https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com_(bank)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/07/25/elon-musk-...
Ultimately, Levchin gathered several other key people in the company, and went to the investors threatening to quit (and destroy the company) unless they brought back Thiel as CEO. The board sided with Levchin, Theil returned and Musk was out of day-to-day operations.
If you’re interested in the PayPal story, I highly recommend Jimmy Soni’s book, The Founders. https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Paypal-Entrepreneurs-Shaped-...
I mean, while nothing about the web was particularly mature at the time, the idea that Windows was more mature than Linux for it is… peculiar, from the point of view of someone who was messing around with web programming at the time. Note how much difficulty Microsoft had migrating Hotmail to Windows.
There's also xAI, which I think is technically another distinct company rather than part of X/Twitter.
I expected Twitter to crash and burn as soon as he took over; I was wrong. I guess it's like Truth Social - if you're fabulously wealthy, you can run a social media site that's a complete train-wreck, without it ruining you.
/me never had a Twitter account. Nor Faceache.
I do get the point you're trying to make though. Just thought that emphasis was a little off.
In that sense Michael Jackson having sleepovers in his bed with 12-year olds[1] and Musk's x.com rename are very similar.
[1]: taking the most generous interpretation; no comment on whether he was a nonce or not.
I agree with you but imagine if Elon had listened when people said the same thing about starting an electric car company, a reusable rocket company or a brain-interface company.
Or if Michael Jackson had listened to all the people that told him the sounds on his album were too crazy and fused too many genres together.
Ultimately it's a fine line between genius and crazy. You have to acknowledge that often where genius resides, so does crazy.
I mean look at Steve Jobs, clearly incredible talent - but also harbored some unconventional beliefs about medicine which many say ultimately led to his premature death.
Even Achilles had his heel.
And those weren't widely held views either so it's not even accurate.
The world would be such a simple place if it really was as simple as "shitty behavior = shitty person". It'd certainly make my life easier if this were the case.
But the world is so much more complicated and difficult to comprehend than that. Often the most interesting stuff happens in the gray areas where you have to wrestle with multitudes. We all contain multitudes ourselves.
He was deeply troubled, but he still had a huge, lasting impact
It does seem to me that extreme wealth is a severe risk factor for untreatable kookiness. And arguably, being a talented entertainer is a risk factor for extreme wealth.
I don't deny Jackson's talent, and I assume Musk is very good at several things I've never tried. I would cheerfully forgo even modest wealth, if the deal was I didn't have to be like them.
As Musk said it himself when asked what he thought about the fact that his tweets may cause billions of dollars of stock drops: "I don't care".
SpaceX's success is massively overstated, every time it's brought up. Their rockets are still not stable and if you actually tally up all the money they've received from the state, it'd be way more expensive - even adjusted to inflation - then the space shuttle launches from the nineties.
What other impact are you thinking of? The hyper loop? The solar rooftop's? His vaporware robots? The boring company? Everything turned out to be pure hype with hilariously overstated success. Or maybe the autopilot which is still only usable by people that enjoy gambling with pedestrian lives?
I'm as cynical about Tesla as anyone, as my comment history will show. I think they played fast and loose with financial data when celebrity and anything tech put you above the rules. If he had the enemies he has now, I don't think they would have made it.
But...Elon Musk is a force. I was skeptical of him in, maybe, 2016, but the guy has managed to continue to do stuff no one else seems capable of, even in the face of haters. There's no way pre-Elon Tesla does what he did, I don't believe it for a second.
Even Twitter; yes he fired too many people and it's a bit of a fiasco (and hard to kill, apparently). But the fact that he's using it to explicitly push an agenda is wild. There's no one else like him.
What tomoyoirl said is correct. Musk's talent is mainly in raising hype which results in incredible funding. he's definitely the most successful person at that since Steve Jobs.
Everyone that ever worked in large enterprise knew that Twitter would be fine after the mass terminations. The only thing you lose at that point is the ability to maneuver, the platform will be mostly automated and barring incompetence or malice, things will just keep chugging along with a skeleton crew.
