I don't think hanlon's razor applies to billionaires , unless the peter principle holds true all the way to the very top

Why wouldn't Peter Principle apply just because the magical financial threshold is crossed? This is Peter Principle in a textbook way, a promotion from managing companies to managing the government.

Was he ever competent in something, tho?

Ah. That would be the Dilbert Principle:

> Unlike the Peter principle, the promoted individuals were not particularly good at any job they previously had, so awarding them a supervisory position is a way to remove them from the productive workflow.

> An earlier formulation of this effect was known as Putt's Law (1981), credited to the pseudonymous author Archibald Putt ("Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle

my original thesis is wrong - while musk may have petered up to the top, that doesnt imply his actions must also be attributed to stupidity. the error in the thesis is conflation of stupidity with the raw brutal strength of cancer

Well, for Twitter it's fine. It's a private company, and the shareholders can only blame themselves for the management they put in charge.

(From a broader society point of view, I'm a bit sad that they didn't actually manage to run Twitter into the ground. I think Twitter's a net-negative for humanity. But that's a different topic. People obviously like using it.)

Not just Twitter almost all of social media apps are net negative for humanity.

Except Hacker News :)

The things that make social media net-negative--advertising, infinite scroll, global scale--aren't part of HN. Facebook wasn't net-negative when it was just a website that a few million people used to post semi-publicly with their community.

Don't forget "personalized" feed/home.

Once content begins being served by algorithm social networks start taking a nose dive in terms of quality and user experience and they slowly spiral into lowest common denominator smut. It juices engagement and therefore advertising dollars for a time, but slowly half of users start to recognize the vapidness of it all and disengage for good.

Hacker News is paginated, but effectively infinite, too. Though I guess that's enough of a UI friction to make a difference?

How is it not global scale? Or do you mean it only target a specific slice of your life (even if it makes not much of a difference where on the globe you are)?

yes. precisely.

Social control media.

Musk is uniquely stupid and arrogant for refusing to understand very complex systems before making radical changes to them. This behavior directly led to outages at Twitter after he brought it.

If only that truly was a unique trait…

I do think Musk correctly identified excess staff and irresponsible spending, but where he screwed up was being his toxic self which drove away even more of the audience and almost every big advertiser.

Musk fired people before understanding what they did at Twitter. The best example is how he fired a Twitter employee who criticized him but it turned out to be the owner of a company Twitter bought and he had enormous legal protection and when Musk found this out he was suddenly much nicer to him.

And Twitter is running fine without all the excess staff

I mean, I don’t think it makes money and it is a cesspool of misinformation, hate, porn, and bots, but technically, it is fine.

It has had revenue declines and moderation problems, but it is still operating at internet scale, serving hundreds of millions of users, generating billions in annual revenue, and remaining technically stable. That’s not ‘fine,’ but it’s also not a failed or non-functional system.

It was staffed with walking examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect. People who knew very little about the departments or the work that they were cutting but enough to assume they knew more than people who had spent their life working there. That requires a special level of arrogance. They went in with the idea that all of these people at this organization are lazy and stupid and so everything they didn’t understand must be a result of one of those things or the other.