Almost everything else is more important than some rich brain parasite’s midlife crisis dressed up as 5-d chess. The brain parasite feeds on attention whether positive or negative.
I just don't really understand why nobody is angry at the old Twitter board for signing the deal in the first place. Yes, Musk was trolling and yes, they have apparently an obligation towards their shareholders to get a good deal for the invested money. But still, the investors in Twitter valued money first and "Twitter's role as global message board" had a lower priority.
Because when some idiot billionaire gives you a premium on an already overinflated stock you sign that deal or you get sued into oblivion by the institutional investors who will use their giant pile of money to bury you for letting the deal of the decade get away.
Things change. You'll get over it.
The company lost an estimated 2 billions by the time Musk bought it, with about 200 million lost per year. It also managed to break GDPR laws, and have some of the largest data breaches.
I understand that some people got value from the platform, but a quick death might be the best for everyone involved.
If we only get angry at this one guy, we usher in the next set of his replacements
Claiming that these things are “unnecessary concepts” is a significantly more extreme position than you make it seem. What are the alternatives that actually work?
See ya.
As such a system would never give rise to Twitter in the first place (hence problem solved).
Or such a system will forever reside in the Platonic ideal universe forever avoiding any real-world flaws or criticism.
Btw you replied to a wrong comment but good on you for looking up my post history ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_Soviet_Union
You seem to be on path to victory my friend.
He sees the X vision to make Twitter become the Everything App, where people turn to it for more than just messaging, but video calls and commerce. Very much like WeChat where it serves as a platform for things like restaurant bookings and hailing a taxi.
I do agree though, it doesn't feel like renaming it to X is the right approach if this is the longer term vision. Personally I would have thought about Twitter X with these additional services and a much slower migration to X to align with the Everything App vision.
This was after he took over.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spri...
This was before.
Trivial, yes, but does show how it can be an annoyance even through simple things.
This has happened. Impression count has been decimated for anyone without a check. Bonus points if you've ever blocked Elon or posted with a sentiment he disagrees with.
I’m not convinced, this is a bit complex, conspiratorial and nonsensical for me. When the simpler explanation is that Elon has just mismanaged the company.
This is qanon-level stuff man, come on.
Twitter also allows for the real-time dissemination of information unfavorable to corporations, like during outages and accidents, and the widespread dissemination of less time-sensitive information by journalists who aren't beholden to corporate media gatekeepers.
Elon Musk's various ventures rely heavily on buy-in from the government - SpaceX relies on NASA's resources, Tesla has only been profitable because of generous renewable energy grants, and even Paypal benefited from lax oversight from financial regulators. That there is likely a relationship is less "Pizzagate" and more "Trump and Russian interference." And if you're going to pretend that that's not a damning analogy, all that does is expose how unserious you are about the matter.
All of that aside, there is also the matter of Musk 1) having had a checkered history with Twitter as it was, including its users, and 2) not having actually wanted to buy Twitter after his initial due diligence. Considering that his actions after completing the deal included firing most of the workforce, stripping users of multiple privileges, and stripping the company itself of its branding, it's not at all farfetched to conclude that he has no intention of simply renovating Twitter, but instead means to strip it down to studs or foundation and build a gaudy temple to his own warped sense of entrepreneurship. This is, after all, the man who insisted that the model names of his cars spell out "S3XY".
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/29/tech/elon-musk-twitter-govern...
Again, I am certain this is incompetence rather than conspiracy
In any case, they would rather have a tool they can control (just get Twitter to shadowban tweets about democracy) that their population uses seems better than a void.
It would be like Google changing the Google name to Alphabet, or to "A.com" or something. Imagine throwing away "to Google something" in an effort to popularize a big, story-less, meaningless name.
I think that describes nearly all of his public behavior over the last few years.
tweet -> excrete
Honestly, not a bad idea. If you are the world's richest person you might as well have a company that can actually make money.
(I also don't think that hypothesis makes a lick of sense -- Apple+Google, not any particular app, is the "WeChat of the west".)
That being said, Wechat payments are also rife with every form of scam, irreversibility, and fake QR code issues that people in the West warn about. That (and the AML stuff) is why it seems to be getting more scrutiny by the Chinese govt.
For p2b, Apply Pay lets me tap my power button twice and hold it next to the payment terminal. Hard to get lower friction than that.
For p2p, the space is already saturated (Zelle, Venmo, etc.) It's unclear why I would want to use Twitter -- sorry, x -- for this in particular. Also, with the launch of FedNow, the days of new entrant intermediaries in the USA are coming to a close.
Finally, as Goldman Sachs just learned, consumer banking is a brutal business. I think the closest they got to building anything like breaking into consumer credit/banking was becoming the bank that supported the Apple-branded credit card.
There is a massive distance between an idea and its successful execution. Most of the success comes from execution, not the original idea.
But who would want those qualities in a bank? Banks should be boring.
It’s more like hours or days under Elon. Maybe weeks but certainly not years.
People in this thread are all saying this is part of his master plan to get Twitter/X to be worth hundreds of billions and then to sell it and walk away. I don't see any reason why he would sell and walk away if he manages to pull it off.
This is the exact vacuous nonsense Sam Bankman-Fried was spouting while playing League of Legends in a VC meeting and it made Sequoia Capital wet their pants. It really puts the cart before the horse of "how or why" Twitter should position themselves this way. It is frustrating to watch people continuously buy into his complete lack of vision or execution.
"Hey, look over there! I'll make the 6 Million Dollar Man!"
I'm pretty sure he just watches 80s TV for vaporware announcement ideas to use when there's bad press to suppress.
Tesla and SpaceX and StarLink are really impressive from a "had a vision for something on a broadly positive world-changing scale, successfully executed it" perspective.
With Twitter, I'm not sure he actually has a vision.
The best realistic pro-Musk argument you can make is that he can be a real ass, but he's an ass whose companies tend to do amazing things. With Twitter, the best I can come up with is that he had a personal grudge against the platform, and the means to take pattiness to unheard of scales.
I would hazard a guess that pre-Musk Twitter, for whatever reason, had fears around bringing payments onto the service, particularly in the case of sexual content and resolving that, but this led to a situation where other services spring up to fill that void.
However, Twitter Blue was a case of having your cake-and-eating-it-too where I think Musk wanted a story on cash flow not dependent on ads ASAP. In truth, Twitter Blue should've exclusively been a service tier for creators who want to monetize content on Twitter; a case naturally requiring verificaiton. That would've given an incentive and a rationale to the extant pre-Musk creator class that bemoaned its introduction, but Musk really fucked that up by trying to exploit Right wing allegations of Twitter being biased towards the Left (which it never was, rather, the reverse was true[0]) to make up for freaking out advertisers.
[0]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...
I'm not sure what you mean by its niche. There are way more Instagram users than Twitter ones, and they are way more exposed to products. It sounds like a much better fit for Instagram than Twitter.
Look, everyone makes mistakes, but the whole Twitter thing, from the beginning, has been the equivalent of hiring a fry cook and then he sticks his fucking hand in the fryer, on purpose, on day 1. Then he sticks the other hand in.
You wouldn't say that dude's a genius chef—or, if he ever was, he's either gone nuts or is on way too many drugs to trust with anything. Or both.
Musk is cramming the social media app with all of those useless buzzwords that Wall Street loves. When he IPOs it, you can bet it will have AI, Finance, and depending on its standing then, Crypto in the prospectus. It will be hot trash but the markets will lap it up as they always do.
You are literally not the audience for these shenanigans.
As for looking like a fool, I think we can all agree that Musk is past that.
0: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/long-island-iced-tea-micro-c...
That doesn’t mean this twitter thing is going to succeed, but your always “dumb move” comment is not very well founded based on musks history.
The entire tone of voice of this thread is exactly what people said about Tesla 5 years ago and why so many were shorting it. Turns out - that was a bad move.
But EVs and private space flight are useful things with demand and large government subsidies. There's little demand to whatever he wants to do with Twitter
A reminder that Elon had to be sued into buying this company.
In the normal world, this is called being really stupid and bad at business
The stock was absurd -- cars with QA issues and lots of recalls outperforming stocks like Ford or Toyota, companies with decades of making reliable vehicles.
Everyone knew it was overvalued by a long shot, and if Musk sold it would crater. So create a headline grabbing buy that would justify shedding tons of shares, then back out and keep the $$$. When TSLA later has a correction he can just ignore it -- got his money already -- and launch some buybacks on the cheap.
Except he couldn't back out.
Seems easier to do that without buying Twitter. He has enough reach that anything he talks about gets fanboy traction, there's no value into Twitter's infrastructure for this, and converting tweeters into everything app users is possible, but a stretch.
Plus the ship has sailed for an everything app outside China.
As far as I can tell, it's the domain of the company he co-founded (X.com), that merged with the company that became PayPal (Confinity), that led to him briefly being CEO before Thiel took over and pivoted to focus on the PayPal service.
2000 - 2017, X.com was property of PayPal.
Musk then buys it back in 2017... and then here we are.
