He drank his own cool aid.
Denpok: *gulp* ... no.
Gavin Belson: Thank you Denpok. I really needed to hear that.
I feel like "Sapiens" and Eckhart Tolle cover a large percentage of what he's saying (though admittedly I haven't checked out his latest musings). I wonder if anyone's crowd-sourced a "top 5" of what the underlying worthwhile books to read would be.
Some brief searching turned up this "reading list," [1] though it looks a lot like one of those book-lists people make to show how they smart they are.
[1]: https://www.kevinrooke.com/book-recommendations/naval-ravika...
This is an actual question, I don't know the answer, but it does seem extremely unlikely to me that this would be the case.
No of course not. Philosophy is a progression of original insights built upon the prior progression of original insights. But the key word here is "original", aka a leap of intuition that reveals something about existence not previously recognized. Not regurgitated, un-credited, pop-philosophy.
Yes-men: Oh, yes, sure, etc.
Smithers: Right on, sir.
Several times?
Oscar Wilde wrote: “To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”
Something of the kind, with an opposite sign, could be said for repeated business success. And in this case it's more than 2 times, and not just some small successess either.
Isn't it more like "He's idiosyncratic and often erratic and/or has political views I don't like" that people translate to an absurd "he has no business talent"?
He's a talented motivational speaker, he can inspire as a leader, he can paint a vivid future of great accomplishments , not in the least bolstered by his extreme confidence of expertise and knowledge (often not actualized). Everything he talks about is at least about the entire planet, sometimes multiple planets, and with xAI even for understanding the entire Universe, and this helps him attract two key resources:
- Capital.
- Talent.
And then when he puts talent and capital together... yes he got lucky couple of times. But he's always been a terrible manager and this is visible not just with Twitter.
He IS? In what contexts? Because every time I see him speak, it's painful. His delivery is so stilted/awkward, that I think he's one of the worst speakers I've ever seen.
We're ready to forgive a lot if we suspect behind the awkwardness hides a genius. The trope of the distracted professor, the autistic savant is at least centuries old. He leans into every such trope, and he's very careful in cultivating an image of a "founder", of an "inventor" of an "engineer". Most people by now know he hasn't founded Tesla, or PayPal (was fired from it in fact), he hasn't engineered the SpaceX rockets (although he had a hand in those that blew up), and he in fact has no engineering degree despite claiming otherwise.
So I'd say all this means he's building this image very intentionally, and he's trying to turn his weaknesses into strengths. The more he stutters and repeats, the less we notice how much of what he says is kinda... vapid. Trump has some similar patterns by the way, you can ask him a specific question and he'll say he has great ways of answering that, some of the best people told him he has the best answers, his history of a businessman speaks about long experience providing great answers to all kinds of questions... and he won't answer your question in the end.
Trump and Musk are very different in some ways, but very similar in others.
From that point on we have a choice. Accept increasing chaos and corruption, or build up the missing guardrails we thought were there. However, from what I see, things aren't going strongly in the right direction as I see it, so far...
A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.
Exactly. A significant number of people want to see "Iron Man" in him or that he is playing 5D chess and they will fill the gaps to rationalize that image they have made of him.
"I alone can fix it"
I’m wondering if my experience was only my experience, was Elon Musk surrounded by good marketers who made sure the right things were said 10 years ago but he somehow lost them along the way? Because he is definitely not the man with the mystique he used to have for me.
It's a bit like how in Big Brother and other reality shows people first try to show their best side, to show restraint. But over time, and with stress, despite all the cameras, despite the knowledge the world watches, you slowly revert to being yourself.
Hah, I'd never have considered the parallels between Big Brother and Twitter before but you're spot on here - even more so when you consider the existence of Celebrity Big Brother showing that celebrities are - of course - people who act like people do. Musk isn't the only famous person who's been unable to stop revealing who they are on Twitter, but he's certainly the one who's taken it the farthest.
So someone can be very effective and charismatic while turning off a non-trivial percentage of the people: I've seen this in company executives a whole lot. The people that dislike the CEO will bounce quick, and in the end you end up with a workforce that is very loyal, via self-selection.
So is he a talented speaker? Just by by how many people react well to him, the answer is yes, regardless of how well he might convince you or me.
If anything it just shows he has enough money that it’s okay when some of his extremely ambitious projects fail. A less wealthy person couldn’t even attempt any of what he does much less fail as often and as publicly as he has. Elizabeth Holmes went to prison, for example.
One could say similar things for other well succesful businessmen:
Remember NeXT? Remember he got kicked out of Apple? Remember the G4 Cube? Remember MobileMe? Remember Ping?
He got that very reliably. When that kind of work aligned with success, he was successful.
Your rebuttal doesn't really make sense. Only NeXT and getting ousted from Apple were personal events for Steve Jobs. MobileMe (now iCloud), the G4 Cube, and Ping were all initiatives of Apple as a company which was far more people than just Steve Jobs.
Just saying. Overall I certainly think Steve Jobs was anything but a failure.
Wasn't that the computer that the first web browser and web server were developed for and on? And a bunch of famous video games were developed on it? It was never a consumer computer company, but for its niche it was pretty successful.
If somebody wrote the "first web browser" on BeOS it make it any less of a failure as a business venture.
Maybe if Tim Berners-Lee had, BeOS wouldn't have been a business failure. Or at least successful enough to be purchased for $400 million?
Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW, and wrote the first server and browser while working for CERN.
You mean the basis for Mac OS X?
> Remember he got kicked out of Apple?
You mean by John Sculley, who basically nobody remembers as having been associated with Apple? And then how Steve Jobs came back to Apple and led it through most of its golden years?
> Remember the G4 Cube?
You mean the spiritual predecessor to not only the Mac Mini, but the Intel NUC and other small form factor computing platforms? A platform that only suffered from the failing of being before its time, rather than a fundamental design flaw?
> Remember MobileMe?
The service that eventually transmogrified into iCloud, which, if not a driving force, can hardly be considered a minor player on the Internet today, if for no other reason than the number of @icloud.com email addresses?
> Remember Ping?
No, I honestly don't, but hey, not every idea can be a winner. At least Steve Jobs' bad ideas failed quietly. Compare and contrast to some of Elongated Muskrat's more… questionable business decisions, like buying Twitter for $420.69 per share just for the lulz.
I mean the company and OS that failed to leave to Jobs expectations, company pivoted to sell the OS on PCs, failed on that too, and was only spared bunkruptcy because Apple was desperate for an OS and Jobs.
The rest is meaningless retorts in the same vain, when all of the above are failed projects associated with Jobs, just like Musk has his own, which was the point.
