What if everyone is making the wrong assumption about why he bought twitter? I'm convinced he didn't do it to make money. He bought it for the power, to control one of the world's largest microphones. He doesn't care about advertisers who will dictate content rules.
At SpaceX, Tesla, and other companies he hired industry experts. He's running this one completely differently and I believe his focus is politics and power instead of money.
Pretty easy, honestly. You tell him what he wants to hear, you don't tell him what he doesn't want to hear, and you make decisions that are best for your people. If everyone that reports to him behaves like that, he will have very little influence on the company.
Musk is a raging narcissist. He just wants to be told that he's the smartest, funniest person alive.
That's not accurate. At least not entirely. I work with a few ex-Tesla managers who tell me the opposite. He would put his hands on any random detail at any time and override people.
I think both claims can be accurate. What I've gathered is that Tesla and especially SpaceX have people dedicated to preventing or fixing whatever odd ideas he comes up with. So, your friends could be 100% right, but maybe aren't as aware of other people following behind to try and clean up the mess? Or maybe sometimes the Musk Disaster Team doesn't get deployed in time, but they could still exist in general.
At SpaceX, Tesla, and other companies he hired industry experts.
And proceeded to overrule them with idiotic ideas like "scrap all sensors etc, our self driving cars will drive with image recognition only". And now most companies with self driving cars in development are miles ahead of Tesla despite starting later.
Did they start later? Where Tesla had an advance was integrating major parts of a self-driving system into actual customer cars and collecting tons of real-world data. The internal research on autonomous cars probably started on most automakers long before Tesla was founded.
He bought it because he got caught red handed trying to commit securities fraud and if he didn't make good on his offer, the SEC would've at the very least kicked him out of the markets, if not put in prison.
He is now trying to destroy it faster than it will destroy him. Social media is too expensive to run without a carousel of new investors. He can't get any since he took it private. He can't pull the plug on it or his existing investors will crucify him, they're just biding their time on a lawsuit already.
He over played his hand and he is suffering consequences for it. This doesn't make him smart, mind you. He's just scrambling to cover his ass from a blatantly poor and criminal decision.
Yeah, people tend to forget how this all started. He just wanted to see under the hood and he was told that the only way he could do that was if he bought the company.
He saw a big opportunity to both get what he wanted and to manipulate the stock market in a big way. So he made a credible offer thinking that he was smart enough to create a loophole that would give him a way out. His loophole didn't pan out although the stock market manipulation arguably did.
He got too far along in the process to back out and the SEC doesn't fuck around. There was no option other than to actually make good on his offer to buy the company. I don't think he ever truly wanted to own Twitter, but I never thought he would set the company ablaze in such a spectacular fashion.
He's just scrambling to cover his ass from a blatantly poor and criminal decision.
While at the same time still performing a never-ending stream of the same fidgety, impulsive, entitled behavior and decisions that put him into this mess in the first place.
his existing investors will crucify him, they're just biding their time on a lawsuit already.
One wonders how big of a chunk of Tesla and/or SpaceX they've got their sights on, after they really get their knives out and go to Attorney Town on this narcissistic imbecile.
That tracks with what I’ve heard from people in the industry. For Musk and now Huffman, it’s some sort of ideological or philosophical thing in terms of how they’ve dramatically shifted the focus and operation of these previously (mostly) stable companies.
Whether he's in it for the money or the influence doesn't really matter... either way, he's doing it wrong, and he's inconveniencing (or outright harming) people in the process.
If we have an analogue to r/EnoughMuskSpam, I'm not aware of it. But I'm also not sure we need one if his fuckups keep being dramatic enough to top the regular news communities.
I've been on facebook since it was still limited by domain names and it was a big deal when my campus was finally added to the list of approved email domains. I've watched it's evolution over the years. Facebook is a shell of a website these days - almost nobody uses it compared to what it was ten years ago. I use it to keep in touch with some older family members and old friends, but for the most part nobody uses it or posts often. It's all junk from different FB groups and an excessive amount of ads.