Ref: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#X.com_and_PayPal
I was just wondering how in the world did Elon manage not to sell "x.com" to a porn company for shits and giggles. It being in the custody of PayPal explains that.
That’s the son - the daughter is “Y”
https://news.yahoo.com/grimes-says-she-changed-her-095553857...
Or, in the US, phonetically-mispelled names.
I guess my point is naming someone isn't really the place for wacky creativity.
That is my signature.
- X (PayPal)
- X (Twitter)
- SpaceX
- Tesla
That most European countries have a whitelist of names was one of the more shocking parts of moving here.
I believe this is very much wrong.
[0] I would claim that calling someone "Mat the fucking dumbshit" or "Poopface" is child abuse
> He stood there looking at me, and I saw him smile, and he said, "Son, this world is rough, and if a man's gonna make it he's gotta be tough, and I know I wouldn't be there to help you along. So I give you that name, and I said goodbye. And I knew you'd have to get tough or die. And it's that name that helped make you strong..."
The approach of "you need to be prepared for the cruelty of the world so I will be cruel to you" feels like a parody of proper upbringing.
It was a Johnny Cash song -- he wasn't known for writing ballads of utopian suburbia.
------
Your head
Mr Cash was in no way endorsing the behavior...
So no, not endorsing.
Have you?
(See other respondent for proof you havent)
I said, "Father, change my name
The one I'm using now it's covered up
With fear and filth, and cowardice and shame"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FYkJuAb0mMk
;)
After you're 18 and after you've experienced some of the most intense social moments of your life.
It's like literally everything else with kids. Parents have a ton of autonomy but there has to be a line where they aren't allowed to hurt their kid further
Iceland has a very traditional name system which is enforced. I think the idea is basically that names won't evolve so they can preserve tradition.
Sweden on the other hand has a pretty vague "name can't be likely to cause child psychological harm" law, that doesn't really come into play unless you try to name your child something really outside the mainstream (there was a case a while back where a couple wanted to call their daughter "Metallica". I can't remember how that ended up going).
I don't see how the Swedish-style system would stop names evolving. There are still plenty of trends and new names that come and go just like in the US. I doubt extreme name choices like Elon's "x-ash-12" would inspire a whole bunch of children to be called that.
Based on what you said, let the kid have a proper name and then they themselves can change to weird as they wish later. Stupid parents have no right to give a stupid joke name to others.
- Parents may only choose names for their children from a list of the top 1000 or so names in whatever country parents choose
- It is permissible to change your own name to anything you like
Finally! Someone remembered us!
And don’t forget google’s X department.
He staged mock naval battles in the lake/canal behind Versailles.
Which, admittedly, sounds pretty awesome.
With-out France, there were a lot of wars.
Howard Hughes also had some mental health issues, similar to Elon Musk.
All the adults are clucking their tongues at him but presumably they'd be fine with him being a quiet entry in the Panama Papers and the Epstein flight logs with the other billionaires.
It would be "fun" if it only affected him. But there are real people who get caught in the blast radius of his "fun."
Who are these "real people" you talk of? I find it interesting in this age of diversity and acceptance of differences, that a "Musk character" can't exist without a constant deluge of backlash, ridicule and grumpiness!
Seriously?
OK, I'll give you an easy one: Google "Twitter layoffs."
That doesn't mean that people's lives weren't upended. You're arguing a completely different point.
If Musk were doing all of the same things, and much worse, without the culture war stuff attached we would never hear his name.
"I take full responsibility for this difficult decision..."
No one has a right to have a particular job, if it's no longer deemed necessary.
One might be lucky enough to have such a job.
But if it goes *poof* overnight then the appropriate take should probably be "It was nice while it lasted."
PS: And we can lament the gutting of their moderation team, but that comprised a small proportion of the total headcount cut.
Musk paid billions too much for Twitter. So at least a few of those real people you're worried about, are now very rich.
Companies have layoffs. Are you saying the thousands of layoffs at Meta, or any other tech businesses in recent times, are "good layoffs", but Twitter layoffs were "bad layoffs"? I don't understand your position here. You seem to have an emotional response about the welfare of tech sector people you don't know.
If you have Twitter on your resume, I'd expect it would open a few doors when job hunting. Your concern for their welfare is odd to say the least.
Would you have preferred every employee, including the most loyal and hard-working, to lose their jobs too?
Musk has multiple Epstein connections including having gone to his house, he’s exactly like the other billionaires.
Edit: So, the top results on connections say there are none, and then snopes saying the claims are false (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/musk-jet-epstein-island/). So this appears to just be libelous rumors.
https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2023/05/16/elon-musk-je...
"Several years ago, I was at his house in Manhattan for about 30 minutes in the middle of the afternoon with Talulah, as she was curious about meeting this strange person for a novel she was writing," Musk said. "We did not see anything inappropriate at all, apart from weird art. He tried repeatedly to get me to visit his island. I declined."
And the people in my world who are upset about Twitter do not give anyone a pass on the Epstein flight logs and Panama Papers.
[1] mostly. there is the matter of the habitat destruction because SpaceX failed to listen to experts.
edit: formatting
the fact that one single app has that much influence means it ought to be destroyed. I was hoping Musk would walk into Twitter, pull the plug, and go home. Now I hope, maybe, he'll just grind it to dust.
Seems like the normal case for right-thinking, properly-educated citizens so I guess I'm just a weirdo contrarian.
Regarding your complaints about twitter:
> In response to a 2017 request from the Pentagon, Twitter kept online a network of accounts that the U.S. military used to advance its interests in the Middle East
It’s not so much fun when it’s directed against you, is it?
someone else posted a howard hughes comparison and i think that is quite apt, including the dating of movie or music stars, and the inevitable mental health issues
One, I was pretty impressed by.
The second? I’ve had less wind noise riding my motorcycle.
Still very hit and miss.
Doesn’t mean I’m not looking to buy one after they refresh them next year, but you definitely don’t get Lexus quality for your Lexus money.
Thousands of employees build it. In the case of SpaceX and Tesla, they frequently build it in spite of Musk, dedicating time and effort to preventing him from screwing things up when he breezes in.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=378
This lie seems mostly accepted only by non-technical people in technical fields from what I've found out. Leads me to believe Elon actually is one of those great people that will be more appreciated after his passing.
Chief engineer is a title Musk has given himself. It's without any value. Anyone in control of a company can award themself whatever title they want. I could label myself chief lovemaking officer, and it wouldn't mean shit.
Congratulations for making the internet worse.
No said Musk isn’t smart. No one said he isn’t capable nor a multi-disciplinarian.
But to pretend he’s the chief/lead engineer of either SpaceX or Tesla (let alone both, at the same time) is laughably naive.
My original reply was to a comment saying Musk is just a money bag. The second comment I replied to was saying that Elon "giving himself" the Chief Engineer title doesn't change anything, effectively carrying over the original claim.
"Chief/Lead Engineer" I guess this can mean a lot of different things. Reason I put "giving himself" to quotes, is because I've been in a situation in a few companies where titles weren't really much of a thing but if someone naturally ended up being in a leading role they would start to be called with such a title.
Given that Elon likes to be hands-on, obviously has a lot of agency, is motivated, and works long hours while shuttling around in his jet every few days (you can hear him saying summaries of his % time used by whichever company in many interviews), I really don't see it impossible that he's grown to the shoes being discussed. I haven't heard anyone saying he's the lead engineer at multiple companies at the same time, though he probably has had periods of putting a lot more time to a specific company, like with Tesla during the over-automation production hell.
I think this comes down to subjectivity and personal experience of what the title pertains. My experience as a Lead Engineer in software has come naturally as I have developed base of tech before others joined and cared for it, including reading most of other people's commits while working 1.5-2x the hours of others. This is in smaller companies. Probably in a bigger company, person with the title would use 70% of their time doing code review and attending meetings, working in a more tiered structure and being less hands-on.
Can I ask why you think the Everyday Astronaut's interview (series) _specifically_ makes Musk incompatible with the "Lead Engineer" title?
Assuming you aren’t, the level of fanboyism you’re showing throughout the comment in this thread borders on the deranged.
Don’t bother replying with another walk of text.
Now it's not much of anything. No backing, No argument. Just some lame personal attack? Seriously?
The actual comment you originally replied to:
"Thousands of employees build it. In the case of SpaceX and Tesla, they frequently build it in spite of Musk, dedicating time and effort to preventing him from screwing things up when he breezes in."
From your own links:
"We’ll have, you know, a group of people sitting in a room, making a key decision. And everybody in that room will say, you know, basically, “We need to turn left,” and Elon will say “No, we’re gonna turn right.” You know, to put it in a metaphor. And that’s how he thinks. He’s like, “You guys are taking the easy way out; we need to take the hard way.”
And, uh, I’ve seen that hurt us before, I’ve seen that fail (Emphasis mine), but I’ve also seen— where nobody thought it would work— it was the right decision. It was the harder way to do it, but in the end, it was the right thing."
Stopped clocks are also occasionally right, but frequently wrong.
