So this is how Twitter goes out: not with a bang but with a seemingly endless stream of stories about the little ways Elon is ruining the service each day.
Just staggers me that Elon could have just… not done any of this. And yet here we are. He’s had to sell billions in Tesla stock to finance this ongoing mayhem, this is surely going to be up there as one of the greatest examples of hubris in modern business.
Maybe milking elderly people with robocalls about the "liberal conspiracy" is really that lucrative, and lighting $44B on fire was just an investment to get into that club?
As best I’ve been able to discern it, Musk said he was going to buy Twitter for a way overvalued sum ($44bn) as a troll? But ended up getting in so deep that he found himself with a legal obligation to buy the thing for an absurd price.
It’s the explanation that makes the most sense to me: obscenely rich man is very used to doing whatever the hell he wants with no repercussions, particularly when shitposting on Twitter (see: SEC) and there was no-one around to tell him to stop.
And even worse than that, he would have had to have been deposed before paying for it. A bunch of his conversations about the deal were already released in discovery. Twitter lawyers were salivating about catching Elon in a lie at the deposition. It’s notable Musk was willing to deal juuust before the deposition was finally going to happen.
Because he's not a business genius, he's just a guy who has made a few big bets and they've happened to work out (specifically PayPal and Tesla, and maybe SpaceX eventually). After that, he thought he had a magic touch and started putting money into companies that caught his fancy because it worked for him in the past. Before twitter it was the Boring Company.
The Boring Company is absolutely a success and imo it's the best example of Elon's tried and true strategy: convince government officials of some idea only the government could buy. Boring Company is a money making machine just like SolarCity, Tesla, and SpaceX even though not a single one of those companies could be profitable without the heavy subsidization they receive.
Good Jobs First track how much subsidies are given out to specific companies. Tesla's racked up $2.5 billion from states and the federal government and another half billion in loans/bailouts[^0] (for comparison, Tesla' net income in 2022 was $11.19B). SpaceX is all government contracts where NASA basically pays a private company to do the things they could and want to do but can't because of political impediments. We're still the ones funding it, we're just paying more and letting a private company take credit. Starlink's subsidized by the FCC, SolarCity's subsidized by a number of states as well as the federal gov'ts subsidization through tax credits for 30% of the cost of solar panels, etc.
And people aren't dumb. He's been sued in a number of countries for subsidy fraud already. Remember when Tesla pretended to have rapid battery exchange ready to go and announced it was live? That was purely to take advantage of a poorly written subsidy package in CA that didn't actually stipulate they had to give people access to it. Tesla won that lawsuit too iirc.
Elon Musk became the richest man on earth without ever running a profitable company. In fact, I'd say it's precisely by NOT running profitable companies that he got to where he is today
Wow. Thank you for explaining so thoughtfully. Would you get banned if you say this in Twitter. Why no journalist asks these questions and make people realize it's their money in someone else's pocket.
A disastrous failure worth $6b! That's my point. Neurolink and SolarCity are also disastrous failures. But Boring Company has gotten contract in Las Vegas, Chicago, LA, and more. And despite all these failures Miami, amongst a few other FL and CA cities, is still in talks about a contract.
That's the business. Continue selling a dream. Talk to any actual engineer with relevant knowledge and they'd likely tell you it was a terribly thought out idea from the start. But those engineers aren't the ones signing gov't contracts
The military wanting to spend money on a starlink like low earth orbit system is nothing new or surprising.
They have been spending vast amounts of money on various types of geostationary based two-way satellite communications technology for 40 years. And they currently do so on some very low term projects and contracts.
Remember that the US DoD is what saved Iridium too.
They are always on the lookout for new or better tech.
Musk entirely aside for the moment, fact is that the starlink Redmond team has been first to market with something that is WAY ahead of kuiper, oneweb, telesat or any other leo satellite network in real world results.
This seems to be giving him more credit than he deserves. If he's trying to get republicans on board, all he needs to do is keep crowing about free speech and cancel culture. Actually making any changes to twitter isn't required. IMO he banned journalists that criticized him... because they criticized him. occams razor
The references support facts that are not in dispute. The only fact in dispute is whether the Twitter purchase was instrumental to this contract, not that Starlink is a military contractor with industry connections.
But I agree that we should be concerned about the military applications of Starlink, and that we should be discussing it more. And I appreciate you highlighting it because I wasn't aware.
Republicans are strongest when they have plenty of liberals to criticize. No liberals on his platform means no ammo for Republicans which means they cannot get votes.
Exactly. Occam's razor needs some sharpening here. Musk is just red pilled. There's no need for a conspiracy theory involving the military industrial complex. It's unfortunate, but hardly unique.
He has probably actually been radicalized by Twitter though, instead of just pretending to be. I suspect that he is actually emotionally invested in his chosen side in the “culture war” and feels genuinely compelled to “own the libs” and whatnot.
I have to say this initially rings to me like a conspiracy theory, but there's lots of info you shared that I wasn't aware of and is quite interesting.
I personally would not be against an interest group pushing over their lifetime for a common interest such as space exploration. Although turning this into a "Twitter is a way to curry favours" conclusion is a stretch.
This comment reads like something that is probably true but is hard to prove because it’s a judgment of something that is intangible by nature (motivations) unless its complimented by a bevy of concrete evidence (e.g. emails, testimonies).
I think that you’re tangentially right. I wouldn’t be surprised if Elon Musk purchased Twitter because he had to, but I wouldn’t be surprised if whatever motivated him to posture toward buying it in the first place was motivated by what you’re explaining.
To people who have seen similar deals in the past like this it was also my conclusion.
It’s like Elon is the modern government agency cut out, but instead of having a handler or agency association - he’s just generally a free agent cut out for anyone who will fund him.
But it’s also the plot of the much maligned movie ‘Aloha’. To the keen eye it is a disturbingly insightful film.
I dunno. Why wouldn't Starlink have gotten that contract anyway...? And why would he threaten to cut off Ukraine if securing this contract were a number one priority for him...? Democrats aren't really less keen on military spending than Republicans, if you want to be a huge military contractor, you'd want the support of both.
I mean this is an intriguing rationalization, but I don’t buy it.
Buying votes simply doesn’t cost this much, by orders of magnitude. Burning your empire to ashes as a loyalty test doesn’t hold water either: It’s politicians that partake in loyalty tests, not donors.
> a massive DoD program, which requires Republicans to fund.
Contrary to the partisan memes, support for military funding is actually bipartisan. Republicans often like to say that Democratic politicians don't support the military, to pander to their base, but this isn't actually true. And Democratic Party sometimes like to play at being peaceniks, again to pander to their base, but this isn't true either.
Look up the composition of the United States Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. 50/50 split between parties. You don't get DoD projects funded by sucking up to Republicans, you need to convince politicians on both sides of the aisle.
@georgeg23, comments in this thread are now disabled for new users so I'll reply here. It doesn't matter if SDI was originally Reagan's baby. Reagan is dead and nothing will get funded without approval from both parties. The Republicans can't fund the SDA on their own.