Given how shit even current EVs are compared to the early Model S, you are totally wrong. It was always at most a side project for ALL the existing OEMs as we now know. They have have had chance after chance after chance to prove the thesis that "if they cared, they could produce a Tesla killer overnight". None of the OEMs have produced anything that is competitive with Tesla in all metrics (price, range, features etc.) all of them compromise in one or more areas.
The only real serious competitors are the Chinese. There is a reason when teardown analysis reports are offered on all the EVs, the Chinese care about one company and one company only: Tesla. Everyone else is just a follower and the Chinese are not even bothering to waste their time looking at them. You even see it in their actions. Tesla is the only "legacy western" company without a JV partner in China. China can happily dump all the other losers any time they want. They can't afford to lose Tesla so they have accommodated them.
>SpaceX's success is massively overstated, every time it's brought up. Their rockets are still not stable and if you actually tally up all the money they've received from the state, it'd be way more expensive - even adjusted to inflation - then the space shuttle launches from the nineties.
Are you for real? In 2021 they launched ~380 Metric tons of mass to orbit while the rest of the world combined launched about 400 metric tons. In 2022? They were double what the rest of the world did and finally in 2023, they were 80% of all the mass to orbit launched. When I mean rest of world that includes: Rest of the US industry + Europe + India + China + Japan + Russia + everyone else. If you look at the other launch providers in the US they get far more subsidies and have delivered not even a fraction of what SpaceX has provided.
Can you think of many industries where a single company is doing 80% of worldwide effort? And they are on track to increase that by 50% this year (a metric they will likely achieve given their track record).
In the last couple years they have sent 42 humans to orbit and back. They year they are on track to do their first spacewalk.
Starlink now has 2.3 Million customers in over 70 countries.
I am seeing this outright dismissal of Musk more and more since the whole Twitter saga. Its reeks of ignorance just like all the people that repeatedly make fun of Apple users as idiots who just get duped by fancy marketing. Even in 2024 people here make that silly argument. Musk bashing is the new version of that. It just makes you look ignorant because you are so blinded by what you don't like that you have dismissed all these amazing achievements that no one else is doing.
Sounds like nonsense used to wave away his success with SpaceX.
If you look at his interviews, it seems like he is most involved in SpaceX of all his ventures. He can explain deep technical details of the product whereas this is less true for Tesla and has been proven many times that he cannot do the same for Twitter.
Elon had all the intricacies and parts of the rockets memorized and was just rattling off details like it was nothing.
Kind of makes me think human intelligence is a direct function of memory.
My point is that every product was hilariously under delivered, not that the product itself is unusable.
Let's address the products you're citing:
The Tesla model s was marketed heavily on price and the full self driving. There were essentially no electric cars in the 100k price range the Tesla cost, so comparing the cars at the time the car was announced with when the car actually was delivered, 5 yrs later is extremely questionable. But without Musk's hype, we probably wouldn't have the rivian etc, as they were all riding his hype wave. But we'd still have electric cars. Just less then we've got right now.
Now SpaceX's. It got billions of taxpayers money, there can be no second company because nobody else can get such funding. In the nineties pretty much everything was delivered by NASA. It just threw in the towel for price reasons, so Musk came along and promised a lunar base & manned missions to mars, netting him all contacts.
So yes, now we have SpaceX. The only player that can deliver things to orbit, because Russia is too poor, European nations somehow don't want to spend money on it and China is mostly interested for military applications, so they're not publishing what they're actually delivering to orbit. They're definitely shipping things however, you occasionally get leaked videos from failed launches that spread toxic fumes close to population centers and similar fuckups.
What you're using as an argument is really an inevitability.
Starlink is another highly exaggerated product, which is still decent value if you need/want an Internet connection in an area that doesnt have usable cable connections. It's not the cheapest, nor the most expensive. It's in the middle. It's a solid choice (and so are the Tesla), it just didn't have quite as much impact as people attribute to it.