FYI, there's more upvotes than downvotes in total. The most noted visible one was at ~5 then magically dropped to -1. Even though it obviously has merit and hosts a lot of conversation below it, which makes the downvotes a bit suspect.
>narrow reading of peoples comments.
This seems like that KGB tactic of turning one's argument on its head. What is actually happening is I'm putting way more effort to answering to ill-informed comments because I just don't like watching obvious lies, even if comforting to some, on the web. This is more draining than giving I can say ...
>The actual comment you originally replied t....
-Nnope. You picked the subheading right after the main lie: "Musk doesn't build any of that, he's just a source of cash, like a bank crossed with a toddler."
>From your own links etc etc
It takes trying to read what you've read negatively. For a more illuminating view, there's actually a part that partially answers this in the provided video: https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=810 (timestamped link). It's his own stake. You're claiming it's 100% confirmation bias that Elon is given any credit. Let me _try_ to present another take:
People remember conflict way better than success. So if it hurts them 20% of the time but succeeds 80% of the time, people WILL remember when it bit them in the ass. Because in that specific instance, everyone was against Elon, and it failed. But in the long the general practice has worked wonders. And obviously turns fail to success faster than a NASA-like forever project process. If I was working in such an inspiring field, I would give a kidney to have a leader that frequently took even half that kind of personal risk to favor progress instead of peace.
_These are qualities I don't just appreciate in Elon, but everyone in power who practices these._ Sadly people usually just pick the conformist path, to avoid hurt feelings, sometimes even if it's their own money (for god's sake!)
If you want to pick anecdotes, from when that video was filmed Raptor 2 has been greatly simplified while its performance has increased IIRC. Among with the cold/hot gas reuse for BFR, idea that was actually spawned through rubber ducking during the EA interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY73exaVpyw
By the way, you just completely dodged the question to your earlier criticism! Did you really have nothing?! I'm actually still willing to engage in civil conversation. That is what I'm trying to turn this often self-hate fest in to.
This argument is extremely funny in retrospect, with one of your posts being totally dead. I hope you adjusted at least some of your priors after this . . .
Zzz...
It's not completely irrelevant, they both sexual harassed employees: https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-paid-250000-to-a-flig...
Trying to pull that kind of strings together on a conspiracy bulletin board with red eyes and shaggy hair in a dank cellar together doesn't really add value to the conversation.
It's like they have a personal investment in Elon not having done the things that Elon has very clearly actually done.
Reddit is overflowing with non-stop Musk hatred. They spout lie after lie about him in every single thread where he's a topic. The most popular lie being that his business efforts - ie his success - were funded by an emerald mine that his father owned (neither thing is true).
The goal is to strip Musk, top to bottom, of any and all personal accomplishments. And to repeat any lies necessary, as many times as necessary, to reach that end.
I say this as an emotionally independent, objective observer of the craziness, I have no stake in it, and don't feel one way or another about it. The seeming mental illness the topic of Musk draws out of people is astounding however, the herd promptly acts like deranged lunatics when he comes up as a topic. Partisan collectivism mentality in action perhaps.
Until Trump drove them nuts I had never seen anything like it before, in person or online. There must be a name for such a massive scale of crowd insanity, to describe the frothing-at-the-mouth irrationality that a single entity can spur in a very large number of people.
No need to ascribe political malice where typical internet popularity-seeking will suffice.
"Elon didn't have anything to do with his companies' technical successes" and "Elon had everything to do with his companies' technical successes" are both low-energy, groupthink-supported replies at this point.
I don’t see anyone claiming Steve Jobs personally designed the iPhone PCB by hand while mining cobalt on the weekends to stay in shape, but on the other, I don’t see anyone claiming that he just provided money and the vision and engineers just manifested themselves.
Much easier to say “musk is actually a lucky idiot” than say “musk worked hard and built a multi billion dollar empire”.
The first avoids personal responsibility for their failures, while the second will send their narcissistic amygdala into a meltdown.
He fell upward every time and started with a sizable fortune. He absolutely didn't work so hard that he "built" a multi-billion dollar empire, no one human can work that hard.
Give it a rest.
Besides which, I can absolutely guarantee you that if I gave you a “small loan of one million dollars”, you’d be bankrupt by the end of the decade.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...
https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...
Try harder.
"According to a Facebook post from Errol, the Zambian emerald mine he held a stake in "collapsed in 1989.""
Which by definition means he owned an emerald mine during the apartheid Era.
Regardless of his political beliefs or leanings, there is no means or manner in which such a mine could have operated _at_all_ without being advantaged by said apartheid norms and thereby being dependent on whar in effect slave labor.
How about You try harder.
Nothing else, carry on ...
Do you really need that or are you just sealioning?
After that, he seems to have been in the position of having to make his own way, while only getting help by a partial investment from his family in a further round of his already-succeeding company that he set up living in his office. So in the positions millions have been. There aren't millions of Musks around but there are millions of younger adults that have more than they deserve. But facts don't bend for your weird fantasies to be true.
Funny thing is, some time ago I thought Elon came from a background where he got a lot of money to start his successes, and still cheered him for making so much more from that than really anyone else. Then people started trying to show in him bad light, which backfired hilariously and now his origin story puts almost anyone to shame.
^ then don't engage in actions which could be misconstrued as such. It's Poes law mfer.
Also, youre shifting goalposts. Tossing out herring and engaging many other fallacies.
If I were a betting man, I'd put money on the probability that you are in fact being disingenuous or are a delusional fool....
Again, if you dont like that reasonable perception of you then alter the behaviors that induce said perception.
I am not shifting goalposts. Note that I'm not the original arguer here. I just noted that you basically doomed Elon from birth regardless of what good he's done during his life, which is a crazy weak argument.
I know people who think that casually considering non-comformists delusional is reasonable. They come in many sorts, but most often its Occam's razor so I don't hate and won't get more involved.
I am not disingenuous. I just hope people would cheer on the people of our time who push on innovation instead of attacking them for their money or pecularities. With enough mass just throwing lazy attacks things can only get worse for everybody.
This is just devolving into typical troll vs antitroll bs and I'm not interested in participating.
Review the thread and return to the actual arguments presented rather than continuing to avoid the actual issues raised/admitting you were wrong.
>Just a FYI your argument is that Elon got a Huge Head Start to his serial entrepreneurism just because someone in relation to him had a business 40+ years ago in South Africa. Far after which he lived almost as a destitute during his college years.
Which you can't retort and makes other arguments meaningless. Which are already so badly-colored (narcissism, trying to dredge up race relations) that are not worth deliberating on for anyone's sake.
Seriously, this was actually already answered.
Quit sealioning.
That’s a year of tech-bro salary.
Why aren’t you a multi-billionaire yet? Surely you can turn 400k into at least one billion dollars, since you obviously look down on musk so much.
Or is even 400k more than your earning potential?
Need I say more?
The only thing they seem to contribute to is… the global scale.
> top 5% childhood positioning, services, access to material and equipment, and more.
Strawman, moving goalposts, etc.
"top 5% childhood positioning, services, access to material and equipment, and more.
Strawman, moving goalposts, etc."
Nope what i listed were specifics, those advantages he gained.
You know that but chose to misrepresent with a red herring.
This is the SOP for Elon fanbois, just more trolling type behaviors just like thier wannabe lord and savior.
Really... it's rather sad and disheartening to know you folks actually drank the Kool aid and aren't just playing games, rather actually think like this and genuinely believe you arent fools.
Social media on the other hand doesn’t attract the same kind of believers at that level and there’s no one who cares enough to make it work in spite of him. Being a far less (or barely at all) regulated industry means he’s free to intervene and meddle in the most egregious ways, and the results are obvious for all to see. As a result of Twitter he’ll likely be in lawsuits (from investors, banks etc) for decades. Meantime SpaceX and Tesla will continue to do well. Not because of Musk but in spite of him.
Rivian’s current sales numbers rival Ferrari.
Fisker is dead.
Faraday is dead.
Nikola just had a truck catch fire twice.
Lordstown is dead.
And if any of what you claim is true, then explain the success of:
Zip2
PayPal
Starlink (we can count this as separate from spaceX)
And he was a co-founder of openAI. Though whether he actually did anything useful there is debatable.
Bezo's mission is to offer orbital fun rides to cashed up tourists.
Fisker failed due to its major investor (DOE) halting future financing, and then being hit with the loss of a large number of vehicles in Hurrican Katrina. Up until then they were following a similar startup arc (with the same sorts of problems) as Tesla had in their first few years. [0]
With PayPal, Musk was insistent that the venture proceed as X.com (despite brand testing showing that people were likely to associate it with porn), but was overruled. He was also opposed to the sale to eBay, which actually catapulted PayPal in terms of growth, and embedded it as a "must have" for e-commerce. [1] [2]
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/fisker-...
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/was-elon-musk-fired-from-p...
[2] https://nypost.com/2018/07/24/elon-musk-made-his-first-milli...
https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/14/musk_twitter_rpc_spat...
Elon Musk is what happens when a 17-year-old stoner is the richest man in the world. He builds cars and trains and tunnels and flamethrows and rockets.
