Don’t forget the texts that triggered his offer to buy Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1575598387335901190?s=...

Damn. I could be wrong, but the texts with Bret makes it look like Elon's ego was hurt, from texting with Parag.

What "heavy-duty" software did Musk write for a 20 year period? I can't square it with the career section in his Wikipedia bio.

I can assure you Mr. Musk was not involved in writing code at x.com. Though he was a very decent product-manager-type guy and generally more technical than most PMs. I believe he can understand many issues with code-bases, but he absolutely did not understand why we did things the way we did in the crypto(graphy) code at x.com.

Sounds like you might have some anecdotes to share :-)

There is none. The only thing anyone has referenced is some pre-PayPal code that got scrapped and rewritten in the merger and some games when he was a kid.

Look for his interviews. He mentions a software his organization wrote and sold, but the buyer didn't know how to fully take advantage of it. Kind of like flying an F22 as a cardboard box down the side of a grassy hill.

Can you elaborate? It's a big leap to go from vaguely describing something you read he said to then describing this hypothetical as a metaphorical F22.

He made x.com, which was a financial service company that got bought by paypal. THen I think he worked at paypal for a while. Then he did spacex. Then he did tesla. All of those are very engineering heavy and he has been known to get into nitty gritty on all of them.

> he has been known to get into nitty gritty

Is he writing any software at SpaceX or Tesla? I've heard stories here and there of him sitting in an engineering meeting.

Zip2 was founded in 1995 -- there are credible claims (from a biography) he wrote software there, and that's all I've found.

Is there any actual evidence of him "getting into the nitty gritty" at SpaceX or Tesla? Confirmation from people who would have been there to see it? Or just his own claims? I don't think his time doing early web stuff at x.com or PayPal counts as "heavy duty" and it certainly wasn't 20 years.

If you ever see him at any talk thats not a pure PR event he tends to go into engineering details. Good series I would recommend from Everyday Astronaut where they get into lots of nitty gritty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ux6B3bvO0w

What do you think "PR" is if not doing videos like that? And how do scripted comments about a technical domain that's not programming have anything to do with his actual claim (see OP) to have done "20 years of heavy duty programming"? There's no doubt that he has some kind of smarts, but he claimed something very specific and AFAIK that claim has no basis in fact.

I don’t have rocket engineering expertise, but I do have AI.

When I see him talk about AI (which he claims to be an expert in), it’s like hearing college freshman, after first 5 classes of ML 101, who read a lot of pop-science blogs about it.

highly doubt this guy wrote a single line of code at any of those companies

He forced PayPal to switch to windows. Opinions differ as to the wisdom of that move.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12513223

He worked in the video game industry at one point and wrote some low level code there.

Rocket flight control? I'm not sure that was 20 years in a row or how much he really does of it, but that's my guess.

He's the CEO. You think he's writing the flight control software?

So many HNers thought the deal wouldn't go through.

I remember those threads, the confidence with which people were claiming 'Musk is just lying and will never ever go for it". Just tells you most people are susceptible to emotions even if they are otherwise rational. In this case, visceral contempt for Musk being against censorship.

> Just tells you most people are susceptible to emotions

This is not insightful and an obvious aspect of being human.

> In this case, visceral contempt for Musk being against censorship.

This is an emotional opinion without the support of facts. Are you sure you are being rational?

Very nice glass house you have there.

> contempt for Musk being against censorship.

Speaking of emotion, this is a far cry from a good faith read on this.

Yep, even here on HN.

I hope Musk turns Twitter around and makes it a great platform.

That's not how I recall it. In my experience, the general opinion here was that Musk indeed wanted to get out of the deal but that he was legally going to have to go with it. Which is what has happened.

If you thought Elon was a genius, you figured he was just trolling the world and would weasel his way out of what seemed like a stupid deal.

If you thought he was a troll first and genius second, and paid attention to the analysts who read the fine print on the offer, you probably expected he was going to be hoisted by his own petard.

