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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

Musk seems to have a very tech bro way of handling things. "Don't tell me what can't be done. You're just stuck thinking inside the box."

Sometimes you are in the box, and if you don't recognize it, you smash into it. We valorize the people who break out and accomplish great things that were thought impossible, but we never get to hear about the things that actually were impossible.

More importantly, the people who did were often more lucky than smart. Over and over we see the ones who got rich and famous screw up everything they try after that.

Musk succeeded more than once, and was surely smart as well as lucky. But that's exactly the kind of situation that convinces you that you're the only smart one because nobody else did it.

The world will not stop while he figures out how to deal with the colossal ramifications of his own actions. And that will cost him even more.

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> And that will cost him even more.

I kind of agree with everything, but this.

Rich people usually don't have to pay, that's how it works. That's also probably why they don't learn, in many cases.

I think you’d be surprised.

Just because you don’t hear about the payments doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. Many settlement agreements include clauses prohibiting those involved from discussing the case, or even disclosing that a settlement exists.

Ask me how I know, or better yet - don’t.

I think you're conflating absolute and relative 'cost'. The rich might have to pay settlements for their wrongdoing but for a multi billionaire a 1m settlement is more of a hassle for the time it wastes than the money itself. The rich rarely have to pay so much that it genuinely hurts. Any fines levied by the EEOC are likely to be an absolute slap on the wrist.

They still have to go to jail if they're criminals. Our goal shouldn't be to make people genuinely hurt in any situation.

They don't always go to jail when they should. They might have a preexisting condition like affluenza that keeps them out.

The goal of fines and punishments should be that they are painful enough to deter the action. It is a strawman to pretend we are discussing "any situation."

Contracts are important for the economy to function. Violating the terms of this many contracts should be painful, like "strip the liability protection of the company structure," painful IMO.

> Our goal shouldn't be to make people genuinely hurt in any situation.

What? No. That’s the whole point of the fine. If it’s just another random expense then it’s not an effective deterrent.

If the rich guy goes to jail for two weeks because he fucked over some poor people it’s not an effective deterrent.

If the poor guy goes to jail for 20 years because he ripped off some rich people it’s just a step shy of a private police force.

> What? No. That’s the whole point of the fine. If it’s just another random expense then it’s not an effective deterrent.

Why not? The damage is compensated in absolute terms, the price is paid.

Only if you want to normalize the behavior. Giving specific behavior a fixed monetary cost means rich people aren’t bound by the law.

All fines give behaviour a fixed monetary value. Does that mean no-one is bound by law?

You missed the point. Given monetary value does not mean no-one is bound by the law. It's if the monetary value is so low that it doesn't matter for the particular individual that suddenly, the individual is not bound by law anymore.

Is it really that hard to understand?

It's easy to understand; just not easy to agree with. The law's job is to enforce penalties and rights equally, blindly even, and not to scale everything according to someone's individual circumstance.

Well your previous message suggested that it was not understood. Apparently it is, and you just disagree.

Then we seem to differ on our view of "equal rights". To me, the law defines what should not be done ("is illegal"), and how one prevents people from doing it. Now if the law defines a fine that is high enough to prevent me from doing something illegal, but seen by a super-rich like I would see 1 cent, then we are not equal: the super-rich is effectively allowed to do it (as in, "nothing prevents him from doing it, because from his point of view he doesn't have to pay anything"), and I am not (because I can't afford it).

It's not the law's function to adjust the punishment to subjective view of the punished. Otherwise, you could argue that heterosexual people deserve lighter prison sentences than bi- or homosexual, because sex 2ith the same sex is much easier to obtain in prisons and therefore prison time is harsher on heterosexuals. For the record, I think this example is absurd, and I'm just using it to highlight the kind of absurdity your logic leads to.

You take an absurd example, then arbitrarily decide that my logic leads to your absurd example, and therefore conclude that my logic is absurd? That's interesting :-).

In case you care at all: I don't think my logic leads to your absurd example.

There's a reason why fines scale with income in some places. If you were charged $5 every time you got caught speeding, I bet you'd be much more likely to speed. The fine has to serve as punishment, not just restitution.