But in this case, the DoD project is decidedly Republican. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was a Reagan initiative and an attempt at rebooting it is a hallmark of every Republican administration since.
It's a particularly spectacle-heavy fall, but it's actually not that uncommon for social networks to decline quickly. Digg famously had their userbase fall apart near-instantly after their v4 launch.
Underrated take IMO. Something many haven't learned ... these things are ephemeral. In the same way they are made new they are made old.
If you care about your online presence and the branding "value" it has, then work to separate the brand from the platform as much as possible.
If you care about your social connections, find some way to separate them from the platform too: follow them on another platform, learn their general identity so you can find them elsewhere, and maybe we can all try to value having our own personal homes on the web separate from any real platform again.
Elon is certainly awful for all that he’s doing, but couldn’t Twitter have simply told him to buzz off when he proposed buying the company instead of taking legal action to ensure he did it?
People up top were eager to cash out at the expense of all the employees under them. That’s equally disgusting to me.
Not really, at least not within a reasonable amount of time to close the deal. Lots of Levine about how Musk couldn't really force the deal with a tender offer, right?
But, I mean, the board did the right thing; their obligation is to the shareholders, and the price Musk offered was absurdly high.
This is where the government should’ve protected our “town square” by blocking the deal (Elon has too many government military entanglements to be allowed to own a social media company, too many conflicts of interest, and Elon’s past history of using Twitter to flagrantly violate the law).
Expecting the shareholders not to take the money and run is unreasonable.
Twitter did tell him to buzz off at first. That was the point of the poison pill. Then he offered stupid amounts of money at astonishingly good terms. All along the way he took shots at Twitter that reduced its value.
Twitter’s shareholders voted to accept the deal at his offered price. When Musk wanted out the shareholders weren’t interested enough to even vote a second time.
Twitter was an unprofitable laughing stock until 2016, and with Trump gone they were very likely to revert to that whoever was in charge. It's hard to justify not taking twice what you're worth for that. Frankly even for employees, getting cashed out on your RSUs at double value and the option to walk away with 3 months' severance sounds better than staying there while it slowly runs into the ground.
Why is this myth so pervasive. Pre-musk, Twitter was making upwards of $1m per employee. If only we could all “fail” this way… It not being profitable was due to short term capital expenditures.
They've had literally two profitable quarters in their whole corporate history. They went from being considered an equal competitor to Facebook to... not, as Facebook was able to bring in advertising revenue and Twitter wasn't.
Every money-losing tech company claims that they could turn the spigot to profitability at any time and the reason they're not profitable is short term capital expenditures; the proof is in the pudding.
> Every money-losing tech company claims that they could turn the spigot to profitability at any time
A bit of an exaggeration but there is some truth here, tech companies are notorious for feeding all their revenue back into growth. However in Twitter’s case it was absolutely true. It had a solid perch and wasn’t going anywhere… until Elon took over and became Trump 2.0 except “this time, he owns the site!”
Elon's slide into max doucheness is a real shame.
I used to tell my kids he was one of the most admirable people around for jump starting the EV industry (yes, I know he didn't do it all).
Then came the pedo guy comments. I cut him slack, he must be tired/strung out, he'll apologise. He never did.
Now he's become like a meme of himself, or perhaps just himself as he always was but now right out there, and it's not good to see.
I feel this comment. I wasn't always a 'fan' per-se of Elon, but I was definitely able to appreciate what his associated companies had put forth. Anymore, I can't stomach the continuous news stream of awful behavior, treatment of others displayed, etc. I cannot support a person like him or what he stands for/represents at this time (or in the foreseeable future).
This seems like the right place for me to speculate idly: I've often wondered about sufficient margins for social engagement on these sorts of things.
For example: how would you or I behave if, no matter what we did, over 50,000 people immediately reaffirmed us online? Would it take 50,000, or would 10,000 be enough? 5,000, 1,000?
This isn't mean to exculpate Musk: he's encouraged this behavior for years, and his own behavior long predates mega-engagement by his fans on social media. And still I can't help but wonder how many of us would be able to similarly contort ourselves, if so much affirmation was on the line.
"To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and remain absolutely sober". -Logan Pearsall Smith
I feel like the fact that he is evidently posting without a filter and probably reading the endless streams of meaningless confirmation is extra damaging.
We all sometimes ridicule the stilted corporate speech of some rich people and their reluctance to appear in public, but increasingly I feel like some of them do it to not fall into the social media trap.
Having a public team write your statements and asking them to provide a weekly/monthly report on the good and the bad seems like a working strategy.
Those people are doing their job and you can even employ different teams to get a more nuanced view while you yourself can be more distanced and collected.
Of course Elon Musk specifically is s social media addict who seems to enjoy being praised by sycophants no matter what he does. He chooses this.
Yes, I wasn't a "fan" but in general I found Tesla and SpaceX to be really cool companies doing things I didn't think I'd see in my life time. When he was a goofball or a little unprofessional it didn't bug me too much, sometimes it was even a little funny, but it got more and more troll-ish and pandering to a mean spirited crowd. Now he's just obnoxious and I wish he'd go away.
Maybe three or four years ago I thought that musk was basically something like the second incarnation of Howard Hughes. Some sort of eccentric high tech aerospace industry misunderstand genius.
Now I can clearly see he's just some guy who is both smart and also a raging narcissistic asshole who came from daddy's apartheid era emerald mine money.
Turns out that shitposting your way through life like an edgelord 14 year old boy on the internet is not an admirable lifestyle unless you are a hardcore musk stan.
Hughes as a company did a lot of cool stuff way after the ww2 era, in fact Boeing's satellite business for large and serious commercial and military geostationary satellites is what used to be Hughes in El Segundo CA, acquired about 20 years ago.
Hughes (now Boeing via McDonnell Douglas) helicopters are quite something. The 500 is generally regarded as quite the hot rod (especially compared to the 206/407). You can even get one in single rotor configuration (NOTAR). Hughes left quite a legacy beyond the Spruce Goose and hopefully El Muskrat will too. It'd be a damn shame if he succeeds in completely destroying Tesla and Space-X.
Oakland PD has a couple of 500s which is neat, but what always brings a chuckle is the tale of how New Zealand farmers went all in on the 500 because nothing else could touch the performance for… hunting deer.
The trouble is that all the cool stuff was also the stuff that Hughes Jr never really cared for. Lasers, Radar, electronics escaped his interest. Hughes wanted you to build world class airframes and sadly this is the one thing Hughes Aircraft never really did well.
I read the other day that Hughes suffered pretty severely de-habilitating mental illness, and that it isn’t fair to him to compare his decline to Elon. He had severe OCD, allodynia, and other things driving his increasingly erratic behavior.
Additionally there is fairly good evidence he screwed up his lower back in early plane crashes and took an increasingly assorted and unusual series of addictive pain medication after age 40+. The 1930s through 1960s were not exactly a golden age of harmless non-addictive pharmaceuticals.
