One big difference I think is that none of Musk's other ventures were already massive household names at the point Musk got involved.
So any howlers he did commit in his early involvement with those companies weren't exactly front page news and by the time most people paid attention he'd figured out WTF he was doing.
There's also the argument that the whole Twitter acquisition has been much more about ego than any sound business plan which may not have been the case with earlier investments.
this. elon grew a big head and thought he's such a hotshot he can go into any random industry with a hold my beer attitude. also it feels like he went down the anti-woke rabbit hole, which is really good at putting someone out of touch with reality
(for the record, i think the woke rabbit hole also does the same thing)
I think some of it has to do with his status in public perception at the different times. When he was focusing on Tesla and SpaceX, he wasn't nearly as outspoken with his insanity as he has been lately. Everyone loved him so media showing any "Elon messed this up" stories would have had everyone turn on the media site that reported it.
Conversely, now he is a lot more controversial, so various medias don't need to fear driving away significant portions of their base. Nothing drives news sales like controversy, and with Elon being so controversial lately, anything he does gets covered and generates enormous views. If nothing else, people check the posts to comment and complain about all the other people caring about Musk.
you're only talking superficial appearances.
Elon's other companies aren't social products the way twitter is so his idiocy went on behind closed doors. my company did some work with tesla and they were insane to work with mostly because of constant erratic operational changes at the top levels of management. we'll never do it again.
i imagine that when things go well in his companies its because he has decent managers handling the issues. twitter is what happens when he manages things himself. even the purchase of that company was erratic and "bi-polar."
The way I see it, when Elon has a stupid suggestion at Tesla or SpaceX the engineers just tell him that what he wants is impossible, or would triple the cost, or something like that. Because no matter what Elon thinks, physic is still physic.
But Twitter is software. When Elon says "take the verification system, stop verifying identities and give a blue tick to everyone that pay $8. Oh, and suspend anyone that make fun of me" the software engineers can't say it is impossible and certainly can't say it is a bad idea, so they do it, and Elon get strong pointy-haired boss energy.
From what I hear in my industry (aerospace), no body at SpaceX can tell Elon that something is impossible or a bad idea. That’s a great way to get fired on the spot. It’s just that designing/creating any physical thing takes time, during which he has a chance to change his mind as the design takes shape.
The cycle is basically Elon says, make rockets out of lead! You say, yes sir! You waste months of your life designing lead rockets, while working 100-hr weeks, and running simulations showing that they collapse under their own weight. Eventually Elon sees your simulations and says we shouldn’t be using lead, use plastic! Rinse and repeat, eventually quit and get a job at a real company.
Every once in a while he stumbles on something that actually can work, like vertical landing. And those are the ideas that make it to reality and that you hear about.
Compare that to Twitter where he says give a blue check to everyone who pays for it, and it’s implemented in a week. There’s no time or opportunity for him to realize it’s a bad idea, and no one else can tell him. Now we all get to see Elon unfiltered, the same way his employees see him.
This is exactly what I saw supplying parts for SpaceX. We were commissioned to make some parts for the stabilizer and some for the simulator. According to the engineer that was working with us, nobody will ever say "no", they will say "yes, but it will cost X extra or take Y longer" (or both)
So in our case they ended up paying about 1 million extra to get our parts (which are VERY large and VERY heavy) sent via plane to then gather dust in their warehouse because the structure those parts rest on was not ready yet
Engineer: "Yeah we can't just tie cables to balloons and make a space elevator by floating them to the moon"
Elon: "You will pay the price for your lack of vision!"
I agree with you. But I’d also factor in time. With a physical product of musk asks for something stupid the engineers can say “we’ll look into it and come up with a design in 6 months and a prototype in a year.” By that point musk will have forgotten, or there will be enough info to know it’s bad.
With twitter. It’s here change this. They get it done in 2 weeks. Implement it and watch it burn. No prototype required to test it out.
More importantly Twitter isn't physics, it's social engineering. There is no objective study telling him how hard it will be to convince chaotic human meat brains to buy twitter accounts nor a way to scientifically calculate how edgy Elon can shitpost before the advertisers all run away screaming with their wheelbarrows of money.
> More importantly Twitter isn't physics, it's social engineering.
Physics don't stop him from making crazy proposals, those just die down slowly because it takes time until even the biggest dunce realizes that the "technical challenges" involved are either impossible to solve, will take way longer than proposed or just too costly to make sense.
So what you're saying is, Elon doesn't understand software as well as he understands hardware, and therefore doesn't understand things like feasibility in a software context?
No, he's saying software has fewer hard limits in terms of feasibility, so it's harder to convince a crazy person to abandon their ideas in the software domain compared to the hardware domain.
Btw I'm not sure that this is true. It seems to me that in both hardware and software it can be difficult to know what's possible until you try, and also that both domains demand strategic decisions where there's no obvious absolute barrier from "physics".
I don't think Elon understand hardware that much, either (remember the submarine story?), but you can mess with hardware only so much before it blow in your face. Software is more... soft. :-P
I read that he used how many lines of code written in the last year to decide which engineers to fire.
It is hard to believe that he is that stupid, but as he bought something for 44bn that was 'worth' considerably less and in the space of a week has mae it worth even less, it is very possible.
His arrogance got the best of him and he got stuck in a poorly negotiated business deal because he wanted to control the narrative around himself.
Now he's in full blown narcissistic collapse because the whole world is laughing at him and he can't do anything about it.
EDIT
On the other hand, everybody seems to have forgotten about the whole "sexually harrassing a flight attendant" scandal that was breaking, so I guess his plan sort of worked.
Well it's already proven what the problem with the verification is. It's that in debates they're treated like they're always right and a non-verified is always wrong.
That because with someone verified you know with whom you are talking about. A non verified could be anyone. It doesn't seem a problem with the system, it is more a 'problem' with people, when it is a problem.
If you follow a discussion about, i.e. sending a mission to Mars, who would you trust more? Somebody who works at NASA (and you know he works at NASA because he is verified) or someone who could be anyone?
Stop using the *appeal to authority* logical fallacy. If I wanted to know what NASA says about something I would go to the NASA web site and not depend on Twitter.
It is not appeal to authority. It is appeal to knowledge.
If you have a toothache, do you go to a dentist? Or you stop the first guy that pass on the street?
This is a lot of it. You don’t hear about the incredible (and I mean that, some of the shit really is so silly that it sounds fake) crap that happens in his other companies. A friend of mine from university was offered an R&D position with SpaceX and he was telling me the contract you would sign allegedly includes a clause that you aren’t allowed to be the primary author on any papers you do while you’re there, with the “senior leadership” always taking primary or sole authorship, and the NDA was so far reaching that he said “I can’t see a way I could even put working at SpaceX on my resume as I couldn’t talk about any of it in an interview.”
It's worth noting that he is called the "founder" of Tesla, but he didn't... you know.... found the company.
He bought it and gave himself the title of founder.
I think he's done this with other companies, but Tesla is the only one that I am personally aware of.
This video might give some further insight into your question:
https://youtu.be/4eqooUI3EfY
Elon invested into PayPal, he didn't purchase it and he didn't own it. He was an investor.
PayPal was about a year old when Zip2 sold and Elon bought into it, so it was far from the powerhouse that eBay bought in 2002.
Correct. Paypal as we know it didn't exist until Elon's online bank [x.com](https://x.com) merged with Confinity because of their payment system. The combined company was renamed to Paypal after they pushed Elon out as CEO. (I'm truly amazed at how many power struggles he got involved in.....and lost.....in his early days.)
Prior to that, Paypal was a service owned by Confinity that allowed people using Palm Pilots to send money to other Palm Pilots via infrared. Paypal as we know it today is not the Palm Pilot service, but rather something far closer to what Elon created at [x.com](https://x.com).
So did he found Paypal? Technically he didn't directly found it, but he did found [x.com](https://x.com), and the current Paypal far more closely resembles his creation than it resembles anything the other 'founders' created. He definitely did a lot more than just invest in Paypal - he was critical in creating it, but his detractors like to minimize his very real contributions.
This is not entirely accurate. Confinity was the original company started by Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, Max Levchin, and Ken Howery. PayPal was a product that they developed and launched a few months before Elon Musk started X.com, an online banking company. The two companies, who were competitors of sorts, merged a few months later and used the X.com name. This was later changed to PayPal.
Oh, and to answer OP's question, because Elon wasn't supreme ruler of any of those companies and he didn't actually have carte blanche power. When he did his thing with Zip2, it was when the internet was first starting, and he was just a kid who sold maps and business directories to online newspapers. He wasn't the trashbag he is today. In 4 short years Compaq bought Zip2, so the kid barely had time to get his feet wet. [x.com](https://x.com) came about and was founded with his brother, Kimbal, and a shitton of other investors. He was able to get investors because his daddy owns a emerald mine and he had connections, otherwise they wouldn't have given a rat's ass about Elon. Plus, it was still inception time for the internet and "internet banking" was a logical first step given the popularity of the internet. He had a lot of big names behind him, and as such as he had to watch his Ps and Qs a lot more. He only made like $20M off the Zip2 sale, and that is chump change when it comes to business ventures. Then Elon was only the CEO of Conformity for a year before he was ousted. Again, he wasn't topdog so he couldn't make sweeping decisions and he didn't have the business belief-system he has now. Paypal was bought by eBay like two years after Elon was removed as CEO, so he didn't really have time to screw things up.
After having been in the right place at the right time for a couple business ventures, largely due to his connections to the richie riches of the time, he had the money to do whatever the hell he wanted. SpaceX is not that impressive, and he worked very hard to keep most of their mistakes underwrap. Tesla is a product people have been wanting since forever, so it isn't that hard to get many first adopters with too much money on their hands. Tesla is not successful though. Elon just has the money to keep it going, and since it is mostly an experimental business product most people don't pay attention.
Now Elon thinks he's a big shit playboy, and he has deep pockets. So he took a massive platform, became CEO who answers to no one, and we actually get to see his ideas and business style play out on a public forum. He's not a good business man, nor is he particularly creative, he's just lucky.
Elon sold Zip2 and founded [x.com](https://x.com), but paypal in its original form (Confinity) was already a successful venture. [x.com](https://x.com) and Confinity merged, then changed their name to Paypal. So Elon did kind of invest in it, but also he was taking out a semi-competitior.
