A literally 100% inconsequential thing that changed absolutely nothing and had no effect what so ever.You are really grasping at straws with this one.
> most famously overruling the real epromoting an FAA and environmental investigationngineers and thus overseeing the destruction of the Starship launch pad
He has the finial decision on all things at SpaceX and had them since Falcon 1 days. He didn't 'overrule' his engineers, at SpaceX decisions are usually made in big meeting with input from everybody and Musk makes the final call. Doing the launchpad upgrades before the first launch would have meant further delay of first launch, thus delaying getting flight data. Now they can evaluate the flight and fix the pad at the same time. Also the launch pad isn't destroyed, its slightly damaged. It was the wrong decision in hindsight but it isn't that relevant going forward.
He takes responsibility for things he gets wrong. He also decided not to have slosh baffles on Falcon 1. That led to its failure. He made other mistakes, if you want you can go threw the history of SpaceX and point all of them out. He also insisted on Deep Cryo fuel that lead to Amos-6 but it also helped SpaceX in the long run. And he takes ownership for these mistakes. When you make a lot of important technical choices, you get some of them wrong.
But its downright sad of you do cherry pick a few things SpaceX got wrong when SpaceX threw-out its history, with Musk as the final decision maker has clearly gotten things right far more often then they have gotten things wrong. Again, SpaceX is literally the most successful space company ever and it isn't really close. Musk has also been the longest serving CEO of pretty much any space company in the industry.
> promoting an FAA and environmental investigation
The amount of times the Musk haters people have claimed that some federal agency will destroy SpaceX because of 'evil Elon' is ridiculous. They knew the risk and some non toxic concrete wont change anything.
If we actually go by factual evidence, companies that Musk was in charge off. How successful are these companies. The result is clearly, Musk is one of the most successful business people ever.
You can personally dislike him and dislike him for choices he made, but saying he is not responsible for SpaceX and Tesla success is ridiculous.
My position is that the companies would be MORE successful if they fired his ass. SpaceX is the most successful venture, because he’s actually the least involved.
But yes, every major decision can be traced back to him, and it’s an epic fail. Hell, I even forgot about him insisting that robots could do finally assembly, even though every company that tried it failed — repeatedly.
Face it. Sempai is a screwup, and he wont let you on the B-Ark either.
So being the single most successful companies in their industry is not enough. You certainty have incredibly high opinion all the leadership behind these companies. And how do you come to this conclusion?
Shotwell is the only one being very public. She had a good career before, but not one that would suggest she could have lead an even more successful company. Most of the rest of SpaceX leaders after the initial set were promoted internally.
Nobody in the leadership of Tesla had such an amazing CV to believe the could do even better.
It seems pretty simple, you don't like him, therefore you just choice to believe that everything would be better without him even if there is no evidence that this is true.
> But yes, every major decision can be traced back to him, and it’s an epic fail.
So every major decision is a fail yet the company is hugely successful both in technology and business. You are so fucking deluded on this issue, it hurts my head to even try to understand your logic.
> Hell, I even forgot about him insisting that robots could do finally assembly, even though every company that tried it failed — repeatedly.
And yet now Tesla has some of the best manufacturing in the world. Their initial approach was flawed in execution but the direction was correct, they corrected and improved, within a year of this issue Tesla had solved the issue and had a highly profitable mass produced EV that changed the industry.
Now lots of companies are copying their processes that came out of that experience. The CEO of VW admitted the the threw-put of Tesla factories was far superior to their own.
You just repeating the same pattern over and over, blame Musk for all bad, don't give credit for good.
Your line of argument is just embracing and you would laugh at anybody making such arguments if it wasn't about Musk. This is just a simple case of you having some sort of personal hangup about Musk therefore you need to somehow justify your position.
> Sempai is a screwup
Man, I wish I had screwed up so much as to be one of the richest people in the world. What a fucking loser.
