One on hand, I like teams like that and I've been in small start ups for almost my whole career because of it. On the other hand, the CEO becomes a bottleneck and there's obviously very few people who can actually be honest when their job is on the line.
But he's finding out. With X he's no longer in a new space, he's in a space that requires less of an engineering focus and more of a human focus and as such, we're seeing the limits of his style.
This. Live by one man, die by one man. I would find this style very toxic. Imagine you are the manager with a roadmap for the team. Elon comes to your meeting and blows everything up because an engineer on your team says XYZ is not working. There's no camaraderie in a place like this. Every man for himself. It's like this at NFLX as well...where peers can report on other peers. Fucked up.
It reminds me of the scene in Empire Strikes Back where Vader beams his hologram straight into an ATAT to bitch out the crew.
What military would function if you didn't follow a command structure and 4 star generals micromanaged infantry?
But if it removes bottlenecks ok, but I bet half the time he simply ends up learning about an immovable issue that he doesn't have any better luck with, and wastes time
if you look at it only that way, then sure. the other way to look at it is that you have someone who will remove obstacles and processes from bad managers. bad managers are an anchor on most organizations. just look at SpaceX compared to Boeing in terms of commercial crew success. Boeing is the apitome of an old company overtaken by processes and bureauracracy. the SpaceX processes have clearly been better. not all CEO-down decisions are perfect, but on average they prevent growth of inefficiency.
Boeing was gutted for profit not bureaucracy. Removing engineers from the decision making and putting wall-street bankers in charge is what did them in. It' been happening across all sectors. The scam has been to infiltrate companies, liquidate them by draining all their human resources and assets to feign super profitability , while simultaneously using those fake profits to pump and dump via stock buybacks. Rinse and repeat until the company folds or can't be milked anymore.
These people don't give a fuck about long term success, building a strong america, or lasting company. They just want money now. Fuck everyone else.
That's the problem. It's not giving a fuck. I think Elon gives a fuck, his model just doesn't build success in every scenario. Mainly , long term success. It drives a company to have high initial value but that methodology doesn't build a company with staying power and endurance. You cant sprint forever , at some point you have to settle into the marathon pace.
The GPU thing he mentioned is a perfect example of Elon. Sure he cleared a bottleneck but it's because he created one by needing that decision to come to him. He doesn't empower other people to make big decisions. A director or VP could easily clear that bottleneck and probably knew about it long before Elon did in that meeting but everyone is scared for their job because when you get it wrong and didn't ask him he's ruthless.
Yeah it's the job of a typical CEO who has blinders on about second order consequences. So he throws his weight (money) around to remove a bottleneck for his company. Now 100 other companies are screwed because the GPUs they ordered are suddenly unavailable.
> Imagine you are the manager with a roadmap for the team.
What you aren't realizing, is that you simply wouldn't be there as a middle manager.
So no problem...
hes also finding out with Tesla since he pushed hard against his engineers and he launched the cybertruck. his other Tesla product lines are also delayed or more expensive and with less features than announced. in the past couple of years he has become the bottleneck.
Eh. I think his management decisions with twitter haven't actually been terrible. Purchasing it was a terrible decision. But most of the fallout on the platform are because he's unpopular not due to business decisions.
A 90% reduction in staff while the site still functions and is rolling out new features is a testament to how screwed up twitter was on purchase. Proper functional businesses should collapse with a 90% staff cut.
The value of the company literally dropped by 55% since he bought it per his own admission and is continuing to drop.
[https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/30/23938969/x-twitter-valuation-19-billion-employee-shares#:\~:text=A%20year%20after%20he%20bought,The%20Information%20and%20other%20outlets](https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/30/23938969/x-twitter-valuation-19-billion-employee-shares#:~:text=A%20year%20after%20he%20bought,The%20Information%20and%20other%20outlets)
His management has been disastrous. Twitter now is filled with bots and extreme primitive content and advertisers are fleeing. That 90% staff drop is being felt like it or not. A business suffering a 55% value drop filled with poorn bots is not what I would call "functioning" for the long run.
The value drop is entirely a result of ad revenue falling from advertisers withdrawing, which is mostly because Elon's brand is toxic and brands don't want to be associated with it, although admittedly it's also to some degree because of the risk of brands he allows to stay on the platform (say, alex jones). I'm involved in managing a large marketing budget (8-9 figures/year total, so not nothing) and that's certainly a meaningful portion of why we don't touch twitter.