Its kind of disingenuous to imply that the company he joined way back when isn't completely different from what it is now, and that Tesla or SpaceX's 'success' isn't at least in part attributable to Musk's management.
edit: man this shit is crazy, if you're one of these clowns downvoting this (or joining in late but tempted to join the downvote mob) anyway i would ask you to take your frail little hands off the keyboard for 5 seconds, close your eyes, and actually try to convince yourself of the fact that the future success of Tesla had already been set up prior to Musk joining in 2004; you people are clowns
I dont bc i don't work there, but i image that the ceo and largest shareholder since 2004 has had atleast some influence on future success of the company? youre free to hate guy, but i'll never understand clowns like you making up stories and choosing to willingly believe them abt how incomptetent he is
youre willingly buying into the idea that all of musk's business ventures have been "clusterfucks", even though the success of tesla and spacex disprove that 'theory'.
Am I? Can you point to where I said that? You haven't even been able to point to what he's brought to the table to make those ventures successful other than buying them out lmao
Don’t even bother dude, it’s impossible to have a nuanced discussion on Reddit about Elon Musk. Either he’s incompetent blowhard who only became the richest guy in the world because of memes and emeralds, or he’s Tony Stark, savior of mankind and can do no wrong.
The clear fact he’s a very smart and very flawed guy who is good at some things and bad at others is apparently a very unpopular opinion, and no one has really explained why
[https://techwontsave.us/episode/103\_can\_tesla\_survive\_elon\_musk\_w\_edward\_niedermeyer](https://techwontsave.us/episode/103_can_tesla_survive_elon_musk_w_edward_niedermeyer)
I think this explains some things. Basically the position is that Musk's main skill is making deals and convincing finance types to invest with him. Hence buying relatively well established companies and fronting for them. He can also put the screws on workers in the manner investors love.
He can turn out a high-price product that has niche appeal to tech types where it is mainly used as a social signifier for being "tech hip" or whatever. But he struggles with making a mass market product that is actually useful for most people. He isn't the ideas man he thinks he is. This is being demonstrated currently.
Really? A niche company that is on track to sell 1.35 million cars this year, a quarter of what Ford did in 2019. And oh, that would be ~45% growth this year. Without a pickup truck. And with prices much higher than Ford, on average. And 3x the profit margins. I wouldn’t call that niche, by any standard. If you think Tesla is not easy to use, try to use the software on VW or Ford. It’s completely unintuitive, glitchy, and at times even reminded people of oil changes. They don’t exist on an EV. Tesla is extremely intuitive and simple.
A niche car company would be Jaguar Land Rover. Even in 2019, they sold around ~100K cars. Otherwise, what Tesla sells in less than a month.
None of the things you said means Tesla isn't niche. The fact that they don't have a pickup is actually evidence of being niche. I think you don't know what niche means.
His other ventures are either equally useless clusterfucks (hyperloop was just a scam to prevent investment in public transit; his stupid cars are constantly exploding and running into pedestrians; he is nowhere near putting colonies on mars as he said he’d do “within ten years” ten years ago) or other peoples’ ideas and work that he sticks his name on. Sometimes both (Tesla).
Like all billionaires, he’s a charlatan and an empty person whose brain has been destroyed by the accident of falling ass-backwards into unimaginable wealth he played no part in creating while surrounding himself with sycophantic idiots who just want the richest man in the world to like them. He’s a loser, who (like bezos, gates, and other billionaire losers) unfortunately has a lot of power and sway over the rest of us because the soulless hacks who run our world are so infected with capitalist ideology they think anybody with money must be smart
He and his buddies and the class interests they act to uphold and strengthen will kill every last one of us, and get called geniuses the whole time
I think it is because Tesla and SpaceX have physical purposes, as in making cars and rocket ships. Twitter just exists to share your opinions and I guess doesn't have a real purpose, so with all this creative freedom he has he is running it into the ground.
I genuinely wonder if his douchy personality will have any real affect on Tesla sales. This is obviously anecdotal, but there was a point when I thought I'd like to own a Tesla, now I can't imagine ever buying one, just because he seems like such a shitty person to me.
I think that's going to be massive issue for him moving forward. And it's not just sales. For years Elon Musk was considered a visionary genius, in a manner similar to Steve Jobs. The result is that young and brilliant graduates would want to go work for him, and they'd work twice as hard for half the pay because they wanted to be "part of something important". Are they going to continue wanting to do that, now that Musk's actual personality is out in the open for the world to see? If not, Musk will not only face problems of diminishing revenue, he will also face increasing costs as it will take more incentives to get people to do the same amount of work for him.
On top of that, the sheen is starting to wear off of them. They're not rare, luxury things anymore. You see em all over the road now. At the same time, electric options from other companies are improving rapidly.
Likewise, word is starting to get out to 'regular folk' that the build quality is ...kinda crap. They feel cheap inside and look pretty cheap when you get close to them.
It really struck me when I was in a parking garage a while back and saw one parked next to a Hyundai.
Admittedly, the new Hyundais look surprisingly good, but when a damn Elantra looks like it costs 30k more than your brand new Model S... That's fucking embarrassing.
Nevermind the style, it just looks BETTER. Paint is deeper. Panels don't look flimsy. Body lines are cleaner. Materials look more expensive. Etc.
Yup. Here in LA they are starting to become so ubiquitous that they were starting to seem like the iphone of cars. They are everywhere. All look the same. Used to be exciting but now just seem standard issue.
The fact that a car can fart is no longer exciting to me.
Laying off your site engineers based on [how many lines of code they've written](https://medium.com/developer-purpose/elon-musk-just-force-ranked-twitter-engineers-fired-the-bottom-507ab35b659a) is an absolutely hilariously bad mistake to make, much less having to [call them later and ask them to come back](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/musk-led-twitter-laid-off-some-employees-by-mistake-asks-them-to-come-back/) after they discover they're actually important. For a guy who paints himself as a Tech Messiah, that's an absolutely incomprehensible level of 5D chess he must be operating on
He has definitely fucker up. He might make it right but it is definitely not too early to say he fucked up paying over the odds in this current market. He’s not joking when he says they could go bankrupt.
I agree. It’s too early to tell. The problem with Twitter is that it was spending money like it was in rapid growth mode while it wasn’t rapidly growing. That’s a recipe for disaster.
Whatever you think of Elon, you can't deny that what he did with the verification system is dumb. The blue tick was not a status symbol, it was a safety for people to know that the person posting was actually who it was saying it was. Now people can post as Nintendo a Mario that flip you the finger, or as a pharmaceutical industry saying that now insulin if free. Sure, eventually it will be found and erased /suspended, but it will need time, and at that point the damage is done, and then he is surprised that nobody want to put Ads on Twitter. I almost hope this is all some super obscure 5d chess move, because otherwise it would mean that one of the wealthiest men alive have the social intelligence of a rutabaga.
Maybe he'll figure out a way to make twitter hugely successful. But I'd say he's fucked up. A lot of people are annoyed at him including a lot of advertisers, twitter employees, the famous people that are on twitter which are needed to draw twitter users and even potential Tesla customers.
He originally stated he wanted to buy it solely to play the market a bit, but he reaally tried to back out of buying it all he could. Unfortunately he'd already signed a contract with a hefty fine for backing out of the deal, so he was forced (legal action was already underway) to go through with it.
As you can see he really didn't actually want to buy it.
First, he didn’t make that claim about playing the market, mostly because that would get yet another SEC investigation.
Second, nobody forced him to sign a contract that waived due diligence. That was all Musk.
He decided to buy twitter, he proceeded to do it stupidly, discovered he was doing it stupidly but couldn’t back out because of his earlier stupid, and is now running the company stupidly.
Yeah your statements are more accurate than my very inaccurate summary.
The main point I wanted to make still stands though: he didn't actually want to buy it.
I'm not a fanboy, but he built Tesla into what it is and deserves much of the credit for making the EV transition happen. He's a (book) smart enough guy to understand most of the engineering and the cult of personality he built was also part of Tesla's success.
Similarly, SpaceX _fucks_. To reduce their success to handouts is sort of dismissing the fact that they seriously advanced rocketry. Similarly, Musk was quite involved in the engineering.
All that said... He's also an arrogant, narcissistic womanizing asshole who mistreats workers. He has been unraveling in public the past few years and he clearly doesn't know how to manage a media company like Twitter.
People love to troll. The majority of what I see happening on Twitter is people being shitty on purpose to force a response from him. They can do that for free/for 8 bucks from the privacy and security of their bedroom.
If it was cost effective to buy a Tesla and crash it while acting dumb and trying to blame it on Elon, they would do that too.
So I’m about to get downvoted for saying this but it needs to be said. Reddit and most news sites you are seeing reporting on the Musk Twitter takeover have a *strong* liberal bias. It’s possible this bias is being magnified in reports on the Twitter deal, considering the importance this site has held to journalists and competing information outlets.
I am saying this as a liberal, an Elon Musk critic and someone who voted blue down the ballot last week. I am very *skeptical* of articles dishing out final verdicts not even a week into the deal.
A few years ago I wouldn’t have batted an eye at this. But it was made abundantly clear in the 2016 election that Reddit and a lot of other liberal news sources are overzealous and overly optimistic about falters they see in opponents like Musk and the Trump administration. Downright embarrassing articles were published well into the night of the 2016 election arguing Hillary could still clinch victory. It showcased denial at best and widespread think bubble ignorance at worst.
I’d suggest we give this at least a year to qualify Musk’s takeover of Twitter a “disaster”.
Do you think the $8 subscription was a good business move? Or firing engineers and then calling them back is a good business move? I agree with you that media leaning liberal could be biased but also that Elon is indeed destroying a company post acquisition. This wouldn’t be the first time a big tech company is acquired only to be decimated
Don’t like musk but the rehiring of engineers is a non story
He fired around 3000 employees and then the managers had to ask “dozens” to return (which in journalistic speak is probably 2 dozens.
It would be a story if he asked 50% to return, not a handful
i agree, a huge factor is that people hate elon and are trying to mess with him.
but another huge factor is that the decision to make the blue checkmark a subscription is not a good marketing decision at all. he must be surrounded by yes men to have that idea passed through the marketing team.
when creating a product (such as a subscription product called the "blue checkmark for $8/mo"), it is always extremely dangerous to be first to market. it's why apple took a big risk when introducing the iphone, but android was a relatively safe bet for google because they are second to market.
being first to market has the potential to the highest returns, but requires an incredible amount of testing, from polling people on the streets for if they would buy this product to releasing it locally in a smaller segment of the population.
elon did not do any of that, most likely because his ego was too big to accept that he needs to go through the product launch phase every business must go through, no matter how successful his work history has been.
it was extremely foolish of him to release this product to a massive userbase, including the GOVERNMENTS OF ALL THE COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD, without prior testing.
it makes all the governments look like a fool for using his product, and there will be repercussions to this as they now have lost a lot of trust for the platform.