It can work - most famously, this was the structure that Google had in its golden years (2001-2011) with Eric as CEO and Larry & Sergey as presidents of Product & Technology, respectively. It also was sort of the structure of Apple with Steve Wozniak as an IC & founder. But it puts the CEO in a very awkward spot where they're in charge of the organization but not really in charge of the organization, which in turn requires leadership with great humility. That's not really what Elon is known for.
The structure of SpaceX or Facebook or Apple 1998+, where you have a visionary CEO and then strong COO under them that makes the trains run on time, is much more common and less fraught with conflicting reporting lines.
In this structure, Elon is embedded in the decision making loop directly. The CEO normally is responsible for the company, but instead, Elon has decided that the CEO will deal with making money while he makes all of the decisions as to how the product works. Which essentially cuts the CEO of of any decision making aside from business partnerships, making her more of a VP of Sales than CEO.
If the issue is the advertisers need someone to escalate too (and someone who Elon would listen to when he needs talking out of some half baked idea), then it is a good fit.
If the idea is to have Twitter actually functional as a product driven engineering company, then yeah that won’t work. But baby steps.
They all want to be CROs (Chief Revenue Officer) now.
That means that he's visible in the office (because bye-bye remote work), and when there are product/technical questions, it's unclear to employees whether Elon or Linda is the ultimate decider. It's normally not a problem that the board can fire the CEO, because employees never interact with the board and often don't know who they are. But when the chairman of the board is also an ordinary employee, some fraction of employees will follow the official reporting structure and do what the CEO wants, while some other fraction of employees will follow the "power behind the throne" and do what Elon wants. The result will be a company that can't agree what it's doing, with multiple competing groups working at cross purposes.
This was a huge problem at Google, both in the early days and today. Larry and Sergey would go directly to engineers with ideas, and then those engineers (hoping to get a coveted Founder's Award, and out of respect for the founders) would drop what they were doing and work on Larry's ideas. It worked in the 2000s, because Larry & Sergey's product judgment actually was really good - that's how we got GMail, and Chrome, and YouTube, and Android. But it's also the root cause of much of the organizational dysfunction that affects Google today. Google culture follows competence, not reporting lines, which means that one giant company is actually 1000+ small groups of unrelated projects, most of which duplicate each other, that never integrate quite right, which will often be technically brilliant but then blocked or unlaunched as soon as they cross some competing executive's path.
Linda, because she is the one who is there every day. If Linda thinks Elon has made the wrong call, she just has to work out how to talk him out of it while soothing his ego, and in the meantime get her team to focus on how to implement the right one. She probably already has that skill, but if she needs mentoring, Gwynne Shotwell can help her out
That sounds exactly like the Twitter I've known for nearly twenty years.
It is actually extremely common for corporations which aren’t regular business as such - for example, trustees of family trusts are commonly corporations with a single director who is the person who ultimately controls the trust. Also a common structure for sole proprietorship businesses that want some protection from legal liability.
I own a company which never has done anything (I was daydreaming). Its board of directors has one member-me. Legally, I am required to hold annual board meetings with myself, although I believe the legal obligation is met if I hold them in my head. “This year’s financial results: zero revenue, zero expenses, zero assets, zero liabilities, zero employees-another great year at does-nothing-corp!”
Otherwise, it’s easier to pierce the veil.
I once worked for a small Corp that the office manager was the board secretary and literally had a meeting with just herself for such a purpose.
I'm guessing what you actually mean is "Also a common structure for one person who does business on their own, who has incorporated, and who is their own sole board member." Is my inference correct?
[https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...]
Interestingly, they're overdue on their bill with Companies House it looks like. Oops.
Lots of entities in Delaware named Twitter Inc. (3) plus what might be a holding company or two. Hard to tell without more digging.
[https://icis.corp.delaware.gov/eCorp/EntitySearch/NameSearch...]
Small firms it is common to have a single person board of directors, where that single person is the 100% owner.
When private equity takes a large firm private, they’ll often appoint a board full of their own partners and consultants/advisers-if you own 20 different firms, you don’t want to deal with all their CEOs, you want a layer between the CEO and you-which is where the board helps.