>Turns out that shitposting your way through life like an edgelord 14 year old boy on the internet is not an admirable lifestyle
Unless you do it to the outgroup. Then it's fine! Laudable even!
Same as shutting down journalists and other accounts. It was nothing to fret about when the opposite side used to do it, "they were misinforming or borderline bad anyway, and they could always start their own blog or something, so it wasn't censorship" and so on.
The Twitter of yore shutting down conservatives and other such "controversial" opinions. I don't care much for bipartisan politics, but the partisan bias in all this is palpable, as is a "the tables have turned and we don't like it so we revert to general principles we pissed on before" vibe ...
It's also comic: pundits pissing on free speech (tons of cheering when people were cancelled before, and lots of articles on how it's justified and free speech is not the be all end-all) making a u-turn to call for free speech and condemn Musk's account shutdowns now, while Musk and co that was defending free-speech before is now censoring accounts, while the "free speech" proponents in the previous round are now cheering him for it...
From that article, it certainly appears true that his dad once held shares in an emerald mine. ("This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia.")
I mean, 1980 Zambia is literally apartheid era. That's a statement of fact.
You don't like the associations that "apartheid" evokes? And yet, for an emerald mine in Zambia, apartheid was certainly a big factor in the working conditions there. The mines in Zambia (mostly copper) benefited the most by apartheid, where white workers were paid over ten times what black workers were paid. Even during the 80s, when supposedly the color bar had been dismantled, mines got around that be defining all black labor as "local" (even if the workers were immigrants) and white workers as "skilled expats" (even if the whites were born next door). [1]
Mining, indeed, was heavily tied to the apartheid from the very start. [2]
So it's very relevant that it's an "apartheid era." You could not invest in a mine in Zambia or South Africa without knowing that you were investing into a apartheid system, and hoping to make money off the backs of the apartheid abuses.
> imply a not insignificant portion of daddy’s money came from that mine
Yes, I agreed that that wasn't backed by known evidence in my statement above.
Using my numbered list above (arrow is chain of relevance):
2 -> 1 -> 3 -> 4
If you’re getting tripped up about apartheid and the mine being separated, just combine them.
1+2 -> 3 -> 4
In GPs post, 2 is not relevant to 4 unless you establish 3. Unless GP is trying to make an unfounded claim that “Elon’s current state is associated with the crimes of apartheid” (where associated means having a not insignificant impact on that state), including 1+2 isn’t relevant. It’s irrelevant that it’s an apartheid era mine because it’s irrelevant that it’s a mine. 4 is not associated with 2 by way of 1+3 like, IIUC, GP implied.
Same. I knew he was arrogant etc., but some degree of that almost comes with the territory. And he is prone to intense idiosyncratic interpretations that lead to unusual behaviour. But I also got suckered into thinking the man had some sort of primarily altruistic drive. Maybe he once did. Celebrity tends to ruin even good men.
Think about a wedding. Think about a bride and groom happily dancing, looking forward to their life together. And what does Elon say at this moment? "As we danced at our wedding reception, Elon told me, 'I am the alpha in this relationship.'"
No thanks. Sounds like you're trying to pile rubbish on someone's name by promoting personal hit piece articles from their ex-partners. That's low quality.
Interview anyone's ex and you'll find grubby things to hold up in the light, if that's your agenda.
If you look for dirt, and want dirt, you'll find dirt.
"Hey everyone, read what his ex wife said"... is nothing but encouraging others to look for dirt as you have done. Nothing to do with the current topic about twitter bans. Similar to what cheap tabloid reporting does.
Well, it is one thing when we hear about someone who is a douchebag but we have no proof. Another entirely different thing is to witness this kind of behavior up close. This is what EM is providing everyone since the last few months.
>Then came the pedo guy comments. I cut him slack, he must be tired/strung out, he'll apologise. He never did.
Same. It's one thing to use a slur like that in some personal dispute; but this was against a hero who had saved children, and on a public forum. I've lied to myself that this was a minor dispute. And it would be that if he'd apologized. But the lack of apology is a very serious red flag of character. Impulsive unkind and unfair behavior is something we all are guilty of some time. But to not acknowledge it and make amends? That's wrong. Because the easy thing was the apology, sincere or not. Musk must have pushed back against his people to not apologize. Musk wanted to hurt that man, and he still wants to hurt him, would hurt him again if given the chance, worse if it was legal. And for what? Publicly criticizing Musk's (frankly hair-brained) idea to save those kids. (Honestly, I don't remember the details.) He reacted very badly to a fair criticism, with personal malice and rage, and he believes these reactions to be appropriate and, if anything, displaying admirable restraint.
I can't help but see echos of that lack of empathy, that meanness, as he takes his various actions now with Twitter - firing large swaths of staff, sending demanding emails to the remaining staff on very short term. We are all capitalists and so give a proven leader like Musk enormous leeway in this position. But his behavior has been absolutely rotten. Even layoffs can be delivered with more grace! His words and actions, apart from layoffs, feel like angry, vengeful behavior rather than "effective leader" behavior - all echoes of the "pedo guy" incident.
To give this more context, Vern Unsworth was mocking Elon Musks attempts to help on request of the lead diver, after providing many batteries and engineers time to work on a solution. Vern himself was not an actual diver in the rescue.
He wasn't a rescue diver, he was the local expert, having mapped the cave and knowing more about its structure than anybody else in the world. he was truly qualified to say that Elon's attempt wasn't going to work and was hogging to much attention.
But he initiated being derisive and mocking of another person whom was personally invited to help by the dive team. Contributed time and resources to the effort as per the instruction of the lead diver. Doesn't sound particularly heroic. People love to leave this out of the story that Vern Unsworth brought it on himself by initiating the negativity, wasn't a diver, and ultimately lost his case.
Yes, I agree he (vern) did "initiate it being derisive". It was a poor choice made by a person who was currently working in an active emergency that was being seen by the whole world. And I do know that he lost his case- a real shame in my mind.
He was a diver- just not a rescue diver in this case.
Unsworth had a bunch of lives to save and his response to Musk was - given the circumstances - a lot more courteous than I would have been in the same situation.
That still doesn't excuse Elon though. If you respond to this comment by mocking me for being clueless does that give me the right to call you a pedo? It shouldn't.
> "the lack of apology is a very serious red flag"
Sounds like something a bot would write.
Musk's Twitter apology to the 'pedo guy' at the time made headlines. A simple google will sort out your confusion. He also apologized in court, and repeatedly stated how it was the stupidest thing he's done.
> "We are all capitalists..."
Again, sounds like something a chat bot would write.
I'm curious, what is the simple google search that will find this apology? And what's with accusing me of being a bot? That seems strange and off topic, and not a little unkind.
The simple google search might be "Elon Musk apologizes for ‘pedo guy’ comment".
It's strange you doubled-down on Musk not apologizing, when it was headline news at the time about his multiple apologies and statements of regret over the incident.