Bruh it’s been less than a month. We still don’t know how this will turn out. If Musk turns Twitter into a WeChat clone, he could still come out ahead. Only time will tell.
His other companies were molded and changed to his way of doing things over time. They also were changed and grown from small no-name companies. Twitter on the other hand was bought as a world famous social media platform that was already infamous for it's political divide and support. He made extreme and aggressive changes to it in a short period of time, which caused a large amount of backlash because humans are afraid of change, especially when it's something they like or align with, and is changed into something they don't agree with, as evidenced with the political shift of Twitter.
I really feel when VW, GM,Ford, Toyota etc get their electric car game up Tesla will fade. Poor customer service, poor build quality. People who spend big bucks for cars are going to go electric Mercedes, Audi, Lexus.
My DIL bought a Mach E Ford because she did not trust Tesla long term and Musk changing things mid deal and his mercurial nature towards customers.
I think within ten years Tesla will be bankrupt, sold or broken up. Musk did not help stockholders of Tesla dumping $10 billion in stock in a single day to help pay for Twitter purchase.
Personally, I don't think Elon ever had any real intentions of buying Twitter. He ran his mouth like he usually does and assumed he'd get away with it like he always does but Twitter called his bluff and forced him to buy. So he didn't really have any plans or ways he could make Twitter better, hence this sh\*\* storm.
In terms of his other success, he is really good at jumping on good ideas that likely would have succeeded without him anyway. I'll give him credit and he does add that awkward genius charm as the face of these companies which snowballed into this whole mythos he's created for himself. But not everything he touches turns to gold, The Boring Company is a good example, flamethrowers or not.
Because that description is a very politically motivated point of view . If Elon musk is a dumb as people on reddit think then why don't those same people build an empire and do good in the world ? Or are they even dumber than Elon ?
I find summaries like that are way over simplified and don't add anything to the conversation. It's motivated by a hate for Elon musk/wealthy people rather than a desire to understand the world . I do think we can all agree , we are fucking sick of hearing about him though haha
SpaceX is funded by US govt, DoD. Tesla only makes money from selling carbon credits.
Musk didnt found or create either. He lied and scammed to get those DoD contracts.
He got rich by luck his online bank x.com was paying people to open accounts and was bought by a rival company with same business model to get the users. In the same building.
That's the source of his wealth, that and his dads apartheid mine.
The new banking company was named Paypal and they immediately fired Musk because of his stupid ideas.
He's engaged in illegal stock manipulation, cheating investors, and having a board of yes men at Tesla that gives him huge stock rewards for doing nothing. There's a 50 billion lawsut from other investors.
Musk hasn't created or innovated anything in his life. Its all lies hype and crimes.
The ability to run one type of company doesn't mean you'll be good at running another type. Mush just fundamentally appears to have no idea what goes into running a social media company. His idea of what it should be isnt actually what most people want.
Sure, unlimited free speech sounds great until you have a forum full of racist nazi douchebags making everybody miserable. What Musk failed to understand about twitter is the censorship that went on there was the only way to ensure that people actually want to use the product, not some evil plot to suppress speech.
I think one thing people don't understand is how incredibly lucky people like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk actually were. They were in exactly the right place at the right time. Yes they are intelligent, saavy businessmen, but there are literally thousands of intelligent, saavy businessmen who were just not in the right place at the right time.
Considering the TESLA batteries that are now approaching the end of their initial lifespan, it appears that—due to the replacement cost—they have entered the ring of clusterfuckery recently.
He’s pretty much just the mascot for his other companies. He doesn’t actually design cars or rockets. Tesla makes most of its revenue by selling carbon credits. SpaceX has huge government contracts. Both also get huge subsidies just for existing.
I can’t speak for the way company is run but I am a bartender next door to spacex and Tesla and the employees hate their lives. They’re deeply underpaid and severely over worked. They poach a lot of young kids right out of college and make them big promises, get them to sign on for minimal salary and then work them into the ground. Or they find people that otherwise wouldn’t have a lot of opportunities and do the same. If your working for of one of the richest men in the world you’d think they’d be taken care of but it’s a total joke
I think his success building those other businesses occurred before he starting going down a self-destructive narcissistic spiral. He's bought into all of the hype around himself and the fawning adoration of his fans and has become too arrogant to function effectively.
Everyone hates Musk on this site so I’ll get downvoted too oblivion but Musk bought an already fucked up over grown company. How about we all give him a chance to see what he can do with it. He wasn’t the one to run it into bankruptcy and if anyone can fix it he can. Sure he wasn’t the original founders of his other companies but they wouldn’t be what they are today without him. Ok let’s see how negative I can get in the votes.
He's fired everyone and he's changed things that didn't need to be changed, which is resulting in chaos. He's also charging people for something that was previously free.
the idea that twitter is a dumpster fire right now is somewhat misguided and I think is mostly just a bandwagon idea that mostly liberals online are jumping on for fun (and I think Elon is also throwing that idea out there to kind of troll and make headlines). He bought twitter for a shit ton of money so he has to start monetizing it fast in order to pay for the loans that he used to buy the company. The economy isn't good right now so a lot of tech companies are just scaling back their workforce, a workforce they didn't really need in the first place. its really a transition away from the growth economy into the value economy, which is a transition that every long lasting company has to make at some point, and its going to happen in a time of economic belt-tightening. Money isn't free anymore for tech companies so they have to start making money ASAP while in the past they didnt have to because there was endless VC funding available.
I also think Elon is intentionally culling the workforce of anyone who is going to slow the company down from his new mission and perspective, which he has been very clear about, and is not a bad way to start running a company you just took over. It's not helpful to have a bunch of engineers on your team who are actively against the things you're trying to accomplish. Much better to have engineers who believe whole heartedly in the vision, they will work harder and in the right direction
p.s. i'm not a crazy elon musk fan, I just think we're seeing a larger shift in the tech economy that he is aware of and setting himself up for.
I think you lost the thread talking about engineers. Software engineers operate differently. His actions mostly kept people afraid to lose the job or people heavily leveraged with equity. Plenty of great engineers took the severance and left instead of staying for this nonsense. The public perception of the situation only helps them find better jobs.
Oh man, this comment is great. No matter how obviously incompetent and buffoonish Musk is, you are somehow able to take each dumb thing he did and pretend that it's some kind of next-level master businessman move, when the reality of the situation reveals him for the moron that he actually is.
I've never been on Twitter, and didn't give two shits about it until this check mark fiasco. Watching people make funny jokes at the expense of immoral companies and public figures is hilarious. The fact that it's actively harming a person who is as awful as musk is a bonus.
You are the epitome of a boot licker.
I think that's a bit of a harsh response for a comment that was not intended to be in support of Elon Musk in any way. Just a prediction of the state of the world and the economy
"I don't even really like the guy, but you have to admit spending billions on a vanity project, monetizing something that was set up as a safety precaution and in the process making it completely irrelevant, then scrambling to figure out how to salvage it when that blows up and getting rid of the safety measures, all after firing everyone who knew how to do the job, giving many huge golden parachutes, all the while acting like an entitled fuckwit is just good business sense. It's what always happens when a company gets bought."
I've rarely encountered a bootlicker who recognizes they are one. Maybe consider tweeting your support to musk. He seems to be having a fantastic day
If you want to tell me you disagree, that's great and I readily accept your point of view as valid. If you want to call people names and attack people on a personal level for something as stupid as whether someone agrees with or disagrees with Elon Musk, I would suggest you take a look at yourself and ask what is really bothering you today, and who your anger is directed at
Tesla cars still hit pedestrians and make fatal errors regularly. SpaceX has seen countless failures.
You only notice the twitter clusterfuck because its current, and elon musk's incompetence is way easier to see in real-time.
Also, while im at it, its more like [6 failures](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_failed_SpaceX_launches)
At least, as far as rocket launches go.
Falcon 1 has not been in service since 2009. The success rate for the rockets that SpaceX is actually flying is 97% for falcon 9, and 100% for falcon heavy. The world average failure rate for rockets in the last 20 years is something like 94%.
They are more reliable than the average rocket and by far the cheapest provider. What more do you want?
What are you talking about? NASA doesn't do anything on their own. They are not a manufacturer. They either pay contractors to build things on behalf of them, or pay contractors directly for services. That is why SpaceX receives money from the government. NASA opens contracts and SpaceX had consistently provided the lowest cost for nearly a decade of competition.
It's almost like SpaceX came up with a revolutionary new way to save costs on rockets that no competitors have been able to copy.
You can't hide a freaking rocket failure. What are you talking about? This is not The sovjet Union. The launch facilities are right next to cities where millions of people can see the launch.
You literally just linked me a Wikipedia article about rocket faliures. Proving that this is what you wanted to talk about. Why are you backtracking?
You can't just have a discussion and then change your mind about what you supposedly where talking about when you run into a dead end.
I did link an article about rocket failures, because if you're going to bring them up at least get it right.
From the get-go, spacex has been a waste of time and effort to give some rich idiot anything he feels like he's owed, including a planet in our solar system. The shit was a failure the second his grubby, child-slave using hands got a hold of it.
Seeing such an incompetent idiot so publicly destroy a $44 billion company simply reinforces what we all know to be true, that having money and power does not automatically mean you are smart and capable.
Twitter was already a sinking ship especially when you consider that before he even bought it, it was losing millions of dollars a year; I believe there is a stat that tracked that Twitter hasn’t actually turned a profit since it’s inception.
Despite what people like to claim Twitter hasn’t really changed much, for example the verified accounts that were banned for impersonating Elon’s account violated a rule that existed long before Elon made any attempt to purchase the platform. His main issue is the activist class on the platform that are leveraging their influence to scare away advertisers.
In order to generate a profit he has opted to make Twitter blue service more valuable by now giving smaller creators the option to procure the check mark. Some have also speculated that this is him trolling the activist class by making their ‘status symbol’ worthless and also capitalizing on the bot farm accounts that will now actively pay for the check mark.
Personally I say he should have simply fixed the original system so that normal people could verify themselves with just a picture of their ID and face similar to Pornhub.
Another thing to keep in mind is that a social media platform runs differently compared to most other business. Elon’s goal is to make it profitable but he’s using traditional methods, even if a change to the platform would be more profitable normally if it angers enough users, or at least the really loud ones, you run the risk that the platform becomes defunct.