The odds of the deal going ahead were always pretty good, because getting out of it would have been difficult. The key here is the unique way in which the Chancery Court operates. They may have very well forced Musk to buy the company.

And so many thought it would.

Predicting the future is an imperfect science, as it turns out.

Because his 44billion dollar investment is worth 12 billion when the ink dries

>worth 12 billion

Why do you say this?

Well, look at what he's been advocating for:

1) Edit Button - already in production

2) "Absolute" free speech - not legally possible, and his tweet (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1585619322239561728) indicated that he knows it's not palatable to advertisers either

3) Get rid of the bots - Either a) it's not that big of a problem or b) it's a big problem, but will greatly reduce the number of users and impressions used to drive advertising revenue

Plus, there's no clear growth plan as it's not an attractive platform for youth or young adults.

Of course, it's possible Elon moves mountains and turns it into a thriving business, but it's not clear at this point in time how that happens.

Smart guy though, he walked it back just in time. I'm sure he'll point to that tweet, and it's timing, whenever his legal counsel eventually tells him that, yes, very much so they need to ban certain folks. And like most of the time when playing to (that particular crowd), it won't matter when his hypocrisy (or pandering) is exposed.

4D chess on how to lose $30B…

I'm honestly not sure I'm more shocked it went through or more shocked he thought he could get out of that contract.

Elon did try very hard to stop it.

or was this all just theater?

To what end? He signed the deal as was proposed, no?

A month ago an article appeared detailing how several prominent investors made a huge amount of money by buying the dip on twitter as the lawsuit business unfolded. I personally suspect collusion. The legal drama cost him relatively very little and was basically a favor to his friends.

To achieve what? Crater a public perception of the company he’s buying?

"no publicity is bad publicity"?

I believe that Elon plans multiple routes to account for possibilities when he does business. I believe he colluded with other parties to depress Twitter's share price through legal drama, firstly so they could profit by knowing the moves in advance, and secondly so he could try and force the valuation lower to save his own money money. I believe he has tried several strategies to get the US government to intervene and cancel the deal.

Maybe all that is wildly out of band, but we've seen him operate for years now. He routinely lies; that is, creates a message he wants a certain market to hear to achieve a certain effect, and in a couple of moments, despite his massive wealth, has demonstrated that he has a keen interest in acquiring more wealth.

Exactly. Hence why so many HNers are extremely annoyed and angry that it happened and that they will still use Twitter regardless. I guarantee you that they won't move or close their accounts down due to this and will continue to peek or use links from Twitter.

I don't care what happens since I'm laughing at the whole mess and chaos.

> "I wrote heavy duty software"

> "I interface way better with engineer who are able to do hardcore programming"

In 20+ years of developing, I've only heard non-technical (or well past their prime technical) folks use the terms "heavy duty" or "hardcore" to describe programming.

"heavy duty", "hardcore", "falcon heavy", "cybertruck". Those terms relate. I guess he means appreciating programming down to the electron, photon millisecond when debugging a lost rocket launch three times in a row burning his money in the sense of physics and not some kind of marketty arbitrary opaque name for flavor of framework, platform package container combo.

How much "photon millisecond" level rocket debugging has Elon personally done?

About as much as anyone else at SpaceX: none at all.

Agreed. I'd expect the average HNer to emphasise with those terms as we all work in complicated and intense industries, but I guess there will always be disappointment as non-Conservatives join the World Wide Web.

The name falcon heavy is a direct riff on the name delta 4 heavy. ULA just slaps 3 delta 4 first stages side by side and that's the heavy variant. Falcon heavy is the same thing but with falcon 9.

I don't think it has anything to do with heavy duty.

Launch vehicles are categorized into small-lift (<2t LEO) medium-lift (>=2t LEO), heavy-lift (>=20t LEO) and superheavy-lift (>=50t LEO).

Falcon Heavy is capable of 57t (recoverable) to 64t (expendable) which makes it actually superheavy-lift.

(Although the Falcon Heavy has never actually demonstrated this ability)

I've heard technical people use those terms when they're talking down (or up, depending on your perspective) to management.