Everyone tries to blame his money or his childishness, when the obvious answer is right there lighting up in public and blowing smoke on podcasts.
As a seasoned stoner it doesn't look like Musk has much experience smoking weed if the Rogan video is anything to go by.
So I have hard time accepting ad hominem arguments as anything but jealous, uninformed, or just plain conformist. Or maybe some people like to just speak untruths with the mindset that the billionaire can take it, but find that anti-intellectual and unnecessarily polarizing.
(This is a comment in general, not an attack on the parent comment but critiquing the generally hateful air I'd expect the HN crowd to be above of)
I literally can't believe anyone can type this with (presumably) a straight face. That's some kind of sarcasm, right?
I want to know what planet you live on because I can't seem to find another one on mine.
Tesla solar. Tesla powerwall. The single biggest infrastructure for EV charging in the world, without which EV’s would have never taken off.
What Tesla figures out so, was that charging infrastructure was the early EV winner, nobody else did that. Whether Tesla's netwirk is still the largest in the world, no idea.
You mean the country we’re in a low-key Cold War in with?
That doesn’t seem to be something to celebrate.
If you're going to defend him for this, you have to admit his distractions have be a hindrance to the cause. Rather than running Tesla and making sure its the market leader across market segments, he's been off on side quests. And now his side quest is making people not want Teslas.
I think he stated that his underlying big plan was to act in fields that he thinks will have the most impact in the future, being good business while not just profit-driven, after he got the PayPal money (Can't find a source right now though) in which he has succeeded, profiting from making the world better, instead, for example, lobbying against ICE's and then providing "just-good-enough" Environmental(r) ShittyCars(tm)
He also has shifted his focus accordingly when Tesla, and at part, SpaceX, were at dire straits. For his kind of personality, I'm not sure just working more would even transfer as simply to linear benefit on that thing.
You don't have to love Musk, plenty of reasons not to but jeez tone it down a bit. It's like if he was seen eating a taco suddenly tacos would be embarrassing and sad according to you.
Everyone else is on some random "responsible" profit driven train to increase quarterly profits by meager single digit % so they don't rock the boat. The west is on a downward slide of "responsible" and average behavior of do the least amount of anything whilst the world moves forward with actual ambition, childish or otherwise.
Something that I was wondering while I was reading about Heinlein and his books was why I hadn't read him. My school library was surprisingly well stocked in classic science fiction, which I explored and read a lot of. So I assume it must have also had Heinlein, unless he'd been 'censored' because of some of his more radical content but the library did have the Illuminatus trilogy, so I don't think so. Did I just never find his books, or did I find them and reject them? It's odd, because I pretty much read any science fiction I could find back then.
I'm much less tolerant of science fiction now, to the point of being somewhat intolerant. I often label people as suffering from 'science fiction brain' and I certainly apply that label to Musk for his beliefs in things like that 'Artificial Intelligence' is actually possible (I consider it only an idea to play with in books and not ever feasible in reality). That's why I found your comment interesting; as an insight to the roots of such a 'science fiction brain'.
Founded in 1999, ousted as CEO within a year, within a year after the merger with Confinity becomes CEO again. Insists on using Windows instead of Unix based systems, which causes tensions and Thiel (founder of Confinity) nopes the fuck out of there. Technical issues ensue and so, again, within a year of becoming CEO, gets kicked out only for Thiel to replace him as CEO.
All in all, sounds about like what I expected from Musk. I’m sure he’s got a boulder-sized chip on his shoulder about Thiel.
The next question is: “Is he really serious about the super app?”. The horror is that he probably is, but what business wants to deal with a mercurial leader who might stop payments, pay people extra, or impound money in your account for no good reason. What business is going to want to put an “X” logo up by their cash register when it means they are going to have arguments with customers. (I bet it will be a hit for “go anti-woke and go broke” businesses though.)
Trademark law requires registering for a series of categories where a product seeks protection, with each category being relatively specific.
At the same time, suing someone for Trademark infringement requires a judge to decide whether it could "potentially induce confusion in the user".
Could an app be confused for a sausage? Could it be confused for a sneaker?... I'd say not, but I'm no judge!
Musk has spent and continues to spend an inordinate amount of effort cultivating a particular image/brand of himself, one which has gained him a large following.
Not having a PR team in front of him and being off the cuff is exactly how he cultivates his brand and has a large cult following.
Well he could've fooled me. He might troll every once in a while, but the rest of his public discourse is standing on a soap box telling us all we're wrong.
Musk reminds me of the guy who came up with the idea of scamming people by dividing them recursively into two groups, each of whose members receives an opposing prediction about some future event with a binary resolution.
By the time he works down from 65536 potential marks to 4 or 8 or so, they think he's a god, a time traveler, or a time-traveling god. They'll give him their life savings without a second thought.
Following his retirement, Frank Avruch, the first nationally-syndicated Bozo the Clown, launched his own website -- bostonman.com -- which, like the “Man About Town” segments he did for WCVB-TV news, provided information on special events, hotels, restaurants, museums, and theaters in Boston.
- Possibly misremembered couplet from childhood, that also applies nicely at Tesla
I think the actual dynamic here is that a personality who is good at inspiring passionate following of a small group of people [0] is not really a good personality for endearing himself to most people. So driving startupesque innovative companies working on hard engineering was in his wheelhouse. Whereas being on the political stage, and running a company whose chief asset is its hundreds of millions of users, is not.
With his ability to create that type of following, Musk would have been much better starting his own social network. Having found himself owning Twitter, he should have put the company into stasis mode, viewed the debt interest payments as a sunk cost of a bad financial investment, and brought in professional management to run the company and slowly cut costs. Alas, he was overconfident based on his previous successes.
[0] including yourself, referring to reasoned criticism as "haters"
But why are you angry about the rebrand?
X... is not.
Watching Elon destroy the Twitter brand is like watching someone throw orange paint on the Mona Lisa.
It can pretty easily go both ways. The Mona Lisa have been a cultural icon for a long time, but Twitter has had a massive influence on culture since it's inception.
Apparently searching for hair loss treatments gets you put on the dick pill list.
>X.com was an online bank co-founded by Elon Musk, Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho in 1999 in Palo Alto, California
So he's returning to his roots more than arbitrarily changing to something random
Still, while the social network was presuambly the most valuable part of Twitter, gotta figure the brand was a non-trivial part of the 44 billion Musk paid to buy the company. Seems crazy to toss it after a few months.
Also, the new brand is bad. if someone told me to check out "x.com", I would assume they were directing me to a porn site. And the logo looks too much like the button you click to close your browser.
… which is exactly what many us do now whenever we hit the paywall.
Pretty sure apples own presentations used “OS Ten” not “OS Ecks”
So I don’t think he is trying to take actions that will improve Twitter, he is trying to morph it into something else entirely while maintaining at least some significant portion of the user base along the way.
I do think it will probably fail, but I’m not sure that it doesn’t have better odds than starting from scratch.
Although I do think it's doable if he somehow kept the fact that he is at the helm a trade secret as he gradually grew the userbase until reaching a certain critical mass and finally revealing that he's the owner.
I would still expect some hate from the sort of people who (rightly) complain about Google Reader being turned down. But normal people don’t care about that sort of thing.
- Identifying inefficiencies in an existing technical solution
- Making people do what he wants
The things that Elon is really good at don't necessarily translate to great success in a long-term strategic vision. In a pure engineering discipline, like automotive production or aerospace engineering, they're very useful, but neither one of those things necessarily lends itself toward making a thing that is better or more appealing for the populace at large.
As an example: The Boring Company. The pure engineering problem of "how do I remove mass from the ground and create a tunnel as cheaply as possible" is a great application of Elon's strengths, and a useful problem to work on, because humanity will always need to build tunnels.
Hyperloop, though, is completely f'ing stupid, because regardless of whether an evacuated tube and car system can transport people efficiently or not, almost nobody wants to travel like this, and the entirety of the system is completely inefficient - trains are better in every case and with every metric.
In both TBC and Hyperloop, Elon wanted a thing, and convinced people to do it. It's just that there was no consideration as to whether the thing Elon wanted was useful or not.
This is Twitter. Elon looked at Twitter as a strictly engineering problem. And yes, Twitter was horribly inefficient, as evidenced by the fact that the vast majority of employees were let go and the service mostly continues to function, but my suspicion is that it is riding virtually entirely on H1B employees who are bound to the job else they are forced to leave the country. People will grind themselves to the bone for advancing human spaceflight and (to a lesser extent, maybe) improving alternative energy, but I don't know of any rational person who would do the same for Twitter, even if Elon bills it as the defacto public square.
Not to defend Elon, because I can't, but to be fair, any person reading this, if they had experienced the successes that Elon has in SpaceX and Tesla, fighting and succeeding against all of the naysayers, would have a non-trivial ego. When you combine that with the echo chamber of Elon's fans who treat him like the second coming, and who seem to honestly think that Elon (personally) can fix any problem, is it any wonder that he starts believing some of the bullshit? When he built the sub that led to him calling the rescue diver a pedoguy, and did it because people asked him to, and so many people constantly lauded him with egostroking compliments that he believed he could. And even though he didn't do anything that ended up saving those kids, he was found not guilty of defamation, so he still walked away with a win.