100% subsidiaries (such as a large multinational firm’s local subsidiary in each country) commonly have multi-person boards of directors, with a handful of local senior staff on it (e.g. country director, head of local finance, HR and general counsel) - they usually all just rubber stamp whatever HQ wants, although occasionally they might refuse (e.g if local counsel insists HQ’s demands are illegal and complying with them would make the directors personally liable)
I should point out that in the traditional legal sense of the term, even US LLCs are corporations-it is just that people in the US have adopted some weird redefinition of “corporation” which excludes them. Under Australian law, a US LLC is a corporation, albeit a foreign one. Worldwide, I think most countries legal systems would reach the same conclusion
The British monarchy is a corporation (a corporation sole) - actually, a whole bunch of distinct single member corporations (the monarch), one for each Commonwealth realm, and also one for each Australian state and Canadian province - each called “the Crown in right of X”. Maybe that’s an example of a corporation without any directors, although one might (rather meaninglessly) claim the monarch is the sole director
But you have a great point about CEO vs COO. As the technical CEO of a small company myself (who loves building things), I know you just have to deal with certain things directly and dedicate your name and time (not complaining, that's just the job) and that takes time away from the day to day building.
I interviewed there a decade ago. Response: someone told me I wasn't a culture fit.
But this wasn't the normal "culture fit" response, oh no. You could tell it was a "you aren't willing to drink the coolaid" type of response. I feel I dodged a bullet.
Your comment is a pretty good example of the kind of organizational dysfunction that results from unclear reporting and leadership vacuums. From the inside, lots of people are doing their job and doing their job well. From the outside, all this activity and all these highly-paid and highly-talented employees don't result in anything novel or useful. The company keeps chugging along, making boatloads of cash from its existing customers because old habits die hard, but gradually loses its capacity to adapt to market shifts. Then when a market shift happens, it goes out of business.
Twitter's problem is that a market shift is already underway, and their financials are precarious. Companies like Oracle or IBM can limp along for decades as long as their customers stay in business. Google is in the middle - their business is probably more precarious now than it's been in 20 years. Twitter is at imminent risk of death in the next 1-3 years if they don't turn the ship around.
Oracle has so many acquired products, many businesses are paying for one and people don’t even notice. For example, NetSuite for accounting. Cerner runs hospitals. Lots of industry-specific software in utilities, insurance, manufacturing, etc
Compared to (say) IBM, Oracle is much keener on killing legacy products
No idea about their web UI (although it can't possibly be as bad as the UIs of some of their legacy on-premise products) – but serious usage one tends to use the APIs much more than the web UI.
I heard about a few things on the grapevine, but in a 100,000 person company things are going to happen, you can’t really generalise from the occasional incident.
That's a good description and it is the de facto structure of a great many companies I've worked in/with. I would say it's relatively normal to be honest
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/13f45mw/com...
But actually following any of them? No thanks.
Language is important and I think lots of it, like "facebook friends" was not choosen well.
If there’s one thing that massive for profit corporations can’t stand it’s capitalism.
Not necessarily, it depends how things get implemented.
There isn't any reason Twitter couldn't build content classification tools that allowed advertisers to select which content to cluster and be targeted with and which content to exclude for perception reasons. The latter is easier than full moderation because it is much more tolerant of false positives.
Or it could focus on distinct product, like whatever their new video content platform thing is going to be.
Or maybe DM based ads.
Or opening up the third party ecosystem again and doing more on the channel side.
Or Musk has said a bunch of things about payment platforms that he wanted to do a paypal and wasn't able to implement but now has an opportunity to try. Similarly for things like identity/IAM products or other internet glue.
Or they could pivot into other advertising platforms and manage spend and and automation across different social media properties in addition to Twitter's own.
Lot's of different potential direction.
That is not to say that Musk's interference is "bad" from a company valuation standpoint as he clearly has a pretty good idea of what features he can effectively market to customers, it is just that those features are not markers of good engineering or actively detract from good engineering. For instance, selling FSD to the general public despite it not working is a criminal engineering decision, but it has done wonders for cash flow and their stock price.