The guy is 50, let him have his boomer dad vocabulary

I've worked with people who are that old in the industry and they don't use those terms.

Elon is projecting here. Big time. I feel like I can just see the impotent self-victimization and glorification between the lines. And walking in with a sink and Tesla engineers to "review Twitters code". Better watch my tongue, but l-o-l.

I can't imagine how delusional a person has to be to think it's even possible to review codebases as large as that. They'd need years to go through everything

You don't need to go through everything to form an opinion. I bet they're only interested in a couple of specific points, and not a full review of every single line.

Sure, good luck finding these hotspots in a distributed environment likely consisting of hundreds if not thousands of artifacts.

You'll have to trust the developers (not the reviewers) to point out these spots and at that point the review is pointless as the developers could've told you the same thing.

It's just a security theater to make some people feel important if that's how you do it.

Ready to be a rockstar dev, taking it to the next level? barfs

"cybervocab" mind

50 is Gen X

Only if he promises to stop trying to shitpost like a 20 something.

Jack and Elon discussing future protocol:

https://www.twitter.com/TechEmails/status/157558827770002636...

I love the "can I call" texts he sends. It's neat to see boomers all act the same about texting.

Far from a Boomer attitude (they love calling and aren't as comfortable with texts), it's very much a Gen-Z attitude.

But these descriptors obviously make no sense when we're talking about CEOs, not random people for whom "age group" is a relevant or informative descriptor.

Calls are less likely to leave a paper trail, too.

Sure, but my point is that asking whether it's okay to call is somewhat rare among CEOs (boomer or not), while it's extremely prevalent among Gen-Z.

He isn't in the boomer generation.

This is really interesting, and for me it highlights the problem of tech/business people trying to solve a social problem. In their mind everything can be solved by tweaking the software architecture or monetisation model. Nothing is proposed to change how users actually interact with each other on the platform, which (IMHO) is the main problem.

I would agree the problem is not software. The problem is people. Specifically people that spread and people that believe misinformation.

how does Parag Agrawal come out of this looking "in the right"?

he comes out of this quite wealthy, and, the man who made elon kneel, so I think he'll be all right.

> man who made elon kneel

Uh, Elon just fired him.

Paid a hell of a premium for the pleasure

He can go around now saying that he forced Elon to buy the company by not backing down, for a price premium during a recession, no less. He has his generous severance package and will walk into his next job very comfortably, I'm not sure why you think there is a downside here.

> Agrawal, Segal, and Gadde were shuttled from the building after being fired, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.

Well, that doesn't seem like an upside to me, but that's just me.

> He can go around now saying that he forced Elon to buy the company by not backing down

Are you or anyone impressed by this?

>> He can go around now saying that he forced Elon to buy the company by not backing down

> Are you or anyone impressed by this?

I mean he produced shareholder value by getting the richest man in the world to by the company for a huge premium...

There are certainly plenty of CEOs who have done worse who are having no trouble finding work today.

Elon handed this to him, he initiated it in the first place after all. And the court sided with Twitter to follow through.

Even this huge premium you guys are so impressed with was set by Musk. Parag had nothing to do with the price.

And before this, what commendable things did Parag do at Twitter? This was just a lucky break for him.

Not impressive at all. At best an unforced error on Musk's part.

Moments of inconvenience in exchange for a huge golden parachute, damn, what a hard life.

Point is he was involuntarily fired in an unceremonious and embarrassing way on Musk's first day on the job. Based on his track record at Twitter, he deserved to be fired.

You're making that out to be such a great thing that he got fired because he gets a huge severance. Big deal. CEOs all over get huge severances for doing shit. Look at Mayer leaving Yahoo. At least she didn't get fired though.

What would be impressive is if he deserved to stay on the company and worked with Musk to turn it around. But he didn't deserve it because he did squat for Twitter. Only thing he did was catch a lucky break at end.

No, it's not a hard life at all, but not impressive at all either.

> but not impressive at all either.