Fast forward 7 years and when he's forced to buy Twitter, he still feels like whatever he does is the right thing, and will do it regardless, and he will convince people under his influence to do what he wants so that he walks away with a win.
So that's a lot of text to say, yes, you're right, it is foolish. He doesn't care, he wants to win, and he'll do anything he can to walk away with a win, regardless of how it impacts anyone else, because ultimately it's not about the people who use the service, it's about Elon feeling good about himself.
Have they pushed the boundaries though? As I understand it TBMs have been a thing for a while and plenty of pretty impressive and enormous tunnels have been built in the alps or under seas like the Channel Tunnel or the tunnel section of the Oresund bridge.
This isn't my area of expertise but all I've heard so far were a few test tunnels and the Las Vegas Loop, which isn't lighting the world on fire. I mean if they make it easier + cheaper to build tunnels then I'm all for it. I've just not yet seen anything that suggests TBC is particularly interesting.
The original TBC at the tunnel across the street from SpaceX was a proof of concept that used essentially off-the-shelf tunneling tech so that the team could learn how the current state of the practice was accomplished, and that they could improve on it.
I don't know if you're familiar with tunnel boring (and if you are, sorry I'm explaining something that you probably know better than I do), but essentially the phases of digging, mucking, and reinforcing are not done concurrently, and I think that was the first things they were trying to do, and then move on from there. But yes, smaller tunnels were part of it.
Also, they did not do any real innovation, as you seem to be claiming. Combining those steps is 50-year-old technology, at least, and has been done at scale (ie not on tiny tunnels) many times.
I always thought Boring was a project intended for digging a base on Mars, fitting a whole Tesla in the tunnel would be even more than what's needed to connect some underground habitats.
I'm not sure that's true considering why he was (or the public story of why he was) pushed out of PayPal.
IIRC: He forced a port/rewrite of their platform to Windows (from Unix) that eventually led to a code freeze of the existing platform to allow the port to "catch up" to the existing platform. At the same time, they were hemorrhaging money due to fraud and they couldn't do anything about it due to the code freeze.
1) having money to throw around
2) having big manic swings that make the money seem attractive
Everything else is a hagiography.
I’ll have to go through the book(s) and check out the explanation again.
Except what people in America actually want to do, which is not ride a train outside of novelty.
The trains in the Boston - NYC - DC corridor seem fairly decent and useful, although I’ve only ridden them as a tourist (from Europe).
[1] TCO of an average car is ~$6,000-10,000/year of after-tax money, median US after-tax income is sub-$40,000/year.
The IRS mileage deductible rate is 65 cents/mile, and it's pretty close to operational cost of a vehicle. Parking and tolls and 10,000 miles a year will easily get you to these numbers.
Some call this freedom, but I call this a financial millstone around your neck.
-----
(Not to mention the mountains of public[1] and private money that get spent on automobile infrastructure, parking offsets, etc, etc.)
[1] Most of which comes from the general tax fund...
Oh, and about $5,000/yr in gas.
Are you in Europe or the US?
My insurance at age 20 with an accident under my belt was under $3,000 a year. My 50k mile Corolla cost less than your annual car payments.
> Oh, and about $5,000/yr in gas.
That's $100 or two sedan sized tanks every week at US prices. At 30 MPG that's over 30,000 miles a year.
Of course this is very situation dependant but under my exact scenario you can probably imagine why I’d spend tens of thousands per year on a car. Of course I don’t, and the number is actually closer to $4k, but even then the time saving makes up for that in like a month.
And I say tens of thousands because car amortization/maintenance, road maintenance, oil subsidies, environmental cost (gigantic) probably clears 4 figures per year easily.
I live in the second largest city in the country.
In order from me to get from north of the golden gate bridge in the SF Bay Area (in Marin) to say, Cupertino, which I did regularly when I worked for Rancher Labs and MariaDB, I'd have had to take 3 separate modes of public transportation which I would need to weave together in a weird way, and was surprisingly expensive. It would also take 4 hours with appropriate adjustments in variation in route timing. Each way. So 8 hours in commute time alone. I didn't even try. The route would have been Home -> Ferry -> Walk from Ferry Building to King St -> Caltrain -> Cupertino'ish, then bus or walk.
OKOK, maybe I should have to live closer to take advantage of the marvels of modern public transportation...
When I worked at Docker, the Golden Gate transit bus stop was right outside of my house (less than a block.) It was $15 each way. The bus ride took an hour+ and dropped me off 2-6 blocks away, depending on the location of the office at the time. So 1.5 hours each way or 3 hours a day + $30 in fares.
Taking the bus was very limiting. Not only did I have to get to the bus at a specific time in the morning, but I had to leave before a certain time at night. What ended up happening was I would take the 5:45am bus, arriving in office around 7:30am and often take the 4pm or 5pm bus back, on average. This was the time I'd get to the office earlier than everyone, work away for a few hours without anyone there, but also leave earlier than most (but arrive home around the same time)
If there was an event in the evening, a spontaneous outing with co-workers, anything, which would happen after work, the busses were no longer running so I had to take the ferry which would take my across the bridge and ask my lovely wife to come pick me up (in a car) from the ferry terminal.
The ferry was shorter in terms of travel time (30 mins across the bay) but you have to get there 15 mins early to park and get in line to board and there's a variation in the schedule. Factor in potential traffic getting to the ferry terminal, and you're leaving to the Ferry 45 minutes prior to departure (for a 30 minutes ride.) So all told it's not much better, all in, but I am already in a car, driving. So no car savings in this scenario.
Even later (past 10pm, oh no!) I'd then I've to call an Uber, and it was incredibly expensive ($120+) in addition to being inconvenient for the Uber driver to have to drive so far away from their normal operating place.
I've tried to like Public transit. It was not time efficient or cost efficient in any way for me personally to do any of this. It was far too constraining, despite the benefits.
I don't think my situation is all too different from most people living outside of a major city or the suburbs of a major city in the united states. Trains and public transportation is definitely not the answer for me. Getting more transportation infrastructure in my area to make it more efficient is not appealing to me in the slightest.
HOWEVER, because of all of this, I am such a huge proponent of remote work. Remote work eliminates all of this shit, and, if you don't want to have a car or commute or have your car on the road, you don't have to.
I've put substantially less miles on all of my vehicles since 2020 as a result of the pandemic and the shift from remote work and I could not be happier. I started my truck and drove it for the first time this year today. That's amazing.
Using public transportation - for me - and a lot of America where population density is LOW in such a case is a waste of time for all of the reasons I listed.
It's not like there's a convenient alternative to be chosen, it's a country where for a lot of people the choice is either to have a car or to starve (by proxy, not being able to get to your job). Doesn't sound much like a choice about what Americans want to do.
This is obviously all the technology that Elon thinks is necessary to colonize Mars, and in each case he's doing the best he can to develop it on Earth. However its usefulness on Earth is a secondary concern.
Think the fact that the engineering problems Musk demonstrated some aptitude for finding solutions to were also vaguely related to his stated aspiration to colonise other planets actually perfectly fits the armchair speculation that Twitter is just an addictive distraction from hard science which he's pursuing out of sheer hubris, not because of any grand vision but because he said he could do better than the people in charge and people liked his posts
But, then again, "woke mind virus"--the cope, it's real.
Are they doing a better job that anyone else? Also, anything they make appears to have to be paired with Telsa's, which for mass transportation, is literally the stupidest idea ever conceived.
The Boring Company an Hyperloop are just Gadgetbahns to try to convince State and local governments to not make public transportation.
Now, if The Boring Company could make tunnels for cheap and then install real trains, then it might be a game changer but until then, it is not.
That would be foolish if that was the point, but that's just a strawman.
Maybe he sold it to the holding company of the company formerly known as Twitter?
Elon is driven by emotions not rationally but I wouldn't be surprised if he goes back to the Twitter logo and brand after he realizes that nobody cares about his new logo and brand.
Like Gil Amelio said[0] about Apple, I would now say about Twitter: Twitter is like a ship with a hole in the bottom, leaking water and Elon's job is to get the ship pointed in the right direction.
The solution to getting Apple pointed in the right direction was (eventually) to buy NeXT and bring Jobs back. So, the solution here would seem to be - buy Bluesky and bring back Dorsey?
It also might have been an impulsive decision to become relevant in “new tech” at the same time (why would he care so much about this, boredom?). Ultimately he probably just wanted to get out of that impulsive deal again though but it was too late.
Lastly he probably also had/has some WeChat ambitions.
We can see how most of these potential goals are now falling apart spectacularly due to extreme unreflected and unchecked ego.
He seems to have succeeded in the first case though, the “moderated”/“mostly sane”(?) free speech “town square” basically destroyed and replaced by an increasingly irrelevant echo chamber for his greater brand.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=twitter&hl...
It's having a downturn, but in the big picture, it's business as usual.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
Edit: I am perfectly aware that Google Trends is not a perfect metric. My point is more broadly that claims of "dying" are anecdotal and exaggerated. Advertisers leaving a service also doesn't count as "dying."