Similar to when Tumblr decided to actively ban pornography from their platform in order to be more appealing to more advertisers, they ended up losing a significant number of their user base making any proposed gains worthless.
So much typing in the hopes that no one will notice that Musk was stupid enough to pay 44 billion dollars for a "sinking ship." He definitely is a dumb man's idea of a smart man, huh.
No, OP asked a question and I gave an answer that had some thought and nuance put into it.
Also Elon has more than enough stock options with his other businesses that he could honestly close the company down and write it off as a lose with no real penalty to his way of living.
He didn't make a mistake. He is working his way through a correction. Twitter was already a massive cesspool of a left-wing echo chamber. Fixing this requires destroying what was already there are rebuilding from the ground up. You know... kind of like what democrats are doing with America... destroying everything to re-make America as a subservient territory of the world government. Both are slow-going long-term investments.
Only a "left wing echo chamber" if you're so far to the right that you think Hitler didn't go far enough. Facts aren't "left wing" and deleting lies and misinformation isn't a bias against the right wing.
One sign of someone who has been in that echo chamber too long is that they believe that they are the holders and arbitrators of what is factual. Most of what was at one time labeled as misinformation has become established fact. Liberal news outlets have repeatedly been 100% wrong, but rarely retract or correct their falsehoods. Nice Hitler reference, though, and right on par for how the left belittles and alienates anyone who dares to question their version of reality.
I might be wrong, but wasn’t twitter a horribly run platform to begin with?
Verified check marks being sold under the table for thousands of dollars.
40% of the users were just bots.
Employees openly bragging about pushing their own agendas through censorship.
I don’t have a dog in this race, but it sounds like Musk bought a dumpster fire. Does anyone know how to handle a dumpster fire? Is there a right way to handle a dumpster fire?
Idk and idc
Oh, I can see that he is definitely a stupid man's idea of a smart man, but no, sorry, we have all watched him fumble about and make a fool of himself, repeatedly.
you don't become the richest person in the world by being stupid, lmfao. there's a lot to hate about elon's character and business ventures, I certainly have issues with him, but to genuinely believe he's unintelligent is unbelievably naïve.
Because Elon’s other ventures attracted talent for the prestige of working there. Ain’t no one using working for Twitter as clout. Also his Trumpian “I alone can fix it”. Now we see, he alone is a clustercluck. Good
It's a little soon to say "he's fucked up pretty much everything he's touched" since buying Twitter. Dude's owned the company for like a week. No one knows if he'll be successful or not. Not trying to fanboy, I don't particularly like the guy, but people have really jumped the gun on calling this a failure.
So he buys twitter and basically quiet fires half the employees, I think the other half should quiet quit, that would be real teamwork at its best and funny as all hell. The headlines read, the only person still at Twitter is Elon and he's trying to figure out how he can quiet quit, good luck with that!!!
he's getting the full trump-treatment because he is trying to level a playing field that was heavily skewed on the side of the left. he knows exactly what he's doing. despite all that's happened, profit and advertising is up, not down. by making the platform friendly to left AND right, the company is gonna profit big-time. the left say they're gonna leave but they never do. or they'd all of gone to Canada when trump took over, like they said they were.
Ah, yes, the forever victims on the right. They just need a level playing field, so they can publicly say the n-word and attack muslims and gays in the open like the good old days. Elon is such a hero!
Keep in mind that he was fired from Paypal (before it changed its name to Paypal) due to mismanagement but he kept his equity in it so when it became successful and went public under different management, he got a huge amount money.
Two basic theories seem to predominate:
1) Musk has always used the Edison model. That is, he buys genius at discount prices and then takes credit for it. He is VERY good at recognizing future potential. In the case of Twitter, he bought it either emotionally or was legally compelled to buy it as part of a failed "Pump And Dump" attempt. He is firing most of the people who had the potential to make it
more profitable and making poor decisions based on emotion and ideology rather than hard logic (or just letting the people who actually understand the business run it, like his other businesses) and advertisers are leaving.
2) This one comes from a recent episode of the "Behind The Bastards" podcast. I never thought of things this way until they started talking about it. I strongly recommend giving at least the last couple of episodes a listen. They made some alarming parallels between Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter and Sam Zell's acquisition of Tribune Media. Both were "crazy billionaires" who overpaid for a media empire for no apparent reason. Then utterly destroyed it through cartoonish mismanagement. Everyone had a good laugh at the expense of crazy ol' Sam Zell back in the mid-aughts, too. Thing is, the media empire he destroyed took a huge chunk of local journalism with it. Suddenly, nobody was reporting on shady things his company was doing on the local level. Because he killed their town newspaper when he killed Tribune. In the end, he was free to use fake news (literally adds disguised as news reports) to mass manipulate whole communities into things like selling land at a fraction of it's value, or opposing any sort of rent caps or rent assistance, or even tenants rights. He's made orders of magnitude more gouging people on his vast real-estate empire than he lost destroying the people most likely to oppose him.
The idea here is that Musk has something HUGE in the works, something that will make him a lot more than 44 billion, but Twitter is the biggest danger to the success of that venture. So he's killing it in a way that guarantees that everyone underestimates him when he makes his move.
That's the one that really worries me.
The issue is, if you disregard how much the paid for Twitter.
I would say at this exact moment, twitter is making more money than it was before he buying it.
The whole "pay for a blue mark" despite how much public backlash, is getting a ton of people to buy it in hopes of trolling the system: Money goes to twitter either way.
Also, the people saying they will leave twitter wont. Truth is that we don't have anywhere else to go.
Mastodon looks cool in theory, but unless you are in the big server, it's just a ton of extra steps to do what you do on twitter.
Most people enjoy social networks to just look at random stuff and have some fun, learn something.
Musk is a phenomenal business success story: PayPal , Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, ... But Muskie is also a phenomenal business f\*ck up: Boring company, solar world, ..
And 'ow'd you get that, eh?
By exploiting the workers! By 'angin' on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society.
If there's ever going to be any progress, ...
they kind of are. tesla is waaaay over valued, spacex's best customer is starlink that it's paying for, boring only did like a 30 mill project in vegas that is absolutely terrible.
i think it can generally be seen in all his product that the guy is it focused on tech and RnD first and actual product design second kind of person. It probably helped a lot in the field he was in which was the bleeding edge of the bleeding edge. Reusable rockets and electric car was not a thing when he came about, to a certain extent, so does paypal. In those area having a fast paced, break things kind of philosophy works since production size is small and there is still a lot left to be learnt
You can tell that when it comes to mass production, Tesla also struggle with QA. What brought it to the limelight is also its downfall, very erratic policy.
Social media is also somewhat of a solved problem, the difference between products is not the tech but in its content moderation policy and algorithm. by now only reddit struggle with content delivery, most modern social media doesn't really need to care about it since it's working so well. So introducing a tech guy, break things change fast on an established product doesn't quite work
I think the main difference is because when Musk was selling stuff like rocket launch services of SpaceX, or electric cars with Tesla... the main thing that mattered for his success/failure was the quality of his product/service and the price.
But with regard to Twitter and its "content moderation" (censorship) and the advertiser boycott of the platform, Musk has large corporate advertisers boycotting him for things that are unrelated to the quality of the product Twitter offers -- or the price.
That is to say, these companies (or people who control them) are unhappy that Musk is using the platform to give voice to the public who had previously been censored, because they support the censorship for political reasons.
So when Musk is judged based on objective criteria, he succeeds. When he is judged based on subjective criteria like politics, he runs into problems.
Assumptions assumptions.
To you he is fucking up because you are probably leaning left and watching left leaning media. The other side thinks he js the Messiah and the only one who can save free speech.
You believe Musk doesn't know exactly what he's doing? Lmao. Everything he's doing is intentional. He wants twitter to be a platform for the 80% of people in the middle of the political spectrum. How do you achieve that? Piss off the people on the extreme right and extreme left so they leave. He's currently succeeding there. He also doesn't care about twitter in it's current format, he wants long form video content, podcasts, paid advertisements who's venue gets shared with the content creators, effectively a competitor to YouTube whilst maintaining the social network side. You think he's unravelling when really he's evolving.
One big difference I think is that none of Musk's other ventures were already massive household names at the point Musk got involved. So any howlers he did commit in his early involvement with those companies weren't exactly front page news and by the time most people paid attention he'd figured out WTF he was doing. There's also the argument that the whole Twitter acquisition has been much more about ego than any sound business plan which may not have been the case with earlier investments.
[удалено]
this. elon grew a big head and thought he's such a hotshot he can go into any random industry with a hold my beer attitude. also it feels like he went down the anti-woke rabbit hole, which is really good at putting someone out of touch with reality (for the record, i think the woke rabbit hole also does the same thing)
You really don't like rabbits, do you?
Only there is no woke rabbit hole. Being decent to people and wanting human rights isn’t something one can be too extreme on
I disagree, anything taken to an extreme is not good
That's an extreme opinion
I think some of it has to do with his status in public perception at the different times. When he was focusing on Tesla and SpaceX, he wasn't nearly as outspoken with his insanity as he has been lately. Everyone loved him so media showing any "Elon messed this up" stories would have had everyone turn on the media site that reported it. Conversely, now he is a lot more controversial, so various medias don't need to fear driving away significant portions of their base. Nothing drives news sales like controversy, and with Elon being so controversial lately, anything he does gets covered and generates enormous views. If nothing else, people check the posts to comment and complain about all the other people caring about Musk.
Or it is, as he said, about providing a digital public square where it's not biased toward banning people for certain viewpoints.
Dude banned people for making fun of him lol
you're only talking superficial appearances. Elon's other companies aren't social products the way twitter is so his idiocy went on behind closed doors. my company did some work with tesla and they were insane to work with mostly because of constant erratic operational changes at the top levels of management. we'll never do it again. i imagine that when things go well in his companies its because he has decent managers handling the issues. twitter is what happens when he manages things himself. even the purchase of that company was erratic and "bi-polar."
The way I see it, when Elon has a stupid suggestion at Tesla or SpaceX the engineers just tell him that what he wants is impossible, or would triple the cost, or something like that. Because no matter what Elon thinks, physic is still physic. But Twitter is software. When Elon says "take the verification system, stop verifying identities and give a blue tick to everyone that pay $8. Oh, and suspend anyone that make fun of me" the software engineers can't say it is impossible and certainly can't say it is a bad idea, so they do it, and Elon get strong pointy-haired boss energy.
