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Comment by TX81Z | Hacker News Reader

Elon had this planned out from the start, 50 steps ahead.

Make an outrageously high bid on a site with no consistent profit, try desperately to get out of the deal, and fail (as a misdirection of course), alienate power users, kill 50% of revenue, totally nuke site reliability, lose all the top talent, and of course, rack up a pile of lawsuits a mile deep.

And only THEN, blow everybody’s mind by jettisoning a brand so valuable it is a globally recognized verb, rebranding using your competitors IP, and take over 50% of global banking.*

(* this is actually what he said.)

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Because I need to vent...

I dreamt this morning that I was berating ElMo for being off his meds and making billion-dollar decisions while in manic phase. For months.

I'm actually pretty annoyed that I would even dream about it. I detest the expression, but this is a perfect example of "living rent-free in someone's head". I need to get off the internet.

It's fascinating how people can't just ignore Elon, especially the people that don't even use/like Twitter.

Life is a lot easier if you just think "I don't care about" this and scroll past. Yet here we are, as I understanding the trademark to X will somehow matter in our personal lives or make us happy

There is something about successful men who get away with giving the finger to the woke crowd that _really_ tick people off.

I think that's certainly part of it, and it happens on all sides of the political Spectrum, but I just wonder why

It’s almost as though none of this was about business and totally about being an imagined champion for a mob of internet losers fighting a battle nobody with an ounce of sense, reason, or self respect buys into?

Big brain stuff. Big brain.

Sure, you can think that. I don't fault you. Musk is extremely childish at times and that's putting it lightly.

It's his money to light on fire and his reputation to tarnish. I don't know why people get so miffed by him. Twitter wasn't anything special to ruin and I think it's doing just fine nowadays.

I mean, that's exactly what I'm frustrated about. I wish I could ignore him, but like Trump before, he succeeds in constantly grabbing media attention and plastering himself over all the headlines.

Deliberate or not, its a good strategy.

There's no such thing as bad attention... Not anymore.

Carlee Russel has entered the chat

That’s like saying “why does everyone rubber neck a horrific car accident? If they just ignored it and drive by traffic would be much better.” Everyone knows this. But we can’t help but be intrigued by the carnage.

I glance at news like this, chuckle a little at comments (and that is a positive), then go on without Twitter, now X.

I am happier.

To paraphrase hitchhikers guide, it may be the clear minded take is Elon needs to get off the internet and you’re fine.

I thought you literally meant Elmo and I found it hilarious.

But srsly bro you shouldn’t be dreaming about celebrities.

To be clear - I’m just agreeing that we could all benefit from being offline . I shouldn’t even be online at 2am!

For those who haven't seen it before, HN has a "noprocrast" feature on your profile page, which you can turn on to block access to the site for X minutes.

I know you're being sarcastic, but it's shocking how many people think he's actually a genius and all his missteps are really galaxy-brain maneuvers we just don't understand yet. Like, there are millions of them.

It just fails basic logic, I seriously don’t understand on any level.

Can't wait to see the promised payment part of "x".

It's gona have crypto and KYC, doesn't it?

Conveniently the advertizers will likely like the additional info.

As will regimes like the saudis.

I'm told it's going to be half the global economy, I can't wait!

Anyone who trusts Elmo with any of their money is a damn fool (to phrase it very mildly)

. . . especially after seeing the last 8 months of baldfaced stupidity

I think I'm going to trust Karpathy on this one over random HN commenters, but that's just me:

"Elon also understands deep neural nets a lot more than I think people imagine. He starts with good intuitions and mental models, but also actively asks for technical deep dives, and has very good retention. E.g. I recall teaching him about our use of focal loss in contrast to binary cross-entropy for the object detection neural net (I said it had given us a 5% bump and he asked to know more) and he understood how it works about as quickly as you'd expect a PhD student to. The fact that he can do this across many technical disciplines is impressive and borderline superhuman. I don't think people understand or would believe how low-level and technical typical meetings with him are. Just saying because I get triggered reading way off innacurate takes on this topic (original comment)."

-https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33703617

A lot of HN users don't want to hear this, but being good at engineering doesn't mean that you're good at business.

I'm trying to figure out why anyone cares one way or the other

I’m jealous of Elon for being able to be on so many drugs simultaneously. I can only do one drug, max, at a time.

I believe in you. You can do it. Dream big.

Legal Disclaimer: not actual advice.

I’m starting to just feel sad because I’m suspecting serious cognitive decline or mental illness. At this point it’s just watching someone have a crisis.

Interesting things start to happen to you once you have too much money. This is a case study that will be written about in the, er, DSM, most likely.

Maybe this is a variant of the long-rumored affluenza?

It's true that the need for all of this right-wing adulation didn't really blow up until Grimes left him for a trans person, but he was always this person. Ask Peter Thiel.

Remember, the entire point of this X exercise is revenge on people who wronged him at PayPal (where he demonstrated total incompetence at managing software projects and people). He's going to show them, dammit. He's going to show all of them!

Is Twitter usage (measured in daily active user hours per day) lower now than it was before the acquisition?

I don’t know if we know. But they have changed the metric they’re measuring publicly to one that is more “accurate” (according to them) and going up quite a bit.

So I’m sure it’s all wine & roses and they’ll be profitable any day.

Sorry forgot that aspect of the master plan: increase “engagement”, raise server costs, and cut revenue in half at the exact same time to prove once and for all that traffic as a universal measure of site value is an entirely corrupt idea that should be abandoned to focus on actual revenue.

50 steps ahead. Man is a genius.

Probably but only because musk removed actual moderation tools and now spends 24x7 furiously refreshing the timeline to manually permaban anyone not sucking up to him.

I prefer to measure in fortnightly active users per hogshead.

But if you're a bit less fussy about the exact metric, Pew Research has some data on the topic:

> "A majority of Americans who have used Twitter in the past year report taking a break from the platform during that time, and a quarter say they are not likely to use it a year from now, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted about five months after billionaire Elon Musk acquired the site." -- https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/05/17/majority-...

> "The majority of highly active Twitter users continue to use the site following Musk’s takeover but are posting less frequently on average." -- https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/05/17/how-us-ad...

Almost all engagement metrics are self-reported, and companies in the "attention economy" tend to lie about them; I don't expect elon musk to be any better.

The masterplan unfolding.

Elon is a genius

No, he’s not. He’s something so much better than that we don’t even have a word for it. He is a human singularity, I can’t believe we get to be alive on this earth at the same time as this man.

"In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness."

- Jack Dorsey, April 25, 2022.

Certainly nobody can deny Elon is solving for the problem of Twitter being a company.

> I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness."

If only we could convert bullshit to energy, we'd need just a handful of these billionaire luminaries to solve the world's energy needs.

He took that back.

https://fortune.com/2023/04/29/elon-musk-twitter-jack-dorsey...

You are in good company: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...

Wait - how does he simultaneously bid on a site with "no revenue" and then "kill 50% of it." If the revenue was meaningless then killing half of it shouldn't matter. If it wasn't meaningless then the "no revenue" comment makes no sense. Which is it?

It would make complete sense even if the total revenue was $1, which of course it wasn’t.

I suspect you know exactly what was meant by those two statements..

The phrase "no revenue" should have been "no profit".

Grandparent comment probably meant to say "no profit" instead of "no revenue". But yeah killing half of your revenue when you aren't even making profit yet is probably a bad idea.

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