The amount of consumption that Parag will be able to do with his golden parachute is very impressive tho.

Impressive in the same way a person is impressed with a lottery winner.

> Are you or anyone impressed by this?

absolutely, and so should you. he made all the shareholders a massive amount of money. not just that but he got them the best outcome possible. he should be celebrated

I'm not. Elon initiated the buyout. Yes, Parag stood his ground when Elon tried to get out of it and the court sided with him, so good on him for that. But without Elon's initiation, nothing like this could ever have happened.

And before this, I'm not so impressed with what he's done with Twitter in his tenure.

Usually that’s what CEO does. They make it happen. I think all of HN approximately know how to start electric car company and beat Tesla, but would anyone be able to execute that plan ? Probably not.

When Musk inevitably makes insane changes to Twitter, Parag gets to point at them and say "those are the thing I wouldn't do as quickly as he wanted."

Elon apparently used Tesla engineers to review Twitter code: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-27/tesla-eng...

Do Tesla employees work for Tesla or are they Elon's personal staff? How is acceptable when employees can be fired for moonlighting?

I stopped trusting Bloomberg’s reporting after they refused to retract their “The Big Hack” which turned out to be bogus. Are there other sources for this?

Apparently, SpaceX has used Tesla engineers in the past, to help them evaluate/integrate Tesla parts into SpaceX designs. If Tesla is okay with doing consulting for one of Musk's other businesses, why not another?

Legally, Musk has to pay Tesla for this, and someone very senior at Tesla (the board or the senior executive team) has to approve – without Musk being in the room. But, why wouldn't they say "yes"?

So I don't think this story is fundamentally implausible. (As I pointed out in a comment on another post, the "code review" was probably actually an "architecture review", but it is easy for non-technical people to elide the difference.)

> Legally, Musk has to pay Tesla for this, and someone very senior at Tesla (the board or the senior executive team) has to approve – without Musk being in the room. But, why wouldn't they say "yes"?

that's not true at all. there's no law that says Twitter/Musk has to pay Tesla engineers anything. it's only up to Tesla's management to decide what they want in return for those resources. Also, as CEO there's nothing stopping Elon from using all of Tesla's resources to help Twitter or any other company. it is entirely up to Tesla's board and shareholders to punish Elon for what should be a gross misappropriation of Tesla's resources

You are correct that (at least as far as I know) there is indeed no explicit legal provision saying Tesla can’t just give SpaceX/Twitter/etc endless free services. However, Tesla is a Delaware corporation, and under Delaware corporate law (same as in most other jurisdictions), directors and officers have to take special care in conflict of interest situations, to avoid contravening their fiduciary duties (especially the duty of loyalty). The easiest way to make sure that duty is being appropriately discharged, is to ensure that those services are provided on commercial terms, which would normally involving paying for them. So while there may not be an explicit legal rule saying they have to do it this way, in practice their lawyers will be telling them this is their recommendation to minimise legal risk, and I have no doubt that they’ll listen to their lawyers and do what they say.

As well as the corporate law issues, the accounting and taxation implications of non-commercial transactions with other firms with which you have significant common ownership can be quite messy in many jurisdictions, which is another compelling argument for keeping those transactions on a commercial fee-for-service basis.

> in practice their lawyers will be telling them this is their recommendation to minimise legal risk, and I have no doubt that they’ll listen to their lawyers and do what they say.

there isn't even a need to see a lawyer about this. there's literally no issue here for the company to ever get sued over. the only risk here is for Elon himself to be reprimanded by the Tesla board. and the chances of that happening are below zero.

> there isn't even a need to see a lawyer about this.

All major companies employ in-house lawyers. Issues like this always go through in-house legal. Rather than a question of whether they “need to see a lawyer”, their own lawyers will be advising them on it as a matter of course.

Sorry, I can’t use Twitter much and that account do not give any context.

I could search, but now that Google is broken I know I will have to decipher crap first.

I feel silly, it’s not real right?

I would rather ask a fellow human at this point.

I mean, It cannot be real right?, the history goes back too long.