My point is that when you put Musk among the pantheon of Silicon Valley CEOs, he doesn’t especially stand out for anything except being lucky. Compare him to Bill Gates, who, for better or for worse, revolutionized computing? Or Larry Ellison, who has somehow despite the odds miraculously managed to keep Oracle afloat and somewhat relevant for decades—no mean feat indeed?
Elon seems to be little more than a charming, lucky idiot. Make no mistake, charm and luck will take you far, but only so far. Sooner or later, one or the other will run out, and for Elon, it seems like he has depleted both resources at this point.
Not back then, he wasn't. The release of the Lisa was a colossal egotistical failure for Jobs, and proved that Woz should have been heading-up his products. Instead of giving Woz a bonus for his success or elevating him for practically saving Apple Computers, Jobs used this as the reason to leave Apple altogether.
> If anything, getting fired from Apple was ultimately a triumph for Steve Jobs, given the benefit of hindsight.
From a business perspective, it was a literal temper-tantrum.
This is selling him too short. He's also a sort of cult leader, one who keeps an eye out for who his next population of acolytes will be.
I'm not sure how one can consider Larry Ellison more savvy and impactful than Musk.
What was meant to be an affordable alternative to the Apple II, became under Job's supervision a method to take control of the Apple line of computers. He ended up making a less feature-rich Apple II, which rivaled it in price, killing the idea that the computer could compete with other cheaper computers on the market.
All to stroke his own ego.
$1,298 for the Apple II $2,495 for the Macintosh
It completely destroyed the progress they'd made. Jobs took this project opportunistically at a time when Steve Wozniak was recovering from a plane crash. If he'd approached the project more strategically, it could have positioned Apple to take a place in the market share of cheaper PC's of the time.
You mean NeXT, the company he sold back to Apple for $400 million dollars?
I would argue that the majority of design flops from Apple in the past twenty years were more Jony Ive than Steve Jobs, based on history and design style. That said yeah not every idea the man had was rock solid, but comparing Steve Jobs to Elon Musk is laughable.
Elon was wealthier than 95% of the people in the United States, the second he was born. He's been playing with a stacked deck this whole time.
Whenever someone says "oh so-and-so is so successful" only two questions enter my mind:
1. where did they start? 2. how much help did they get along the way?
I would argue that in Elon's case he's been successful despite himself.
So like 16,595,000 other US citizens?
I think it's weird to compare failed products within a company (and minor products at that) to failed companies. I think you may have not even listed some of the more notable ones (The Apple LISA, the iPod HiFi). But he wasn't betting the company on the Cube, or MobileMe, or even Ping. These were low-stakes (and arguably low effort) bets taken within a company that was simultaneously having insane success in other departments. The G4 Cube came out between the iMac and the iPod (2 years after the iMac, 1 year before the iPod). That seems like a damn good product-line, and if you could choose any one to miss on, it'd be the niche prosumer device, not the two consumer devices.
> Remember NeXT? > Remember he got kicked out of Apple?
These could be interpreted either way. It seems all part of the larger "Apple story arc", and more comparable to Tesla's shaky middle period, than as binary successes and failures void of any surrounding context. However, I do mean that it could go either way. I wouldn't fault someone as judging them as true failures separate from the later Apple success.
An idea, not a company
> Remember boring company?
Still a company.
> Remember solar city?
Acquired by Tesla, who remains a major supplier of residential solar panels.
Which is typical Musk conduct: he lies a lot, people believe him, and he somehow makes it through until the lies do not matter any more. See robotaxis, self driving, etc.
==Acquired by Tesla, who remains a major supplier of residential solar panels.==
Tesla bought Solar City for $2.6 billion in 2016. In 2019, they targeted 1,000 installations a week. In 7 years, Tesla has installed a total of 3,000 solar systems, getting to about 20 installations a week. Add in the fact that he purchased the company from his own cousins and the story looks worse. [1]
==Still a company.==
It is still an existing company, but that doesn't make it a success. Founded 7 years ago, has built one actively used tunnel. They also had to change the entire idea (it's actually just Teslas driving underground).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thud_(media_company)
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/30/tesla-has-installed-3000-sol...
GP was merely trying to dunk on Musk and didn't have a real argument.
I'm very aware of Musk's failures. Heck, they are the very things that define his companies and enable their successes. Every rocket explosion was a failure on the road to success. Every over-promise drives his people to work that much harder.
But you want to dunk on Musk a little more, fine, let's get this out of the way. (Not a comprehensive list.)
Bad:
- Twitter looks like a bad deal (so far), and is a public opinion disaster
- FSD did not deliver the promised value to its original customers (future remains to be seen)
- Boring has under-delivered and is not growing explosively (but they are still in business)
- His general skepticism of any COVID precautions (I think his entrepreneurial bias is behind this)
Worse:
- The handling of the cave rescue aftermath
Arguable:
- His political statements
- Twitter layoffs
- Personal life stuff (not really our business)
- Work-at-home policies (his track record says he knows what he is doing here)
There. Can we pin these somewhere so we don't have to keep hijacking every Elon post with these "revelations"?
If he’s lost his own money on stupid projects, that’s fine ? Hitting it for six once an over is still a good innings…
He can keep throwing darts at the board as long as he maintains his ability to rope other rich people into his delusional self-confidence. Twitter might just be what breaks the spell.
Failure is precisely how we learn. To be afraid to fail does not lead to success.
With such a large population, we expect some people to just be stupidly lucky many times in a row, right? Especially since they aren't really independent events - if you get a lucky break, it keeps you in the game longer, making your second break more likely.
And it would make sense that the lucky outliers would be some of the wealthiest, right?
No, that's not how business work. This is not coin-tossing, the "being lucky" includes attracting VCs and investments, building a good image, picking a good niche, delivering, getting buyers, and several other things besides.
You can get lucky with one of those, but not all of those, and several independent times.
Else skill doesn't mean anything, and you could make the same argument for any human venture.
Which is to say, don't think in terms of inviolable rules - that's useful for engineering the system, but can sabotage your ability to understand the system - and think instead in terms of what is possible and at what rate you expect it to happen. Then try multiplying that by 8 billion.
> Else skill doesn't mean anything
Skill matters, it just isn't the only factor.
> You could make the same argument for any human venture.
Luck profoundly effects every aspect of our lives, yeah.
Think about, say, professional gamers. Are they skilled? Doubtless. May the winner of a match be decided by the RNG? Definitely. If we're talking about a tournament of the best players, they're going to be pretty evenly matched, and it becomes pretty likely that luck will determine the winner.
Notice that the above have nothing to with statistics. It's just handwaving based on the "with 8 billion people trying, anything is possible".
>Think about, say, professional gamers. Are they skilled? Doubtless. May the winner of a match be decided by the RNG? Definitely. If we're talking about a tournament of the best players, they're going to be pretty evenly matched, and it becomes pretty likely that luck will determine the winner.
