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- If you read accounts of the way he treats Tesla and SpaceX workers, the treatment of Twitter employees is on brand.
- Elon has always used Twitter as a way of getting attention for himself and his companies. It's his primary platform. Even ignoring his ego, it makes sense he would bump up his own content.
- "Ridiculous amounts" is relative to what you earn. What sounds reasonable to a billionaire will sound ridiculous to you or me.
- The blue-check mark was one of the few things of value (excluding ads) that Twitter could trade for money. It was a thing that people wanted, and therefore could have a price attached. Selling blue check marks is more similar to selling a tesla, than the roundabout way ad sales generates money.
- A lot of the speech he unblocks, he agrees with. If you dont believe that, and want to believe he wants unlimited free speech thats fine.. but that unlimited free speech belief is from an misunderstanding of the business reason that social media blocks certain content (legal, ad-friendliness, etc).
- Unreliability is from implementing ideas without listening to feedback and planning properly.. and exactly what he does at Tesla. Example: removing the radar from Teslas and updating the software later.
- It's not the symbol of death to Elon. It's the cool brand they wouldnt let him rename PayPal to.
I've seen nothing in Elons behavior that indicates he's behaving any differently that he has at his other companies. Why is it assumed that this guy who has no background in this industry knows what he's doing? When you start a company, you get time while it's small to make all kinds of dumb mistakes. Elon doesnt have that experience, and every mistake is at-scale.
Several of his mistakes have, I am sure, been born out of ignorance. This is not a good explanation for his decisionmaking in general. Nearly everyone, whether in the industry or not, has been able to foresee the consequences of his actions better than he has.
His worst decisions have been born out of emotion. He has throttled access to websites like the New York Times and slandered organizations like NPR because they don't praise him enough. He rebranded the company to 'X' because he is still hung up on his failures in the '90s. He writes pathetic and incoherent rants at 2:00 AM and demands every user see them because he is deeply insecure. He desperately wants to feel popular, even if it has to be by fiat. He has done the wrong thing, time and time again, because he is weak.
From what I can tell, it was x.com even after the merger with Confinity, and the change to PayPal didn’t happen until after Thiel took over.
There are also accounts of focus groups where people had negative reactions to the name X but the focus group result was written positively.
> From what I can tell, it was x.com even after the merger with Confinity, and the change to PayPal didn’t happen until after Thiel took over.
Elon wanted to rebrand PayPal, the product that had been acquired with Confinity, after the company name, X.
AFter Musk was forced out as CEO (the second time) the company, X, was renamed after the product, PayPal.
So, you’re both right.
also so he can deflect or downboost criticisms of him and his companies
Steve Jobs could have veered all over the map. He was anointed with the title of genius by the public broadly (and Jobs may have indeed been a genius at what he was great at, narrowly speaking). He successfully rebuilt a globally iconic company and his leadership resulted in Apple producing extraordinary products that hundreds of millions of people have enjoyed. He was also one of the richest people in the world when he died and quite famous. Instead of veering widely, he had the self-control to stay on task, stay focused, and more or less had the discipline to not veer far outside his sphere of competency. The self-control to stay on task seems to have been something Jobs intentionally made himself get better at over the years. He recognized the more important thing was to do fewer things and do them well and he preached that to anyone that would listen. He recognized that our time limitations (and time-productivity limitations (you can only be highly productive for a fraction of a day)) are aggressive, so you're better off focusing heavily rather than sprawling. We're quite finite in our capabilities, at best. Even when Jobs was doing Pixar, he was very careful not to go too far away from focusing on Apple, and he didn't attempt to keep sprawling his focus even though he easily could have (this is a big separation for Jobs and Musk; maybe someone with high productivity potential can do an Apple + Pixar simultaneously, with good management; do more than that? I think Musk has potently found the point of imploding returns on sprawling focus).
Musk is at risk of producing a lot of duds as he sprawls his focus, and maybe he doesn't care if that happens, however there is a significant time-productivity cost to what he is doing (and a huge monetary cost). The Twitter time and $40 billion could have been spent on getting to Mars. $40 billion would probably get SpaceX to Mars. This is something that makes me understand why some people like to hurl invective at him. Guy spends two decades with a supposed overarching goal of chasing Mars, acquires a quarter of a trillion dollars, some of which he can liquidate to accelerate the mission, and then he does this. Talk about veering off. Jobs would have sold $20 billion of Tesla and pumped it into chasing Mars, if that were his primary goal.