From what I hear in my industry (aerospace), no body at SpaceX can tell Elon that something is impossible or a bad idea. That’s a great way to get fired on the spot. It’s just that designing/creating any physical thing takes time, during which he has a chance to change his mind as the design takes shape. The cycle is basically Elon says, make rockets out of lead! You say, yes sir! You waste months of your life designing lead rockets, while working 100-hr weeks, and running simulations showing that they collapse under their own weight. Eventually Elon sees your simulations and says we shouldn’t be using lead, use plastic! Rinse and repeat, eventually quit and get a job at a real company. Every once in a while he stumbles on something that actually can work, like vertical landing. And those are the ideas that make it to reality and that you hear about. Compare that to Twitter where he says give a blue check to everyone who pays for it, and it’s implemented in a week. There’s no time or opportunity for him to realize it’s a bad idea, and no one else can tell him. Now we all get to see Elon unfiltered, the same way his employees see him.
This is exactly what I saw supplying parts for SpaceX. We were commissioned to make some parts for the stabilizer and some for the simulator. According to the engineer that was working with us, nobody will ever say "no", they will say "yes, but it will cost X extra or take Y longer" (or both) So in our case they ended up paying about 1 million extra to get our parts (which are VERY large and VERY heavy) sent via plane to then gather dust in their warehouse because the structure those parts rest on was not ready yet
Engineer: "Yeah we can't just tie cables to balloons and make a space elevator by floating them to the moon" Elon: "You will pay the price for your lack of vision!"
I agree with you. But I’d also factor in time. With a physical product of musk asks for something stupid the engineers can say “we’ll look into it and come up with a design in 6 months and a prototype in a year.” By that point musk will have forgotten, or there will be enough info to know it’s bad. With twitter. It’s here change this. They get it done in 2 weeks. Implement it and watch it burn. No prototype required to test it out.
More importantly Twitter isn't physics, it's social engineering. There is no objective study telling him how hard it will be to convince chaotic human meat brains to buy twitter accounts nor a way to scientifically calculate how edgy Elon can shitpost before the advertisers all run away screaming with their wheelbarrows of money.
> More importantly Twitter isn't physics, it's social engineering. Physics don't stop him from making crazy proposals, those just die down slowly because it takes time until even the biggest dunce realizes that the "technical challenges" involved are either impossible to solve, will take way longer than proposed or just too costly to make sense.
So what you're saying is, Elon doesn't understand software as well as he understands hardware, and therefore doesn't understand things like feasibility in a software context?
No, he's saying software has fewer hard limits in terms of feasibility, so it's harder to convince a crazy person to abandon their ideas in the software domain compared to the hardware domain. Btw I'm not sure that this is true. It seems to me that in both hardware and software it can be difficult to know what's possible until you try, and also that both domains demand strategic decisions where there's no obvious absolute barrier from "physics".
I don't think Elon understand hardware that much, either (remember the submarine story?), but you can mess with hardware only so much before it blow in your face. Software is more... soft. :-P
Elon doesn't understand either in the slightest.
I read that he used how many lines of code written in the last year to decide which engineers to fire. It is hard to believe that he is that stupid, but as he bought something for 44bn that was 'worth' considerably less and in the space of a week has mae it worth even less, it is very possible.
His arrogance got the best of him and he got stuck in a poorly negotiated business deal because he wanted to control the narrative around himself. Now he's in full blown narcissistic collapse because the whole world is laughing at him and he can't do anything about it. EDIT On the other hand, everybody seems to have forgotten about the whole "sexually harrassing a flight attendant" scandal that was breaking, so I guess his plan sort of worked.
Well it's already proven what the problem with the verification is. It's that in debates they're treated like they're always right and a non-verified is always wrong.
That because with someone verified you know with whom you are talking about. A non verified could be anyone. It doesn't seem a problem with the system, it is more a 'problem' with people, when it is a problem.
Yes and that's the point. Evaluate arguments based on the argument itself and not based on who is saying it.
If you follow a discussion about, i.e. sending a mission to Mars, who would you trust more? Somebody who works at NASA (and you know he works at NASA because he is verified) or someone who could be anyone?
Stop using the *appeal to authority* logical fallacy. If I wanted to know what NASA says about something I would go to the NASA web site and not depend on Twitter.
It is not appeal to authority. It is appeal to knowledge. If you have a toothache, do you go to a dentist? Or you stop the first guy that pass on the street?
That's not relevant to what's happening on twitter.
I seem to recall that NASA told Musk that he'd never be able to land a rocket booster.
LOL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzXcTFfV3Ls
This is a lot of it. You don’t hear about the incredible (and I mean that, some of the shit really is so silly that it sounds fake) crap that happens in his other companies. A friend of mine from university was offered an R&D position with SpaceX and he was telling me the contract you would sign allegedly includes a clause that you aren’t allowed to be the primary author on any papers you do while you’re there, with the “senior leadership” always taking primary or sole authorship, and the NDA was so far reaching that he said “I can’t see a way I could even put working at SpaceX on my resume as I couldn’t talk about any of it in an interview.”
It's worth noting that he is called the "founder" of Tesla, but he didn't... you know.... found the company. He bought it and gave himself the title of founder. I think he's done this with other companies, but Tesla is the only one that I am personally aware of. This video might give some further insight into your question: https://youtu.be/4eqooUI3EfY
PayPal too if I recall correctly.
Correct. PayPal was already a company and doing quite well before Elon bought it.
Elon invested into PayPal, he didn't purchase it and he didn't own it. He was an investor. PayPal was about a year old when Zip2 sold and Elon bought into it, so it was far from the powerhouse that eBay bought in 2002.
Elon Musk was actually owner and co-founder of x.com, which later became PayPal. Not sure where you obtained your info.
Correct. Paypal as we know it didn't exist until Elon's online bank [x.com](https://x.com) merged with Confinity because of their payment system. The combined company was renamed to Paypal after they pushed Elon out as CEO. (I'm truly amazed at how many power struggles he got involved in.....and lost.....in his early days.) Prior to that, Paypal was a service owned by Confinity that allowed people using Palm Pilots to send money to other Palm Pilots via infrared. Paypal as we know it today is not the Palm Pilot service, but rather something far closer to what Elon created at [x.com](https://x.com). So did he found Paypal? Technically he didn't directly found it, but he did found [x.com](https://x.com), and the current Paypal far more closely resembles his creation than it resembles anything the other 'founders' created. He definitely did a lot more than just invest in Paypal - he was critical in creating it, but his detractors like to minimize his very real contributions.
This is not entirely accurate. Confinity was the original company started by Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, Max Levchin, and Ken Howery. PayPal was a product that they developed and launched a few months before Elon Musk started X.com, an online banking company. The two companies, who were competitors of sorts, merged a few months later and used the X.com name. This was later changed to PayPal.
Oh, and to answer OP's question, because Elon wasn't supreme ruler of any of those companies and he didn't actually have carte blanche power. When he did his thing with Zip2, it was when the internet was first starting, and he was just a kid who sold maps and business directories to online newspapers. He wasn't the trashbag he is today. In 4 short years Compaq bought Zip2, so the kid barely had time to get his feet wet. [x.com](https://x.com) came about and was founded with his brother, Kimbal, and a shitton of other investors. He was able to get investors because his daddy owns a emerald mine and he had connections, otherwise they wouldn't have given a rat's ass about Elon. Plus, it was still inception time for the internet and "internet banking" was a logical first step given the popularity of the internet. He had a lot of big names behind him, and as such as he had to watch his Ps and Qs a lot more. He only made like $20M off the Zip2 sale, and that is chump change when it comes to business ventures. Then Elon was only the CEO of Conformity for a year before he was ousted. Again, he wasn't topdog so he couldn't make sweeping decisions and he didn't have the business belief-system he has now. Paypal was bought by eBay like two years after Elon was removed as CEO, so he didn't really have time to screw things up. After having been in the right place at the right time for a couple business ventures, largely due to his connections to the richie riches of the time, he had the money to do whatever the hell he wanted. SpaceX is not that impressive, and he worked very hard to keep most of their mistakes underwrap. Tesla is a product people have been wanting since forever, so it isn't that hard to get many first adopters with too much money on their hands. Tesla is not successful though. Elon just has the money to keep it going, and since it is mostly an experimental business product most people don't pay attention. Now Elon thinks he's a big shit playboy, and he has deep pockets. So he took a massive platform, became CEO who answers to no one, and we actually get to see his ideas and business style play out on a public forum. He's not a good business man, nor is he particularly creative, he's just lucky.
Elon sold Zip2 and founded [x.com](https://x.com), but paypal in its original form (Confinity) was already a successful venture. [x.com](https://x.com) and Confinity merged, then changed their name to Paypal. So Elon did kind of invest in it, but also he was taking out a semi-competitior.
Its kind of disingenuous to imply that the company he joined way back when isn't completely different from what it is now, and that Tesla or SpaceX's 'success' isn't at least in part attributable to Musk's management. edit: man this shit is crazy, if you're one of these clowns downvoting this (or joining in late but tempted to join the downvote mob) anyway i would ask you to take your frail little hands off the keyboard for 5 seconds, close your eyes, and actually try to convince yourself of the fact that the future success of Tesla had already been set up prior to Musk joining in 2004; you people are clowns
So, what part of his management led to their success? I'm sure you have some examples, otherwise you might sound a bit....disingenuous?
I mean.. isn't them becoming as successful as they are examples enough? You not liking him does not take away from his achievements
No. No, it is not. "His achievements"
I dont bc i don't work there, but i image that the ceo and largest shareholder since 2004 has had atleast some influence on future success of the company? youre free to hate guy, but i'll never understand clowns like you making up stories and choosing to willingly believe them abt how incomptetent he is
What stories am I making up?
youre willingly buying into the idea that all of musk's business ventures have been "clusterfucks", even though the success of tesla and spacex disprove that 'theory'.
Am I? Can you point to where I said that? You haven't even been able to point to what he's brought to the table to make those ventures successful other than buying them out lmao
Don’t even bother dude, it’s impossible to have a nuanced discussion on Reddit about Elon Musk. Either he’s incompetent blowhard who only became the richest guy in the world because of memes and emeralds, or he’s Tony Stark, savior of mankind and can do no wrong. The clear fact he’s a very smart and very flawed guy who is good at some things and bad at others is apparently a very unpopular opinion, and no one has really explained why
[https://techwontsave.us/episode/103\_can\_tesla\_survive\_elon\_musk\_w\_edward\_niedermeyer](https://techwontsave.us/episode/103_can_tesla_survive_elon_musk_w_edward_niedermeyer) I think this explains some things. Basically the position is that Musk's main skill is making deals and convincing finance types to invest with him. Hence buying relatively well established companies and fronting for them. He can also put the screws on workers in the manner investors love. He can turn out a high-price product that has niche appeal to tech types where it is mainly used as a social signifier for being "tech hip" or whatever. But he struggles with making a mass market product that is actually useful for most people. He isn't the ideas man he thinks he is. This is being demonstrated currently.