Of course, this is all small potatoes compared to the immense amount of money Musk has raised for Tesla from consumers by falsely claiming they will have autonomous vehicles next year, every year, for 7+ years.
These raises are distinct from any government support they may have received, though his ability to structure the companys to receive government support and the cash flow generated from those activitys may have been helpful in supporting the companys and the narratives they built to achieve the valuations and funding levels they got. It really just all leads back to him being amazing at getting his hands on huge gobs of money.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/01/03/spacex-...
[2] https://payloadspace.com/predicting-spacexs-2023-revenue/
[3] https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/spac...
EV subsidies were made as a way for the government to encourage consumers to buy electric cars and encourage car producers to make electric cars. It’s not like they were made with the purpose of making Musk rich and literally any other car manufacturer or rich person wanting to make a car manufacture could have done the same. Should the US have never subsidized electric vehicles or should have all the car manufacturers have ignored the subsidies and continued to to completely ignore the EV market?
Complaining that someone filled a market niche that the government very intentionally created just seems so weird to me.
SpaceX has been spending billions on R&D, that's what the fund raising is for, that's why their spending is greater than revenue, the results of which are clearly visible in the weekly Starlink launches and rapid development of Starship and which have a strong business case.
This sort of bad faith analysis is exactly why companies in industries with significant "front heavy" investment have such a hard time.
Honestly, I would rather send my tax dollars to SpaceX, that over-delivered on it's promises than to other players, like ArianeEspace... [0]
[0] https://www.space.com/europe-no-reusable-rocket-until-2030s
In fact, credit hurt Tesla quite a bit because they burned threw them very early on when lithium batteries were super expensive and then later foreign competitors could undercut Tesla using mass market vehicles by using the credits.
And fuel credits are an enforcement mechanism that gives rewards and penalties to car companies based on how well they follow regulations, its not a government subsidy.
> government space contracts
If you want to see how well space companies do when they only do government work, look at ULA and Boeing.
SpaceX from the beginning attacked the commercial market with great success and the US went from 0% of the commercial market to like 60-70% in like 5 years.
Yes of course SpaceX gets government space contracts, its fucking space, governments are involved. But SpaceX was literally the least government oriented rocket company in history.
If you actually compare SpaceX to other space companies and Tesla to other car companies, the claim that these companies are uniquely depended on government totally collapse.
Just one example, Tesla got 400M$ loan to produce Model S (advanced vehicle manufacture), Tesla paid this loan back with profit for the tax payer before they had to and change the car industry, Ford and GM took multi-billion $ loans built a few compliance vehicle and have since delayed the return of those loans.
But yeah, Tesla is evil subsidy company, when they received less and did more.
And the claim about his companies raising huge amount of money is also false, compare Tesla and SpaceX with its peers, like Lucid, Rivian, Blue Origin, Relativity and that story falls competently apart.
If you have watched Everyday Astronaut's tours of Starbase with Elon[0], where he explains in significant detail pretty much everything that is going on with the various prototypes, you'll know what I mean.
He's not a guy with an MBA that has somehow lucked out by throwing gobs of cash at various Hard Engineering Problems (although there's that, too.) Of course the bulk of the work is done by "rank and file" engineers.
[0] e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7MQb9Y4FAE and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw
At a surface level. If you ever drill down on his shallow tech understanding, he sputters, kicks you out or flees.
Also, have a look at recent unedited videos of Tesla’s self driving. It’s not everything that was promised and it’s much later than promised, but it sure is impressive. However I agree it is being oversold and that’s extremely scummy.
To attempt to be civil, I will also state I find the hero worshiping of Elon to be similarly deranged.
https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
I'm not sure about Elon's proficiency with software, but based on his comments on twitter I'd lean on him being out of touch there. He does seem to be knowledgeable on the AI/DL side though, see Andrej Karpathy's comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. I don't care whether it's boo or yay, we just don't want shallow flamewars on this site.
Dan, this line of yours cracked me up! Big Time!