Facebook still works for what it was great at, originally: Communicating in relatively small groups. There was one meeting-niche competitor, meetup, but they decided they only want conferences and stuff. For everything else, all others either don’t support groups, or lack network effects. The feed, sadly, is completely unusable nowadays.
Let the older generation stay on Facebook. We don’t want them out in society.
Let the trolls stay on Twitter, let the types of people whom defend Spaz stay on Reddit, and let the influencers stay on Instagram. Those are the best places for them.
If you’re comfortable with Lemmy, then there are enough of us here to let this grown organically.
Meanwhile, Tumblr is strangely still around. They had a minor Blunder, but that basically became a site-wife in-joke, and they seem to be doing rather well for themselves.
Are there any major social media companies left after them, besides Facebook?
Running a social media company is not at all like running a normal tech company. It's one part technology, but it's one part psychology. He doesn't understand the psychology part whatsoever. He doesn't understand stand why people choose to engage or not engage with a community. He doesn't understand how and why Twitter became part an important news and information source and all of decisions he's made so far have reduced the relevance of the product.
Twitter verified status is there to help people trust Twitter, not just the person behind the checkmark. Now nobody trust your product. It also doesn't take a genius to understand that limiting access to your product makes people use it less.
Doesn't he have a condition that keeps him from understanding social norms? Wouldn't that alone disqualify him from making decisions about a social media company/site?
Elon has publicly claimed to have Asperger's (or, as it's known by the modern DSM, "ASD Level 1").
While I don't know if that's a self-diagnosis or the truth, I also have ASD Level 1 so I can somewhat understand his thought process... sometimes.
The fact that the platform makes the community isn't necessarily something I'd consider at first, and I don't think Elon considered it either. I really do think Elon was mad about how much people on the internet disliked him, so he made an impulsive bid to kick 'em out and tried to buy the whole platform. At some point someone talked some sense into him and he tried to back out, only to realize he was trapped in the deal and couldn't back out.
So the only thing he could really do at that point is double down. Kick the people off the site that he wanted gone. Find a way to kick out the bots that were clearly irritating him. Unban people who he thought were unjustly banned. There are easy and simple solutions to all of those things, and although they aren't popularthat's sort of the problem with ASD Level 1:
Failure to make eye contact or read social cues properly
Challenges in establishing or maintaining conversations
...
Apprehensive behavior
...
Trouble shifting focus
Expand that behavior up to a community of millions of people and you can start to understand Musk's behavior. It's fundamentally a community, with social norms and mores that aren't immediately obvious to those with ASD Level 1 (myself included). ASD makes it hard to have a grasp on why a community is there, and if you're a megalomaniac on top of that I can see how it'd be very easy to just say "Eh, I'll change it to work for me" without care for how it affects everyone else that uses it.
So you have him just making all these dumb-looking changes because understanding and empathy isn't his strong suit. He just does what he thinks will fix "the problem" and assumes that users are a given.
Yeah but Elons problem isn't just the ASD - that's part of it sure, but his problem is having ASD and a mother who told him repeatedly from a very very early age, that he was a genius.
That would be damaging to a neurotypical persons self view, but I dread to think how that damages a neurodivergent 😲
In short, Elon definitely displays narcissistic tendencies - and I suspect that being constantly told you are a genius who will change the world, is a bug reason why.
The fact that the platform makes the community isn’t necessarily something I’d consider at first, and I don’t think Elon considered it either.
Small correction, it’s actually the community that makes the platform. The community exists regardless of platform, the platform is there to help the community connect. The platform can help make new communities by facilitating connections but the platform needs communities to exist. People will form communities tailored to their interests without the internet all day, they’ve done it for millenia. If the platform makes it difficult for communities to connect, then the community will just go elsewhere.
The fact that he's trying to find a "cure" for ASD (using the most extreme methods) makes me think he's a self-loathing autistic and a turncoat who deserves no praise from others with ASD. I certainly don't respect him.