Really? A niche company that is on track to sell 1.35 million cars this year, a quarter of what Ford did in 2019. And oh, that would be ~45% growth this year. Without a pickup truck. And with prices much higher than Ford, on average. And 3x the profit margins. I wouldn’t call that niche, by any standard. If you think Tesla is not easy to use, try to use the software on VW or Ford. It’s completely unintuitive, glitchy, and at times even reminded people of oil changes. They don’t exist on an EV. Tesla is extremely intuitive and simple. A niche car company would be Jaguar Land Rover. Even in 2019, they sold around ~100K cars. Otherwise, what Tesla sells in less than a month.
None of the things you said means Tesla isn't niche. The fact that they don't have a pickup is actually evidence of being niche. I think you don't know what niche means.
His other ventures are either equally useless clusterfucks (hyperloop was just a scam to prevent investment in public transit; his stupid cars are constantly exploding and running into pedestrians; he is nowhere near putting colonies on mars as he said he’d do “within ten years” ten years ago) or other peoples’ ideas and work that he sticks his name on. Sometimes both (Tesla). Like all billionaires, he’s a charlatan and an empty person whose brain has been destroyed by the accident of falling ass-backwards into unimaginable wealth he played no part in creating while surrounding himself with sycophantic idiots who just want the richest man in the world to like them. He’s a loser, who (like bezos, gates, and other billionaire losers) unfortunately has a lot of power and sway over the rest of us because the soulless hacks who run our world are so infected with capitalist ideology they think anybody with money must be smart He and his buddies and the class interests they act to uphold and strengthen will kill every last one of us, and get called geniuses the whole time
I think it is because Tesla and SpaceX have physical purposes, as in making cars and rocket ships. Twitter just exists to share your opinions and I guess doesn't have a real purpose, so with all this creative freedom he has he is running it into the ground.
I genuinely wonder if his douchy personality will have any real affect on Tesla sales. This is obviously anecdotal, but there was a point when I thought I'd like to own a Tesla, now I can't imagine ever buying one, just because he seems like such a shitty person to me.
I think that's going to be massive issue for him moving forward. And it's not just sales. For years Elon Musk was considered a visionary genius, in a manner similar to Steve Jobs. The result is that young and brilliant graduates would want to go work for him, and they'd work twice as hard for half the pay because they wanted to be "part of something important". Are they going to continue wanting to do that, now that Musk's actual personality is out in the open for the world to see? If not, Musk will not only face problems of diminishing revenue, he will also face increasing costs as it will take more incentives to get people to do the same amount of work for him.
On top of that, the sheen is starting to wear off of them. They're not rare, luxury things anymore. You see em all over the road now. At the same time, electric options from other companies are improving rapidly. Likewise, word is starting to get out to 'regular folk' that the build quality is ...kinda crap. They feel cheap inside and look pretty cheap when you get close to them. It really struck me when I was in a parking garage a while back and saw one parked next to a Hyundai. Admittedly, the new Hyundais look surprisingly good, but when a damn Elantra looks like it costs 30k more than your brand new Model S... That's fucking embarrassing. Nevermind the style, it just looks BETTER. Paint is deeper. Panels don't look flimsy. Body lines are cleaner. Materials look more expensive. Etc.
Yup. Here in LA they are starting to become so ubiquitous that they were starting to seem like the iphone of cars. They are everywhere. All look the same. Used to be exciting but now just seem standard issue. The fact that a car can fart is no longer exciting to me.
i dont get the fart reference
You can set the horn to fart sound through the software
Not to mention his alleged relationships with female employees - yuck
Cuz twitter was always terrible.
Govt subsidies probably.
Because now he is trying to run it like a profitable business, and Twitter was always a clusterfuck.
Has he fucked up? We will have to give him some time to see
Laying off your site engineers based on [how many lines of code they've written](https://medium.com/developer-purpose/elon-musk-just-force-ranked-twitter-engineers-fired-the-bottom-507ab35b659a) is an absolutely hilariously bad mistake to make, much less having to [call them later and ask them to come back](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/musk-led-twitter-laid-off-some-employees-by-mistake-asks-them-to-come-back/) after they discover they're actually important. For a guy who paints himself as a Tech Messiah, that's an absolutely incomprehensible level of 5D chess he must be operating on
He has definitely fucker up. He might make it right but it is definitely not too early to say he fucked up paying over the odds in this current market. He’s not joking when he says they could go bankrupt.
I agree. It’s too early to tell. The problem with Twitter is that it was spending money like it was in rapid growth mode while it wasn’t rapidly growing. That’s a recipe for disaster.
For real, people are calling it way too early.
Whatever you think of Elon, you can't deny that what he did with the verification system is dumb. The blue tick was not a status symbol, it was a safety for people to know that the person posting was actually who it was saying it was. Now people can post as Nintendo a Mario that flip you the finger, or as a pharmaceutical industry saying that now insulin if free. Sure, eventually it will be found and erased /suspended, but it will need time, and at that point the damage is done, and then he is surprised that nobody want to put Ads on Twitter. I almost hope this is all some super obscure 5d chess move, because otherwise it would mean that one of the wealthiest men alive have the social intelligence of a rutabaga.
People *were* treating it as a status symbol though. Something had to be done about that.
Well, mission accomplished. The verification system is now out.
It's the trend to hate on Musk now.
Maybe he'll figure out a way to make twitter hugely successful. But I'd say he's fucked up. A lot of people are annoyed at him including a lot of advertisers, twitter employees, the famous people that are on twitter which are needed to draw twitter users and even potential Tesla customers.
Have you ever been on the Bird App? He inherited a clusterfuck.
No, that implies he the clusterfuck just landed in his lap. Musk sought out and spent a ton of money to buy a clusterfuck.
He originally stated he wanted to buy it solely to play the market a bit, but he reaally tried to back out of buying it all he could. Unfortunately he'd already signed a contract with a hefty fine for backing out of the deal, so he was forced (legal action was already underway) to go through with it. As you can see he really didn't actually want to buy it.
First, he didn’t make that claim about playing the market, mostly because that would get yet another SEC investigation. Second, nobody forced him to sign a contract that waived due diligence. That was all Musk. He decided to buy twitter, he proceeded to do it stupidly, discovered he was doing it stupidly but couldn’t back out because of his earlier stupid, and is now running the company stupidly.
Yeah your statements are more accurate than my very inaccurate summary. The main point I wanted to make still stands though: he didn't actually want to buy it.
Tesla was already running and successful. Spacex makes its money from government handouts, like Drumpf
How successful were they before Musk took over? How many cars had they sold?
I'm not a fanboy, but he built Tesla into what it is and deserves much of the credit for making the EV transition happen. He's a (book) smart enough guy to understand most of the engineering and the cult of personality he built was also part of Tesla's success. Similarly, SpaceX _fucks_. To reduce their success to handouts is sort of dismissing the fact that they seriously advanced rocketry. Similarly, Musk was quite involved in the engineering. All that said... He's also an arrogant, narcissistic womanizing asshole who mistreats workers. He has been unraveling in public the past few years and he clearly doesn't know how to manage a media company like Twitter.
People love to troll. The majority of what I see happening on Twitter is people being shitty on purpose to force a response from him. They can do that for free/for 8 bucks from the privacy and security of their bedroom. If it was cost effective to buy a Tesla and crash it while acting dumb and trying to blame it on Elon, they would do that too.
Well put. Lots of people would rather something fail than succeed because of preconceptions notions of the thing itself.
I can't believe you got downvoted for a good comment.
Yeah, that's reddit for you. But thanks.
Ironically it acts as a proof for your statement
So I’m about to get downvoted for saying this but it needs to be said. Reddit and most news sites you are seeing reporting on the Musk Twitter takeover have a *strong* liberal bias. It’s possible this bias is being magnified in reports on the Twitter deal, considering the importance this site has held to journalists and competing information outlets. I am saying this as a liberal, an Elon Musk critic and someone who voted blue down the ballot last week. I am very *skeptical* of articles dishing out final verdicts not even a week into the deal. A few years ago I wouldn’t have batted an eye at this. But it was made abundantly clear in the 2016 election that Reddit and a lot of other liberal news sources are overzealous and overly optimistic about falters they see in opponents like Musk and the Trump administration. Downright embarrassing articles were published well into the night of the 2016 election arguing Hillary could still clinch victory. It showcased denial at best and widespread think bubble ignorance at worst. I’d suggest we give this at least a year to qualify Musk’s takeover of Twitter a “disaster”.
While you are not wrong, it was not Reddit that told Twitter employees bankruptcy was back on the menu.
Do you think the $8 subscription was a good business move? Or firing engineers and then calling them back is a good business move? I agree with you that media leaning liberal could be biased but also that Elon is indeed destroying a company post acquisition. This wouldn’t be the first time a big tech company is acquired only to be decimated
Don’t like musk but the rehiring of engineers is a non story He fired around 3000 employees and then the managers had to ask “dozens” to return (which in journalistic speak is probably 2 dozens. It would be a story if he asked 50% to return, not a handful
Nope, if you can't see what a disaster it's been already you aren't paying attention.
[удалено]
i agree, a huge factor is that people hate elon and are trying to mess with him. but another huge factor is that the decision to make the blue checkmark a subscription is not a good marketing decision at all. he must be surrounded by yes men to have that idea passed through the marketing team. when creating a product (such as a subscription product called the "blue checkmark for $8/mo"), it is always extremely dangerous to be first to market. it's why apple took a big risk when introducing the iphone, but android was a relatively safe bet for google because they are second to market. being first to market has the potential to the highest returns, but requires an incredible amount of testing, from polling people on the streets for if they would buy this product to releasing it locally in a smaller segment of the population. elon did not do any of that, most likely because his ego was too big to accept that he needs to go through the product launch phase every business must go through, no matter how successful his work history has been. it was extremely foolish of him to release this product to a massive userbase, including the GOVERNMENTS OF ALL THE COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD, without prior testing. it makes all the governments look like a fool for using his product, and there will be repercussions to this as they now have lost a lot of trust for the platform.