Gave me a good laugh. (which I don't get to do much these days)
There is ample proof that this is a patently false statement.
Link with sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
My favorite from John Carmack: John Carmack (Twitter, Wikipedia) is a programmer, video game developer and engineer. He's the founder of Armadillo Aerospace and current CTO of Oculus VR. "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."
There are tons of pictures of Elon in the early days of SpaceX literally using CAD software to design rockets: https://i.insider.com/63a0c11eb5600000185b5e8d?width=1300&fo...
https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-history-biggest-momen...
His title at the company is Founder and Chief Engineer, and there are tons of anecdotes from employees, as well as statements directly from Musk that major engineering decisions go directly through him.
Can't speak to what it takes to do CAD, but as a developer I know for a fact that being capable of writing code is a very low bar.
I do think the picture painted of him tracks with what I know life is like as a senior engineer.
Above L5 at Google, most engineers do not spend much time coding. Most time is spent approving CLs, mentoring, collaborating on design docs, and helping to make major engineering decisions.
Same with other faangs. This tracks with Carmack’s (and others’) description of Musk’s role.
In Paypal’s S-1 filing with the SEC in 2002 [1] to go public Elon Musk is listed as a director of the board and is reported as having graduated from UPenn in 1995. Elon Musk received his degrees in 1997 [2]. I do not know about you, but I do not know any college graduate who can not tell me the exact year of their graduation after a little thinking even if they graduated decades ago, but in this case he could not even accurately recall what occurred 5 years ago and he reported that in a SEC filing of a company where he was on the board (and formerly CEO?). Sometimes people forget the year they graduated, but not in SEC filings reviewed by lawyers, that is 100% deliberate.
Elon Musk viciously attacks his critics like when he viciously accused Vernon Unsworth, the cave diver, of being a pedophile, doubled down, and sent a investigator to harass him [3].
Elon Musk actively cultivates a cult of personality and directs them to attack his critics [4] causing them to be fired or quit due to the harassment.
He is also well known to impulsively fire employees that speak out against him. Also to harass employees who are being fired such as when he declared that the Iceland Person of the Year was faking his lifelong disability to get out of work [5].
Elon Musk does not get the benefit of the doubt when discussing his personal qualitys and when looking for 3rd party support since he makes significant effort to actively shape the narrative.
His personal statements are useless as support. Most of the people quoted were employees speaking on the record. You would be hard pressed in any company to find employees who would speak negatively on the record, let alone in a Elon company where he would fire, harass, and sue you if you did so. So, those are worthless. The rest of the people are then largely people who have not worked with Elon or are not experts in the field. And frankly, since Elon does not get the benefit of the doubt, the burden of proof is not on me to discredit their statements, but on the opposing perspective to provide proof that their statements are informed and credible.
As to the photos, the first one is obviously staged. The photo of him looking at wreckage unrelated to demonstrating engineering competence. It is also likely staged. No other images presented are relevant.
Labeling yourself as a Chief Engineer does not make you a engineer. In anything it lends support to the opposite because what actual engineer constantly broadcasts that at every possible opportunity so that everybody knows.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1103415/000091205702...
[2] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/musk-physics-degree/
[3] https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/08/elon-musk...
[4] https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/10/28/cars/tesla-ntsb-cummings/...
[5] https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/07/elon-musk...
People love to claim this but its just not true. Compare how much money Tesla raised to other EV companies. Tesla did far, far better with far less money.
The accusation that his companies are successful because he can just magically create money comes from tech people who have no idea how much it costs to grow capital intensive business.
Both SpaceX and Tesla have comparatively raised very little. Compare how much Lucid, Rivian, Blue Origin or Relativity Space raise and then compare the results after similar time-frames.
> All credit for engineering successes at those companies is entirely because of the leadership of those companies, like Gwynne Shotwell
Shotwell wasn't even the COO of SpaceX before Falcon 9 days. And magically Tesla doesn't even have a Shotwell figure and is still incredibly successful.