It might, perhaps, almost be that a google trends graph isn't a reliable measure of business sustainability.
Twitter was only profitable for one year while it was public (2018). It's not like Elon could make that much worse. For what it's worth, he claims (edit: claimed before the advertisers left) it's break-even now.
As for competing services, Facebook has their work cut out for them. Active Daily User count on Threads has gone down 70% from it's bombastic launch. Average user engagement time has also gone down to 4 minutes from 19.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/threads-user-engagement-continu...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/willskipworth/2023/07/21/thread...
Musk is swimming upstream, having notched the top-tick LBO of a decade-long ZIRP run.
With Twitter's original finances, in a strong economy, the debt would have been difficult. As currently configured, with ad revenue down 50% [1], it's obviously unsustainable, a reality reflected in its bonds' prices.
> he claims it's break-even now
Musk expected, last year, Twitter to break even this year [2]. He claimed break-even in April, but conceded profitability was still away [3], implying an unlevered definition of breaking even, i.e. before financing costs.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/elon-musk-says-twitters-c...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/elon-musk-expects-twitter...
[3] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-twitter-is-opera...
It is not, and will not be the point for Elon - he's clearly stated he does not care about money. There are goals beyond what the petty populace panders or bitches about. So again, your argument - while well formulated, is insignificant if the short-term losses support long-term heading changes.
What's your take on Amazon?
Which are? And I'm asking about Twitter specifically not Tesla or SpaceX.
- Maximize user-minute happiness
- Make Twitter a source of timely truth
Amazon isn't levered to the hilt. It can choose its own time frames.
Leverage enforces an external horizon. It's unlikely Musk loses control of Twitter in bankruptcy--nobody wants it. But even if he "does not care about money," which is obviously untrue, he structures for himself and responds to monetary incentives, his lenders (and advertisers and employees and minority shareholders) do, and that's operational chaos for potentially months on end that adds zero value to Twitter or his brand.
That's like saying that because a company is profitable there is no room for improvement. There is a big difference between making $1 a year and making $1 billion a year, and same that there is a big difference between losing $1 a year and losing $1 billion a year.
It can absolutely get worse than running roughly break-even. If you have $4b in revenue and $4b in operating costs, and your lose half your revenue, you now have a hole that gets $2b deeper every year.
On top of that, the buyout added a $13b loan which has an annual minimum cost of $1b.
So he needs to increase profitability by a quarter of their previous annual revenue just to get back to where Twitter was pre-buyout.
As if this scale were merely binary rather than a continuum.
To be fair he could. Even ignoring everything else the interest alone on the debt alone he offloaded to Twitter during the acquisition is enough to finance the payroll of at least 1000-2000 additional employees (assuming total 600-300k cost per person and only 5% interest..). Which is why he had to fire so many people.
To say that "Elon has no doubt pissed off [...] some advertisers" is such a hilarious understatement.
Also: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1680082007873953794
I'm not disagreeing with your point just nitpicking word choice; the best kind of annoying comment!
Maybe he just wants to build WeChat ultimately to be sold to the US government, in the same vain as with his other ventures where he runs on government subsidies and/or full-on privatization mandates.
Again, extrapolate mid/long-term with “new” Republicans (don’t care about small gov at this point) potentially winning next election(s) and him providing an “AI” enabled personal interface for every US citizen… what could go wrong?
It’s a natural sell / setup for “we must win against evil empire of China, be as efficient, yaddayadda”.
The only question left at this point is how soon.
Pre-Elon, you have financial statements showing the strength of the company. Profitable before Covid before they hired a massive number of people (like a lot of companies during covid) and then dropped below profitability. It's very possible that a smaller layoff and a focus on fundamentals could have brought them back to profitability.
Elon has admitted that they've lost around 50% in ad revenue since the takeover and that they're not cash-flow positive. Reports are saying 59%-70%. I'm inclined to believe that Elon is under reporting to the public (based on his history of exaggerating/under-reporting/lying about this kind of stuff). Either way, it's clear Twitter is in a much weaker position now than pre-takeover.
Maybe the lawyers and landlords will take payment in blue checks.
It's been 30 full years of questionable debt-dependant business models.
My own account is still in a banned state for telling Microsoft they suck for making their OS bloated. Before I was off twitter, because fuck deleting a reasonable tweet to appease some censorship bot and its review team, twitter was less and less 'free' for anyone not worshiping that rich ass-hat.
So while Twitter is indeed a toxic hellhole, it is oftentimes the only way you can directly attempt to communicate with "the right people" in an organization.
they even censored the president of your country but no Musk is the evil lol. Somehow I can understand that the average joe is deep into politics and biased because they want their team to win but in HN, between engineers, that like facts and concepts that are abstract can't we just say that censoring the POTUS was something unseen in any kind of social media platform and that was probably the biggest event that ever happened? whatever we think of the guy, he got trough where he was through the voices of millions of american and just banning those is a danger to freedom and democracy
You have to view these billionaires as toddlers. They never hear a simple “no”, and when they do they go apoplectic.
None of this should ever apply to any even moderately-adjusted individual beyond childhood. Certainly not as an adult.
I think it's a relatively universal human trait to resent dissent, these guys just have more resources to make their distate known.
Most people when they hear “no” feel a little upset and get over it.
When a narcissist hears “no” he suffers a narcissistic injury and seeks revenge.
When a narcissistic billionaire hears “no”… well, buckle up. 1/6 showed us how bad that can get.
Which is also the story of Twitter and Musk.
I think it didn't even scratch the surface of how bad it can get. But it was already plenty bad.
Just saying yes as a parent doesn’t help them learn to cope with it. Rather a close similarity to GP’s point!
A few times a day.
> I find it pretty common to get a visceral reaction when I disagree with people,
I only find this common with people who are very sensitive (not that there is anything at all wrong with that). An interesting corollary I've found as well: very sensitive people tend to think the rest of the normal world is equally as sensitive (something I've picked up from having a very sensitive partner for over 5 years now; a partner who has many very sensitive friends); they somehow seem to forget that countries like Germany have people that are super direct as the norm.
> I think it's a relatively universal human trait to resent dissent
I hear far "worse" from good friends on the spectrum or from Germany or Russia and it's rather easy to chalk it up to them just communicating in a different way.
One they are billionaires, hearing no is likely exceedingly rare, however to get to prestige, I'm certain they heard no many many times (or the equivalent, say "no way you can do that") so they're so used to people objecting and they succeed anyway - Tesla, SpaceX come to mind here - that no just makes them want to double down on what they're doing, combined with the fact that their inner circle at this point likely isn't saying no very often, if at all, directly to the person at hand, it makes them very resistant to real feedback
It doesn't have to be just billionaires, one of the startups I worked in had a leadership culture like this. I ended up leaving after the new person I was reporting to took this to an extreme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com
It looks like this isn't a rebranding so much as making an "everything app".
> On October 4, 2022, Elon Musk described his acquisition of Twitter as "an accelerant to creating X, the everything app".[28] This has been linked to x.com.[29] In conversation with Ron Baron a month later, Musk said he will execute the X product plan "with some improvements" which will make Twitter "the most valuable financial institution in the world."[30]
Well, it'll be interesting whether he succeeds or fails. But this does not look like it is impulsive.
A rebranding would make more sense at the point where you actually roll out those everything features. Him being a marketing engineer, I guess he just had to stay in the conversation this week.
those who are already looking at him skeptically will not care and were already on the way out / not using the app.
dumb, but riding the hype train is really his only play IMO.
The impulsiveness and crowd sourcing writes the headline itself.
I’m not implying it’s a super calculated masterplan, more that he just knows it’ll grab headlines and mindshare cheaper than any paid marketing launch ever could.
Elon's company merged with Confinity. Confinity was already well underway with PayPal (owned trademarks, patents, and the domain name) at the time of the merger, and notably, had a working MVP.
Notably because when Elon was initially selected as CEO, he spent his tenure trying to throw away this working MVP because it was written in Java on Solaris, which he didn't know, so he wanted it rewritten in Classic ASP so he could better understand the codebase.
A few months (four, IIRC) of stubbornness about that, and the board had had enough, and removed him as the CEO.
Believe it or not, with all that being said, it still looks like it is impulsive.
Years ago I remember reading something about the Chinese microblogging sites and it was mentioned "these sites also have a character limits. However, b/c in Chinese a character can be an entire word, the 'word limits' are much longer."
Moving to the 4000 character limit feels very much a response to the above.
What exactly is it meant for then if not serious discussion?
> We have blogs for that.
You mean the one sided discussions? Also not every thought is worthy of a blog post, but is worthy of being put out there.
> Nobody wants to read it for an interesting article about geopolitics- foreignaffairs.com already exists
Geopolitics isn't the only thing longer convos are for... The problem with pre-Musk/4000 char limit Twitter is that nuances are heavily lost because of the lack of characters and that nobody wants to do thread storms.
> Know your audience.
Ironic.
All other types of discussion. Promoting serious discussion elsewhere.