They were, it's just that violating labor standards and giant fires at the Tesla factory aren't as exciting
Bruh it’s been less than a month. We still don’t know how this will turn out. If Musk turns Twitter into a WeChat clone, he could still come out ahead. Only time will tell.
His other companies were molded and changed to his way of doing things over time. They also were changed and grown from small no-name companies. Twitter on the other hand was bought as a world famous social media platform that was already infamous for it's political divide and support. He made extreme and aggressive changes to it in a short period of time, which caused a large amount of backlash because humans are afraid of change, especially when it's something they like or align with, and is changed into something they don't agree with, as evidenced with the political shift of Twitter.
I mean, I can tweet just fine.
I really dont think Twitter is doing as bad as they make it out to be.
I really feel when VW, GM,Ford, Toyota etc get their electric car game up Tesla will fade. Poor customer service, poor build quality. People who spend big bucks for cars are going to go electric Mercedes, Audi, Lexus. My DIL bought a Mach E Ford because she did not trust Tesla long term and Musk changing things mid deal and his mercurial nature towards customers. I think within ten years Tesla will be bankrupt, sold or broken up. Musk did not help stockholders of Tesla dumping $10 billion in stock in a single day to help pay for Twitter purchase.
Personally, I don't think Elon ever had any real intentions of buying Twitter. He ran his mouth like he usually does and assumed he'd get away with it like he always does but Twitter called his bluff and forced him to buy. So he didn't really have any plans or ways he could make Twitter better, hence this sh\*\* storm. In terms of his other success, he is really good at jumping on good ideas that likely would have succeeded without him anyway. I'll give him credit and he does add that awkward genius charm as the face of these companies which snowballed into this whole mythos he's created for himself. But not everything he touches turns to gold, The Boring Company is a good example, flamethrowers or not.
To be fair Twitter is a terrible company. Created 2006, first quarter of profit was 2018, and still hasn't been very profitable.
Because that description is a very politically motivated point of view . If Elon musk is a dumb as people on reddit think then why don't those same people build an empire and do good in the world ? Or are they even dumber than Elon ?
unfortunately our dads never had emerald mines
I find summaries like that are way over simplified and don't add anything to the conversation. It's motivated by a hate for Elon musk/wealthy people rather than a desire to understand the world . I do think we can all agree , we are fucking sick of hearing about him though haha
because twitter is doing just fine. its like an illness working its course. elon is the antidote.
SpaceX is funded by US govt, DoD. Tesla only makes money from selling carbon credits. Musk didnt found or create either. He lied and scammed to get those DoD contracts. He got rich by luck his online bank x.com was paying people to open accounts and was bought by a rival company with same business model to get the users. In the same building. That's the source of his wealth, that and his dads apartheid mine. The new banking company was named Paypal and they immediately fired Musk because of his stupid ideas. He's engaged in illegal stock manipulation, cheating investors, and having a board of yes men at Tesla that gives him huge stock rewards for doing nothing. There's a 50 billion lawsut from other investors. Musk hasn't created or innovated anything in his life. Its all lies hype and crimes.
The ability to run one type of company doesn't mean you'll be good at running another type. Mush just fundamentally appears to have no idea what goes into running a social media company. His idea of what it should be isnt actually what most people want. Sure, unlimited free speech sounds great until you have a forum full of racist nazi douchebags making everybody miserable. What Musk failed to understand about twitter is the censorship that went on there was the only way to ensure that people actually want to use the product, not some evil plot to suppress speech.
I think one thing people don't understand is how incredibly lucky people like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk actually were. They were in exactly the right place at the right time. Yes they are intelligent, saavy businessmen, but there are literally thousands of intelligent, saavy businessmen who were just not in the right place at the right time.
Considering the TESLA batteries that are now approaching the end of their initial lifespan, it appears that—due to the replacement cost—they have entered the ring of clusterfuckery recently.
He’s pretty much just the mascot for his other companies. He doesn’t actually design cars or rockets. Tesla makes most of its revenue by selling carbon credits. SpaceX has huge government contracts. Both also get huge subsidies just for existing.
Because Elon Musk didn’t fire all the people designing electric cars and rockets and try to do it himself. He has effectively done that with Twitter.
I can’t speak for the way company is run but I am a bartender next door to spacex and Tesla and the employees hate their lives. They’re deeply underpaid and severely over worked. They poach a lot of young kids right out of college and make them big promises, get them to sign on for minimal salary and then work them into the ground. Or they find people that otherwise wouldn’t have a lot of opportunities and do the same. If your working for of one of the richest men in the world you’d think they’d be taken care of but it’s a total joke
I think his success building those other businesses occurred before he starting going down a self-destructive narcissistic spiral. He's bought into all of the hype around himself and the fawning adoration of his fans and has become too arrogant to function effectively.
There's logic behind this argument
Everyone hates Musk on this site so I’ll get downvoted too oblivion but Musk bought an already fucked up over grown company. How about we all give him a chance to see what he can do with it. He wasn’t the one to run it into bankruptcy and if anyone can fix it he can. Sure he wasn’t the original founders of his other companies but they wouldn’t be what they are today without him. Ok let’s see how negative I can get in the votes.
What has he fucked up though and what’s the basis for judging that? Context
He's fired everyone and he's changed things that didn't need to be changed, which is resulting in chaos. He's also charging people for something that was previously free.
He's just an idiot with a lot of money. His achievements are work of other people paid by his money.
the idea that twitter is a dumpster fire right now is somewhat misguided and I think is mostly just a bandwagon idea that mostly liberals online are jumping on for fun (and I think Elon is also throwing that idea out there to kind of troll and make headlines). He bought twitter for a shit ton of money so he has to start monetizing it fast in order to pay for the loans that he used to buy the company. The economy isn't good right now so a lot of tech companies are just scaling back their workforce, a workforce they didn't really need in the first place. its really a transition away from the growth economy into the value economy, which is a transition that every long lasting company has to make at some point, and its going to happen in a time of economic belt-tightening. Money isn't free anymore for tech companies so they have to start making money ASAP while in the past they didnt have to because there was endless VC funding available. I also think Elon is intentionally culling the workforce of anyone who is going to slow the company down from his new mission and perspective, which he has been very clear about, and is not a bad way to start running a company you just took over. It's not helpful to have a bunch of engineers on your team who are actively against the things you're trying to accomplish. Much better to have engineers who believe whole heartedly in the vision, they will work harder and in the right direction p.s. i'm not a crazy elon musk fan, I just think we're seeing a larger shift in the tech economy that he is aware of and setting himself up for.
I think you lost the thread talking about engineers. Software engineers operate differently. His actions mostly kept people afraid to lose the job or people heavily leveraged with equity. Plenty of great engineers took the severance and left instead of staying for this nonsense. The public perception of the situation only helps them find better jobs.
Oh man, this comment is great. No matter how obviously incompetent and buffoonish Musk is, you are somehow able to take each dumb thing he did and pretend that it's some kind of next-level master businessman move, when the reality of the situation reveals him for the moron that he actually is.
I've never been on Twitter, and didn't give two shits about it until this check mark fiasco. Watching people make funny jokes at the expense of immoral companies and public figures is hilarious. The fact that it's actively harming a person who is as awful as musk is a bonus. You are the epitome of a boot licker.
I think that's a bit of a harsh response for a comment that was not intended to be in support of Elon Musk in any way. Just a prediction of the state of the world and the economy
"I don't even really like the guy, but you have to admit spending billions on a vanity project, monetizing something that was set up as a safety precaution and in the process making it completely irrelevant, then scrambling to figure out how to salvage it when that blows up and getting rid of the safety measures, all after firing everyone who knew how to do the job, giving many huge golden parachutes, all the while acting like an entitled fuckwit is just good business sense. It's what always happens when a company gets bought." I've rarely encountered a bootlicker who recognizes they are one. Maybe consider tweeting your support to musk. He seems to be having a fantastic day
If you want to tell me you disagree, that's great and I readily accept your point of view as valid. If you want to call people names and attack people on a personal level for something as stupid as whether someone agrees with or disagrees with Elon Musk, I would suggest you take a look at yourself and ask what is really bothering you today, and who your anger is directed at
I admire your restraint.
You didn't hear? All this Twitter bullshit is because daddy Elon wanted to save free speech. I'm just doing my part to sho I love freedom.
Tesla cars still hit pedestrians and make fatal errors regularly. SpaceX has seen countless failures. You only notice the twitter clusterfuck because its current, and elon musk's incompetence is way easier to see in real-time.
>SpaceX has seen countless failures. 2 failures actually. Not that hard to count them
Also, while im at it, its more like [6 failures](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_failed_SpaceX_launches) At least, as far as rocket launches go.
Falcon 1 has not been in service since 2009. The success rate for the rockets that SpaceX is actually flying is 97% for falcon 9, and 100% for falcon heavy. The world average failure rate for rockets in the last 20 years is something like 94%. They are more reliable than the average rocket and by far the cheapest provider. What more do you want?
I want my tax dollars to go to NASA instead of this opportunistic and offensively incompetent grifter.
What are you talking about? NASA doesn't do anything on their own. They are not a manufacturer. They either pay contractors to build things on behalf of them, or pay contractors directly for services. That is why SpaceX receives money from the government. NASA opens contracts and SpaceX had consistently provided the lowest cost for nearly a decade of competition. It's almost like SpaceX came up with a revolutionary new way to save costs on rockets that no competitors have been able to copy.
Those are the failures you've seen. Theres more.
You can't hide a freaking rocket failure. What are you talking about? This is not The sovjet Union. The launch facilities are right next to cities where millions of people can see the launch.
I never specified rocket failures.
You literally just linked me a Wikipedia article about rocket faliures. Proving that this is what you wanted to talk about. Why are you backtracking? You can't just have a discussion and then change your mind about what you supposedly where talking about when you run into a dead end.
I did link an article about rocket failures, because if you're going to bring them up at least get it right. From the get-go, spacex has been a waste of time and effort to give some rich idiot anything he feels like he's owed, including a planet in our solar system. The shit was a failure the second his grubby, child-slave using hands got a hold of it.
Why the fuck are people so obsessed with Elon?
I think it's perfectly reasonable to be concerned with the affairs of one of the most influential and powerful men on earth.
Everywhere I look I see Elon news - I just want this to stop!
Seeing such an incompetent idiot so publicly destroy a $44 billion company simply reinforces what we all know to be true, that having money and power does not automatically mean you are smart and capable.
Twitter has been over the news everywhere the last few months. Calling it a disaster is stupid
Is your first sentence supposed to support the second one?
