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Comment by Quinzel | Hacker News Reader

It seems like Elon Musk has a vision of creating a platform business model that encompasses all his business endeavors and more.

I don’t like Twitter, nor do I like Elon Musk, but it seems clear to me that he has a strategic plan. I doubt he gives two shits about what Twitter is or was - when he bought Twitter he acquired a lot of talent, and a place to start to launch his platform - of which he envisions the world being beholden to, and he will be the king of that castle. I wouldn’t be surprised if he will have some kind of X crypto, X digital wallets, X online shops, he’ll probably even have his own X-onion sites too, for all the people who want his X branded LSD and MDMA.

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He did acquire a lot of talent. Then he fired the majority of it and slagged off/alienated the rest, losing most of the institutional knowledge gained over years. He then systematically torched any external goodwill with both advertisers and users, before torpedoing the brand identity which had cut through to non-tech culture.

At some point, you have to just admit that he might not be playing 5D Chess, but 1D Connect Four, and he's still losing.

> but 1D Connect Four

I think we're down to noughts and crosses.

     o| |o
     -----
     x| |
     -----
     x| |o

oops...

Reminds of the time Musk said chess is "too simple" because there is no "fog of war" and no "technology tree".

Oh I'd forgotten that, truly the idiot that keeps on giving.

Wouldn't 1D connect four be a guaranteed draw?

If you assume that it's simply linear, then depending on length you could certainly lose if sufficiently incompetent. Of course, then 1D Connect Four would be effectively a tape, and thus a Turing machine capable of encoding 5D Chess... I'll admit the simile doesn't stand much in the way of stress!

I was thinking connect four with only one column. But if you do only 1 row, it is indeed winnable. In fact, in 2D connect four, that is one of my favorite strategies with a new player - try to get two pugs next to each other on the bottom row with space on both sides

> it seems clear to me that he has a strategic plan

I highly doubt that because he originally didn't want to buy the thing in the first place. He's just making one hail Mary pass after the next to try to get it to turn a profit and failing so his last card - the one he always seems to play at some point - is to set it up for acquisition by one of his other companies to bail himself out.

That may work, or it won't, in which case Twitter (sorry, 'x') may well end up taking the rest of his empire with it.

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