That has already shifted the goalposts, to "luck among the best players" as opposed to "he just got lucky".
I was suggesting a thought experiment. I thought the way you were approaching this was rigid, I was encouraging you to see this as more of a scientific phenomenon than something rote.
It was just a suggestion, it's your business if you don't wanna take it.
> That has already shifted the goalposts...
Just trying to give you an example where both luck and skill matter. No goalposts were moved. I was responding to your objection, wherein the goalpost was, "does the existence of luck imply the nonimportance of skill?"
The point that you are missing is that these are not only not independent times, but in fact extremely highly correlated. Especially for someone who already comes from an extremely wealthy background and has social connections to other wealthy elites.
It’s not exactly rocket science to employ smart people.
This is a ridiculous statement if you've ever run a company. "Just hire smart people and your company will be successful!"
Great, glad you cracked the code.
HN is trully a trove of business wisdom!
To employ, no, but to get a stream of important innovations out of them, that might actually be harder than rocket science.
The vast majority of smart people around the world are stuck in mediocre jobs. Hotspots of technical productivity like Bell Labs or SpaceX or NASA of the 1960s are pretty rare and rarely last for more than approximately a generation.
How to get smart people to be actually scientifically productive is a major question of history.
An example: 100 years ago, several very important innovators like von Neumann were Hungarians; nowadays, Hungary is a scientific backwater. (With the exception of Katalin Karikó, the mRNA lady.)
Oh, but it is based on how hard it is for corporate America to even accept such a notion without going for 'egghead' in their internal vocabulary.
I think I disagree.
With enough people in the world, someone will eventually get lucky in several improbable ways and may look like a genius thanks to survivorship bias.
I'm not saying Musk is that, but maybe his primary talent is risk-taking and fundraising rather than product innovation.
Still takes some skill, I don't doubt that. But the main ingredient is risk.
I'm also pretty sure with his first company sale he made much more money than his family ever had to begin with.
Because of the rarity of multi-billion dollar companies it makes more sense to flip the question - what are the demographics of those who found those companies?
If the odds of doing something are 1:100 who is going to have better odds at succeeding - the person who gets 1 throw or 10 throws? Neither are guaranteed to succeed, but they both have a chance and one is much more likely than the other. That's what's at play here.
Of course there’s also hereditary factors at play that people like to ignore.
Well, this is why we have to look at the numbers. And it depends on the odds. If it's one in a billion and the rich get ten million throws and the poor get 1 each then the fact there are a lot of non-rich people isn't as impactful.
> Of course there’s also hereditary factors at play that people like to ignore.
Yes, like having cash to throw around and a safety net to rely on so that those shots can be taken as well as easier access to potentially important connections and resources.
> I'm also pretty sure with his first company sale he made much more money than his family ever had to begin with.
Well yeah. But he got there partly because he had some money to invest in the first place, and partly because he had useful connexions.
This hypothesis is somewhat testable statistically.
There are approximately 25 thousand people worth 100 million dollars+ in the world, with more than a third of that number residing in the US. [0] I think we can safely say that people worth 100 million and more are rich.
If it is easy to get lucky several times with a rich family, you would expect some nontrivial share of Musk equivalents among them or their kids. Say, two hundred?
Not observed. Either the willingness to risk own money in engineering startups is < 1 per cent among those, or it is not that easy.
[0] https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/money/2022/10/18/us...
Maybe? The thing about having a rich family is... you're already rich.
That removes one of the prime motivations to take serious risks, of the sort that paid off for Musk; namely, to become rich.
I'm sure you get a lot of people who invest, or toss some money into this or that.
But I'd be surprised if a significant number invested their entire net worth and time into a single endeavor.
AFAIK Musk was a relative nobody in the millionaire world when he poured a majority of his wealth into SpaceX (2002). They were very close to bankruptcy during the Falcon 1 experiments and if the fourth launch failed, they would have joined a fairly extensive graveyard of defunct space startups, together with Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace and a few hundred others.
Then $100M went to found SpaceX.
But that does seem like a very large bet that millionaires don't often make.
Smart people, who are cutthroat, and who are driven/motivated have a much higher chance of success if they start out rich than those who don’t.
I get the argument and it has certain logic in it, but surely they all cannot be 100 per cent lazy. And if the non-lazy ones have it relatively easy to succeed, we should see a lot of successes from that cohort, even if they are in a minority compared to their lazy peers.
I don't know if Musk's success is down to luck or not, but to answer your implied question of "Do you really think it could be luck to succeed on several different occasions?" the answer is yes. To suggest otherwise would be falling for the old "it's been heads 9 times in a row, it must be tails next" gambler's fallacy. Someone could succeed in building billion dollar companies largely on luck many of times in a row. It's very unlikely, but it's not impossible, at least as far as any company's success is down to the luck of the founders.
Get one coin flip right => get 10 flips for free.
I don't think you understand how this fallacy (and logic ) works. This is only a fallacy because the coin toss events are trivially expected (and assumed) to be independent chance events in the first place.
Business success are not supposed to be independent like that, unless you take for granted what you're supposed to prove.
And to do that, you'd have to ignore some pretty big factors different to coin tosses, like the continuity of an agent making business decisions, their promotional and organizational skills, their connections, their reputation with VCs and the press, past performance as part of their image, their experience, and several other factors besides, which makes repeated business successes nothing like independent coin tosses.
I don't think you understand how similes work.
There's no way to really know what extent luck is involved when a business succeeds, but it's probably not zero. It's entirely reasonable to suggest Musk has been lucky many times over. That doesn't mean he'll be lucky again, nor does it mean the lucky events he's had so far have been trivial. Believing that Musk will (or won't if you're not a fan) be lucky again in his next business because things will fall in Musk's favor again is the gambler's fallacy - the belief that past events influence future events. No doubt the things Musk can influence will go his way, but there will be things outside of his control that he might not be so lucky with. Even big, important things. Nothing about the gambler's fallacy says anything about how trivial or otherwise the lucky events are.
There's no fallacy here either, the implication is he was repeatedly successful due to his business skills, not luck, which he can be reasonably expected to apply to his future ventures.
To suggest otherwise would be falling for the old HN 'but technically' fallacy.
Yes. @notacoward had a perfect comment about this a few years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076
The argument was that Musk was just a lucky incompetent person, not that he was skilled but "only" among a "limited" ten million plus people in the US alone starting at the same wealth levels...
Or you still mean the first, that those say, 10 million Americans at similar wealth starting points had the chance to throw their darts, and Musk just happened by chance to hit bullseye on a major company sale/exit/buildup 4 or more times in a row, including turning out the richest man in the world by mere lucky darting?
That wasn't the argument. The argument was about luck, not competence
> Or you still mean the first, that those say, 10 million Americans at similar wealth
You're assuming all those wealthy Americans decided to throw darts, or threw the same amount of darts. They did not.
