I doubt it because it's a braindead decision. It's also totally out of his wheelhouse. Twitter is not a commercial product, nor is it an engineering project. It's a forum. A really volatile forum. Elon has no experience moderating forums, he's not a site administrator. If he's the one actually calling the shots he's gonna run it into the ground because it simply isn't his field. This is the acquisition the least similar to any of his other successes he's ever made. Such a business simply doesn't run in the same logic as a contractor or manufacturer. Besides, a huge number of Twitter's core staff just jumped ship the moment they heard the news. That's the relevant experience. That's their product people. They fled. If the brain drain hits the company hard enough and the loosening of moderation goes particularly poorly the whole site is absolutely doomed and he will lose more money than Yahoo acquiring Tumblr did.

Remember that Elon co-founded x.com, which merged with confinity to form PayPal. WeChat is essentially what Elon wanted x.com to become, so it's not totally out of his wheelhouse.

Turning Twitter into WeChat is probably a bigger challenge than sending a rocket to Mars, but...

> WeChat is essentially what Elon wanted x.com to become

Yeah that doesn't count. Stuff you don't do doesn't count.

Similarly with Tesla, legacy automakers will electrify the world. Being a cheerleader on the side doesn't count.

CEOs are people who sign off quality of life for the people who buy the products/services that the company they lead is selling. And that is all there is to it. There is nothing tough or poetic about it. Sane people are scratching their heads at how some people are falling for the cult of the founder which started with Jobs.

> That’s like someone who has no idea how to cook leaving a bad review for food they could never hope to improve on

Ignoring the context of the article, I don’t believe that the example you’ve given here is really fair. It’s perfectly valid to review something which you could not create. If we excluded that whole category, then reviews would mostly cease to exist, and only peer review would be possible.

IMHO, the world would be a better place of people who're qualified in a particular subject would opine in their area of expertise.

Nowadays, we have every Tom, Dick and Harry commenting on anything and everything, regardless of how informed, educated or even experienced in the area they want to criticize.

> IMHO

I would like to hear an expert's opinion on this though.

Well done. Almost spit out my coffee here from laughing. :)

OMG. I created an account on here literally just to say, "Bravo!" Nice LOL in the morning.

An expert or a so-called expert?

Touché

> IMHO, the world would be a better place of people who're qualified in a particular subject would opine in their area of expertise.

You can go to sites or youtubers that specialise with reviewing stuff.

The problem is that it's just opinion of a single person & they can be easily bought or swayed so even if you have "experts" reviewing it that doesn't mean quality.

Also don't need an expert to tell you some piece of shit of a device fell apart after a month...

But I do wish that the reviews on sites were actually stuff people write month+ after getting the thing instead of "well, I got it, it works, I tried it for 5 minutes"

Totally agree! Peer review is the only valid feedback in many situations. You don’t see many ultra-successful serial entrepreneurs doubting on Elon! You see many of them driving Teslas.

As someone who has been in the kitchen since childhood, I can appreciate how difficult great food is to create! If I taste something inferior I’m going to be specific with my feedback for improvement, highlighting the good points not just focus on the negatives.

Drives me nuts when at a restaurant with friends/family who haven’t put in the time in the kitchen and couldn’t hope to create a delicious meal dissing the food … if you can’t make something better, either shut up or try to be helpful with your feedback! Being critical is so easy and cliché.

The world needs more optimistic Elons not more doubters.

> Totally agree!

Um, your response is not agreement.

I can't make a cell phone, so if my new cell phone constantly drops calls I'm not allowed to say it's a bad cell phone?

You can, because your feedback is constructive and specific.

If you said "idk, this phone just sucks, because i feel like it does and idk how it could be made better", that would fall under "useless complaints". But saying "my phone drops calls often" is a specific complaint with a very specific (implied) improvement suggestion ("make phone not drop calls").

So the cooking thing would be totally valid if the person just said "It was too salty?", allowing the relatively uneducated/unskilled to make claims about quality even though they could never reproduce it? That's not how the original claim was framed.

I agree thay even with "it was too salty", it could be entirely baseless. However, "it was too salty" is still infinitely better than "idk it isnt good". Even if "it was too salty" was incorrect. But that is purely a personal opinion, and imo there is nothing that can substantiate it much.

Although I think it’s always kind to be polite and constructive with feedback, I totally disagree that you have to be as capable a cook as the chef to critique their food.

You don’t have to be a culinary wizard to tell when many foods are overcooked, underseasoned, etc. Sometimes chefs just screw up and a dish has outright unpleasant qualities.

Most people have hundreds or thousands of points of comparison for high-quality food even if they can’t make it themselves. If a restaurant bills itself as high-quality and then doesn’t live up to that standard I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say so.