Whether or not that was what the platform was meant for, it was what it was. And as far as I heard, our country was not the only one where this was happening.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2017/Giving-yo...
They made Unicode code points below U+1100 count as 1/280 of the character limit, and code points above it count as 1/140 of the character limit.
Where's the data? What's the warrant?
Do these arguments not recognize the ability to self-curate the content they see on the platform? It's entirely possible to individually remove and/or add follows. Block people. Mute people. Report violative content. Contribute enough and get into community notes. "Be the change," rather than just "whine about it" is probably the only useful pathway.
I'm squarely in the Capitalism + Elon Musk == good thing camp. Haven't seen a convincing reason to change my mind yet, and I'm the most apt to hate billionaires. Even the "Elon is WEF, he's not your friend" crowd have some compelling ad homininominons I'm too impressed to consider.
Then again, I'm a fuckin' nobody with negative net worth, so economically and capitalistically speaking perhaps I am guilty of idolization. But logically some of the arguments are out of my ability to understand. Emotional arguments don't work nor resonate with me.
The problem is that there is a clash between what users want to see and what the company's algorithm wants you to see, and it seems like there's strong evidence to conclude that Musk and his platform are trying to push the kinds of things that a lot of people don't want to see.
So yes, you can spend the time and energy to self-curate and find people who have interesting opinions. I could also go to a white supremacist march and find people who have interesting things to say about classic Dr Who episodes or who have the same passion for Dungeons and Dragons as I do, but I'm not going to tolerate all that toxic crazy to find them when I can go literally anywhere else. In the end, you're still stuck in a cesspool trying to filter out the content that Twitter really, really wants you to see. If I have to work at not seeing the stuff I've explicitly chosen to see, I'm going to find anywhere else (or nowhere).
> due to extreme unreflected and unchecked ego
Unfortunately, I think it's worse than that. My belief is that it's manic phases caused by bipolar disorder. If you squint and chart these 'manic' decisions, it seems to be about every 4-5 months. In between he'll often (though not always) post some self-reflective and more 'down' things and be generally more quiet (remember the diet-coke and gun pics?). Then, like with many bipolar sufferers, he'll get 'manic' again and do these kinda things to his businesses and to those around him who care. His personal life is famously a mess.
I want to be clear, I'm not a shrink, I have no degrees in this, and I'm 'diagnosing' this very far removed from the guy. But I do have a few bipolar people in my life and, to me, the parallels are very striking.
I feel for him in that way. Despite all the money and fame, the disease that I suspect he suffers from (with, again, low evidence) is a very tough one to accept. Of the people in my own life that suffer from it, none have moved past a confirmed diagnosis and started the long road to recovery and acceptance.
Does it seem like manic? Yes. But when this behavior is persistent, not sure bipolar is the diagnosis per se.
> Sunday, on Twitter, Musk was also asked if he was bipolar, to which Musk replied, “yeah,” but then he explained further, saying his psychological highs and lows are associated with actual ups and downs in his life.
> “Maybe not medically tho,” says his tweet. “Dunno. Bad feelings correlate to bad events, so maybe real problem is getting carried away in what I sign up for.”
https://sports.yahoo.com/entertainment/elon-musk-tweeted-bip...
Mixed episodes are no joke, I've experienced a couple and hope to never do so again.
We’re not morally responsible for the fact some of us may have mental disorders (some like OCD which I have won’t leave us entirely), so stealing which we would be morally responsible for is worse than having a mental disorder.
However, having a mental disorder would be worse than stealing in terms of its consequences (we just can’t get rid of it no matter how much we try).
(At least I think it makes sense to accept both of your statements that way since I think having a large ego is morally bad independently of any consequences.)
I think that Mr. Musk is an undiluted asshole and one of the worst douchebags to ever grace our planet, which he has proven again and again.
But analyzing his mental condition is sure as shit not up to me or to anybody else.
After all, he proved again and again what a sad excuse of a human being he is.
But I don't think it's OK to judge his mental state as an outsider.
Curious; not trying to bust your balls.
Why not? Am I unallowed to suggest that Howard Hughes had OCD? That Kurt Gödel was paranoid?
Submitting a hypothesis about some’s mental condition is a reasonable thing to do, given that you have a substantial body of evidence in the form of behavioural reports.
I don’t find the above argument convincing, but only because it’s vague and lacks specific examples - not because it’s ”not okay.”
I don't like Musk, nor do I trust the things he says, but I usually err on the side of granting people some humanity.
Cool your jets, man!
Musk has done plenty of good, for the country and the world. I can think of plenty, plenty others who have accomplished nothing but feel entitled to run other peoples' lives.
This is projection and what Twitter was explicitly doing with the Trust and Safety org. It was protecting the elite from free speech. Elon dismantled that.
I lived with a republican during the trump years. When trump was on tv I asked her what the appeal was. Her reply:
"I think he's funnyyy."
"I like the way he talks to people."
That's all this is. Musk is being funnyy. His fans think he's funnyyy.
As Jon Stewart pointed out about trump in 2016, there is nothing else there.
I suspect you'll fairly quickly realize the problem with taking a sample size of 1 and extrapolating characteristics about a population of 10s of million of people.
The only things they really have in common are that they both happen to be billionaires who bought their own social media platform that they now use to signal boost discredited right-wing conspiracy theories through memes and insults.
Beyond that, the comparisons are totally superficial.
They bad. We good.
Classic tribal caveman-level thought process.
You could go ahead and replace X with Steve Jobs, Wozniak, Carmack etc and your argument would make the same amount of sense, it's so detached.
Writing this I realize there is a non-zero chance I'm arguing with a literal bot. Great
To clarify, saying "there's nothing else there" about Elon Musk, or any great inventor, or even a great villain, I consider too vacuous itself to merit a more pointed response. You don't get to have your thoughts being discussed 24/7 on an intellectual forum without being a bit resourceful.
He thinks that every idea he has is a good idea, simply because he had it, and therefore his ability to think on his feet and come up with and try new ideas is a virtue; he doesn't understand having to build and maintain something, to provide stability and consistency, because that would mean not using all of his new great ideas.
Unfortunately, all of his ideas sound like he came up with them while sitting around in his mom's basement getting high and saying "wouldn't it be cool if...", so I guess we'll see how this all bears out. My biggest hope is that people see him for who he really is: an insecure and entitled man-child who's never been told no.
Either way, despite how polarized it may have been, it was valuable for many groups and a large number of genuinely grassroots social & artistic movements originated it there or effectively used it. Destroying those doesn't seem like a clear cut positive for humanity, as you're framing it.
You can't have an actual discussion with such a small character limit. However it's easy to spout off nonsense bullshit in a small character limit. And then no one can really argue with you because it takes more words to actually back things up. Thus it's really easy to spread bullshit and the people who are more susceptible just eat it up as they can only stay focused for a few sentences anyway.
TikTok was kind of the same way and it drove me crazy up until the last year, because the comment limit was so short (and the fact that you can't really see a thread properly, just like twitter.) The user base of tiktok seems to have vastly changed over the last year (or maybe they keep improving their algo so much I just don't encounter it) but I've gotten used to the limit because people aren't arguing as much they are just genuinely commenting on a video.
I was always a fan of Reddit (until recently) because it was just a message board- you could actually read real thoughts and have a formatted threaded discussion (like on HN).
I think social media itself is the problem, not the post length.
Letting everyone talk is free speech. On the street you walk away from the lunatic, but with social media they find their kind and yell together.
Which one would the social media algorithms promote?
I credit algorithmic timelines as one of the primary factors in today's hyper-polarization. Twitter was one of the more influential ones, especially when coupled with a short character limit that prohibits deep discourse and as others have mentioned a lack of comment threads or other tools to organize ideas. The whole thing promote vapid sound bite meme-think, which best fits fanaticism and trolling.
Facebook and YouTube are the other big mass-lobotomizing engines. The mechanism is largely the same-- promoting things that maximize engagement which means the most inflammatory or ridiculous ideas.
PayPal. SpaceX. SolarCity. Tesla. Boring. Elon Musk has a signature characteristic of building 10x-ethos companies from first principles at great personal & financial risk.
It's the Muskian Cycle: Innovate, try to garner investment, be laughed out of the room, make it work anyways, laugh all the way to the top of tens of thousands of millions of dollars of net worth. Then stuff all the capital into the next Big Thing.
Steve Jobs said something like "Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower." As far as I can tell, each of Musk's successful ventures has inculcated iterative or multiplicative innovation into the fabric of technology, society, and interaction.
PayPal spearheaded and won the race for payment processing. It wasn't perfect, but it was in no small part due to Musk why the company succeeded and earned its eBay buyout.
SpaceX, with its obvious contributions to the fields of not only rocketry but every second-order industry around it, including testing/software, etc., has been a game-changer. Again, second-order, competition arises, humanity wins.
Ditto Tesla; not only the AI/ML/CV wizardry in the stack but plenty of other non-primary-field innovation and progress comes alongside (manufacturing, battery tech, etc.). I personally am not convinced EVs are some solution to the "climate problem," given the net-impact of mfg and power consumption, but it is a pre-requisite to self-sustainability that we move toward renewables, and with that optimism I move on.
