I don't know about that.

I think he just approached Twitter like he approached building electric cars or rockets. The latter are both a series of (admittedly very hard) engineering and technical challenges to solve with few, if any, gnarly social or political issues to navigate other than those which inevitably arise in any growing or large company.

But Twitter is nothing like this: it's all about the people, the politics, the social aspects, and simply having an end goal in sight and pushing hard towards it isn't going to get you to where you want to go - in fact, where you want to go may not even be possible due to different cultural and legal constraints around the globe.

I don't know that I'd describe him as unprincipled, but he is perhaps quite naive along certain axes. I think this is actually relatively common amongst very successful people who haven't experienced that much in the way of substantial failure: they can be really bad at dealing with choppy waters when they arise (I've seen this from quite close quarters, as it happens) because it sort of deconstructs who they think they are. And you really only learn who you are when the going is tough.

The trouble with the learning-by-crashing strategy is that it worked great for rockets, OK for self-driving cars on closed tracks, and terribly for Twitter because Twitter has people "aboard".

Every time he tweaks the rules and "crashes" twitter, a bunch of people leave, build a new network elsewhere, and never come back. Or are permanently banned and can't appeal through the back channel like pg.

(edit: the @garius "trust thermocline" concept is a good elaboration https://twitter.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904 )

Oh, yeah, don't get me wrong: I'm giving my (unequivocally outsider's) perspective on how I think he fucked up, not excusing it.

Thanks for sharing. The "trust thermocline" was a good short read.

Tesla also got funded through zero-emissions vehicle credits so I'd say the problem is always political. Same for the Staged combustion cycle engines, wouldn't it been for the US gov access to the N1 descendants I seriously doubt they'd been able to make such a progress.

Not sure why it should be different for a company like Twitter dependant on global access.

Sure, but getting those credits entails a much smaller group of people to avoid pissing off, and a much smaller corpus of regulation to avoid falling foul of.

A much (much) larger proportion of the hard work with Tesla was on vehicle development. Just look at the story of the development of the original roadster, which started out in concept as a modified Lotus Elise, but ended up being basically a completely reengineered car, and the reengineering was made that much more difficult by starting from an existing platform rather than from scratch with a clean slate.

With Twitter you have a clumsily handled set of layoffs, with lots of talk about Musk wanting to see code samples from engineers (and frankly way too much talk about Twitter's engineering in general), carried out in front of an already more-politicised-than-the-general-population userbase, features retired, introduced, withdrawn, etc., and in general lots of thrashing around. And all of this in view of an entire audience with a greater-than-the-general-population bias towards kicking off and taking matters viral.

Tesla started small: Twitter was already (relatively) a giant company with thousands of employees. It's just a fundamentally less "make it soable" situation than a small, primarily engineering focussed, car startup.

Given he was forced to follow up on the deal or face a market manipulation lawsuit, my personal opinion is that Musk wanted to work directly hands-on on Twitter's direction, overestimating his knowledge and know-how from the early dotcom. Given thefame he got from SpaceX and Tesla he seems to have fallen victim of his own illusory superiority. It's just a website right? For the matter I really have my doubts of him being able to personally code review a modern complex stack).

This is the only difference I spot, meaning no one was oversighting his internal management of the company. His inputs went live into operations as if they were tweets.

Yeah, I think we're probably in agreement for the most part. From both points of view he overvalued his prior experience, and the skills gained, in a scenario with which he was unfamiliar.

P: He has no morals and no principles.

> I think he just approached Twitter like he approached building electric cars

aren't tesla systematically overconfidently marketed self-driving car capabilities which caused fatalities proving P's point?

If the standard were "It caused a fatality, shut it down," nothing would ever get built. This came up as a human rights issue with the World Cup, but if you're uncomfortable with that, wait until you see how many deaths happened constructing the Empire State Building. You can certainly call Musk overconfident, but "People died. DIED," isn't a strong argument.

I get your point but ... isn't "people died" pretty much the strongest argument at all practically possible? Think about it

Human life is the most important thing in the world. Wouldn’t you agree when it comes to your family?