You stated: "honestly, I don't remember the details" yet proceeded at length with your analysis and judgement.
People have been using the new chat AI tools to post comments. Your comment was strangely drawn out, laboring on disjointed ideas, pressing inaccuracies like how the new bots do it.
I didn't double down. I asked. And yes, Musk apologized during the defamation trial. That's better than nothing, but not by much- he was under $150M of duress at that point. The vibe I got was distinctive, and softened, but not invalidated by this new information.
I think this is maybe in reference to LBJ's lifelong biographer Robert Caro where he states that "power does not corrupt, power reveals". In it he asserts that what one does with power after obtaining it reveals what the person is. It was there all along, power simply makes it show up prominently.
Yes I understand but I am challenging that with my question (besides "power" in the abstract is very different vs "being constantly recognized/followed"). Certainly being followed, attacked and assaulted in public constantly for being famous can bring trauma, and trauma can change a person, usually for the worse.
Well, there are multiple facets to it. Suddenly having money and having random relatives and old acquaintances show up in your life asking for it might make someone disillusioned about what they thought about the people.
But it won't make genuinely nice person into an asshole that kicks kittens, the money just acts as enabler for stuff they might've been afraid to do before coz of consequences. Like for example pretending to be nice to get promotion at work vs unleashing assholery once there is nobody there to kick you down for your behaviour
It doesn't need to be as conspiratorial as Musk being a foreign asset.
If Twitter took loans from interests either connected to or sympathetic to foreign governments e.g. Saudi Arabia, Russia then simply trying to keep them onboard could be enough to influence his decisions.
The Saudis are major shareholders in Twitter, although personally I doubt they're telling Musk what to do so much as being content to let him run it into the ground; it's a win for them whether Twitter under Musk succeeds or fails.
I don't actually even remotely believe that he is a foreign government asset, but I don't think that's a good argument: giving Starlink to Ukraine is exactly one of the things that a Russian asset would do.
Nearly all of the value of his companies comes form government grants and loans. He also has large security state contracts with SpaceX and Starlink. He's a US govt asset, which is worse, imo.
Tesla got carried over the chasm by hundreds of millions of dollars in DOE-backed loans, their product is subsidized by state and federal price supports, and all of their profits are due to air pollution swaps, another government subsidy. Good for Tesla for being aligned with the government, I guess.
This is to say nothing of Elon's small-potatoes stealing from local governments via Boring.
Ok, but the vast majority of revenue was not generated from selling credits over the entire lifetime of the company, which is what matters when we are talking about Tesla's present-day value (and therefore the source of Musk's wealth).
Most of the value comes from the ponzi scheme that is their stock. Nothing they have in assets, physical or otherwise, ever justified the price of the stock even at half of what it is today.
I guess a definition of "value" as "the intangibles that allow it to keep functioning" would make your statement correct, but a definition that relies on "how it generates revenue" would probably not.
5% of Tesla 2021 Q1 revenue was generated from selling emission credits, 1% from trading Bitcoin, for a total of 6% generated from not selling cars / energy products / etc.
So yes, the vast majority of revenue generators (and therefore value generators) for Tesla (at least in Q1 2021, as per the article you linked) are the things I listed in my first comment.
You were seemingly thinking about what was generating profit, which is generally not how value is calculated, otherwise my (profitable) two-man company would be more valuable than Twitter. But given that you explicitly said "how it generates revenue" at the end of your comment I'm actually a bit confused as to your position.
> Emissions credits accounted for $518 million in revenue in a quarter that saw a pretax income of $533 million and a net income of $438 million on a GAAP basis. Needless to say, the credits account for almost the entirety of Tesla's profit for this quarter
518/533 ~= 97%, not 5%. I must be misunderstanding something somewhere. Explicitly, I'm saying that (per my understanding of that article) Tesla derived more income from selling emissions credits than from selling cars in that particular quarter (and, I think it's reasonable to assume, other quarters, given how overwhelmingly that seems to be their business model).
You are conflating "net income" (profit) with revenue. I do not disagree that the vast majority of profit was generated by selling credits, but revenue is how most people measure value for corps (this is how Amazon could be an amazingly valuable company while not turning a profit for years). Re-read the last para in my other comment for another example of why you don't use profit to benchmark "value".
Even the emission credits being "pure profit" is misleading, given that the only reason Tesla can sell those is because of the cars/batteries/etc they are producing, so realistically the cost of producing those things should be deducted against the revenue generated by selling the credits.
Right... or those are both ludicrous rationalisations for someone who was always a gaping asshole. Many of us managed to never have been fooled by him.
If anything turned him into who he is, it would be his childhood. When he writes the xmas card to his half sister / niece, it must be difficult deciding how to fill out the card.
I've seen enough behind closed doors to believe wealthy+successful+powerful people are given every opportunity to go down dark paths of personal "development" and that statistically some are likely to turn out "bad" while protected by many layers of power and appearance and prestige.
I recall having conversations with some people, who seemed to follow the "scene" more than I, telling me that his image was relatively well curated and managed by PR people in and around his companies, and that his "quirkiness" was allowed out in managed quantities so as to maximise interest and attractiveness without being off-putting.
I never looked into it because I didn't care much. The rockets stuff is cool but also profitable so good for him and capitalism. But I found it highly believable and never really understood the cultism around him. I wouldn't have predicted this twitter or doucheness, but I certainly don't find it surprising.
Why twitter though, it's quite small and not very influent except maybe in some countries like the US, could have bought Weibo and reached a huge market for potential clients and way more ways to make money.
America is probably saturated, it's not even like it wants to buy Musk products, and Musk feels so much more like a Chinese boss than the head of an american social platform having to navigate impossible compromises :D
The strategy to act like a republican douche courting Trump to try to maybe make them like barely finished EVs might pay off, but it's such a risky bet. I d pay good money to witness one day american conservatives "owning the libs" through buying his electric cars.
Twitter itself will never yield him 44bn, so there s no economic rationality for the buyout: it can only be now a derivative gain.
The EV industry is a distraction to prevent us from doing what is needed to save the environment: ie. minimise the use of cars. It (much like the hyperloop scam it necessitated) is simply an attack on car-free living and public transport.
No, that's dumb. These are largely orthogonal problems.
Not having EV's wouldn't have made everyone suddenly switch to public transit and bikes, as cool as that might be. They'd just keep driving gas and diesel vehicles.
And realistically, you can't get rid of cars and trucks entirely. Even super dense areas with strong public transit still use plenty of cars and trucks, because they're useful. You think Singapore and Tokyo and Seoul could run on no cars or trucks whatsoever?
Car-free living doesn't imply the total eradication of all cars. It just means reducing dependency on them to a bare minimum: ie. those uses which cannot possibly be replaced. The former is something that literally nobody has ever proposed. The latter is something which is a serious policy option.
Also you are making a logical fallacy by assuming I am saying that -EV's- (sorry: "EV industry", different thing) are singularly responsible for the lack of decent climate policies. I just said they were an attack on the objective. One of many.