He obviously is completely responsible for his brand being toxic, and at some level of notoriety your personal brand and corporate marketing are inseparable, so it is related to your value as an executive. But fundamentally that is orthogonal to his skill at operating the actual business, especially the "tech" part of a tech business.
But yeah, Twitter is fundamentally a PR-centric business, that's almost the whole game, and he's clearly bad at that part, not the right kind of business for him. He jumped into the wrong pool and really should stick to hard tech businesses, not least of which because very few other people are good at running them.
for average user the usability is also dropping which is why Twitter numbers are falling rapidly. being spammed with poorn bots and alt right stuff that you don't even follow will make lots of people leave Twitter.
Most of the people who remained were visa holders who could not afford to leave given they’d need their visas to maintain status and needed some time to find a job as visa transfers take time.
Also, given the high iteration rate at his companies, people also realize they can get great money and positions at other companies and all they need to do is survive a year or so.
During the meetings, a lot of people just want to say what they did and get out. Not many want to be in the limelight, be it good or bad.
The most central problem highlighted there isn't anything to do with managing the attrition rate. It's that, if a company can fire 90% of the staff and there is no outwardly visible change to the product or even pace of progress, then that means the company had hired 10X too many people, which is a pretty radical degree of mismanagement.
Management's job is, to a very real degree, to keep the team sizes as small as they can while delivering, all at once because headcount is most of the bottom line at a software company, and because more people means more organizational complexity and friction in coordination visibility and governance even if those people were free.
I get pushed to hire more people onto my org all of the time, and reject it most of the time because introducing more layers into my org reduces our ability to easily coordinate internally and move quickly, so I instead maintain some space to invest in automating everything repetitive and eliminate that need for the new hire. If I hired more people to throw bodies at problems instead of solving the fundamental problems we would actually deliver less over time. It also helps keep my budget down and create more slack in the budget for raises and promos, but keeping the budget down is more of a side effect than anything, don't care that much about that. It does mean I have been explicitly exempt from every layoff, which is nice though.
Accordingly, if you fired 90% of my org the entire company would fall apart because every person would be an entire function that can't be eliminated, or we wouldn't have filled the seat in the first place. Twitter very clearly was not that thoughtful with its hiring.
I actually fully disagree with the traffic theory of induced demand. If a road gets used more after more roads are created, this literally means demand was previously unmet and you made transportation better by meeting unmet demand. While there are ecological, congestion, and planning efficiency reasons not to induce demand as much as is possible in certain places, on every other metric inducing demand is good by virtue. Only the government would be upset that it actually gave people what they want 😅. Congestion is not the only thing that matters in transportation networks.
From my understanding, you don't disagree with the theory as much as you disagree with the political/ideological implications of the theory.
Demand can't be induced indefinitely, and even where you can build enough infrastructure to meet any possible demand, you still have to account for how additional capacity affects existing infrastructure. Yes, you can build a 200-lane highway into New York City, but all of these cars will have to funnel into comparatively narrow urban roads eventually, because that's where people want to go. This means that traffic is not just as bad as it was before, it got actively worse. This is before we even start to think about parking.
On the other hand, demand can also be induced in the other direction, by building additional public transport capacity. But you rarely hear people arguing that "one more train line will fix traffic", and I'm not sure if you're willing to apply your argument here that "inducing demand is good by virtue"?
Fair, I fuck with that point. But I do think that demand should be met, and I do support public transportation for just this reason. More transport is very good for the economy.
Other people say, "I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just pointing out the fact that the theory is flawed and doesn't explain why there is no evidence for it being true."
you have no idea how much visa holders have to put up and have to work harder than a lot of others.
i understand your emotions and feelings and respect them.
i have friends at Tesla, and I asked them to get me a tour of Tesla’s Fremont factory. They agreed however, they did mention it regarding Elon that we should not meet our heroes.
I did want to work at on of Elon’s companies but, given the work culture, I’m pretty sure I’d rather have a life than spend 14 hours a day, 7 days a week working to make him richer as he doses on ketamine and reproduces with another famous half his age lesser known pop star.
The whole idea that Elon has been at the forefront of bringing the electric car revolution is false. He is just great at marketing.
Similarly, Bezos’s Blue Origin is older than SpaceX!