If you follow his successes, you can see a repeated cycle: "invested millions or billions of his own money, kept the company afloat for years". You don't get to do that on competence alone.
All of his companies were on the verge of bankrupcy at one point. And lookey lookey, on "competence alone" NASA awards SpaceX a 1.6 billion dollar contract after a single successful launch (after three failed attempts).
As an aside, "Griffin later estimated that SpaceX was around 85% funded by the federal government, mostly through his NASA awards, with the remaining 15% funding split between Elon Musk and other private investors".
Same for Tesla. It existed for 7 years before it delivered its first car. And even by then it was at least 70 million of Musk's own money. And then a huge infusion of government money.
SolarCity. Failed, and bought with Tesla's money.
Neuralink. No idea if it's a failure yet, exists due to Musk's money.
BoringCompany. A non-entity that existed only because of Musk's money, and then due to unlimited investor money (what the US mistakes for "innovation"). It really exists only due to anti-public-transportation lobbying.
And so on.
He exemplifies the quote I posted.
Yes ? Not only there is no reason for it not to be the case ( it's not like rolling 6 two times in a row is impossible... ) but anyway once you've achieved your first success it's easier to buy the next ones.
People that are wealthy very very very very often, fail upwards.
Say there are million people with 1 million to invest.
Then 1/100 chance to get lucky. Do it 3 times (1/100)^3?
Maybe the general idea was nor bad and he got lucky in recruitment? Recruiting young people believing in his idea and getting overworked to reach them?
It’s easier to do when you can be bailed out by friends and family after the first failure, compared to people who end up sleeping on the street. Considering that even succeeding once is a rare event, it is not that surprising that the final population is heavily skewed.
> Maybe the general idea was nor bad and he got lucky in recruitment? Recruiting young people believing in his idea and getting overworked to reach them?
There is certainly a bit of that. And to be fair, it is the best strategy: a single human has only so much bandwidth them handling all the aspects of a large-ish company is a recipe for disaster. Not to mention, a single point of failure, so the company’s dead the moment anything happens to them. It’s been the same with Jobs, one of his talents was to hire the right people.
Yes. Capital tends to make it easier on each iteration.
If people had issues before twitter, then fine.
After, it just means you would do well in a fascist / Marxist society where the government controls all speech.
Well, the fact that he said a whole bunch of things about free speech, and proceeded to walk all of them back in short order—while still claiming to be a staunch supporter of free speech—probably pissed off a lot of people.
Seems to me like you’re just taking a known liar’s words at face value.
Also being able to pay to make your speech more visible isn't what most people have in mind when they think of "free speech absolutism"
[1] Company with $15 million revenue in 2008 gets $465 million "loan" in 2009, https://techcrunch.com/2009/06/23/the-government-comes-throu... https://www.statista.com/statistics/272120/revenue-of-tesla Of course, Ford got $5.9 billion bailout, because capitalism is the lie profiteers tell to the wage slaves as they privatize profits while socializing losses.
[1] "the U.S. Secretary of Energy will be giving details about the first loans to come out of the government’s $25 billion program to help auto manufacturers. Ford got a $5.9 billion loan, but Tesla Motors, Silicon Valley’s electric car manufacturer, is receiving $465 million from the program"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Icon:_Alan_Mulally_...
That's the joke in the end: there are no companies (and there is no government), just a bunch of chaebols [2], at least South Koreans don't lie to themselves.
[1] "Ford previously took out a $5.9 billion loan under the program in 2009. That loan was fully repaid as of last year (2022), according to the DoE. [3]", https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/22/business/ford-department-...
There is nothing loan-like in government "loans" (of 2008, or of 2021, see the PPP heist [2]) almost by definition: no interest, no shares changing hands, not even a share buyback restriction (how most of the government loans are spent anyway).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKYEUXlYcSI
[2] "How Did PPP Scammers Steal $100+ Billion", https://www.aura.com/learn/ppp-loan-fraud
He has a talent: self-promotion.
People can't wrap their heads around the idea that someone can be simultaneously a genius and an idiot. In the real world this is very common.
I like to put it this way: how many musicians do you like who are geniuses at composition, drums, guitar, vocals, or some other musical skill but are absolutely intolerable assholes and/or complete lunatics in the rest of their lives? Can you still enjoy their music? Does their music cease to be good when you learn about their personality flaws?
IMHO much of Elon's success can be attributed to two things:
(1) He is at least a good enough engineer or has good enough "engineers' intuition" to hire people who know what they are talking about and get them working on the right things. He seems much stronger in physical areas like rockets can cars though, not software.
(2) He doesn't listen to pessimists and nihilists who say things are impossible if, when reasoning from first principles, they can be shown to be quite possible. Example: ignoring people who said you can't land a rocket or that an EV could never do well in the market. Ignoring pessimism can be a superpower.
I do think Elon shows signs of chronic burnout at this point. The far-right / conspiranoid brain worm infection he's developed is IMHO a symptom. Opportunistic infections take hold when the immune system is weak.
It's true, lots of people did fall for his Tony Stark act, but the past year has really opened people's eyes to the fact that it was all narcissism. The signs were there long before, but they were easy to ignore in light of the success of innovative companies like Tesla and SpaceX. But now people are wondering whether the success of those companies was really because of him, or that we was just there to provide the money and bask in the glory.
The "raising money" part is the inarguably most important part of any startup. Given enough money, you can ride through absolutely anything - and the kind of projects that Musk provided with money always need a crapton of them: Tesla to even have a tiny chance at surviving against the established behemoths, and SpaceX because (prior to them) spaceflight was something for rich developed nation states only.
Basically, they had other people to help guide it vs just Musk doing it himself.
That myth (or rather propaganda) that they are some übermensch that work more than you could ever imagine and are so productive and it’s all thanks to the magic of powernaps or whatever bullshit they make up to sell you the temporarily embarrassed billionaire tale is thoroughly debunked. They are ordinary people who got into a very lucky situation and didn’t fuck up too bad.
Bro, do you even HN? That's like the gospel here...
Lmfao your opinion is literally the popular opinion on this site. Talk of bubbles within bubbles within bubbles!
Note I am guilty of using that qualifier once or twice prior to stating a popular opinion on HN...
Just leave that sentence out. It adds nothing to the discussion.
He's playing with his own money, no different than Bezos losing money and 500K subs on the WaPo.
Real stellar performance.
An actual unpopular opinion would be that Elon Musk exposed that twitter has a problem with free speech before he took over and that twitter largely worked in cahoots with the US Democratic party.
I don't think the rebrand to "X" is a good idea however.
Edit: indeed, this post is getting heavily downvoted.