AI-generated comments will soon ruin HN and everything else. https://xkcd.com/810/ I don't think this will be something to glorify when it arrives.

This is probably more common than the context suggests. CEO/CTO that both claim deep technical skills while not having touched code in decades, one demanding to talk to engineers, the other claiming he's deep in the codebase and knows what's going on. The best executives I've worked with are the ones that freely admit they don't know about the code, the worst are the ones that insist they're "technical" and keep bringing up stuff from 20 years ago with no bearing on the current problem but believing they're sharing their technical expertise

I read it more as CTO was protecting the engineers.

Lol, I always find it funny when people pretend that Parag is some clueless "management type". I graduated the same year as him from the same school, and he is a ridiculously sharp engineer who has risen up at Twitter the old-fashioned way. It's painfully obvious that Musk just wants sycophantic yes-men around him and was pissed off that Parag wasn't willing to kiss his ass regarding all his "revolutionary" suggestions.

Can he invert a binary tree though?

Here's a sequence of events that led to me quitting a job:

- The owner/CEO of my company met with another local business owner and sold them on us doing some custom software work for them. He gave them an estimate during the meeting, and made a handshake deal.

- Owner tells a PM at our company about the project. Usual project kickoff stuff happens where the PM organizes a team and schedules a meeting with the client, etc.

- PM sends a meeting invite to a dev (me), a designer, and a QA, to meet at the client's office for the meeting.

- The owner of the client company does a similar thing, and at the meeting is 3-4 employees who know a lot about their business and the needs of this project. We talk for 2-3 hours and have a pretty good idea of what they need.

(details: The company operates a fleet of temperature sensors. They currently subscribe to a service that alerts them when a thermometer reports values too high or low. They don't like the software and don't want to keep paying for it, and want us to build them a replacement. Basically to collect a bunch of data from devices in the field, parse and store, send sms/email based on rules configured on a web app, and also have some really basic reports viewable)

- The team (4 people, including the PM) play agile games for a few hours, coming up with narratives and points.

- I get to work. Get access to the data, find a japanese manual online for the devices that describes the format of the data, set up a web app, database, user management, data download/parsing, a polling and alerting service. Lots of parts unfinished, but it's technically functional. Less than one week has passed (and my time is split across multiple projects).

- Project is put on emergency hold. Client found out how many hours we had spent, and was pissed. Apparently the person writing the check was told by our owner that it would be like 10-20 hours of work. That was never communicated to the employees at either company. The requirements gathering meeting exhausted the budget all by itself, unknown to everybody present.

- The PM is fired.

- The owner schedules a 1-on-1 meeting with me, where he spends 40 minutes describing the concept of database tables and rows. His thinking is that if I had only known how to store things in a database, the project wouldn't have taken me so long. Fortunately he gets a phone call and abruptly leaves.

- The client was apparently paying $20 a month for their monitoring software.

Look at Parag’s work history. He’s been coding recently enough. “Decades” is totally wrong.

Parag Agrawal joined Twitter a mere 11 years ago as a software engineer. He went from that to first CTO then CEO in a few years, at a big tech company. I have no doubt he has deep technical skills.

So you’re saying Musk is worst executive, no matter his track record?

> [...] I won't let this fail and will do whatever it takes. It's too critical to humanity.

It's really hard for me to not be disgusted by these people thinking that a web platform whose main purpose are shitstorms is critical to humanity.

This is so absurd.. it could be a Monty Python script.

On this website you have loads of people claiming that Twitter is an utility and should be regulated and even funded from taxes instead of running as for-profit company... I don't agree with this, but I think it's not so clear cut to be disgusted - many intelligent people think so as well...

Lets be honest, Can you go a month without twitter and be okay? Well then its not critical

I agree with you 100%, but even here among us you have many people who would've agreed with Musk.

This confirms that Jack Dorsey will be back on top

I hope he does not. Jack Dorsey endorses decentralization, I don't believe Elon would. Jack is best left out to pursue his own products which will be more decentralized.