And even if Shotwell is great, Musk hired her, Musk promoted her, Musk empowered her. Putting the right engineers into the right places is maybe the most important skill in leading a tech team. Musk putting Mueller, Königsmann, Buzza, Shotwell in those positions and gave them all what the needed to succeed, while he coordinated and made the final decisions. That is what 'Chief Engineers' generally do.
> we have seen time and time again to be actively detrimental to engineering success
Except that far more often we have seen it to be extremely successful. I'm always astonished at how people who seem to dislike Musk can selectively read history. Anything bad at SpaceX, Musk is at fault. Anything good, Musk wasn't involved.
> but it has done wonders for cash flow and their stock price
It really hasn't, if you actually look at their cashflow. But maybe I'm not looking at the fantasy investor report you have in your head. I just looking at the one that is publicly disclosed by Tesla.
And in terms of stock price, if you actually look at all the major wall street analysts, the majority of them never had a huge amount of believe in FSD being a major driver of Tesla and only included it into their most optimistic long run bull cases.
Tesla stock really jumped when they showed profitable margin Model 3 mass production and spiked for a while when the market went crazy for all EV stocks. Not just those who claimed to have 'FSD'.
*Hyping things, pumping stock, raising $.
If you actually want to argue on HN, you need to actually provide some analysis.
Because factually speaking, if you actually compare Tesla and SpaceX with peer companies rather then by themselves they have not raised a lot of money relative to what you achieved.
Go and actually compared Tesla, Rivian, Lucid (not to mention other bullshit companies like Nikola, Faraday Future, Better Place) and so many others. You will see that Tesla for a such a capital intensive business didn't raise that much.
A few times they optimistically raised when the stock jumped, but that's just good business. And if you actually look at their cash balance, that money was never even spent. It permanently raised the balance. Tesla would have been totally fine without the last 2 cash raises.
And for SpaceX its far harder to do the pump and raise shit you are talking about. Its only large institutional investors who don't randomly just buy lots because of some 'pump'. The funds investing in SpaceX have a lot of their own technical knowlage and evaluate things deeply.
So in summation, your claims have zero bases in reality, its just away to justify your hate for a person.
Are they? The majority of his successes came from investment, not from building.
[edit] I think his superpower may be wealth, like iron man.
(To cut to the chase there, Elon seems to have gotten around $90k from his father, of which $28k was a loan. You can check out Errol Musk's Sun interview and the wikipedia article for more info)
> Elon Musk: "... In South Africa, my father had a private plane we’d fly in incredibly dangerous weather and barely make it back. This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia."
I was talking about how a lot of his success came from Tesla, where he wasn't a founder, but instead an early investor. He started calling himself a founder one day, and the actual founders sued him. They settled. [2]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140729222547/http://www.forbes...
[2] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/tesla-ceo-settles-for-...
There is nothing more complicated in his decision here. Elon is a visionary and a builder. That's all his ventures.
Another thing you may not know: Twitter will soon be competing with Youtube.
In the sense my walk through the park today "competed" with Kipchoge because we both propelled ourselves forward on legs, sure.
Twitter video is by far the least functional it's ever been, and this is a relatively recent (past ~month) development.
https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/4/18/23687125/elon-musk-...
It makes sense in terms of how I can imagine Elon's vision. It doesn't (to me) make sense as any kind of realistic proposition.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1657050349608501249
>Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app.
Musk is just steering it one particular way.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...
Be careful, you might be undermining a narrative.
I am not normally a fan of the term "virtue signaling" but I think her involvement with WEF might just fit.
It could be virtue signaling, but in theory following these people could be virtue signaling as well.
Well, "Hack jobs" with living, sentient beings is close enough for me:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/05/neuralink...
> Twitter has fully complied with more than 80% of government and courts’ requests to remove or alter content since Elon Musk bought the company, up from around 50% before he took over, according to a report from the technology publication Rest of World, reflecting a discordance with the billionaire’s promises to limit political censorship.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...
Well, come on, that was true under Dorsey too, he was just criticized for it by the half of the people who are now praising Elon for it.