Is peer review more valuable? Probably. But most restaurant guests aren’t chefs so pleasing non-chefs is valuable too.

> Never bet against Elon

Success does breed success, but it’s not inevitable. There’s still hard work to be done and his big successes have come from hardware (batteries & rockets). Twitter is software in the social / content realm.

To use your cooking analogy, it’s like saying don’t bet against Gordon Ramsey (an expert in the cooking / media / art / experience realm) if he acquired Virgin Records. I’m sure he has connections and some knowledge that helps, but it’s a new field with new challenges.

Long before there was Tesla and SpaceX there was Zip2 and Paypal; both software. Elon is first and foremost a software engineer. Yes, Twitter is social / content. But who better than someone who understands the platform well enough to have 100 Million followers to help take it to the next level?

Haters are always telling me not to jump into a barbed-wire-covered nettle bush in a tar pit - why don't any of them have the vision to help me succeed at it? :)

> That’s like someone who has no idea how to cook leaving a bad review for food they could never hope to improve on.

I agree it's like that but disagree there's a problem with that. Ultimately it's the consumers that are the judges if it's a business.

The thrust of the article is that buying Twitter only damages Musk.

And the way to make it better would be to go back in time and not make the mistake of buying it.

Exactly! A Time Machine is the answer! Captain Hindsight to the rescue! Why didn’t Elon think of that?

Nilay's job is to generate revenue for The Verge and it's shareholders. You generate revenue by increasing ad views. You can increase ad revenue with controversial hot takes with saucy language.

Nilay is doing the exact right thing, in the context of his corporate job.

I think Elon will succeed _and_ I agree with almost everything in this verge article. But Elon has been very inconsistent in what he’s said.

It’s impossible for Elon to accomplish his current vision because it’s not internally consistent. You can’t only moderate what is within the law and make Twitter a more friendly place and make it more attractive to advertisers and grow it to a billion users, and make it the defacto public square and make it the free speech public network and eliminate bots, and make X the everything app and fire 75% of twitter employees.

So while I think Elon Musk will succeed, it’s also interesting to point out the paradoxes and difficulty and in doing so elicit curiosity in how he will accomplish his goal. Conservatives seem to be taking a victory lap today, but it’s one of those things where compromise means no one ends up completely happy.

I think there could be a balance here, allow that which is legal but distasteful but don't promote it or advertise beside it. You could probably repurpose some already pre-existing ML models searching for users to ban over takes that are too hot for twitter to mark as un-monatizable. Cleaning house is the way to make this vision of twitter a reality.

Bots I think is both the harder and existential problem.

I agree this is definitely possible, but if you do all that, is it still the public square open to debate, if you are selectably promoting / monetizing "tasteful" tweets?

I think distasteful nonsense gets deprioritized in all public squares as a natural consequence of our social mores.

Not really. Look at pretty much any reality TV show, or the magazines at any checkout line. Nonsense and drama is big business from an attention and advertising standpoint.

Plus, you can look at most biased news sources and see the drama that they selectively cover under the guise of news. "1 person did a bad thing" and "here's another reason why this entire group is conspiring against you" are not uncommon tropes.

My reference to distasteful was meant to reference a much more vile flavor of speech than gossip and celeb junk news.

Fair enough, but that’s also why it’s so hard to define your content moderation policy, because the definition of “distasteful”, etc. varies between people and over time.

> I think there could be a balance here, allow that which is legal but distasteful but don't promote it or advertise beside it

OK, but then it's more like blacklisting rather than banning. You're still free to show up and participate, you just can't get access to the biggest audiences.

So then the conversation turns from "why is Twitter blocking my free speech?" to "why is Twitter penalizing my free speech?".

Plus, what's legal speech is a real grey area. Free speech cases constantly go to the Supreme Court because we're talking about a near infinite number of ideas that can be expressed. And intent usually matters. So when Kanye writes his "death con 3" tweet, is it a direct threat to incite violence (not protected), an ambiguous threat that's not actionable (possibly protected), a joke (very likely protected), or as a brand new idea that hasn't been expressed yet (possibly protected)?

At the end of the day, a human has to make a decision. So, we're just swapping Jack's and Parag's vision of content moderation for Elon's, but it'll still be content moderation - perhaps better, perhaps not.

I think your example in Kanye might be a good one.

Maybe his tweet should stay up, ambiguous speech isn’t clearly illegal. Illegal speech is much easier to recognize. But Twitter probably wouldn’t want to put that tweet on the trending front page or advertise next to it but he has an audience and can continue to interact with and grow his audience.

Minimal regulation as required by law, no moderation, and maximal participation.