FYI: I live in Seoul and there's certainly a lot that could be done to reduce the insane amount of cars from current nightmare levels. Korea has a very powerful auto industry, one thing they could do is stop subsidizing it. Switching to EV's will undermine any effort to do that "bEcaUsE EV's aRe grEeN!"
It's not an "attack". You can have good public transport and cars live in harmony if you design cities properly. Hell, in fact it synergises well, the more people opt in for public transport the less cars on the roads there are.
It's just abhorrent design of cities, that is the problem, especially in US.
I feel like this was something that he was turned into. Things like the pedo guy comments and the Covid skepticism and a bunch more are genuine criticisms, but for every story of substance there has been a deluge of pure character assassination. Between the years of long work hours and a stream of hot or cold praise or condemnation I think it's quite easy to lose your moral compass.
I think a lot of my friends think I'm a die hard Musk fan when I say a criticism is unfair. I actually just think he's a human being under a microscope coping poorly. I'll support the criticism when I think it's warranted. The is a culture of everything is bad because bad man is bad, that unsettles me.
As for this particular story on HN, I really don't know. Twitter is a chaos box at the moment, It's hard to tell whether Musk is directly involved. These actions (or any actions really) might be policy, edicts from the top, officious middle employees or just plain screw ups.
I believe the person you replied to was saying that was an example of a legitimate issue with Elon's behavior, as compared to the "pure character assassination."
>Twitter is a chaos box at the moment, It's hard to tell whether Musk is directly involved. These actions (or any actions really) might be policy, edicts from the top, officious middle employees or just plain screw ups.
This is an issue that allegedly involves Musk's family. He's tweeted about it directly multiple times stretching back to his initial offer of cash for @elonjet to go away, and has directly discussed this policy change in his own tweets over the past 24 hours, including tweeting about this round of bans.
Are you actually saying "it's hard to tell whether Musk is directly involved" in this specific issue, or...?
In that respect I was talking about the journalist bans rather than the elonjet bans. Now that I see he has weighed in on this issue it does seem to be that he was involved in the policy. The policy itself seems at odds with his previous statements but the no doxxing rule does seem to be arguably a reasonable thing to have.
Whether those banned were actually in violation of those rules I don't know. I would have said remains to be seen, but I fear such details will be lost in the news churn.
He apologised more than once. Including on Twitter and again in court where he looked the guy directly in the face and apologised.
I mean, it was widely reported but somehow you missed the headlines at the time such as Washington Post's "Elon Musk apologizes for ‘pedo guy’ comment: ‘The fault is mine and mine alone’"!
You're right, I did miss it. But it looks he followed up with this (after the apology) so the point stands:
He blasted: "He's an old, single white guy from England who's been travelling to or living in Thailand for 30 to 40 years, mostly Pattaya Beach, until moving to Chiang Rai for a child bride who was about 12 years old at the time.
"There's only one reason people go to Pattaya Beach. It isn't where you go for caves, but it is where you'd go for something else.
"Chiang Rai is renowned for child sex-trafficking."
But you wrote the statement "he never did", as if you'd done your homework and had concrete facts. And others have replied to your comment saying "yeh he never apologised" etc. Note the virality of wrong information when you're on an attack path.
Here's some facts... The diver guy launched a public attack on Musk at a time when kids needed help. Everyone was focused on helping the kids, but this diver decided to get some attention by insulting Musk out of the blue, in a CNN interview.
Musk's sub wasn't used for the cave rescue, but was kept by the Thai Navy who said they could use it for future rescues. The navy were trained in how to use it.
The diver guy was wrong to attack Musk. So the sub couldn't be used in the cave, so what? It was help, undeserving of scorn. I'm not excusing Musk's reactionary comments, but I'm glad the diver lost the court case. The diver wanted 160 million dollars and was awarded zero by the jury.
And speaking of apologies, the diver never apologised or backed away from accusing Musk of a stunt and telling him to stick his sub up his rear end. A sub that a team of people worked on, not just Musk.
> Here's some facts... The diver guy launched a public attack on Musk at a time when kids needed help. Everyone was focused on helping the kids, but this diver decided to get some attention by insulting Musk out of the blue, in a CNN interview.
My guess is that both the diver and Musk desperately wanted to help the kids. The divers attack on musk (I believe attack is too strong a word, but sticking with your terminology) was likely motivated by the view that Musk was making things worse, not better, with impractical ideas. From what I've read of the case, musk's submarine was indeed not practical - for this requirement.
However, whatever the divers motivation, responding by falsely accusing someone of being a paedophile is vicious, uncalled for and indicative of being a giant douche. Apologizing and then unapologising - and doubling down on the false smears of someone way below him on the ladder - is more of the same.
Not to mention, hiring a PI to dig up dirt on the guy to try and defame the diver further. It's one thing to hurtle insults around on Twitter, is another thing entirely to mess with people's actual lives.
You're claiming to know the motivations of others, but your record of accuracy is not great in this thread.
Building and delivering a sub with the intention to help, is never going to "make things worse" even if the sub isn't used.
If my colleague writes a program that ends up not fitting the application, I would never tell them to shove their code up their arse. Who would do that other than a giant douche?
Both the Diver and Musk engaged in a squabble in public, started by the diver, escalated by Musk. You're focusing too much on the contents of the insults, and deciding Musk's was not only the greater crime, but the only crime. You've pardoned the diver of any fault, and invented a squeaky-clean backstory to explain his remarks.
I agree. This slide into barefaced shittiness hurts all the more because, at first, he felt like the hero we needed.
EDIT: "barefaced" intentional because there's significant evidence to claim that these character traits were always present (see - the famous essay by his ex-wife), just less noticed.
Yeah I think he's lost it - all that money seems to really have gone to his head. Really he should be doing one thing well (pick cars or rockets) and enjoying life - spending hours a day personally banning people he doesn't like on twitter can't be good for his mental health - frankly the emperor has no clothes
I think Twitter was long dead. It just had no prospect of making money, but slowly degrade into more “heavy VF” propaganda machine it had been for years, and recent series of events is its heart attack at Leviathan timescale.
I don’t understand why people say this: Twitter wasn’t lucrative in the way that Facebook is, but they made a healthy profit in 2019 and probably would have made a small profit in 2021 had it not made settlement payments. Their revenue per employee was close to $1M, which is about 2/3rds of Google’s.
It’s not clear, either then or now, that Twitter “had no prospect of making money.” By most metrics, it was a potentially (and in actuality) very profitable company with a history of mismanagement.
Twitter was already struggling with right wing nutjobs and banana republics before El Muskrat got into the mix. Beyond that, Twitter was absolutely struggling to monetize eyeballs. While it wasn't about to implode in the short-term I don't think anyone expected Twitter to stick around long-term without significant changes. El Muskrat just doused the whole thing in acetone and dropped a big fat blunt on it.
Twitter was profitable for, what, a single quarter in 2019? That's not sustainable. But yeah we're talking years before a major cash crunch not weeks. Elno accelerated that timeline pretty dramatically.