An LBO. It’s become clear Musk’s employment cuts haven’t brought Armageddon. He’s now installing an advertising executive as CEO, which portends a return to the status quo business model. This is a classic cut-the-fat corporate raid.
Is it clear? I haven't really used Twitter since well before the acquisition, but I've heard nothing but complaints about bugs, ad revenue falling off a cliff and replies being nothing but right-wing reply guys.
> This is a classic cut-the-fat corporate raid.
If this were true, Elon would have cut the actual fat. Instead he (directly and indirectly) destroyed Twitter's relationship with advertisers, which was the only meat in the company. All that's left is fat.
They’re allegedly approaching cash-flow breakeven [1]. Musk is notoriously unreliable with timelines, but he tends to be conservative with purely financial ones. That, assuming this is actual cash flow and not an unlevered metric like Ebitda, signals stability.
I’m not calling it a success. But Twitter is operational. People complained but, largely, haven’t left. The new product initiatives were busts, but quickly withdrawn when the data showed they didn’t work. Stability is on the horizon; it’s not Armageddon.
> Elon would have cut the actual fat. Instead he (directly and indirectly) destroyed Twitter's relationship with advertisers
He did both. He’s now trying to reverse on the latter. Given the financial stability, Yaccarino has a solid foundation from which to do so.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-07/musk-says...
I think it's pretty clear that there was a lot of fat to cut. From a technical perspective Twitter hardly seems to be suffering at all.
The biz move (to pivot to a right-leaning social network) is what scared off users and advertisers, not the layoffs per se. In a counterfactual world where Elon slashed staff but left the existing policies and target demographics in place, Twitter would've been a lot healthier.
Posts and quotes fairly frequently don't load (though QRTs were never reliable) but more importantly they've stopped moderating everything, which is why searching for "cat" has returned animal abuse videos for the last week, and their solution was to turn off autocomplete of search terms.
(i should perhaps disclose that i have a very low opinion of Musk, but don't hate him)
At the moment it's hard to say whether the stream of small bugs (the one that annoys me is that the unread notifications indicator seems to be perenially out of sync) is just normal enshittification, or the foreshocks before The Big One.
This is what I meant. The vision is that of a classic LBO play. Cut the fat. Survive long enough to pay down the debt. Now you own a profitable company.
Now he'll move left again and cash in. Also of course there are considerations like Tesla subsidies and DoD contracts. But perhaps those institutions approved the above plan to restore centrist views.
Their entire platform is geared to be maximum advertiser friendly, aka the status quo.
It really isn't like YouTube doesn't discriminate equally, I'd even say in some cases they do so more strongly towards certain groups that tend to be left wing (e.g. queer people immediately being demonitized when not shrouding words like "biosexual").
Sometimes I watch a rightwing video, and then all I get is more and more extreme rightwing videos suggested.
Then I have to watch some leftwing video to get back to more balanced content :D... but there seems to be plenty of content on both sides, with suggestions leaning heavily on which side you watched the most.
Content that gets an extreme emotional reaction is strictly better at causing engagement, that's just like a basic sociological thing.
The result is that youtube pretty much constantly tries to radicalize everyone. It doesn't care if you get radicalized left or right, it cares that you go into rabbit holes that make you angry or emotional and have a reaction. I watched youtube attempt to do this to me, as I watched a singular video by a more radical than average leftist youtuber, and youtube immediately started recommending me the classic "angry incel right wing" content that so many young men are deeply entrenched in, but I have never been recommended in my 15 year old youtube account. Depending on your beliefs or research I'm not aware of, right wing radicalization might be more effective, as "it's not your fault, we just have to hurt and remove certain people" is more palatable to certain people than "the system is fucked and we have to gut it and work hard to build it back". In that case, it would naturally push right wing radicalization over left wing radicalization.
None of this has to be purposeful. However, willfully ignoring this outcome because it makes you a lot of money is actively evil in my opinion.
Because of the way Elon bought the company it needs to make a shit-ton of money and fast. Elon can't just sidestep that responsibility by vacating the CEO role.