What if I bet his lawsuit would fail and he would be forced to buy Twitter?

yeah, many hedge funds and individuals have lost serious $ betting against tesla

YTD $TSLA is down 44%.

In some of those cases, they lost due to unpunished securities fraud though? Tesla should be a fraction of it's valuation. Short selling is an important part of price discovery and attempts to curtail it should be punished IMO.

Don't bet against him getting away with scamming.

And don't bet against politicians wanting to affiliate with his celebrity/interact with his clout giving him subsidies.

Yeah, all those Teslas which deffo weren’t sold, what a scam

Are you saying the Tesla valuation is only due to the cars that have been sold?

I'm saying where's the scam?

Those that paid $10k+ for full self driving got at least partially scammed.

And many more have made an absolute fortune. Down more than 40% this YTD, even worst if you go from ATH to current prices.

It's also been a trader's paradise given the volatility and occasional appearance of someone mysteriously placing huge OTM call purchases for that Friday in an effort to force a gamma squeeze. In a market with regulators this would be suspicious and investigated, but we're in post-GFC America.

which Friday, which options

Your argument falls apart here, since you can review food without being able to cook said food. For example, you don't need to know how to cook to know that something is burnt and therefore critique it based on that.

What you're really arguing here that Elon Musk is more capable than the previous people in charge of Twitter. I won't defend them much, but based on many of his previous actions I'm skeptical he's going to do any better and in fact think he'll probably do worse than the ex-leadership.

The article nails the inherent contradiction in optimizing for "free speech" and optimizing for advertising. He has burned 44 billion. He will bleed advertisers and legit users if it becomes a 4chan's pol board.

Fanboying Elon on the twitter deal of all things is just hilarious. He paid $44B with no diligence for a company with hardly a billion worth of revenue, stagnating growth, a last-generation social graph, an incredibly toxic userbase, and a very demoralized staff--and he has no plan for how to fix it either. This will go down as one of the worst deals in history and here you are saying "but Starlink".

> hardly a billion worth of revenue

Where do you pull these numbers out of? Twitter's yearly revenue was $5.2 billion.

If you're so off base for the objective metric, want to guess how off you are on the rest of your opinion?

What are the generations of social graphs?

If that's a serious question, it's something like:

1) Friendster

2) MySpace

3) Facebook

4) Twitter

5) Instagram

6) TikTok

Obviously the exact list is a matter of opinion, but Twitter is definitely not current-generation, I think everyone can agree on that.

Here, have fun exploring when each one was "born" and therefore its generation:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=t...

It was a serious question. I thought you were talking about the organizing computer science or social principle of the network but it seems you just meant the age the company was founded or became popular, which is unremarkable. Sorry to bother you.

I'm not the person you originally responded to, I was just clarifying what seemed to be the obvious meaning.

But to say the generations are unremarkable isn't quite true -- the whole point is that previous generations are generally stagnant in growth, unlike the newest generation(s) that are still growing. This is a very valid argument for why investing in TikTok might be a smart idea while investing in Twitter is... not.

Ah, sorry. Yes, there is certainly some value in thinking about the age of the company. But it’s also so strsightforward that I wouldn’t have asked about if it they’d used less ambiguous wording. And I’m a little disappointed that I wasn’t able to be pointed to a cool research paper or something. :) I appreciate you clarifying for them; I like to do similarly on HN when I see two people missing each other’s meanings.

> Starlink alone will make more money than twitter ever could

In a world where people are increasingly living in urban areas, fiber will annihilate satellite internet.

Starlink is yet another niche thing which Musk is specialized in pursuing.

In fact all of Musck companies can be summarized with "everybody has heard of them in the financial and technology press, but not many people use them"

The rural market, RV market, boating market will always be an enormous niche. But fiber and other broadband tech like 5g wireless may win out in the long or mid term. Leaving only the very secluded rural market.

I would not have guessed that the satellite tv market would have gone on as long as it has, considering how many satellite customers also have access to cable. And yet, you can drive through any suburb and find plenty of dishes.

Mobile internet is already available pretty much everywhere.

Not that many people need internet access in the middle of the ocean.

It never really made sense to me. But then again I live in country that can do mobile infra. 4G and 5G with good availability and affordable or even cheap prices. And we are not even dense.

So I never really got how any other place has any excuses.

Perhaps you dont realize just how not-dense some of the western US is. Looking through counties in Nevada, some of them have less than 1 person per 10 square km.

Rural Eastern Washington has rotting 1Mbps DSL, line-of-sight towers on a few mountains (good luck seeing them), and overloaded 4G internet. And there are thousands and thousands of people here! Fiber-everywhere futurists are seeming more disconnected than Starlink fanboys.