Despite how much certain people hate Musk now (in the same way they hate Trump, and for similar reasons), he is brilliant at what he's good at. No matter how much his detractors wish to tear him down, and no matter how much he makes it easier for them, it's simply true that he is a very intelligent person and at least narrowly highly competent. Most of the HN crowd would instantly vaporize when confronted with what he has taken on over the past 10-15 years (being worth $200+ billion and globally hyper famous would melt nearly everybody on HN, and that's just one point). Trying to do things well outside your competency, when you're already stretched thin on your primary mission/s, is a very bad mistake of impulse control / focus. Your line: "Why is it assumed that this guy who has no background in this industry knows what he's doing?" pretty well nails it. It reminds me of the average Joe thinking they have an idea for a restaurant or bar, and that that'd be a great business to pursue (because they've eaten at restaurants before and like most people they have strong opinions on food/service); Musk's mistake on Twitter comes from a similar place, he was a heavy social media user just as Joe eats at restaurants.
Musk will require another beating (akin to Tesla and SpaceX nearly failing simultaneously) to pull his focus back to Earth. Otherwise he'll just continue to sprawl, his impulse control is too mediocre to self-impose that course correction without hefty pain prompting it. Something sharp and negative has to affect him, in proportion to his financial capabilities and or something very bad has to happen to Tesla or SpaceX. Maybe he'll remain hyper rich and just waste his twilight days sprawling around, either occasionally getting in the way of the SpaceX mission or being fortunate enough that it succeeds in spite of his erratic approach.
What is that exactly? Seems like he is primarily good at having money, well at least until he set so much of it on fire with his Twitter acquisition. Otherwise, what is his achievement that isn't effectively just throwing money at a problem in a way that no one had previously done?
He could have spent that money on practically anything else and benefitted humanity. People would have been awarding him Nobel prizes and fawning over him for the rest of his life.
Instead he bought twitter and let the fascists run riot.
No.
This is the most common mistake the anti-Musk crowd makes. They fail to differentiate between a person being intelligent and having good self-control. They are not the same thing.
Musk failing at Twitter doesn't make him stupid. Musk having poor impulse control does not make him stupid. What you see in the Musk detractors is their own idiocy and or poor impulse control on display, in the way they go after him by proclaiming that he's stupid or the equivalent, it shows off their inability to think deeply and to control their own emotional impulses (to lash out; a failure to think rationally, a failure to be able to dissect a topic dispassionately). It's rather interesting that Musk's poor impulse control lures the same behavior out of his detractors (which is exactly what Trump's wild behavior did to his detractors, they have been wildly rabid for seven years non-stop; Trump acted wild, they reacted wild).
Intelligence is no guarantee of self-control, discipline, focus, integrity, work ethic, et al.
Smart people can be cruel. Smart people can be very lazy. Smart people can be liars. Smart people can be x y z. And in exactly the same way, smart people can have poor impulse control, behavioral disorders of all sorts, or just be lazy and not develop their work/task focus capabilities throughout adulthood.
There is also an interesting difference between smart/intelligent and wise. Musk is very intelligent, he may not be particularly wise. Knowing, understanding and accepting your limits is generally an area of wisdom rather than smartness. Properly acting on your acquired understanding of your limits would be maturity / personal responsibility (integrity is typically a major factor in that mixture). I don't think Musk is a very mature person, and of course his tweets have put that on display for many years now.
"Smart" does not just mean "high intelligence", as you very well know. In common parlance people use "smart" to mean an ill-defined combination of intelligent, knowledgeable, careful, and wise. A smart person is one who can deal with complexity and make good decisions.
Deliberately misinterpreting what someone has said in such a way that it is obvious nonsense, then claiming what they said is obvious nonsense, is not a clever trick. All too often effective, but not clever.
I am not willing to conclude Musk is especially smart, for the record. SpaceX seems pretty competent, but Tesla, Twitter, Neuralink, and several failed projects are technically dreadful in numerous ways. What can be attributed to Musk's intelligence, what can be attributed to his behavior, and what can be attributed to the fact that any fool with a big enough bag of money can hire brilliant people? I do not know.
What I do know is that every time he speaks on a subject I know well his remarks are word salad.
As someone watching from the sidelines, a lot of the social change Twitter created was negative, and harder to see from inside the social media sphere. People getting dumber, angrier, and more dependent. Personally, I'd love to see it all go away, so I'm fist-pumping every time Musk does something stupid. Unfortunately, I haven't really seen any evidence that makes me believe he can actually kill it, let alone what it represents.