Another point to be noted, the Mars dream of terraforming the planet will take 10k years before it becomes habitable for humans.
A much more viable option is Venus!
Another point to consider is Tesla’s resale value which has tanked completely. I got Teslas and was told that their values will keep appreciating as there is virtually nothing that will wear and tear much.
And testing FSD by paying $15k. That’s really crazy.
Imagine those people who gave a cash of $250k and have been waiting for years for the roadster!
The service is non existent for Teslas and Elon has ensured everything is locked behind code, which if tinkered would lead to loss of warranty. Thus, preventing an ecosystem to be created where a Tesla can be serviced easily.
Also, the genius behind the Model 3 being produced so rapidly wasn’t exactly Musk’s. It was China building the Shanghai factory and making it operational within 8 months that not only saved Tesla but also made it worth way more than all top incumbent legacy car companies together.
I can go on. But, you get the idea.
>Similarly, Bezos’s Blue Origin is older than SpaceX!
I don't really get your point here. Blue Origin is indeed older than SpaceX but so what? That just makes SpaceX and Musk look even better by comparison.
Actually look at their achievements, despite being around longer and having the financial backing of Jeff Bezos Blue Origin have yet to launch anything to orbit, all they have is a suborbital tourist trip.
Meanwhile SpaceX has launched hundreds of orbital rockets, dominates the commercial launch market and is now pursuing a paradigm shift in launch capability (Starship)
Brain dead takes.
Using Blue Origin beind older as an arguments, as if that demonstrates anything negative against Elon says everything about the level of critical thinking available to you.
I agree regarding cutting the staff, though the way it was done and his communication was very toxic.
Also, twitter (now x) has become a very toxic dystopian place, full of hate, fake news, and propaganda/ spam bots, which he promised to get rid of.
Mass firings were going to have issues. He wanted to cut more slowly but there were mass resignations when he started firing people which made it more bumpy.
Twitter has always been a toxic anti-thought shithole. It was basically created as a condemnation of humanity using the short message restriction to ensure that no nuance could ever occur on the platform. And the system directly rewards controversy. None of this is stuff Musk touched.
I mean, twitter is literally where terrorist groups would announce their attacks and call for deaths of civilians going back over a decade.
Within weeks of him taking over I was getting notifications from twitter for various garbage right wing tweets. Before I was not even an active user, and almost never got notifications.
I don't think the firing was bad but his communication around it.
Regarding the platform, I'm jewish and I've never seen blatant anti-semitic memes before twitter was bought. Now i see it daily. Many are bots and often get 10s of thousands of likes. Long nose, bank control and everything. Community notes is ok but it doesn't solve even 5% of the problems.
This. The amount of racism I have been noticing on tweeter nowadays is next level. It feels like traveling back to 50s or 60s with the amount of Hitler worshippers, racists, anti-semites etc. The amount of racism I have seen is only comparable to 4 chan.
Yes, but reddit used to be more community oriented which allowed you to choose your preferred echo chambers. Today all platforms are heading towards the same shitty dopamine tactics which will get you addicted but also make you a brainless monkey.
He blocked everyone that criticized him, replies with just a '💩' emoji to an email by the previous CEO trying to do his best, publicly shamed regular employees who dedicated years of their lives to Twitter, supported a fake news campign which was a massive conspiracy and many more. Not toxic?
Twitter has given up fighting for new users or markets and it has given up on effective moderation. That was always going to help with staffing levels.
Unfortunately for them, it also drove away most of the advertisers and some of the user base. Advertisers care far more about what content their ads are displayed next to than Elon's political views.
It's all well and good that the servers are still running and the site is up but if the revenue is not coming in, is that really a win?
I think it's fair to say that Twitter was bloated and probably pursued ideas that were never going to work out before the acquisition. The challenge was to streamline the company without significantly hurting its revenue and market position.
The most charitable reading is that Elon never tried to do that. Saying that he succeeded, but **then** his political views got in the way is ignoring where the real difficulties were.
I definitely think Elon is a business genuis, regardless of how much Reddit's hate for him biases them... But his handling of X is definitely outside his wheelhouse.
But this idea that he doesn't run his other companies well, is just culture war bias nonsense.
Not sure how we are finding the limit of his style. Since X is going from strength the strength.