If pigs had wings they could fly, but they don't so they can't. Almost profitable is not actually profitable, and Twitter was profitable for a brief moment in time with no indication that it was or would be sustainable.
I agree with this! My point was that Twitter was not destined to fail: it had (has!) hundreds of millions of high-value users who treated (treat!) it as a news and culture feed. They made lots of money off of those users; the fact that they weren't more regularly profitable is an indictment of management rather than the fundamental business model.
This entire thing is an extended farce in two acts: (1) Twitter's leadership's inability to turn a highly addictive social media network into a regular money fountain, and (2) the sale of a potential regular money fountain to the single least qualified person possible.
Twitter had reasonably healthy finances and steadily growing revenue. It turned profit in 2018 and 2019 and could have fully recovered from the 2020 slump within a few more quarters.
A change in leadership (never been a fan of Dorsey) and a refocus on core competencies could have given it a big boost - if it was planned and executed competently. But what we got with Musk is the exact opposite of that. The amount of fuckup is truly amazing to watch.
Exactly! I couldn't help but think of Hughes recently with his crazy choices. He hasn't got the injury from a plane accident to attribute his awfulness to though.
I feel like the media determined they were going to report it as a failure regardless of what the facts are. Remember all the stories about how Twitter was definitely going to fall apart during the world cup?
PG has been a Musk fanboy defending his every crazy action on Twitter. Even now his first instinct was to assume that there was some foul play. Anyway he saying it’s bad is a change for sure.
He's confidently stating now that there was a "coordinated campaign" to continue posting the jet tracker link (e.g. https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af). From the chrysalis emerges the caterpillar.
I read it that way at first too, but I think he’s saying that’s why he originally suspected the bans were due to an algorithm gone awry. And that’s a reasonable worry — it was possible that a particular url was causing the accounts to be banned, e.g. if Musk added ElonJet to some kind of internal ban list, that’d do it.
No, he's claiming the journalists "coordinated" a campaign to share external links to the jet tracker. Some of them admit that they did (not "coordinated" -- alternate sites of this public data has been very widely shared), but others are at a loss and claim they did no such thing. One had reported on an LAPD statement -- that despite the imminent harm Elon claimed, they hadn't gotten a crime report and actually had to reach out to Elon's people -- and shortly after got suspended.
Elon is constantly leveraging the "for the children" cover for his petulance.
"My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the
account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal
safety risk," he tweeted on Nov. 6.
> So this is how Twitter goes out: not with a bang but with a seemingly endless stream of stories about the little ways Elon is ruining the service each day.
He also brought back a ton of banned people … who were similarly banned without explanation.
In this case, he needs to set rules and judges for his kingdom if he wants a certain group to keep using it.
As an aside, one of the people banned was known to take clips out of context. Add commentary on top, and actively mislead people. Imo these aren’t journalists, they’re activists
> As an aside, one of the people banned was known to take clips out of context. Add commentary on top, and actively mislead people. Imo these aren’t journalists, they’re activists
All of these things - mischaracterization, commentary, misinformation, activism - fall well within the "free speech" Musk said he'd be protecting, even if your assertions are true.
“A Twitter representative said the action followed the violation of rules prohibiting “operating fake accounts” and attempting to “artificially amplify or disrupt conversations through the use of multiple accounts,” as noted here.”
“Update: The image was in fact redacted, I thought it was done by the person who took the screenshot but the first digits were removed in the original tweet.”
It's hard to overstate what a crucial time this is for Tesla. They had early-adopter success when they had the field to themselves. But now every major car company plus a bunch of other people (possibly including Apple) are coming for them. Pivoting to the mainstream market and fending off all the competition is going to take both dedication and gobs of capital. Capital that is going going to be harder to raise with a distracted CEO and a bunch of investors who've had their fingers burned.
Latest rumor is that they pushed it from 2025 to 2026.
By 2026 it'll be next to impossible to make any serious impact in EV market, certainly not serious enough to affect Tesla.
In 2026 Tesla will be at run rate of 5+ millions cars.
There's no magic in this business.
Even if Apple has a car with that kind of demand, it takes 1 year to build a factory and 3 years to ramp it to 1 million cars a year. This is what Giga Shanghai did and that's faster than anyone ever done it.
So we're talking 2030 for 1 million cars, if somehow Apple can build it's first factory at the same scale and speed as Tesla it's second factory, after lots of painful learning scaling Fremont production.
Plus, without robotaxi what's the point? Luxury brands like BMW / Audi / Mercedes top out at ~2.5 million a year. That's a business, but it's not a Tesla destroying business.
Apple is extremely good at being a late mover in key markets. Few even remember MP3 players before the iPod or smartphones before the iPhone. Or look at how the smartwatch market changed after the Apple Watch was introduced.
They also have one of the world's strongest brands, with a lot of dedicated customers. They don't have to compete on price, so despite having 13% of the global phone market, they are making 75% of all smartphone profits: https://www.imore.com/apple-takes-75-smartphone-profits-desp...
I am not an Apple fan and own none of their gear, but even I can recognize how Apple would be a formidable player.
> Few even remember MP3 players before the iPod or smartphones before the iPhone. Or look at how the smartwatch market changed after the Apple Watch was introduced.
You say your not an Apple fan, but really sounds like you've been hanging out the Apple Store a bit too much lately.
Those are all cold business fact. At the various times, I owned an Archos Jukebox, a series of Palm devices, and a Pebble, so I was paying attention to all of those markets as Apple swept in. I have never owned an Apple device, as I dislike their sealed-box, consumerist nature, and I thought Jobs was a gaping asshole. But despite my personal dislike, I can recognize that there are reasons they are the world's most valuable company (4x Tesla's value): https://companiesmarketcap.com/
It might have lost short-term gamblers a lot of money, yes. But if you lose money through gambling, the only person you should blame is yourself.
If you’re an investor who’s in it for the long run, I don’t see what today’s stock price has to do with anything though. You can’t use the current stock price as an answer to what the stock is worth.
> Capital that is going going to be harder to raise
Tesla has over $10 billions in cash and adding few billions every quarter. They don't need to raise ever again.
> They had early-adopter success
Yes. Also, they became the largest EV company in the world with 2x margin of other car companies.
> when they had the field to themselves
Nissan Leaf and Bolt EV launched before Model 3.
Jaguar i-Pace, Audi eTron, BMW i5, VW ID.3 and ID.4, few models from Hyundai and quite a few more.
Model 3 and Model Y had plenty of competition for several years.
That competition didn't sell many cars and Tesla did.
> But now every major car company ... are coming for them
More like desperately trying to catch up. Tesla is still ahead of everyone in things that matter, like securing raw materials for batteries, building battery cells, securing battery cells from suppliers, manufacturing (gigacasting, spending less time and money to build a car), building more factories (ramping up 2, soon announcing 2 or more), Tesla Semi with best specs by far, still the best motors, the most efficient cars, the safest cars, building insurance business, shipping more software updates than anyone. This is not a complete list.