Because it's easy to tweet "just had dinner at grandmas, was great!" and much much harder to make an insightful statement in those 160 characters or whatever still-short limit it is now.
Almost all the posts I've seen on Twitter that were actually worth reading, were cut up in tens of pieces, each with their own sub-thread attached. Basically making the whole content unreadable without using threadreader.
To me it's not surprising people who are disjointed and thoughtless thrive in this environment but for me the ratio of pure shit vs insightful stuff is so low I've always hated this platform with a passion.
I don't have an account there and I never look at it, if there's something worthwhile reading on twitter I count on Hacker News to bring it to my attention.
Thing is, to you, that's not "insightful" (whatever you mean by that.) But to some of Malcolm's 30 followers, it's an interesting piece of content. To future historians, it might fill in a tiny piece of context they were missing when they're trying to piece together how Malcolm's life turned out.
I don't get the hate - not everything has to be insightful and not everything is for you. Just ignore it and get your "insightful" content elsewhere.
Why would advertisers pay if their cows could only be milked for a few minutes of engagement per day?
Is there a particular reason to believe that he's doing so? Recall that he didn't voluntarily make the purchase; he was forced to by a lawsuit. And, given that the persona he presents publicly is childish, spiteful and petulant, I think it makes a lot more sense to take his actions at their face value and conclude he has no intention of running Twitter well (or, in the long term, at all).
He was forced by a law suite since he signed papers about him buying it. It was his free choice to sign those papers. It was his free choice to have them even drafted. Also the value, is a value he came up with. (Maybe while stoned)
Well, theoretically you could make an offer, that raises the share price to the offer and then you can cancel the offer and sell your shares fornthe high price and profit.
However the SEC would investigate very carefully. Especially in the case of Musk, who has a history of stock manipulation. He'd need very good arguments.
However there was something else: After his offer markets crashed to some degree. Thus he overpaid compared to what he'd have to pay, if he had made the offer a few weeks later. So maybe he only wanted to lower the price.
It's likely that the initial offer came out of a rage. Just see the back and forth with him joining the board ... or not. However the key point is: He's not a poor victim who was forced to buy something he didn't want at all, but he initiated this and signed papers about it. The court just decided that he can't get out.
Yes but his history also shows he doesn't really care what the SEC thinks and does what he wants regardless. I think this is still a pretty plausible reason.
Everything we’ve seen so far fits the theory that he didn’t have a plan other than changing their policies and has been winging it ever since.
It seems to be mostly under the flag of 'for the children' and in the US it seems more religiously/GOP oriented but if you actually start a discussion and dismantle some of their talking points with actual proof (no, kids are not indoctrinated into becoming trans or gay, it's just about understanding), the actual underlying rabid hate comes out.
I'm not LGBTI+ myself but I'm very good friends with many of them and I find it sickening. Leave people to be who they are.
I had no idea about Musk's daughter though, that explains some of it in his view I guess.
This is where I consider "pride month" relevant: I'm not LGBTI+ either and for large parts consider the hate a edge phenomenon on internet and in some groups and more or less forget about it. During pride month there are so many anti-gayncomments one can overhear, which to me serves as a reminder that in my bubble it's not a problem, but once you step out it's a crazy world ... (I'm outside the US)
When I grew up in the 80s it was all totally OK. A bit uneasy still but OK. In the 90s things improved even more. Being gay was just normal, not even special. Not that everyone was gay but it was just normal the way some people are blond and others brown-haired. It wasn't even a 'thing' anymore. It just was.
But now it has definitely become a thing spurring lots of hate again. And it saddens me. We had this covered. Only trans wasn't really a thing when I was young but queerness was. I think it was more just not a thing because the medical options weren't as advanced as they are now.
I think polarisation of society has played a big part in this. I think religion also plays a role as many religions frown on this. In the 90s our society was really 'done' with religion, young people were completely disconnected from it. But it has made a comeback for various reasons.
I've done a lot of thinking about this. People point to religion or society or statistics, but I believe that those are mere fig leafs to justify their hateful gut feelings.
I think it's an offshoot of homophobia. Some men are simply terrified that other men are looking at them the same gross way they or their acquaintances look at women. By the same token, I believe that the disgust felt towards transwomen by some men is that it's "tricking" a man into being gay, and that some women perceive transness as some sort of "stolen valor."
I don't think buying twitter was a very good business decision, but it was certainly calculated.