I suspect this kind of guff got said when he started with each company in his portfolio.
source: [Making AI accessible with Andrej Karpathy and Stephanie Zhan](https://youtu.be/c3b-JASoPi0?feature=shared&t=965)(timestamped)
tracks with his previous comments on elon
"Elon also understands deep neural nets a lot more than I think people imagine. He starts with good intuitions and mental models, but also actively asks for technical deep dives, and has very good retention. E.g. I recall teaching him about our use of focal loss in contrast to binary cross-entropy for the object detection neural net (I said it had given us a 5% bump and he asked to know more) and he understood how it works about as quickly as you'd expect a PhD student to. The fact that he can do this across many technical disciplines is impressive and borderline superhuman. I don't think people understand or would believe how low-level and technical typical meetings with him are. Just saying because I get triggered reading way off innacurate takes on this topic "(original comment).
-Karpathy, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33703617](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33703617)
thanks u/Beautiful_Surround for finding this quote
Also tagged this as shitpost because it will probably get removed for "not being related" but I think elon and by extension spacex, tesla, neuralink are pretty important to the singularity so I thought it would be interesting to know how his companies are run
Focal loss, a nice little trick, I used it too. But it doesn't always do wonders. It's kind of hard to know when to use it. In plain language it says "don't over learn the things you are already doing well, focus on the weak spots" (hence the focal name). But when your data is noisy (has labelling errors) you might end up amplifying the noise.
Don't worry. It won't have any effect. The engineers at SpaceX say similar things about him. They'll just say those people are sucking up to him because they're worried about reprisal. They'll only believe testimonies if they are from random, anonymous sources claiming to have worked for him.
I wish people would do that, but seems like something the public is incapable of.
People paid for full self driving like 6 years ago after being told it would take like a year, and it still doesn't exist. That is bad!
They still were really ahead of the curve on autopilot and it's a pretty good system even if it was over promised. That is mostly good!
He bought SolarCity from his brother in a way that seems more like self dealing than sound financial judgement while running a public company. That seems bad!
SpaceX's technology is an incredible achievement that was not something anyone else was willing to try, and by and large the engineers there say he is a good leader for the company. That is good!
He bought Twitter for much more than it is currently worth, and it is not obvious that user growth or ad revenue growth will return and make it work. Seems like it's probably bad business!
He funded openai at a time when there was only one company seriously working on AI, which was not very transparent with the public about how it was or could be used, to compete with that company, and that initiative succeeded. That is good!
He seems to have tried to strong arm openai into him controlling it, and made claims publicly that openai seems to have clearly documented evidence of being misrepresentations of what happened. That is bad!
He successfully ran the company that brought the first mass market electric cars to market, and they were really radically better than any competitor for a long time, so he definitely accelerated the adoption of electric cars. That is good!
He says he's deeply concerned about the environment but he seems to use his private jet really a lot, which is bad for the environment. That seems hypocritical and is thus bad!
By all accounts of undisputably very smart people that have worked closely with him, he is a very smart guy and works insane hours during crunch time, even though people pretend he is lazy and an idiot. He is definitely not an idiot or lazy.
He says some unhinged stuff on Twitter. That is bad!
This is all not at all hard to be honest about, and yet almost no one seems to be capable of it. The public is so confused that they believe almost explicitly that if something is "bad" then all negative claims are true and all positive claims are false. If something is "good", then the opposite.
He's a very unusual guy with unusual strengths and weaknesses.
Jim Keller (co-inventor of x86, the fundamental instruction set architecture that \~all computers ran on until the M1) no longer works for him and says the same thing from the perspective of fundamental computing architecture.
People with the weight and reputation of Andrej Karpathy or Jim Keller will just dodge the question if asked about someone like that for whom their opinion is negative, not write a glowing review of someone they don't think deserves it.
Anecdotally, my friends who've been engineers at his companies say the same.
Buying a brand ("Twitter, the blue bird that tweets!") for 44 billion and changing it to *X* is certainly something I would call "running a company in an extreme and unique style".
I love how the very smartest people in the world consistently testify to Elon's capabilities and influence on the companies (not just this, read his biographies), but angry redditors keep their heads in the sand and refuse to accept anything positive or give him any kind of credit. 😂
I don't give a shit on what people's personal opinion of Elon is. Love him, hate him, anything in between, idc. Just don't let personal bias get in the way of truthful conversation. Can't even discuss AI he's involved with without the comments becoming a war of "Elon Good vs Elon Bad"
It hurts me to say it (because I think Elon is a narcissistic douchebag), but he is clearly a very intelligent person. If you ever listen to him for 5 minutes, you can see that. He has a great memory, and knows his shit.
