Why Musk Is Successful at Building EVs and Rockets, but Bad at Running Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Why Musk Is Successful at Building EVs and Rockets, but Bad at Running Twitter

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6 pointsredbell14 comments

He's not. He was never that close to the management of Tesla and SpaceX as he is to Twitter. Twitter is Elon naked.

In his other companies they see him as the public cheerleader who attracts capital and talent, but he's kept away from day to day decisions. At Twitter, he's making ALL the decisions. And it's glorious to behold.

Are you telling us that Musk isn't even a good engineer? If so, I'm feeling a bit misinformed, really don't know why.

He's been touted as generally brilliant but it looks more and more like he has not only feet of clay but a gold pin in his belly button.

He has obsession with certain things (X being one of them), like being called a founder of companies he didn't found, and being called an engineer on projects he didn't engineer. He's telling people he has an engineering degree that he doesn't have. I'm sure he was there for some of it, and contributed ideas. The quality of those ideas likely varied and considering he's not an expert, tended towards the bad.

The only engineering we have evidence of is that he's a self-taught programmer, which is fine, many good programmers are self-taught. But this doesn't make you an "engineer" in general. Also the people who fired him from PayPal were appalled by the quality of the code they found, so despite he could code, we have no evidence he was actually good at it.

In other words, he expresses some autistic tendencies.

Surprise, surprise --- autism is not all that compatible with social media/advertising/Twitter.

His main talent is being a taskmaster and driving technical people hard.

Then I expect him to pull the pin out very shortly.

Seems pretty simple. Physics doesn’t care if you are an unlikeable person with politics that huge numbers find repellent. Anyone of any belief system can make a rocket fly if the math and manufacturing are right. Media on the other hand is a popularity contest and absolutely does care who you are.

A recent profile on J B Streubel coming back to Tesla as a board member dropped the enticing bit of gossip that the first prototype Tesla Megapacks were installed in the Tesla car park and after a couple of months someone had to explain to Elon what they were and he instantly demanded the project be shut down to focus on the cars. And everyone ignored him.

For starters, he spent tens of billions of his own money and $13B in LBO loans in order to rage quit litigation he was losing. There never was a plan other than "I could flip it for less than a settlement would cost."

The marginal cost of a lawsuit and buying Twitter isn't much more than just agreeing to the sale, and there's a tiny chance of being able to get away with paying less. Why not just fight it out in court?

I've seen some suggestions that he didn't want discovery to continue, but that seems rather speculative. It's kind of an odd outcome.

If you're definitely going to lose a lawsuit, it generally makes sense to settle; saves wear and tear in lawyers. I assume his lawyers told him he had no hope. Persisting past the point where he had no hope would be particularly silly in this case, as that would not only raise his legal bills, but also _Twitter's_ legal bills, which he was about to inherit. (Note that he's trying to sue Twitter's lawyers over those bills now...)

> It's kind of an odd outcome.

It's really not. Civil stuff rarely goes to trial, in the scheme of things. If there's no doubt of the outcome, anyone even vaguely sensible will settle.

Rather poor analysis in my opinion.

Twitter is not like Musk's successful companies. Twitter uses technology --- but it doesn't really create it.

Technology is not what Twitter is all about. From a business perspective, Twitter is fundamentally an advertising company. You can't succeed at it by simply laying off half the staff and threatening the rest.

You also don't succeed at it by providing a "free speech" soapbox for social misfits. Advertising is not about politics or "free speech" but rather the opposite of it.

Advertising is a much more humanistic, image focused and socially nuanced endeavor than Musk's other companies. In all the credit given to Musk, I have never heard anyone applaud his amazing social/political skills. If anything, I've heard it suggested that he expresses certain autistic qualities.

It's the Peter Principle --- Musk simply rose to find and embrace his own personal level of incompetence.

Some people were just made to do some things, and not made to do some things

Easy: he’s not personally designing or building the rockets or evs.

Starship is kind of his baby. But, so far, it could turn out to be a space Spruce Goose.

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