The question for the future is not: will Toyota or Honda kill Tesla.
It's: will Toyota and Honda keep up enough to not go bankrupt.
As to the future, we'll see, but it's perfectly possible that Tesla will end up in the bucket with Groupon: promising early start, but in retrospect only of historical interest.
Staying in the car business during a time of transition is an expensive game. Tesla may well need to raise money again and the way their stockprice has been going as of late isn't going to help them with that.
I agree the first bit is true; I just don't think it guarantees future success. Looking at the top 25 vehicles in 2021, Tesla only has one on the list, and that's way down at #17. They have a lot of climbing to do to get to #1. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g36005989/best-selling-car...
The latter argument is addressed in the article: "Tesla's value is down more than 52% since the Twitter buyout was approved on April 25, while the S&P 500 is only off 5.5%. And Tesla stock is off 29% since the deal closed on Oct. 27, much worse than the S&P 500's 6.6% gain in that time."
> I agree the first bit is true; I just don't think it guarantees future success. Looking at the top 25 vehicles in 2021, Tesla only has one on the list, and that's way down at #17. They have a lot of climbing to do to get to #1.
That's true, however the majority of people still purchase non EVs, which is not the market Tesla is in. As multiple parts of the world are moving to ban sales of new petrol cars (UK 2040, EU 2035, Chili 2035, Hong Kong 2035, India 2040, etc), there will be an interesting point where most new cars purchased worldwide are EVs.
I don't believe Tesla are the ones who need to catch up to the petrol manufacturer market - the opposite is true. The traditional manufacturers have about 10 years to catch up or start bleeding, as laws will force purchasers to buy an EV.
RE the value loss argument, it is certain that the overvalued Tesla stock is dropping, however that 52% is during a period that tech stocks (which I would argue Tesla is one of) have been dropping like crazy. The NASDAQ is down almost 30% from the start of the years, mostly pulled downwards by tech stocks:
I don't think they're in a worse position than any other tech stock, especially with global legislation effectively guranteeing them a long term pay off.
Your theory appears to be that with the shift to EVs over the next 15-20 years, most people will shift manufacturers to an EV-specific one, specifically Tesla.
But it's at least as reasonable to think that people will keep buying EV versions of their favorite cars. Not only is there significant brand loyalty in the car markets, but there's no particular reason to think that Telsa can be all things to all people. Tesla only has 3 models total; Toyota alone has 5 models on the top-25 list. The current Tesla model lineup appeals to a pretty specific demographic, and I don't see much sign Telsa can expand beyond that.
There's plenty of sign that other manufacturers will catch up. Consumer Reports has studied 20 EVs. They recommend 5. Tesla only has one model they recommend, and it's in the middle the scores for those 5. The Kia EV 6 gets a 91 and the Genesis GV60 gets an 84. The Tesla Model 3 gets a 78.
That's all before we get to Musk. Tesla got gobs of free publicity and cheap capital because of his PR savvy. But that has now gone into reverse, with no sign that Musk even thinks that's a problem: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4562466-can-tesla-survive-w...
And personally, I think "Tesla is a tech stock" and "Tesla will become the dominant car manufacturer" are theses that are at odds. Tech stocks are high margin businesses. Niche luxury cars, as Tesla has been to this point, can be high-margin efforts. But the mainstream market won't be.
Not sure what indications we have that Twitter is "going out". User numbers are higher than ever.
He unbanned a lot of people that were also banned previously for no reason. I think a lot of the outrage comes from the "unfairness" now being dished out to those people with whom the outraged agree with...
His advertising has plummeted, the service is now in extreme debt and he’s not even paying the bills lol. There’s plenty of evidence if you bother to look.
If Musk does end up taking out Twitter, it’ll be up there with electric cars and rebooting the private space travel industry as a service to humanity. Twitter is an awful platform that relies on cognitive hacks to elevate the worst people (across the spectrum) to prominence. Do you remember the last few years? We got to the point where respectable news outlets were reporting on cable news the insane takes that were flitting through Twitter. Nuking Twitter from orbit is a goddamn public service.
"In 1918, Ford purchased his hometown newspaper, The Dearborn Independent.[76] A year and a half later, Ford began publishing a series of articles in the paper under his own name, claiming a vast Jewish conspiracy was affecting America.[77] The series ran in 91 issues. Every Ford dealership nationwide was required carry the paper and distribute it to its customers.
"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford#Antisemitism_and_Th...
I think Musk bought Twitter to serve as his own platform, to spread his ideas and to suppress those of others.
Whoa. I didn’t downvote, but that’s a surprising take from you.
One obvious problem with it is that if Twitter dies, some other site will take its place. The idea of tweeting isn’t going anywhere. It’d be a bit like trying to uninvent a bicycle.
More generally, a bunch of thoughtful people use Twitter, and Twitter DMs changed my life. It’s the AOL messenger of the 2020s. A low friction “DMs open” platform is very hard to come by — the closest before the messenger era was email, which usually isn’t a conversation. So there would be a real loss in terms of social value. E.g. TikTok requires both people follow each other before DMing, so there’s not even an option.
You’re not entirely mistaken, but the caveats seem worth calling out. On the whole it seems like more harm than good would come from the implosion.
> not with a bang but with a seemingly endless stream of stories about the little ways Elon is ruining the service each day
Is Musk making mistakes in his management of Twitter? I'm sure he is.
On the other hand, it is also true that a lot of people now have it in for him, and will amplify any story about such a mistake, regardless of how real it is, simply because it is what they want to hear, it feeds the current narrative, it makes great clickbait.
In terms of how Twitter actually turns out, I think we are really going to have to give it time, including waiting until the media gets bored with it and moves on to some other topic. It is probably going to do worse than Musk hopes, but also not as badly as many of his detractors predict.
Of course, Musk isn't helping things by feeding that media outrage cycle himself. But I can only imagine that behind the scenes, cooler heads – such as Gwynne Shotwell and Robyn Denholm – are urging him to step away from the controversy for a bit, stop feeding it and let it die down. Hurry up and find a new CEO for Twitter, then go spend a few weeks chilling on a tropical island.
> He’s had to sell billions in Tesla stock to finance this ongoing mayhem, this is surely going to be up there as one of the greatest examples of hubris in modern business.
He's always been willing to stake it all on the left field idea. Sometimes that has worked really well for him (Tesla, SpaceX), other times it has gone rather poorly (Twitter). But, you can't really have one without the other – either you take big risks, sometimes strike it lucky and make it big, other times get badly burnt; or else you don't, and you avoid the burns, but you'll never make it as big either. The kind of person who always takes the right big risks and never the wrong ones, is either too lucky or too wise to actually exist.
He made a huge amount of money really fast, and now he's gone back a lot on that. But he's likely got another 20-40 years of life ahead of him, he could easily make it all back and then some.