I didn't know I had ASD until I was an adult. Growing up I just knew I was weird and different and strange and nobody liked me. I didn't know why, I just knew I was doing something wrong and I simply wasn't "normal".
I would have given literally anything to be neurotypical, for a very long time.
When I was 19, I got formally diagnosed. For a few years after I was still hoping that it would somehow be "cured" and one day I could be like everyone else. I dunno if that made me a turncoat; just someone who didn't accept who I am.
I've since come to terms with it and accepted that it's an intrinsic part of me and that I wouldn't be the same person if I didn't have ASD. Like I can imagine what my life would be like without depression; I can't even think about what my life would be if I was neurotypical. I'd be so completely different that I basically wouldn't be "me" anymore.
But I only got to that level of acceptance because life worked out for me; I learned how to effectively mask, I have a good-paying stable job in my dream field (AAA game development), a significant other, and even a couple friends.
From what I can tell, Elon may have money but he's miserable. I can see a world in which he blames ASD for his misery (like I once did), and I can see how wanting to "cure" it makes him think that maybe he'd be happier. That's probably why he's killing monkeys with brain chips.
“It’s remarkable how many people who’ve never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who’s run Tesla and SpaceX,”
Running a company doesn't necessarily indicate you are good at it. I don't need to be a pilot to understand that diving into the ground is a fatal idea.
Just to add to that, They also quote Paul Graham from 3 days ago:
Surely someone who can figure out how to build spaceships can figure out how to distinguish scrapers from legit users. The patterns must be so different.
It’s almost like a ceo is only as good as the product and the people they surround themselves with.
Twitter could never be a profitable business, the numbers don’t work. No one with visionary talent wants to associate themselves with Musk’s right wing tweets.
Musk isn’t a genius, he’s a person who started with money and made much more money on a few things that went right and many more that didnt.
Indeed, SpaceX was indeed almost bankrupt. It only succeeded because the last attempt to launch and land a reusable rocket got them a massive cash injection from NASA. But if that launch had failed like the ones before it, that would have been the end of SpaceX.
He messed up the one thing that twitter folks can’t forgive or forget - he cut off their supply. People can’t do the one thing they needed twitter to do.
Reddit did the same thing. I could trust my supplier not to taint my shit. If I buy from the official source they cut it with all sorts of crap I don’t like.
His solution was also to cut down their usage, which is basically the opposite of what you want your users to do when you’re running a social media network.
Fewer users means that there are fewer people watching the ads, which means less income. It also makes it harder to justify subscribing to their premium service if you’re on the site less.
Honestly, I love seeing the twatter news every morning when i wake up. To see what bullshit he's instituted now. Will be a sad day when twatter shuts up shop for good. only because i'll lose a source of amusement
After the 2008 financial crisis (when the article claims the divergence started). The US and the EU chose different paths. The US chose bailouts and the EU went with austerity. Both were very unpopular, but one of them was also stupid. Helping the “wrong” people, it turns out was a better choice than trying to actively hurt all the people.
I’m sure there is a lot of other factors at play but EU governments getting religion about belt tightening and small-government in ‘09-‘12 was phenomenally stupid.
Gertrud, 55 aus Bayern hat sich mit ihrem Mann 200.000 Euro Vermögen aufgebaut und hält sich jetzt für superreich und hat Angst vor der Besteuerung des reichsten Prozents..
Das sind nicht nur die weltfremden Alten.
Wie oft habe ich hier oder auf Reddit lesen müssen, dass Leute glauben, Vermögens- oder Erbschaftssteuern würden sie persönlich ja so schwer treffen und man müsste dann das Elternhaus verkaufen.
Gertrud, 55 aus Bayern hat sich mit ihrem Mann 200.000 Euro Vermögen aufgebaut und hält sich jetzt für superreich und hat Angst vor der Besteuerung von den Reichsten...
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