I noticed that Musk became unpopular here right after the media and social media turned on him. It's disappointing that even top-tier intelligent people don't usually think for themselves.
And in fact this X.com renaming sounds like him dealing with personal baggage and vendettas from back then.
Basically the opposite of the stoic and calculating personality one expects a giant of capitalism to be.
So I actually just wonder if it's more than there was a 10 year period of Musk... getting lucky... by surrounding himself with some competence. That, and the investing world after 2008, with its intensely low interest rates and high tech-sector profits made it easy to "swim naked."
The efforts of a narcissistic showman Dunning-Kruger personality like Musk... are a great place to dump your money as long as you're not the last one holding the bag when shit hits the fan (aka Twitter).
That doesn't really mean he is a genius at business, just that he is really good at pitching his vision and getting people excited about it.
It’s more recent. The Sacks-Chamatch-Calacanis axis didn’t go into gear until Covid. Somewhere between the election of Trump and lockdown, the rot set in. That suggests it’s still excusable.
Musk's success in Zip2 and X.com was mostly realizing there was a market opportunity and working long hours personally on the code to get the sites up and running.
With SpaceX and Telsa mostly his value-add has been looking at things and saying "This isn't elegantly designed enough" sort of like Steve Jobs but for internals. And he seems to be right often enough to be successful.
But he seems to think that he has this ability for software engineering and user interfaces too, but he doesn't. Which is why he was canned at PayPal and why he's making such a mess of Twitter.
All people are composed of both strengths and weaknesses. The important part is finding a position which plays to your strenths. Sadly, I think critical introspection is a strength that Elon doesn't possess.
He absolutely does. We’ve seen it in his prior reversals, when fortunes at his firms were down and he changed course savvily. The sycophants he’s surrounded himself with, namely, Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks, do not. And that’s rubbing off on him.
“Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” - Andy Warhol
Shouldn't a person with a high ability for critical introspection be impervious to and deeply suspicious of the influences of sycophants?
More like when he gets called out on his lies and abuse, he buries what he previously said. When was the last time he talked about Hyperloop? Did he ever apologize to the person he accused of being a pedo? Robotaxis?
He lies to pump his stock or ego, then hopes people forget what he said. That’s not “savvy”, it’s just sleazy.
That wasn't his value add for either case. In both situations he brought together teams of extremely passionate and talented individuals and gave them a greenlight to employ a "move fast and break things" mindset that they otherwise couldn't in extremely conservative industries. Elon didn't send people back to the drawing board because he had some vision of a more elegant solution, they went back to the drawing board after the most recent iteration exploded.
With SpaceX and Tesla, I'm not as sure about the facts - I believe there is / was a strong component of "Jobs", but also (especially at Tesla), plenty of pissing engineers off with really BAD proposed solutions. I.e., plenty of "thinking differently" (which can be very valuable, and Musk has had some notable successes here and there), but not enough "filter".
I would say, though, that as his value** has fluctuated on the technical side (and, I personally have the sense has likely never been that high), he did build some real strength in "branding" and selling / marketing. He created / built a personal brand, especially, that was quite important in raising money / funding for R&D etc. at SpaceX and Tesla, especially.
Ultimately, his arc is ... an archetype. His arc is a great example of a pattern that is seen frequently (enough) among ambitious people who become very successful through drive, risk-taking / (some degree of) unconventional thinking, etc. You see this with people like George Lucas, and part of it is the "yes men" trope alluded to in another comment.
Basically, early in their careers, their impulses and "visions" and the like are tempered by others and organizational structures of various types. This tempering is a key additional filter which helps keep their creativity and problem-solving skills etc. more focused / ~"pointed in the right direction". But, over time, they gain more and more power - more and more freedom to do what they want, to not have to listen to anyone else. The decline in quality / success / etc. of their projects and companies seems to very closely mirror the degree to which they are unfiltered / unconstrained / no longer (so) dependent on others.
Basically, classic human "ego stories" (that don't necessarily depend on "big ego", but even the simple blindness of "ego" we all have) recognized and well-explored by the Ancient Greeks, in particular (e.g., "Icarus", "Odysseus", etc.).
* Not really pertinent / germane to this discussion
** To the degree I have any ability to judge, particularly as regards actual knowledge of much of this history (similar to the vast majority of people)
I find that many many people in software think they have a knack for thinking what is a good user interface, even though they are just users and not experts in the field.
Success at that level is dangerous.
Oh come on.
At best, it's hard to take someone seriously when they intentionally lie about the obvious. At worst, it makes it seem like you are part of a pr campaign.
Can you point to a post where you were savagely downvoted for criticizing elon and anything having to do with twitter? I genuinely interested. Maybe your experience on hn is different from everyone else's.
I see more people complaining about hidden posts than hidden posts (which I do read every time, and I have seen once or twice a hidden post that should not have been). It’s difficult to take seriously people banging on about a down-voting cabal being after them because they’re so edgy and right.
Then he slowed down once his companies got big-enough and stable-enough to run themselves. His transphobia (combined with his hatred of the COVID policies that were hurting his bottom line) led him down the worst internet rabbit-holes and now he's off the deep end.
Make it look like a business... "accident", publicly say twitter actually never had a chance to get out of debt, Sell the assets, refinance the whole thing at a fraction of the original buyout price, threw a few millions to the creditors and get away with the whole thing.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/876661/0000876661220...
> The merger between Twitter, Inc. and X Holdings II, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of X Holdings I, Inc., wholly owned by Elon R. Musk became effective on October 27, 2022. Each share of Twitter, Inc. Common Stock was exchanged for USD 54.20 in cash, without interest and less any applicable withholding taxes.
And if you think he is smart, think again. He tried to "smartly" get off the deal but the other party was smarter. He is clearly not the smartest man in the room.
Boring Company / Hyperloop existed mainly to stop California from building their own high speed rail, and The Tesla Truck existed mainly to rebuild hype around the Tesla brand at the time, and it's probably never going to go into production. Both were "built to fail".
Once he realized that he couldn't get out of buying Twitter, I believe he's trying to apply the same script to make sure the loss is way smaller than 44 billion dollars.
Regardless of whether "truck" here refers to the Cybertruck (https://www.tesla.com/cybertruck, for which you can place an order) or the Semi (https://www.tesla.com/semi), are you really suggesting it is just fake and there's nobody working on these vehicles?
I will throw in the new Roadster (https://www.tesla.com/roadster) for good measure too.
Also, I wouldn't call it fake outright. Something more along the lines of the Lamborghini Huracán Sterrato[1] or the Porsche 911 Dakar[2] - which are like... yep, they're real cars, but it's more of a limited run branding exercise than an actual vehicles range.
[1]https://www.lamborghini.com/it-en/modelli/huracan/huracan-st...
[2]https://www.porsche.com/international/models/911/911-dakar/9...
