Regardless your thoughts on Elon, his drug habits, and his political brashness, I don’t think you can say he’s in any way close to the Oceangate guy. There is something legitimately special about him and his collective.
The only reason Twitter has more active users is that it removed some of the protections for bots, in particular broad filtering coming from certain country involved in a war.
You don’t think Musk is any close to the Oceangate guy? Let’s review some interesting decisions by his companies then:
- Musk mucking around with the blue checks and the bot filters in Twitter skyrocketed the amount of scams in the platform.
- Tesla uses very strict NDAs and settlement to silence the reporting of accidents
- The infamous electric door handle that locks up Teslas when power goes out was an obvious point of failure, it was ignored, people died, and now several countries have legislation against it
- Reportedly Musk had safety lines and other safety features in the factories removed for serious reasons like “not liking yellow”
- Any understanding of how to parse public insurance data will show you Tesla’s have accident rates that are multiples of other brands
- The Starship, a vessel that is intended for human transport, has no safe abort system, no way to fit one in its current state, and no plans to modify that.
Just a reminder that even a very SpaceX-friendly count (in which flights that did not attempt to land are considered “good”) puts the current reliability rate at <40%.
As a naive boundary, for clearing the 97.5% predicted crew survival, SpaceX would need to fly in the order of 300 good Starship launches.
Those are just of the top of my head.
Measuring bot activity became harder after the API changes (I wonder why!), but there’s been some attempts at finding ways to estimate bot activity. All those measures are compatible with increases in bot activity, and incompatible with bot decline.
Everything you’re talking about is trivial to automate with playwright.
I would read a deep dive though into the history of Twitter (with the financials) to understand better and I do get that for a single product company there really is a point at which you give up on finding the next big thing and just optimize on your main thing and you really just need a few dozen awesome people and a rotation of new hires to keep things rolling but not thousands of engineers.
That said, do you remember these kinds of articles?
> Musk summons engineers to Twitter HQ as millions await platform’s collapse
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/18/twitter...
> “Former Twitter employees fear the platform might only last weeks.” Melissa Ingle: “I don’t see how it lasts the month.” “All signs point to some catastrophic failure of the system, and very soon.”
Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/18/1063467/former-t...
> Twitter ‘to lose 32m users in two years after Elon Musk takeover’
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/13/twitter-l...
Elon was firing people left and right and literally physically destroying Twitter’s data centers. I remember hundreds of these hysterical articles and tweets that very clearly did not come to pass. He obviously did something more clever than the authors of these articles expected… is all I’m claiming.
Just claiming, you know.
But we can separate the financial inanity of his empire from the question, which is whether Elon is a capable engineering mind or simply an ‘Isaacson puff piece recipient’.
They both have loud, stupid, and obviously wrong ideas about how hard diving in the sea is or isn't.
Twitter has certainly been a glowing success at becoming a right-wing propaganda chamber for Musk but as a commercial venture not really. Revenue is down 60% since Musk bought it.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-approach-advertise...
And even with all of that, the new users, the AI, the paid subscriptions, None none of that actually fixed the major underlying issues that Twitter is not profitable. Jack Dorsey couldn’t fix it and neither did Elon. I think he just realized having a modern media platform he controls is more powerful than it making money. He inherited a platform built by someone else, and keeps the lights on with a skeleton crew. I don’t see that as a success