I don't know a whole lot about the Solar operations at Tesla, but SpaceX + Starlink has made one of those incremental improvements in the internet access game. I've got my biggest gripe with this venture - based on Kessler Syndrome, I'm afraid of trashing our space-way by means of junk, though admittedly this fear comes from Stephenson's "Seveneves" and not facts or reality. Orbital tracking remains a significant challenge to the exploding private space industries.
Bringing us to the Boring Co. Literally nobody is complaining about that, but it's such a banal and useful and imperative tech to develop for the overall goal of Martian exploration, and it's not abstract - it exists and is doing what it needs to do.
Certainly 𝕏 (neé Twitter) and Xai are integral to Musk's overarching vision. For years, I've posited that someone should, or perhaps already has, been meticulously analyzing the entirety of Twitter's data. This data, rich in semantic analysis, interaction templating, linguistics, and more, could be instrumental in training and researching emergent systems. The rapid, mostly unfiltered, and bite-sized nature of the medium provides a unique lens into the human thought process, offering a potential approximation of how "thoughts" might interact.
It's possible we (humans) are destined to reclaim our collective consciousness through technology. It is also possible Elon is the anti-Christ, and we should be looking inward, meditating, and removing blockages to our lineage that has shrouded the collective consciousness, muted our heart and soul, and reduced us to a low level of being, what the Buddhists might consider Naraka.
There are a lot of FUD-spreaders about Neuralink, too, but listening to the technical discussions and grokking the science has me convinced they are approaching another sea change. There are hard engineering problems and there are impossible problems. Elon's companies take the hard ones and just work really hard, then get the solution. I see no reason why this approach to software platforms and dynamic interactivity interfaces would be any different.
People don't like change, and they love to complain about something. So I obviously understand why these > angry and disappointed types are out of the woodwork.
But the thing is, we should celebrate and adore the scientific progress, commitment to science & innovation over pure profit, and - in my opinion as a USA chap - dedication to as much free speech as possible.
Cringe, hate, love, whatever - the guy is objectively successful and objectively delivered on some cool shit. I wouldn't argue he is the most precise or accurate predictor, but he's quite the visionary. When the Starship gets to orbit, there'll be some more creative press and commentary, but I will be watching and as excited as when the Roadster Spaceman went to Mars. Or when I saw the first booster landings.
Everyone fails, we are defined by how hard we try.
Musk was removed as CEO within four months of his company merging with Confinity, who had already developed and written an MVP for PayPal.
This is a bit of a stretch. After that point, Musk's "contribution" to PayPal appears to largely have been cashing dividend checks.
Not that he does in all cases. Not even that the X looks bad. But the Twitter bird was both iconic and cheerful, and there was nothing wrong with it. Kicking it to the curb is the action of a foolish fool.
The 'vote' was for money, not for any sort of trust in Elon's leadership
I didn't follow this too closely so I really have no idea if internally the Twitter directors thought this was going to be good or if it was a 'dump it on the billionaire' thing
What I mean with my original post above is that Twitter is such a recognizable brand it must be worth multiple millions of dollars - to throw it away for the most bland and un-googleable thing "X" is... hard to understand
How does "x dot com" work to prop up the brand in daily communication and will people actually do it?
Because if they don't do both, then none of the content on x dot com matters, right?
Twitter needs nothing extra, no 'dot com' in any fashion, the brand lends itself exceedingly well to verbal and digital uses while consistently establishing and reinforcing the brand.
Really, he tanked most of the brand value if not all of it, it just doesn't "work".
Social media doesn't age well. Look at myspace. This will be controversial, but Google didn't get where it wanted/needed to be with Google+ and they ripped the cord out of the wall; it seemed like it was just google being google but it may have been genius.
I was also critical of FB/Meta buying Insta, I figured it was all going to somehow be Facebookgram but they kept it separate. FB is now for old people and Insta is probably at its peak. I will not be shocked when Meta launches a new video oriented application similar to TikTok or YouTube but somehow different.
Twitter has been toxic from day one, in fact I think the very idea of reducing discourse to something the size of a tweet is bad for the world. Lately it has been a cesspool, I get targeted political content that I absolutely never sought out, very obviously biased. That aside, do you somehow "rehabilitate" twitter? Or do you scuttle it and have a newness? Rebranding seems like the most realistic Hail Mary option, it can possibly be new without rebuilding everything. I don't think it will work and I don't really want it to, personally, but it's a bold play that is way better than continuing to watch it erode. I've heard 2 or 3 different media sources talking about twitter in the last week, partially about the "X" but also very openly about how it isn't the same thing and they don't like it. It might be too late when NYTimes podcasts are openly talking about how the reporters dislike using it anymore.
I'm not a super active participant in or consumer of "social media" but I can't remember one having a second act, once it was no longer "cool" it seemed like the party was over, did I miss one that reinvented itself? Twitter is not cool anymore.
I'm still salty that they pulled out the Foursquare location backend and replaced it with Facebook's... whatever it is they replaced it with. Eleven years later and it's still less often correct than it was when Foursquare was providing the data.
The question of what happens to the blogosphere types if/when Twitter explodes matters a lot to me. Idk if Substack is the right answer.
Sure, sometimes those public announcements of events were "I hate minorities" or "yo look at my dick", but the platform was a global notice board that served a positive purpose in that narrow definition.
Would it have significantly less engagement and be "less successful" than Twitter? Absolutely no question. But it wouldn't be as much of a ridiculous hell of shitflinging and people arguing about stuff with a small character limit and less than ideal amounts of context
I'm sure it was not.
> but it sure was helpful for example for getting alerts to breaking news stories and such
Yes, presumably the breaking news that the government-corporate propaganda machine wanted us to see.
Seeing earthquakes and mass shootings and the like a few minutes before legacy media was an interesting novelty but not much actual practical value and not something that will bring down capitalism/billionaires/fascists/etc.
Nytimes is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. They pretend to be better than something like Fox News but they’re the same thing. Their css and layout plus their history would have fools believe they are a good source of unbiased news. But they’re just as fake as the other news and cater to the left instead, which is anti-Musk for reasons.
Also with twitter and AI threatening to displace journalists I can’t imagine they’d like it much.
Not necessarily disagreeing with any predictions about what becomes of twitter/X though..
^ I think you need to read that
Throwing away powerful branding is just a hilariously bad call.
Perhaps it's not foolish. People have been leaving Twitter in a huff, slamming the door on their way out. "Twitter" was ruined according to numerous articles and memes. Rebranding might be going with the flow rather than fighting against the grain of "old Twitter".
It’s for Wall Street so he can take this dumpster fire public again, but with a whole bunch of buzzwords.
The wealthiest huckster in the whole entire world has done so many horse tranquilizers as psychedelics that something broke and he is flipping out and wielding his power in unaccountable ways, like any billionaire, but in obvious madness.
He broke. But nobody can do a thing to help, because billionaires are so powerful that the man is completely unaccountable to anyone or anything. It's worse than Ye. Elon broke, after too many horse tranquilizer trips. He's not there anymore. You're seeing the drugs acting in his stead.
There are reasons why societies don't set individuals up with this kind of power.
We currently have more than 8270 people waiting. I hope it is not against hacker news policy to post links that people may find helpful. Also spending time outside is always good :)
How do you know what he’s doing? Even if he’s said something positive about it and/or used it in the past doesn’t mean anything. I have positive things to say about psilocybin but haven’t done it in 20 years.
So if he's just endorsing its usage in a clinical context, that is way different than railing lines.
> Musk takes ketamine in small doses to treat depression and uses higher doses of the drug at social events
"I don't understand or agree with every decision along a multi-decades long goal thus drugs and why socialism"
It's also telling how people simultaneously blame him for every failure while discarding every success. He only has responsibility for failures or perceived short term failures. It shows how dishonest the entire conversation is.
> huckster
> has done so many horse tranquilizers as psychedelics that something broke and he is flipping out
> after too many horse tranquilizer trips. He's not there anymore. You're seeing the drugs acting in his stead.
Do you have a credible source for this besides “trust me bro”?
I would be surprised if this wasn't in the billions of dollars.
And all discarded...
I guess it could be because he didn't single handedly buy Twitter. IIRC he contributed $15B of the $44B acquisition. I guess he can't turn it off without his co-investors holding him accountable?
If, on the other hand, he had simply shut of the servers many (most?) of these communities would have simply vanished for good, and many of their members might have been “liberated” from social media for good.
"Twitter was acquired by X Corp both to ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app. This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing.
The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting – but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video.
In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world. The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird."
This, though. This one makes me angry and disappointed.
Twitter has had such a solid brand for so long. It's accomplished things most marketers only dream of: getting a verb like "Tweet" into the standard lexicon is like the pinnacle of branding. Even with all of the issues, "Twitter" and its "Tweets" have been at the core of international discourse for a decade now.
Throwing all of that away so Elon can use a domain he's sat on since '99 seems exceedingly foolish.