I'm not even bashing Musk. What I said from the start is that his contributions are exaggerated.
(Delivery on his wild promises, well, sometimes the true believers he hires make that happen, sometimes not.)
I wonder how long this lasts, though? The more we see of him, the less smart/magical he seems other than to devotees. I feel like his getting in the limelight has pulled the curtain back quite a bit.
Why do you think that? As far as I can tell, both electric cars and reusable rockets technically could have been done decades earlier. But for all this time nobody was crazy enough to go all-in on it, until Musk did.
His individual actions certainly bumped things forward. I suppose what I doubt is that no one else would have done that, or that steady gradual adoption wouldn’t have been as far off as we imagine.
I should add a disclaimer here that I don’t feel very strongly about this stuff, and I’m pretty comfortable with being wrong. I also don’t have any major hang ups about Musk; he has undeniably done some great work.
The emperor has no clothes.
My take is that Musk then sorta went "f-it, I had to buy Twitter. I might as well try and make it into X."
I always thought the rebrand was a complete shame, if only for the reason that "tweet", meaning "to make a posting on the Twitter online message service : to post a tweet" is in the dictionary!
What a waste to throw that away.
To understand, you must look through the lens of "gran autismo".
Everything about the purchase and the way the company has been run since Elon took the reigns has been baffling. The bizarre forced-push of the X brand is just the tip of the iceberg.
I dunno, is it that baffling? It seems like he really loved using the product but didn't like the leadership, and he just wanted to own it so he could mess around and have fun following his own whims.
Once you get the idea that he doesn't actually care about financial success it all seems pretty reasonable. Like any hobby, for X/Twitter to be a "success" it just has to amuse him, and based on his usage of the platform it seems to be doing that.
The amounts of money he's losing are staggering to us but also meaningless to him. Our society has allowed him to accumulate so much wealth that nothing he could do "wrong" in a business sense would meaningfully impact his lifestyle.
This is the frustrating part. If I went around my office tomorrow endorsing nazi propaganda, I would be out of a job by the end of the day and probably struggling to pay my mortgage in a few months.
But this fuckstick can do whatever he wants and never face any real repercussions. He could bankrupt Twitter, SpaceX, and Tesla and just decide to retire early on a private island.
It's so incredibly hard to actually fuck things up when you're rich that it's downright impressive when someone like SBF comes along and manages to actually do it.
If anything, the problem is with your workspace which forces a particular political viewpoint on you.
I'm frustrated that being born into money can make you functionally immune to most of those consequences.
There are two sides to freedom of speech. You have the freedom to say dumb shit, and I have the freedom to not associate with you because I don't like the dumb shit you say. If one of my employees started expressing pro-Nazi sentiments at the office, I would fire them, because I have a right to do so and because I believe the rest of my employees have a right to a safe working environment where they don't have to put up with people who think they are inferior just because of their race or cultural background.
nazi speech would incur this consequence because it is classified as hate speech.
However, termination of employee cannot apply to just _any_ speech that the boss doesnt like. Of course, the boss would have other ways to "manage out" that troublesome employee, but directly firing for the speech cannot be one of them.
What I have zero tolerance for is hate speech. These infractions don't get second chances.
Yes, once one throws reason out the window, just about anything becomes "reasonable"
Idk. Probably the people who remain at Twitter, and to a certain extent, the investing institutions that were courted to help fund the acquisition.
Of course, they probably hedged, so they don't care as much, but still.
This is a case study in how concentration of capital in the hands of one person can go terribly wrong for the purposes of resource allocation.
So let's say, hypothetically, they build in a redirect from twitter to x-dot-com. Off the top of my head...
- All logins are now busted. Some percentage of users is lost forever because they can't remember their login credentials and instead of going through the recovery flow, they go use Bluesky.