> In a world where people are increasingly living in urban areas, fiber will annihilate satellite internet.

Fiber may be way better, but putting a glorified wifi router on top of a million dollars worth of kerosene and stainless steel is a great deal cheaper than digging a 1000km long trench.

There aren't many of them compared to the people in cities, but being able to serve the billion or so people that would have to pay hundreds a month for crappy microwave internet with somewhat less crappy space microwave internet sounds like a the one company he's running that isn't fleecing the taxpayers or investors.

Is the population outside areas that could reasonably be served by mobile connections really a billion? A few hundred people around should already be enough for a single tower.

Well even if you only get 10 million customers you break even in overnight costs on your 60k $1m satellites after 6k each. If starship ever materialises, and after making 20k or so satellites they should get cheaper too.

Those hundred people can't dig a particularly long trench or put in more than a few thousand poles for $600,000.

Seems to work out unless I'm vastly over estimating the bandwidth of whatever the bottleneck in the constellation is.

Plus there's all the people in cities willing to pay extra for low latency.

I doubt that actually. I've got Starlink because I despise Comcast. They're my only wired option, even though I live in a largish city. I realize it's possible I'm an outlier, but on the other hand a lot of other people really hate Comcast too. I even had fiber at my old house and really liked it, but it's just not an option where I currently live, and I'd rather use satellite internet than pay for more fiber to be laid.

The relative ease of throwing up a few satellites and selling internet across the globe vs digging trenches to each and every residence make me think it's going to be a very popular internet option very soon.

Media has been going totally in the left direction after Trump won.

I don't really like him, but cancelling people exactly at the same time by all media companies shows that it's all controlled by a few people. Of course they try everything to say bad things about Elon now...it's funny to see actually.

Love to see somebody use the word cancelled, because it means absolutely nothing.

Louie CK jerked off in front of women, got cancelled and got a Grammy last year. He's still wealthy and does shows. So is Kanye. Cancelling doesn't mean shit.

Ye got his deals with Adidas (and others) cancelled and Louie CK got a Netflix show and comedy tour cancelled. In both of your own examples "shit" happened.

Both still have profitable businesses and communication channels. Both are celebrities that still have large fanbases. If and when they end up poor and forgotten, then they'll be canceled, now they just lost the privilege of being promoted via some media channels.

I'm having a hard time defending wealth people who lost a Twitter account because they acted like dicks. Some of them literally.

There are certain swimmers who acted not too fairly in a swimming competition, but Twitter management was defending that person. I have no problem with that as it's all politics, I just prefer not having the same political side in all media.

There's a vast difference between defending them and saying their actions had no consequences. You seem to think that since they are not immediately forgotten, disowned by the public and de-celebrityfied, and plunged into poverty that nothing happened. That's not true, their actions did have consequences. You can not defend them while also acknowledging something did, in fact, happen when they were cancelled.

Sadly as the monetary system is getting more and more unfair and it's getting harder for people to survive, due process and respect of property and privacy rights are getting thrown out of the window.

I'm a benefitor from the low interest rate environment of the last decades (most of us in tech are), but I can understand the billions of people who haven't.

This is why so much hate is directed at Elon. His repeated success in different domains causes severe cognitive dissonance. It's an in your face painful reminder that success isn't entirely due to luck.

It's a lot easier to dismiss someone's success when it only happens once.

More like bewilderment on how many times someone can not deliver on promise yet still get people throwing money at them

Millions of electric cars, thousands of charging stations, thousands of powerwalls, thousands of Starlink satellites and re-usable rockets weren't delivered?

No one delivers 100%, but that's a historically exceptional track record.

Elon predicted in 2013 that Tesla would be shipping 500,000 cars a year by 2020. That was a crazy insane prediction that he delivered on, among many other similar predictions.

Nobody expects all predictions to come true -- professional futurists have a batting rate of about 10%.

I'm talking about stuff people preordered and still didn't got, not on his predictions.

Maybe people should stop preordering then. It's a dumb practice anyway, in any field, not just Teslas.

Musk failed at countless things. It's pure delusion to think that he has "repeated success in different domains."

Engineering.

Finance.

Management.

Electric cars.

Charging stations.

Satellites.

Reusable rockets.

Are you seriously listing things as vague as "engineering" and "management?"

He's the chief engineer of the leading space company and successfully manages thousands of employees across several companies. That's not vague.

He's not the lead engineer of anything and many companies manage thousands of employees.

> Starlink alone will make more money than twitter ever could.

Is there anything other than aspirational thinking behind this statement? Musk himself has said it's a cash incinerator - and that's by Musk standards (read: used to huge public subsidies and constant capital raises).

I came here for the Musk apologist fun and I wasn't disappointed.