Well, the other party sold their company to Elon Musk to run into the ground, so smarter isn't quite the word I'd use for them, either.
Yeah, I get that, but in doing so destroyed a thing that lots of people found value in. So yeah, they made more money than the thing was worth, great business decision, but I'm not willing to award "this nice thing is worth more as scrap than it is on its own right now" as being called "smart".
> X.com is an online payment company founded by Elon Musk and Harris Fricker in 1999. In March 2000, X.com was acquired by Confinity, which had a money-transfer service called PayPal. Later, X.com was renamed PayPal, and under Elon Musk's leadership, it became the world's leading online payment platform.
> In 2015, X.com was sold to PayPal and Elon Musk bought it back in 2017. As of now, if you visit the site, it simply shows a single, lowercase "x" on the page. Elon Musk hasn't announced any public plans for the website.
I just don't have any words.
What are you talking about? There has been more change at Twitter in the last year than in the last ten. From editable comments, subscriptions, revenue sharing, blue checkmark for sale, alternative check marks for govts and org, culling of old accounts, API restrictions, forcing people to put parody in acct. I noticed a lot less spam as well. A year and a half ago I remember every top reply being crypto scams from fake vitalik accounts
I get you prob don't like the guy but saying the product is unchanged is just delusional. Maybe some of the changes are worse but there have been a lot of changes
I'm sure there's more. I stopped using the service because it was never great but now it's one of the worst properties on the internet.
Almost surprisingly, blocking him does still appear to work. Though it will sometimes have him in the list of suggestions to follow, even if you've blocked him...
* everyone's DM settings got changed to only allow DMs from blue checkmarks/Musk sycophants
* There are now rate limits on DMs unless you pay for the checkmark
These changes of course are justified with spam reduction. IMO the best spam reduction would be to allow me to hide all tweets from people who pay for a checkmark and didn't have one pre-Musk
Alternative check marks and forcing people to put parody in the account were both caused by the idiotic decision to put blue checkmarks for sale. There's no need to conspicuously identify government/business accounts as "no really, this is for real" if you haven't completely devalued the "no really, this is for real" symbol of your platform. And there's no need to put "parody" on an Elon parody account if you can clearly see that it's not verified.
Are you saying that API restrictions is a good thing? You seem to be suggesting that, but I don't know why you'd feel that way. Revenue sharing just incentivizes inflammatory behavior, which is an obvious net-negative for the platform as a whole. Culling of old accounts is neutral at best.
And the DM spam problems were basically unchanged until just the past week when he forced everyone's DMs closed. He did manage to introduce new spam problems though, because now every large account's replies is full of the most braindead nonsense, just because the user paid $8. I'll gladly take crypto spam instead this.
Also, the text you quoted said "no product improvements", but you're saying that the product is not "unchanged". I agree the product has been changed, but I would agree with the GP's statement that there haven't been improvements.
As for revenue sharing, take musk out of the picture and if I were to ask about a social platform that is primarily supported by subscriptions and content generators get paid, you would be all for it. Do you apply the same criticism with YouTube sharing revenue?
Come on, I can't take you seriously for criticizing a social network for sharing revenue with creators. We're just so far apart on basic values nothing I can say could change your mind
The kind of toxicity and algorithmic pushing of content on Twitter isn't quite like other platforms. Users are regularly exposed to content from deliberately inflammatory users. Your timeline can be filled with retweets, suggested content, or replies to accounts you don't follow by accounts you do. Adding a monetary reward for being inflammatory before addressing the toxicity is the problem. Adding revenue share to Twitter is like throwing money into a mosh pit; it wasn't done thoughtfully enough to not make things worse.
If Musk wanted to expand revenue share, he could have done it in thoughtful ways. Expanding the subscriptions feature would have been a good start.
It looks like they're haven't got rid of the Tweet button yet. That's a powerful marketing verb. But now the platform is X and you still tweet? Seems like a mismash of the old and new brand.
You’re rebranding information from the article as your own speculation?
Twitter was first going to be a safe harbour for free speech. Then it was going to the launch site for De Santis' presidential campaign (ignoring the irony of championing politicians who can't sign censorious bills fast enough).
Now it'll be a payment platform? People don't want to come to Twitter to spend money, it's reality TV for the internet -- nobody's paying for that. It would be like purchasing a sports team, and setting up a credit card signup booth at the stadium.
You don't need to "speculate", because Musk has literally said this.
Musk is a business genius alright, but not what I would call a product genius like Jobs was.
True in the sense that it's made it worse. The "giant touchscreen and fewer knobs" UX sucks once the novelty wears off. Then there are things like the "yoke" and the retracting door handles...
I think many Tesla fans confuse novelty for improvement.
https://www.autoweek.com/news/industry-news/a44600661/is-tes...
Removing the tweet limit was a massive improvement (something I'd wanted for a decade). Showing view counts is also nice. I don't like the login-walls and selling blue checkmarks, but I understand that the company was financially struggling prior to Elon. In any case my impression has been that Twitter has improved more since Elon than prior to that. My Twitter usage is definitely higher than before, though admittedly that could be unrelated to Elon.
The essence of Twitter is precisely that the tweets are short, bite-sized thoughts. It's what drives interactions and engagement, removing the limit shows a lack of understanding of what makes Twitter Twitter. And I assume that most people aren't even using the limits even when they're paying Twitter blue, precisely because they know that it's not how you use Twitter.
> Showing view counts is also nice
I don't know if they have fixed this, but those view counts were fairly inaccurate.
> I don't like the login-walls and selling blue checkmarks, but I understand that the company was financially struggling prior to Elon.
The login walls and the blue checkmarks are again a massive mistake that is driving away brands and institutions from the site. Now their statements aren't visible to everyone, and people can't even be sure which one is the official account because the already existing symbol that said "this account is who they say they are" now just means "this account paid for Twitter".
Yea hard disagree there. I spend more time and get more value and depth from reading Twitter threads than random tweets. Twitter threads however are an abomination UI-wise and annoying to write. Longer tweets make more sense.
In any case if you prefer shorter content that's fine, but there's nothing to be gained by restricting content type. Give people freedom and let the users decide what they find worthwhile.
It's funny to me that everytime I'd mention increasing the tweet length all the replies I'd get would be people telling me I'm wrong and that Twitter should keep the same smaller character limit. It's like vocal people on the internet fear change.
> massive mistake
Whether it's a mistake comes down to how much revenue Twitter makes in blue checkmark fees vs. how much revenue they lost from advertisers bailing. I'd need to see some hard numbers on that before being able to call it a mistake.
From a user perspective however I don't care at all. If anything making that more egalitarian instead of some mythical status symbol makes more sense.
For the record I say all of this as someone who hasn't purchased a blue checkmark.