Show me the list of billionaires jailed that aren't in prison because of some more powerful billionaire strongman that they were foolish enough to cross.

>They still have to go to jail if they're criminals.

Genuine question: do they?

Agreed. My mom was friends with an ex-secretary of a SF real estate mogul and she's quite wealthy now herself because she sued and was paid off to go away.

The people who are paid off are usually bound by confidentiality agreements.

They pay, but it doesn’t matter that much when you are so wealthy.

Exactly.

There is no will to make oligarchs like Musk pay in amounts that meaningfully impact their lives, and as a result they can embark upon virtually limitless folly and malfeasance.

In this case I don't think he cares. He can just walk away from $44 billion without noticing.

I think it's more the blow to his ego.

>Rich people usually don't have to pay, that's how it works.

The reason why Musk is the current owner of Twitter (or X) is because he had to pay, even though he really didn't want to.

I mean, he had to pay, but he still managed to somehow get twitter to pay 50% for itself…

It's really hard to weasel out of employment law violations, even for the rich.

Isn't wage theft like $30 billion/year or something ridiculous like that? Regardless of what ends up happening with this one I think most of them are getting away with it.

Yes — significantly more than blue collar crimes like burglaries and shoplifting. And it’s not just “the system” that is invested in letting rich people get off the hook; just look at how many people on here are extremely vocal about e.g. arresting their way out of petty theft yet have no interest in the far more harmful crimes committed by rich people.

Blue collar crimes like burglaries? There is a wiki-entry of "Blue collar crimes", but the phrase doesn't make sense. It is not a crime you do becouse you are a blue collar worker, unlike say finanial fraud as a bank clerk.

Some additional research here: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021/

> Isn't wage theft like $30 billion/year or something ridiculous like that?

It's hard to justify this. It's multiplied-up survey data. It's not real the way FTX numbers were actual real numbers worth talking about.

"Multiplied-up survey data" seems like a pretty normal way to do estimations in statistics. What is your concrete issue with this?

Surveys aren't a general thing about statistics.

I assumed you were derogatorily referencing study data. Can you be specific what kind of survey it was that you saw, and why it doesn't rise to the status of a study?

Elon Musk could foot the estimated yearly wage theft for the entire United States for 4 years and still have 50B.

> The world will not stop while he figures out how to deal with the colossal ramifications of his own actions. And that will cost him even more.

It seems unlikely the company will ever turn a profit. It's crumbling under the weight of its own infrastructure (some question how it even still runs!).

Rumor has it they lacked the manpower to actually keep the API running and scrapping it was a last-ditch attempt at getting rid of bots. Same bots who flocked to the platform after the layoffs started since people in charge of mitigating these were fired.

Firing abuse and content moderation teams meant there was a lot more unsavory spam on the platform and advertisers didn't want any of it near their brand. In a few week Twitter lost half of it's top 100 biggest advertisers [0] and it doesn't seem they are coming back.

At this point, I'm wondering if not paying former employees, rent and cloud bills is a way of getting the company bankrupt with litigation, so he can later claim that it wasn't his fault that it went down but "all the rent-seekers conspiring against him".

To be fair, there were a lot of non-technical or "tech-adjacent" people from third tier business schools who seemed to think Musk was a genius for firing most of his "overpaid underproductive programmers" and will desperately try to imitate his every moves (probably trying to play the same games with employee severance and cloud bills). It'll be hilarious to see them crash and burn in the coming years (see Holmes, the Jobs copycat currently serving her sentence).

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-lost-half-top-advert...

I find it remarkable that Twitter can't turn a profit. The core concept behind Twitter is a standard first project for any new framework.

Obviously the real Twitter is as far removed from that as a Falcon 9 is from a model rocket. And I'm sure the real expenses of Twitter are all about managing the nine billion pies its got its fingers in, especially the massive hassles of moderation and placing advertisements.

Still... it feels like it just shouldn't be anywhere near that expensive to fulfill the core, very simple purpose of Twitter.

> And I'm sure the real expenses of Twitter are all about managing the nine billion pies its got its fingers in, especially the massive hassles of moderation and placing advertisements.

Exactly.

> Still... it feels like it just shouldn't be anywhere near that expensive to fulfill the core, very simple purpose of Twitter.

