Twitter’s legal letter to Meta: a guided tour of a weak litigation letter
davidallengreen.com
davidallengreen.com
Elon is basically a big bully, or rather a big child who screams when he doesn’t get what he wants.
Makes cool stuff though and has a pretty good sense of humor.
And we’ll, it’s multi-billions at stake, so why not try :)
> Makes cool stuff though and has a pretty good sense of humor.
His sense of humor like his other behavior is similar to that of a 5 year old child.
I’m gonna need citations on both of these. What has he actually made? He’s been know to take credit for a lot of things, and he could from the point of view of spending the money and maybe hiring some people, but ultimately he doesn’t make or come up with much of anything that I’m aware of.
Also his sense of humor is…awful. It does appeal to one particular group largely, and they all have blue check marks because that is a meaningless badge these days.
The same could be said of Steve Jobs. It would be an unfair statement, for the same reasons I feel it's unfair with Musk: their vision strongly influenced the products their companies made.
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
> "A what?"
> "A reality distortion field. In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he's not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules. And there's a couple of other things you should know about working with Steve."
> "What else?"
> "Well, just because he tells you that something is awful or great, it doesn't necessarily mean he'll feel that way tomorrow. You have to low-pass filter his input. And then, he's really funny about ideas. If you tell him a new idea, he'll usually tell you that he thinks it's stupid. But then, if he actually likes it, exactly one week later, he'll come back to you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought of it
At the end of the day, he isn't designing the rockets. He isn't building the rockets. He isn't even flying the rockets. He pays the people who hire the people who do those things. That has value, but not the kind of "billionaire genius entrepreneur who built a technological empire with his bare hands" value that society gives him. People have called Elon Musk the most brilliant man who ever lived, the man on whom the very arc of human evolution and progress depends, Tony Stark, Edison, Einstein and Davinci in one.
I don't think the parents' statement is unfair. I think it's unfair that the world will know Elon Musk's name a century from now and that no matter what he does (barring, maybe, mass murder) his carefully crafted narrative will live on, but the names and stories of the people who actually turned his vision into reality have already vanished under the sands of time because they are merely assets, no more important to the hierarchies of capitalism or the great man narratives of history than office furniture.
He hires all the people that actually work on making the really cool stuff. Which most already where in the industry. They were just given the opportunity to try something Boeing and all the existing companies didn't support. High confidence number of those engineers that joined SpaceX already had ideas for a re-usable rocket system.
Even Mercades-Benz beat Tesla to market for certified self-driving. Should of really scored some of those engineers from Mercades-Benz, or the ones that handled the out-sourcing, too.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36722606-taming-the-sun
Edit; spacing
And that's hard. I personally think hiring is the hardest and most important part of running a business.
Humor, well, let's say each to their own tastes...
How long before Musk claims that he can't pursue the issue because [insert purported flaw in US legal system here]?
Although I do suspect the audience for this was certain of his other investors, not his glee club.
Exactly who you want to do business with.
When I first read it, I thought some of it sounded really amateur. I've read lots of lawyerese (I used to provide expert testimony in certain types of technical cases), and this did not come across like it was written by a legal expert of any level.
Now reading this analysis, there are a lot more bells going off. I personally would disregard it - and if forced to respond, I would require a rewritten letter with an appropriate level of authority in its wording.
The vagueness alone is enough to realize it's aimless. I doubt I worked with lawyers at this particular level before, but their letters tended to be bullet proof in their detail and specificity. I would automatically question this one because it doesn't really say very much, yet takes 2 pages to attempt saying something.
It's bizarre that Spiro wouldn't already understand this, but even weirder that it appears he didn't even research the topic or have an associate/junior partner with more applicable tech knowledge give it the once over. Possibly, Spiro and Musk were provided that feedback and purposely ignored it due to their outsized egos.
What's most obnoxious though is that Musk fired the employees in question while avoiding paying their agreed severance, and then has the gall to invoke the specter of non-compete agreements. I would hope that Spiro, or his firm, would at least be aware that non-competes are unenforceable in California and many other states.
All of this shit is nutty as hell.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230707193011/https://davidalle...
Internal Tech Emails is a goldmine of letters, threats, and lawsuits back and forth.