Well, as I already said what people find worthwhile is the shorter tweets, it's what generates more engagement. I do agree that one gets more value and depth from longer tweets, but Twitter isn't really a place for value and depth, but for shortness and content density. And also, while threads are not really the best UX, they have a very interesting advantage for Twitter: they allow users to engage and amplify the part they find the most interesting, and that drives more engagement than waiting for people to find the interesting part in a five paragraph-long tweet.
> Whether it's a mistake comes down to how much revenue Twitter makes in blue checkmark fees vs. how much revenue they lost from advertisers bailing. I'd need to see some hard numbers on that before being able to call it a mistake.
Well, we don't have the exact numbers but Elon Musk already said that ad revenue fell 50% and cash flow is negative. IIRC, Twitter was cash flow positive when he bought them if you didn't take into account some one-time expenses.
It wasn't. It's been profitable every quarter except 2 since late 2017.
Musk chose to load Twitter with massive debt when he bought it which is why it's now financially struggling after the buy out. That's not due to Twitter, that's due to Musk.
Musk's LBO of Twitter should not be expected to be going well.
"The character limit for subscribers in the U.S. is now 4,000—more than 14 times the existing 280-character limit, which remains in place for all non-subscribers and Twitter Blue users outside of the United States".
I wonder what the motivation is for making the service less useful for non-Americans.
"Restrict peoples' freedoms", good lord, as the kids say you might need to touch grass. What an absolutely absurd (and incorrect) thing to say. I just said I had never seen it, I didn't pass judgement for or against longer tweets. I think people that pay for that are silly but comparing that to restricting freedoms is just a new level of disconnected from reality.
What a strange limitation, if the character limit is a problem, won't that just drive away users who see the service as racist now?
I used Twitter for a decade, and frustration was the primary emotion associated with the service. I had about a thousand followers but barely any engagement to anything I ever posted. There was never any positive reinforcement to an insignificant little guy like myself.
I don't really see how longer tweets or view counts do anything to help with that fundamental problem. (View counts only make it more obvious that nobody cares about my tweets, which is presumably why Twitter had previously hidden them under the engagement metrics UI.)
It's a platform dominated by big accounts. As the owner of one of the biggest accounts on Twitter, Musk doesn't experience or see the problem and can't fix it.
People seem to have forgotten that social media is for friends. If you make friends on Twitter, they'll care about your content because they care about you.
If they were struggling before, they're circling the drain now.
Sure but Notes (long-form tweets) began public testing in June 2022, 4 months before he took over.
(at least that's my memory of it, admittedly it's been a while so could be off)
So he thought he is a genius and can make this one work too. He realized his mistake (tried to get off the deal) but when the deal stuck, he thought he could run this thing; and turn it over to a massive success.
His latest money (valuation) came from his Twitter pumping/dumping shitposting. That's why he wanted to have Twitter and that's what he is doing with Twitter right now. He is obviously burning Twitter to the ground and with it Tesla, which has a 800bn valuation as of today...
I just hope Space X survives all this madness.
Let's not forget that the initial plan of SpaceX was to meet and get drunk with Russian leaders to buy missiles from them and resell them to US market.
Imagine the nightmare if it actually had worked as planned.
Regarding implementation in SpaceX, the success is mostly due to very good engineers and to a less bureaucratic process, where you can move fast and break things.
The NASA is a big boat that cannot steer due to political issues. It works ok but it is extremely slow and expensive.
The story I've heard is that he wanted to buy a single missile, but regardless.. where is the 'nightmare' in disarming Russia by buying up all their missiles in a firesale? It seems doubtful that such purchases would have effectively funded the construction of new missiles since Russia is/was so corrupt. I think the money would have gone into the hands of some oligarchs, and not been invested back into new missile development.
Even if that plan had gone through, it would have been child's play compared to the ESA and NASA as well as numerous western corporations buying rocket rides from Russia since the mid 90s up to the second Russian invasion of Ukraine a few years ago. Go down the lists of Proton launches on wikipedia and mouse over each of the payloads, you'll see that most of them since the mid 90s have been for American or European organizations. Even ULA and Orbital Sciences have bought hundreds of engines from Russia and used them to launch US payloads. I don't see many people raking them over the coals for this. Has this even proven to be a nightmare? Western money has kept Russia's space program alive, but has that funded any successful 'Wunderwaffes'? Russia's military is still running off the fumes of the Soviet Union and their supposedly amazing wonder weapons either don't exist or aren't relevant. Most of that money probably went up their noses.
Ah those pesky "political issues" commonly known as "process", "due diligence", or "laws".
These days it would be harder to pull something like that off, investors would be demanding better books from day one.
Currently, Tesla makes each car with a profit of almost 10k USD. That is insane compared to competitors, VW is at 973USD. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-teslas-unrivaled-pr...
It was really bad in the beginning, but now it's stellar, second only to Ferrari and other luxury cars. I don't like the guy, but this is not just luck.
There would have been other places for investors to stick their money.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4573601-tesla-gross-margins...
I don't see how that negates everything I said. Tesla can and does ship directly to buyers, so kudos to them.
Should SpaceX even threaten to go off the rails, the US government can and will seize it faster than Elon can go crying to the Supreme Court.
Space access is too much of a national security risk.
Let's hope Musk's vision for SpaceX will not devolve into "Twitter, but in space".
I doubt it will have much impact on marketing. It's most just a domain name and some corporate heading stuff.
The only utility and potential confusion is a single letter domain for linking to tweets until people get used to it. But on sfuff like imessage, SERPs etc it pulls in the <title> tag above the domain so it's not the only signal
Leave Twitter as is otherwise, add search and cut opex. Twitter was great for what it was from a user perspective.
That problem really must be bad because I don't think I've seen anything of major value on Twitter in my entire time using it.
Edit: Example of the first Tweet thread in my favorite list that's valuable and hard to find elsewhere: https://twitter.com/devonzuegel/status/1683301667733663744?s...
Edit2: To be clear, I'm not saying Twitter needs better recommendations. Maybe they do, I don't care. I'm explicitly saying search.
Twitter wasnt profitable or sustainable so he s going to experiment in whatever way possible only to realize what everybody knows: mass media is not profitable in the financial sense, but in the political
Twitter as a platform and product works better today than it did a year ago. Less bots makes a huge difference.
It's also not hard to imagine why they lost 50% of their advertisers. 50% kind of lines up with the percentage of "woke" (horrible label, but whatever) companies out there who basically "had to" pull their ad dollars to not piss off the camp they put themselves in.
Prognostication is fun, but to be honest, we don't really have any idea whether or not this rebranding and redirection will work. Time will tell.
I, however, applaud people willing to take moonshots.
Musk used to be political Teflon. He threw away that bipartisan edge for no gain. That was one of the beginnings of his Howard Hughes analogy.