Fully interactive, user-generated content, number 4 website in the world by traffic... [0]

At this scale people have issues like physical availability for inter-dc data transfer and site-reliability [1]. You are probably directly dealing with (several, since not a single one will be able to fulfill one whole order)OEMs to design server racks to your specifications. [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_visited_websites

[1] https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...

[2] https://www.opencompute.org/documents/ocp-yosemite-v3-platfo...

Their AWS deal in 2020 probably isn’t helping, nor the GCP deal in 2018. I shudder to think what their hosting costs must be. Apparently GCP is 200M/yr alone.

I think Charlie Munger (Berkshire Hathaway cochairman) describes Musk the best saying that Musk is a person with a 150 IQ thinking he's a 170 IQ which makes him both very bold and dangerous.

150 is quite generous if you ask me.

I'd say 115-120.

I'm no Elon fanboy, but it's hilarious how much normies cope that Elon is just relatively average intelligence. Find one video of someone intelligent and credible who's actually interacted with him who shares that take.

Let me guess, you are referring to people who work in the space industry? A very small industry where there's a very good chance you'll be forced to work with SpaceX, and if you piss of the petulant manchild you'll be blacklisted and effectively kill your own career.

Listen to Musk talk about something you know in great detail, and you'll realize he's a moron grifter.

Feel free to link to something that exemplifies this.

Do you consider yourself not a normie but someone with genius-level intelligence?

No I'm pretty normie. My point is the significant players don't share this low opinion of Elon. Only normies, but not all normies. A lot of normies worship him too obviously.

I think the answer to your question is implied by the attitude of calling people "normies".

Do you think 'normie' has some negative connotation? It's just internet slang for a normal person.

95 would be more realistic

> We valorize the people who break out and accomplish great things that were thought impossible

Even then a lot of things aren't literally impossible and no one thinks they're literally impossible, it's just to make it happen requires a billion dollars. Unless you've got a billion dollars such things are practically impossible.

The spectrum of possible things is highly dependent on how much money you've got available. Even big companies don't necessarily have a billion dollars to spend on some new endeavor.

I find it disingenuous to throw around the word "impossible". Impossible is building cars out of ground up unicorn horns or magic dragon egg shells. Building marketable electric cars was never impossible. It just required money up front with a long horizon to build a business rather than return profits right away.

Valorization in these cases is merely survivorship bias.

Totally a survivor ship bias in the techbro circle

> And that will cost him even more.

We'll see. From my perspective, this is a case where Musk acted with extremely well-publicized malice towards his employees, and towards the very company he bought, to the point that it may not even be able to pay the severance those employees are due. Musk has been talking about bankruptcy; a maneuver that could be used to void those debts.

Should that happen, I want this case to pierce the corporate veil; for those payments (plus legal fees and damages) to come directly out of his pockets. But piercing the corporate veil seems like a bit of a long shot from what I've read of it.

Curiously, twitter corp (california) does not exist, it was merged into X corp (nevada). California is apparently quite liberal with respect to piercing the corporate veil, Nevada is not: another maneuver to protect his pockets.*

Make no mistake, Musk is smart. He's just not the "engineer an electric car and a rocket all by himself" smart that people got so worked up about. He's smart like Trump is smart: he looks out for #1 and knows exactly how to use his wealth to maximize his opportunity to keep playing the game.

* Edit: it gets even juicier from there. He's apparently trying to keep the shareholders of X Holdings secret, going so far as to redact his own name from the list! https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/12/twitter-reveals-that-x-h...

California is apparently quite liberal with respect to piercing the corporate veil, Nevada is not

That is irrelevant, as the case would be held in a California court and subject to California laws.

If companies could avoid laws by just incorporating elsewhere, every multinational would be incorporated in Somalia.

> very tech bro way

aka psychopath.

Psychopath, yes, but remember that I'm really talking about a lot of the people right here on this message board. It's not some movie villain. I'm connecting his behavior to what I see here, every day. We notice him because he's got tons of money behind it, and a lot of people think that's just great.

It's not so much a warning to them, as to people who see them as psychopaths. Those psychopaths are all around us and can harm us. They'll also harm themselves, but we do not gain in the process.

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