> I think we are really going to have to give it time
Yes and no. The acquisition is now complete, so we can judge what led up to that. And it was terribly done. The dude made an offer on a lark, thought he could wiggle out, and discovered that, however much he normally can get away with shenanigans, a Delaware chancery judge was not among the people who would let him slide. So he was forced to buy a business he had spent months trashing publicly. He easily lost $20 billion the moment the deal closed. It's one of the most spectacular own-goals in business history.
We can also start judging the actual takeover. There is absolutely no reasonable business goal that justifies the level of chaos and mismanagement during the takeover. Even if one believes that cutting 75-80% of the staff was necessary, it was very poorly done. If someone had wanted to maximize the level of media attention, they could have hardly done better than all the dramatics.
So is it possible that he'll pull Twitter out of a dive and turn it into a functioning business again? Yes. Network-effects businesses are notoriously hard to kill, which is why Twitter survived all these years despite its problems. But it it likely he'll ever turn a profit on it? I doubt it.
But I think the real long-term cost here to Elon is in brand damage. He was a media darling for quite a while, with a lot of people buying his Tony Stark/Edison 2.0 routine. But those days are over. Tech reporters can be pretty credulous, as they are paid to get eyeballs. But business reporters are much less forgiving, as they're paid to be useful to people trying to make money. And now that Musk has made himself look so erratic, there will always be questions about his competence. His media honeymoon is over, and given how much he used his brand to hawk products and get cheap capital, that's going to be a big problem for him going forward.
What seems an obviously right course of action to you is not to others and it comes down to value systems. Only time will tell the outcome. My colleagues wife’s company was acquired by a huge media company and she and dozens of her colleagues have spent the last 6 months wondering if they are going to have jobs. The stress is palpable every time I see her. That’s not more humane to me than what Musk did (let everyone know within weeks where they stand). It impacts her, it impacts my team lead which impacts me. It’s horrible.
I remember a few weeks ago Twitter wouldn’t be able to keep the lights on. That’s obviously not the case. Interesting how fast the narratives are moving.
Let’s pretend for a minute Musk wasnt liberal public enemy #1 and the machine wasnt fully activated to take him down (now that we have confirmation of what we already knew, that media companies collude to suppress or amplify coverage)… he is running Twitter without any noticeable impact to the operation of the services with 70% less staff. That’s astounding to me. All else equal, this business would have been significantly more profitable over night.
The fact of the matter is, companies will go where the users are. Once the noise dies down, why wouldn’t you continue spending money on Twitter if your competition is?
> What seems an obviously right course of action to you is not to others and it comes down to value systems.
Thus far a lack of one is being demonstrated.
> Let’s pretend for a minute Musk wasnt liberal public enemy #1...
When was Musk "liberal public enemy #1"?
> he is running Twitter without any noticeable impact to the operation of the services with 70% less staff
My house would hum along for a few months if I died suddenly, but eventually the power would get cut for lack of payment. The impacts of cutting staff dramatically may take time to become evident.
Are there value systems by which Musk's bid for Twitter was well done? yes. For one, comedians certainly appreciated it. But by the value system of the Wall Street Journal or the average business school professor, it was terribly done. And that's the one that interests me here.
I agree that the post-purchase stuff is harder to evaluate. But I don't think there's a good case to be made that it was competently done for any set of reasonable business goals. If you'd like to try, feel free. Any value system you like.
> he is running Twitter without any noticeable impact to the operation of the services with 70% less staff.
There is more to the service than just the technical. His decimation of the moderation teams is immensely noticeable.
> The fact of the matter is, companies will go where the users are. Once the noise dies down, why wouldn’t you continue spending money on Twitter if your competition is?
When the CEO is spreading outright hate speech, sane people go elsewhere. Brands won't want their image tarnished by looking like they are supporting hate speech.
Right now there isn't a great alternative to Twitter. Mastodon is definitely not it. But once there is, e.g. something like t2.social, my guess is that Twitter will be toast faster than people imagine. I'm sure the hardcore alt-right will hang on, but it will be a shadow of its former self.
> He easily lost $20 billion the moment the deal closed. It's one of the most spectacular own-goals in business history.
I'm sure he regrets a lot of it, and wishes he could go back and change some of it. However, a big part of that was poor timing with the economic cycle – if Putin hadn't invaded Ukraine, the markets might be in much better shape right now, and the deal would have turned out a lot less bad. He took a stupid risk, and it blew up on him – but it might not have, and people would have paid far less attention if it hadn't. Anyway, while US$20 billion is a huge loss in absolute terms, it is only around 10% of his net worth, even less at the time it was incurred. I'm sure he's not the first and won't be the last billionaire to lose 10% of their net worth on a bad deal, and many have bounced back from that kind of loss before. Maybe he's even learned his lesson, and will be more financially conservative in the future.
> Even if one believes that cutting 75-80% of the staff was necessary, it was very poorly done
I find it very hard to work out what is actually true about that. I heard people here condemning him for planning to let people go with no severance, and then suddenly he is giving people three months instead. Did he backtrack under pressure? Were the earlier claims just unsubstantiated rumours? How am I supposed to know. My gut feel, is he probably did make somewhat of a mess of the whole thing, but not quite as bad a mess as many claim.
> But I think the real long-term cost here to Elon is in brand damage. He was a media darling for quite a while
I think that is somewhat overstated. Remember the whole "pedo guy" incident? The "Texas Institute of Technology & Science"? A lot of people (both in the media and the general public) have disliked him for years, and they do have some legitimate reasons for that dislike. All Twitter has really done, is added to those reasons, and drawn attention to them, rather than creating something which wasn't there before.
How is SpaceX Starship going to go? Nobody really knows. Worse case scenario, is it flounders and turns into an expensive boondoggle. Best case scenario, it successfully pulls off Artemis III and dearMoon, people forget about the delays and Musk's endlessly over-optimistic timelines. If the best case scenario happens, what are people going to think of him when Twitter is yesterday's news, and Musk-founded SpaceX played a key role in returning Americans to the surface of the Moon? Especially if it happens under a Republican administration, a GOP White House will probably be rushing to give Musk a "Presidential Medal of Freedom" if Artemis III succeeds, and those who can't stand him will probably just have to bite their tongue.
Yup I don't like Elon but I assumed twitter would mostly stay the same with a bit more trumpism. I was fine with that but after the sheer stupidity of the last few weeks I'm going to have to leave.
He has lost 40% of his net worth (over $110 billion) so far this year largely because of this one deal. Truly one of the most disastrous business decisions of all time.
The silver lining here is that we are quickly learning beyond all shadow of doubt that you would not want to live on Mars in a dome owned by Elon Musk, at the same time the odds of that ever happening are dropping faster than his net worth.
This is ultimately a long awaited revenge against sour activism taken too far, and exposure of alarming things hidden or ignored for ages — things Twitter and its Big Club have been known for for a long time.
Just staggers me that Elon could have just… not done any of this. And yet here we are. He’s had to sell billions in Tesla stock to finance this ongoing mayhem, this is surely going to be up there as one of the greatest examples of hubris in modern business.
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