SpaceX, sure - but what he's doing to Twitter is straight from a private equity / corporate raider textbook.
Source, please?
That's false though. Some of the improvements are gated behind a subscription, but HD video streams with more options and longer durations (allowing full movies to be distributed on it), longer tweets (reducing the need for "threads" which are obnoxious to read on Twitter and have led people to write bots that put them together), view counts, bringing back the chronological timeline and increased transparency are all net improvements.
What makes this surprising, or sad, or funny depending on your perspective, is that among the rapid product improvements, he sprinkles odd, impulsive decisions with little context and controversial messages that alienate a bunch of people. I guarantee you that without that he'd be hailed as a genius by the people who are calling him Elmo and pretending that revolutionizing the car industry and satellite Internet was "just luck". If there's a lesson to be learned there it's that social media addiction can spoil anyone.
40 billion dollars is just two years of Gazprom profits.
Imagine the discussion if the idea was presented in a public company with the CFO in the room "Rather than spend money trying to attract churned users, we decided to use it instead to reward loyal and highly engaged users even though we are pretty sure their engagement level would be high no matter what, and in fact they would happily pay us to use the platform".
It's just acknowledging that on Twitter there's an implicit division been content producers and consumers, and that the content producers are getting close to leaving and taking their followers with them now that there are viable competitors. Paying them to keep producing content is hardly novel.
In contrast, most people are on Twitter to read tweets produced by a tiny minority of Twitter users. These users are directly analogous to YouTube content creators (and indeed, many YouTubers are also active with large numbers of followers on Twitter). It doesn't take great business acumen to see the parallel, all you have to do is look at the distribution of follower counts.
Now he is full of himself and he doesn't know how to move forward. So he stumbles repeatedly. And then regrets it. But never is humbled by any of that.
He is also no longer surrounded by people who are intelligent. He is surrounded by sycophants.
To me it looks like everyone who‘s trying to take him seriously by now with all this are making themselves laughing stock. And Musk couldn‘t care less.
For me the only problem is that I‘m a Tesla shareholder and I‘ve seen a sort of dilution and all his suffering first-hand, where a single share of mine has already turned into 15 since I bought it. Thus of course I have skin in the game, but I still consider this all as a big meme-like joke.
Soon we‘re all dead anyway, so let‘s not think about things too serious and money is just money for most people who have it. It‘s no bigger than life. Have fun and enjoy the ride, our 100 years on this planet are a sliver so we‘ll all be enjoying it in our own messed up ways. Elon does it this way.
This is how I see it.
My understanding is that manipulated numbers would have been a legit reason to exit the deal but it turned out that Musk couldn’t provide that and thus was forced to go through with the offer. Am I misremembering?
If he had evidence that his offer to buy Twitter was based on false information, he would have gone to court to fight it. Instead he caved before the court date, presumably because his lawyers persuaded him he stood no chance.
I think he complained about bots on twitter before he made the offer.
And so, X. Which doesn't mean anything in particular.
Dying platforms are often the result of negative network effects, superior competitors, and self-centered founders who believe early successes make them brilliant business leaders and experts in everything else they touch.
Have you followed his twitter account? Watch his interviews. Read his SEC filings? He's been pretty open about his intentions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Corp.
> Everything he’s done to Twitter carries the foul stench of Death by Private Equity. No product improvements, but worse reliability, more spam
That's not what 'Death by Private Equity' is or looks like.
> and a weird desperate-looking rebrand.
Desperate weird rebrand? The rebrand happens months ago. It's not a new thing.
"The concept for X solidified in October 2022, when Musk tweeted that acquiring Twitter is "an accelerant to creating X, the everything app"."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Corp.
Elon is doing what exactly what he said he was going to do but you are twisting into some bizarre 'Death by Private Equity' that doesn't make sense because you don't like elon? Isn't that the gist of it? The anti-elon pr campaign is no different than the anti-zuckerburg campaign.
Exactly. It was going to eventually be rebranded as soon as he acquired it. Not sure why HNers here are seemingly very surprised about this and still screaming at the changes?
But it is quite funny to see lots of HNers here already showing signs of memory loss in less than a year since he made that comment with lots of emotional reactions to the news.
> The anti-elon pr campaign is no different than the anti-zuckerburg campaign.
Absolutely. I remember when the 'anti-zuckerburg' campaign of HNers and the media all screamed and attempted to prothesize the death of Meta Platforms when it's stock plunged to $90.
Even before the layoffs, Zuckerberg was the 'villain' somehow and is somehow called by the most angriest of people a 'Nazi'. Now it is 200% up in less than a year and now the media's opinions have changed like the weather and are now cheering him again.
Today, Elon is somehow now the 'villain' of the year because of the layoffs and buying Twitter and now they are even angrier that Twitter / X did not 'die' immediately before 2023 as incorrectly predicted. So every speed bump Elon makes to Twitter / X is now 100x magnified from now on by the media.
Either way, the predictions of both the deaths of Twitter / X and Meta Platforms by the media and on HN has always been greatly exaggerated.
So he's scrambling. Trying to find any way to make it pencil out, using all the stunts he can think of. "X" is just another one he'd kept in his back pocket for decades. He'd obviously always liked the brand, since "X.com" was part of his PayPal story, and he named his space company "SpaceX", and one of his Tesla models, and his kid.
Have you taken the time to understand?
> No product improvements
I disagree. Musk owns Twitter for less than 9 months. Just off the top of my head:
* view counts
* revenue share with creators
* fewer bots
* long videos
* improved spaces
* no censorship
> This is what it looks like when inept MBAs try to squeeze some more life out of a dying platform
Inept MBAs do whatever it takes to bootlick advertisers. Not the case with the today's Twitter.
> He’s supposed to be a product genius
According to whom? I've never heard anybody saying so. However, here is an anecdote from my personal experience: I recently purchased Tesla and the UX was as simple as buying shampoo on Amazon–just a few clicks from the app.
> He was supposed to bankroll exciting new ventures
Isn't that what he is trying to do? X is the experiment to launch an exciting new venture. Give him a chance?
> Instead it’s kind of like MySpace meets SourceForge
I'm confused on this analogy–cannot see the connection. Please, elaborate.
P.S. Your reactstudio.com certificate is not valid.
Everything he’s done to Twitter carries the foul stench of Death by Private Equity. No product improvements, but worse reliability, more spam, and a weird desperate-looking rebrand. This is what it looks like when inept MBAs try to squeeze some more life out of a dying platform.
The strange thing here is that Musk’s acquisition was supposed to be the exact opposite. He’s not beholden to private equity masters. He’s supposed to be a product genius. He was supposed to bankroll exciting new ventures. Instead it’s kind of like MySpace meets SourceForge.