> Last November, General Motors Corp. (NYSE: GM) was among the first companies to announce pausing Twitter ads. Among those that took a similar path were General Mills, Inc. (NYSE: GIS) and Volkswagen AG’s Audi unit.
> Brands such as Mondelez International Inc. (NASDAQ: MDLZ), Coca-Cola Co. (NYSE: KO), Merck & Co Inc. (NYSE: MRK), Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. (NYSE: HLT) and AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) have also not returned to Twitter in terms of advertising as of February, Bloomberg noted.
> Last month, Musk said that Twitter’s revenue had fallen by 50% since October because of a decline in advertising.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitters-revenue-drops-advert...
Don't forget that the company also has to pay $1.5bn a year to service the debt Musk used to buy it.
https://www.marketingbrew.com/stories/2023/04/12/twitter-s-a...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/271337/twitters-advertis....
https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/snap-q4-2022-earnings-...
Do you have a source for this? All I can find is an interview remark from Musk about the company "roughly breaking even," without any actual numbers cited.
That's how money-losing products get designed.
I don't understand how people view him as a product person. How is he making the product (Twitter) better?
Taking away an existing feature like verification and selling an objectively worse version back to people doesn't make the product better. Strengthening the silo effect by banning talk about competitors doesn't make the product better. Charging $50k / month for business verification doesn't make the product better, especially for businesses users.
I thought Twitter might improve because I believed the rhetoric about Musk being a product person, but I don't believe that any more. All of his moves have been short sighted cash grabs.
Is there a single thing about the (technical) product that's improved since Musk took over?
> pushed the chronological feed
It's funny how many people who did not even know they weren't using a chronological feed before, are now cussing him out for showing a "For You" page - when he just made it much more visible and easier to switch to the "Following" feed.
Super Follows in 2021 https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...
Birdwatch (community notes) in 2021 https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...
all launched before Musk took over.
Also, bookmarks have been there for years. As have subscriptions, and Community Notes.
Twitter as of 2020 was fantastic, and these features added essentially no value to it. On the other hand, the public API is now a mess, twitter circle tweets are being shown to people who were not supposed to see them, I get logged out of all my accounts at least once a week and most notifications have serious delays. I've been using twitter since the whale days back in 2010, and it feels like we lost a decade of SRE progress.
Yes, that's why I wrote "pushed". Before Musk it was hidden behind a stars button. After Musk it became a huge button at the top of your feed.
> Community notes precedes Musk too.
Which is why I wrote "improved".
> Longform text is literally what twitter is not about, and a major turn-off for so many people.
People have circumvented that since the start with screenshots or 15 tweet long threads. It makes a lot of sense to offer the option that a lot of people have been asking for and using through different hacks.
> I've been using twitter since the whale days back in 2010, and it feels like we lost a decade of SRE progress.
I joined in 2008 and my experience is that the development has been nonexistent for 10+ years. Rebranding bookmarks into likes was probably the worst idea. The fact that it doesn't do video well despite being the #1 news source for breaking news surprises me the most.
Let's suppose for a moment none of the objections to these "features" I raise are valid. Why are people not talking about twitter circles being flat out broken? What about the constant changes to the UI which no sane design team would approve - like removing the "RT by @account" text out of nowhere, then putting it back up a few days later. Improvisation and rollbacks to major decisions? Remember when a couple of weeks in they just let people pay to get bluechecks and major advertisers had to deal with verified accounts posing as them? The whole "remove legacy bluecheck" thing?
Twitter was afloat and since 2020Q3, posting profits every quarter, but revenue has crashed as a result of all this. I can't really get why these details like "improved community notes" are more relevant to some people than the blatant mismanagement.
Only use of long form text posts is so you know to block the person without reading them.
He did fix the awful old algorithmic recommendations by just firing the team who were bad at them, but it only worked once; it's not like ad targeting is any better. The new UI is just a slightly different version of forcing you onto the algorithm feed.
That said spam seems to have dropped and recommendations I get are pretty interesting so hope that continues.