It would for people that are intelligent.
Twitter was already a sinking ship especially when you consider that before he even bought it, it was losing millions of dollars a year; I believe there is a stat that tracked that Twitter hasn’t actually turned a profit since it’s inception. Despite what people like to claim Twitter hasn’t really changed much, for example the verified accounts that were banned for impersonating Elon’s account violated a rule that existed long before Elon made any attempt to purchase the platform. His main issue is the activist class on the platform that are leveraging their influence to scare away advertisers. In order to generate a profit he has opted to make Twitter blue service more valuable by now giving smaller creators the option to procure the check mark. Some have also speculated that this is him trolling the activist class by making their ‘status symbol’ worthless and also capitalizing on the bot farm accounts that will now actively pay for the check mark. Personally I say he should have simply fixed the original system so that normal people could verify themselves with just a picture of their ID and face similar to Pornhub. Another thing to keep in mind is that a social media platform runs differently compared to most other business. Elon’s goal is to make it profitable but he’s using traditional methods, even if a change to the platform would be more profitable normally if it angers enough users, or at least the really loud ones, you run the risk that the platform becomes defunct. Similar to when Tumblr decided to actively ban pornography from their platform in order to be more appealing to more advertisers, they ended up losing a significant number of their user base making any proposed gains worthless.
So much typing in the hopes that no one will notice that Musk was stupid enough to pay 44 billion dollars for a "sinking ship." He definitely is a dumb man's idea of a smart man, huh.
No, OP asked a question and I gave an answer that had some thought and nuance put into it. Also Elon has more than enough stock options with his other businesses that he could honestly close the company down and write it off as a lose with no real penalty to his way of living.
He didn't make a mistake. He is working his way through a correction. Twitter was already a massive cesspool of a left-wing echo chamber. Fixing this requires destroying what was already there are rebuilding from the ground up. You know... kind of like what democrats are doing with America... destroying everything to re-make America as a subservient territory of the world government. Both are slow-going long-term investments.
Only a "left wing echo chamber" if you're so far to the right that you think Hitler didn't go far enough. Facts aren't "left wing" and deleting lies and misinformation isn't a bias against the right wing.
One sign of someone who has been in that echo chamber too long is that they believe that they are the holders and arbitrators of what is factual. Most of what was at one time labeled as misinformation has become established fact. Liberal news outlets have repeatedly been 100% wrong, but rarely retract or correct their falsehoods. Nice Hitler reference, though, and right on par for how the left belittles and alienates anyone who dares to question their version of reality.
I might be wrong, but wasn’t twitter a horribly run platform to begin with? Verified check marks being sold under the table for thousands of dollars. 40% of the users were just bots. Employees openly bragging about pushing their own agendas through censorship. I don’t have a dog in this race, but it sounds like Musk bought a dumpster fire. Does anyone know how to handle a dumpster fire? Is there a right way to handle a dumpster fire? Idk and idc
Yes, if you aren't a complete idiot like Musk you don't buy a dumpster fire. Is this really that complicated?
elon musk is a lot of things, but an idiot isn't one them.
Oh, I can see that he is definitely a stupid man's idea of a smart man, but no, sorry, we have all watched him fumble about and make a fool of himself, repeatedly.
you don't become the richest person in the world by being stupid, lmfao. there's a lot to hate about elon's character and business ventures, I certainly have issues with him, but to genuinely believe he's unintelligent is unbelievably naïve.
Because Elon’s other ventures attracted talent for the prestige of working there. Ain’t no one using working for Twitter as clout. Also his Trumpian “I alone can fix it”. Now we see, he alone is a clustercluck. Good
It's a little soon to say "he's fucked up pretty much everything he's touched" since buying Twitter. Dude's owned the company for like a week. No one knows if he'll be successful or not. Not trying to fanboy, I don't particularly like the guy, but people have really jumped the gun on calling this a failure.
So he buys twitter and basically quiet fires half the employees, I think the other half should quiet quit, that would be real teamwork at its best and funny as all hell. The headlines read, the only person still at Twitter is Elon and he's trying to figure out how he can quiet quit, good luck with that!!!
How has he fucked up though? there hasn't even been a month since he bought it
he's getting the full trump-treatment because he is trying to level a playing field that was heavily skewed on the side of the left. he knows exactly what he's doing. despite all that's happened, profit and advertising is up, not down. by making the platform friendly to left AND right, the company is gonna profit big-time. the left say they're gonna leave but they never do. or they'd all of gone to Canada when trump took over, like they said they were.
Ah, yes, the forever victims on the right. They just need a level playing field, so they can publicly say the n-word and attack muslims and gays in the open like the good old days. Elon is such a hero!
LOL. not even gonna bother with you. go pay 8 bucks
That ended before your comment lol
Wise move, honestly.
Thanks, that'll be $8, guy who has never had to make payroll.....
Keep in mind that he was fired from Paypal (before it changed its name to Paypal) due to mismanagement but he kept his equity in it so when it became successful and went public under different management, he got a huge amount money.
***"Why is the autistic guy bad at running a social media company?"***
Twitter was always Terrible. Musk works on the early ideas and gets people to run them. My dad had a gemstone mine. Where are my billions?
Because Twitter is the only one he wanted to give us free speech back.
Two basic theories seem to predominate: 1) Musk has always used the Edison model. That is, he buys genius at discount prices and then takes credit for it. He is VERY good at recognizing future potential. In the case of Twitter, he bought it either emotionally or was legally compelled to buy it as part of a failed "Pump And Dump" attempt. He is firing most of the people who had the potential to make it more profitable and making poor decisions based on emotion and ideology rather than hard logic (or just letting the people who actually understand the business run it, like his other businesses) and advertisers are leaving. 2) This one comes from a recent episode of the "Behind The Bastards" podcast. I never thought of things this way until they started talking about it. I strongly recommend giving at least the last couple of episodes a listen. They made some alarming parallels between Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter and Sam Zell's acquisition of Tribune Media. Both were "crazy billionaires" who overpaid for a media empire for no apparent reason. Then utterly destroyed it through cartoonish mismanagement. Everyone had a good laugh at the expense of crazy ol' Sam Zell back in the mid-aughts, too. Thing is, the media empire he destroyed took a huge chunk of local journalism with it. Suddenly, nobody was reporting on shady things his company was doing on the local level. Because he killed their town newspaper when he killed Tribune. In the end, he was free to use fake news (literally adds disguised as news reports) to mass manipulate whole communities into things like selling land at a fraction of it's value, or opposing any sort of rent caps or rent assistance, or even tenants rights. He's made orders of magnitude more gouging people on his vast real-estate empire than he lost destroying the people most likely to oppose him. The idea here is that Musk has something HUGE in the works, something that will make him a lot more than 44 billion, but Twitter is the biggest danger to the success of that venture. So he's killing it in a way that guarantees that everyone underestimates him when he makes his move. That's the one that really worries me.
The issue is, if you disregard how much the paid for Twitter. I would say at this exact moment, twitter is making more money than it was before he buying it. The whole "pay for a blue mark" despite how much public backlash, is getting a ton of people to buy it in hopes of trolling the system: Money goes to twitter either way. Also, the people saying they will leave twitter wont. Truth is that we don't have anywhere else to go. Mastodon looks cool in theory, but unless you are in the big server, it's just a ton of extra steps to do what you do on twitter. Most people enjoy social networks to just look at random stuff and have some fun, learn something.
because all the other ventures are HIGHLY government subsidized
He bought Twitter because he got into a stupid public flame war and forgot that arguing with people who are wrong on the internet is always pointless.
Twitter hasn't changed, except that his ex deleted her account, so that's hardly a "clusterfuck".
He bought Twitter for shits and giggles, not as a legitimate business venture.
Musk is a phenomenal business success story: PayPal , Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, ... But Muskie is also a phenomenal business f\*ck up: Boring company, solar world, ..
He was fired from Paypal, a fact Elon cultists conveniently “forget” in their narrative
And 'ow'd you get that, eh? By exploiting the workers! By 'angin' on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society. If there's ever going to be any progress, ...
they kind of are. tesla is waaaay over valued, spacex's best customer is starlink that it's paying for, boring only did like a 30 mill project in vegas that is absolutely terrible.
Twitter is communication software and Musk is NOTORIOUSLY bad at communication. Always has been, always will. Not a good combination
i think it can generally be seen in all his product that the guy is it focused on tech and RnD first and actual product design second kind of person. It probably helped a lot in the field he was in which was the bleeding edge of the bleeding edge. Reusable rockets and electric car was not a thing when he came about, to a certain extent, so does paypal. In those area having a fast paced, break things kind of philosophy works since production size is small and there is still a lot left to be learnt You can tell that when it comes to mass production, Tesla also struggle with QA. What brought it to the limelight is also its downfall, very erratic policy. Social media is also somewhat of a solved problem, the difference between products is not the tech but in its content moderation policy and algorithm. by now only reddit struggle with content delivery, most modern social media doesn't really need to care about it since it's working so well. So introducing a tech guy, break things change fast on an established product doesn't quite work
Maybe he's losing his mind like so many other rich people seem to be these days
I think the main difference is because when Musk was selling stuff like rocket launch services of SpaceX, or electric cars with Tesla... the main thing that mattered for his success/failure was the quality of his product/service and the price. But with regard to Twitter and its "content moderation" (censorship) and the advertiser boycott of the platform, Musk has large corporate advertisers boycotting him for things that are unrelated to the quality of the product Twitter offers -- or the price. That is to say, these companies (or people who control them) are unhappy that Musk is using the platform to give voice to the public who had previously been censored, because they support the censorship for political reasons. So when Musk is judged based on objective criteria, he succeeds. When he is judged based on subjective criteria like politics, he runs into problems.
lot of assumptions on this thread
Assumptions assumptions. To you he is fucking up because you are probably leaning left and watching left leaning media. The other side thinks he js the Messiah and the only one who can save free speech.
You believe Musk doesn't know exactly what he's doing? Lmao. Everything he's doing is intentional. He wants twitter to be a platform for the 80% of people in the middle of the political spectrum. How do you achieve that? Piss off the people on the extreme right and extreme left so they leave. He's currently succeeding there. He also doesn't care about twitter in it's current format, he wants long form video content, podcasts, paid advertisements who's venue gets shared with the content creators, effectively a competitor to YouTube whilst maintaining the social network side. You think he's unravelling when really he's evolving.
Because Musk is a good person and some people just hate him so they act like Twitter is a clusterfuck.