- A huge amount of third-party integrations are busted because they aren't using client libraries that understand redirects
- A full code audit is necessary. Someone has hard-coded twitter.com into a critical system somewhere. Other people have referenced a variable, but it's the wrong variable. Still others are looking up the value in a database somewhere that doesn't have a search frontend anyone knows about. And some other database has a huge cache of absolute URLs it vends and everyone who built it got fired by Musk. This is probably the most predictable-cost step, but it's still a cost to be paid.
- A significant number of users are confused. The median of web user is profoundly ignorant of how the web works, and no matter how much you warn them and how much you prepare them, day-of-switch they will panic. Staff up your support team. Customers-lost-forever-two-point-oh.
- Every business integration needs to be updated. Google App Store, Apple App Store, Amazon Appstore... They all have bindings to twitter.com, and some part of their flow will panic and flag a security issue if they see it's turned into a redirect to elsewhere. That probably triggers a security audit of every version of the Twitter client (and those companies aren't particularly inspired to foot the bill on Musk's behalf, billionaire that he is...). Hell, Google indexes twitter.com via a dedicated side-pipe. Will that side-pipe handle a redirect?
(source: I've been in the side-seat for a merger-become-rebrand, and the number of things people expect to "just work" and don't is impressive).
That includes everyone who had 2FA active before Musk made that a "premium" feature and subsequentially lost their 2FA device. What a clusterfuck, that one.
> Every business integration needs to be updated. Google App Store, Apple App Store, Amazon Appstore... They all have bindings to twitter.com, and some part of their flow will panic and flag a security issue if they see it's turned into a redirect to elsewhere.
And that's assuming the integrations even support changing the primary domain name in their OAuth backend, which a lot of them will not. Or you have appliances that got made years ago when Twitter integration was the fad of the day - I 'member there's a fridge out there that showed tweets on its screen -, game consoles or other devices that don't get firmware updates any more.
Most of those are probably already broken. Twitter dropped support for most third-party API clients a few years ago.
1: HN won't let me paste the rune, not sure if it's limited to BMP on purpose but you can see it on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansuz_(rune)
The US doesn't have the same sort of naming laws that are common in European countries, but there are state-specific limits around what you can have in a legal name.
Specifically, in California, you cannot have diacritic marks in a name, which is part of why people were shocked that Musk was able to name his child X Æ A-12, when someone named Ramón Núñez will have their legal name as "Ramon Nunez" in California.
It's stupid and irrational because this wasn't a decision that was made based on reason - it was an emotional one. Elon is a bag-holder. He bought x.com in the dotcom boom and doesn't want to admit that the domain he paid a good chunk of money for is worthless - hence the (failed) attempt to make a brand out of it.
This is how it goes in all big companies :(
Stuff like this makes it obvious that the people who are still there no longer give a fuck, they just do what they are told with the minimum effort required to collect the paycheck.
Stated goal is to gradually transform it into an “everything app” — https://theconversation.com/elon-musk-aims-to-turn-twitter-i...
It's not going to work, but it is the only story you can tell yourself and employees about how the Twitter saga ends in any way other than Musk losing interest and getting distracted by AI again and Twitter spiraling into the drain and possibly being dumped into bankruptcy by its debt load.
While Twitter wasn't making money hand over fist, it was bringing in $4,500million in ad revenue prior to the rebrand and had years where it was marginally profitable.
Musk's saddling Twitter with interest on the debt he paid to buy the company is one of the reasons it's immolating money.
Sarcasm aside, they probably were hoping to convert the brand name twitter has to 'x', but failed to realize how sticky the name was/is.
I mean, if nothing else, "X did [something stupid]" just looks like someone forgot to fill in a template; no-one is going to publish an article with 'X', unqualified, in it.
Was thinking almost exactly this while reading a recent BBC article — their style guide appears to be that the company's name is "X, formerly Twitter,"
There is strong nostalgia for aw-shucks persona of an inventor-turned-business-owner.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/16/cnbc-exclusive-cnbc-transcri...
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/dealbook-summit-2023-el...