The value he got from owning the public discourse platform is enough for someone who is a billionaire and doesn't really need money anymore.
He debt financed the buyout. While he had to put up a non-trivial amount of his own money he also borrowed a non-trivial amount of money. Part of Twitter's problems today is paying an extra billion dollars a year in interest payments on those loans.
Hard-earned value? Please tell us this is satire.
Are you referring to the creation of the segregated online society of haves and have-nots? Where many of the checks were handed out based not on merit but on industry connections?
The blue checks were one of the biggest displays of inequity in all of modern existence, and we are all fortunate that the old model was swiftly killed off.
Yes, Tunisia is more democratic that it was before Arab Spring, but Tunisia still only scores at 5.51 on the Economist Intelligence Unit's democracy index (compared to 2.79 at the start of the Spring). (Mexico by comparison scores at 5.25.) More importantly, Tunisia's population (11.7 million Tunisians) is only about 1 or 2 percent of the Arab population, and more Arabs than that have been killed or made homeless by the unrest and the civil wars in Egypt, Yemen and Syria.
You: why not champion the potential for tools like twitter to act to release all of that energy?
And now things do changed quickly but not perfectly.
And you may be missing his greatest creation: Revenue share. Big account get a share of revenue for ads shown.
I have 70k+ followers and made $3000ish last month (I rounded up it was a little less than 3k). That’s a huge incentive for something I did for $0 these past 10 years.
Have tried Mastodon, Bluesky et al but Twitter is where the discourse still is.
Also mob rule, bullying, jump to conclusions tweet bs.
As someone from the outside, Twitter seems like a worse cesspool than Reddit even that people are so hung up and caught up on.
>* The blue check-mark saga - destroying a lot of it's hard-earned value...
"Value" how is it valuable? lmao the funniest shit I've read. I can tell you are a heavy Twitter user.
Obviously not since the lights are still on, and there's more features. There were too many staff before. Nobody is irreplaceable.
> While attracting lawsuits for the manner of firing people.
You mean the lawsuits that turned out to be bullshit lawsuits?
> Keeps tweeting pretty deranged stuff...
You mean pretty entertaining stuff?
> Unblocking hate-speech accounts
What is a "hate-speech account"? Is it one where name-calling and ridiculing individuals with hit-list style rundowns is celebrated? Like what you're doing? Or is what you're doing "love speech" and I'm just not seeing it?
They wanted to happen, they would have used something else. Plenty of history happened before Twitter.
Thousands of other data points scattered all along human history, successful or not.
Winner write history
So whatever happens, it'll be called just...until it isnt
If they were so essential I'd expect the service to have crashed and burned long ago and never came back up.
Trading off hundreds (thousands?) of people at US salaries for only a 10% impact in uptime is a sane business decision.
Having this many people working on a system that was built and "finished" 10 years ago (there have been no major feature updates to the core Twitter experience) in a decade, it means:
1) the system is built and working well but the engineers continue building complexity for complexity's sake in order to justify their continued employment and/or polish their resume (very common in any kind of large tech company with no clear product that people pay for - I call these "engineering playgrounds")
2) if the system is not actually working and needs hundreds/thousands of engineers to tend to it, then those people are incompetent and should be let go either way
False dichotomy. There is a vast space between continuing to run normally and turning into a smoking crater overnight. This includes brief outages, "secondary" functionality being broken for longer, slowdowns, inability to handle spikes or add new features, etc. All things we've actually seen with Twitter BTW. No one of them is enough to kill the site outright, but people do notice when a site is flaky. It erodes trust, and they seek alternatives.
The fact that Twitter hasn't experienced a more serious collapse since Musk's takeover is a testament to the quality of the engineering that was done before. But there's little difference between a sudden death and a slower one, in the end. If you want to rail against "perf-review driven engineering" or churn for churn's sake, you'd do better to aim your invective at Meta or Google instead of kicking people who are already down.
A system with 90% uptime is a whole lot less than 90% as valuable as one with nearly 100% uptime.
Twitter was pretty reliable. Now it is not. Users have noticed.
It seems clear to me already that the impact is more than a 10% impact on uptime and a lot of that value lost is going to be evident over years not immediately. EVERY software product on earth could fire the majority of its staff and be OK for a while.
That's something a lot of journalists dislike, hence all the attacks and hit pieces on him.
Note how the headline of even this very article is misleading: using the word "wipe" to suggest that the data was destroyed, as in wiping a hard drive, while that's not the case.