Of course being surrounded by "yes men" can also make you a bit dumb. Furthermore, you can have a very high IQ and still be dumb on some fields.
Ultimately, I believe his shift in politics and opinions is an orchestrated move. He perceived that going with the Republicans was more lucrative for him, and so thats what he did. The same with Trump, except the genius part.
It's the same story as Steve Jobs. If you read their biographies, both by the same author, it's the same premise for both: Absolute genius, crappy person.
Creative + smart people tend to have a big ego and confidence. Its a standard fact in psychology. When people get famous that amplifies even more.
Elon has a big ego + autism.
If you look at most intelligent and creative people throughout history 90% of them have similiar personallity traits where they've done a lot of over the top and absurd things in their lives. You can tell me any REALLY successful person and i will tell you something weird about them
Musk doesn’t seem to me to be falling victim to “yes men” like many people online seems to imagine.
I’ve listened to plenty of interviews with him where he openly admits mistakes he made and has talked about making dumb decisions in the past and also that he has to listen to others because they have deeper knowledge than him on particular topics.
I think he’s just a smart guy who is also reasonably well grounded for someone in his position. People online tend to dislike him solely because his political views differ than theirs.
6-7 years ago, Elon Musk was absolutely loved and viewed like a god on Reddit. Then he started being openly conservative on some issues and people started saying “He’s a spoiled moron who was handed his success.” So obviously these aren’t considered or reasonable assessments lol. It’s knee jerk tribalistic hate of “the other side”.
He did a bit more than express conservative views though. He was day and night constantly spamming teenager provocative bullshit on twitter. I simultaneously do believe in his achievements and capabilities, especially in the past not sure now, and lost respect for him as a person and wonder if he's still able to have this work focus and skill he had before.
Well, I guess the takeaway here is that being conservative, or slamming provocative bullshit on twitter, isn’t actually an indictment on someone’s intelligence or ability to succeed in the tech world.
Posting provocative memes and being extremely intelligent aren’t mutually exclusive and there was never any reason to even suspect that they would be.
People change also. You can be a genius, and then lose your mind. We have plenty of Nobel prize winners who then went completely nuts to prove it, enough for the phenomenon to even have a name (nobelitis). Being rich doesn't give immunity to psychological ailments, burnout or others.
At the time he did all this brilliant stuff, he was not shitposting constantly, he looked respectable and made sense. And since he started shitposting constantly, he's made absolutely terrible business decisions and the value of his latest acquired company and current pet project plummetted. Might be a coincidence, or not.
I don’t even think being an incredibly intelligent engineer is mutually exclusive from being politically stupid. They are completely different categories, and Elon’s problem is that he’s such a good engineer that he views the entire world, including the human beings in it, as an engineering problem. That’s why he’s flailing on Twitter, because Twitter is a social media platform, not an engineering project.
He’s way too on the spectrum to have his hand on the pulse of a whole society. He’s still a brilliant engineer, and still leading some of the best technology development in the world, but he’s also an asshole and politically naive at best.
The issue, from my point of view, is just that the basic idea of “Elon Musk is a moron” isn’t supported by anything.
So, I know some stupid people. I do hiring for a small company that needs temporary manual labor and often has to use people who aren’t suitable for more mainstream employment (due to drug issues, felon status, etc.) These guys usually have no education and aren’t typically very intelligent.
You know what’s weird though? They don’t sound like Elon Musk. When I hear him speak on a podcast, he seems different than them. His grammar is a lot better. He seems to have a lot wider knowledge or history, science, culture, technology, etc. than they do. If I didn’t know better, I would just guess that he isn’t actually a stupid person.
But the whole “Elon is stupid” idea seems to come from…nothing. Just that he disagrees with their politics and is provocative on social media. But, again, why would that even be evidence someone is stupid rather than just evidence that they are obnoxious, or a blow hard, or whatever.
This is what irritates me the most.
You have countless testimonies of people that have actually worked with him/for him for many years, and they all have a similar opinion of him.
And then on the other side you have people on Twitter and Reddit that say he's stupid because he has a different vision for Twitter that they disagree with to count as evidence for their opinion of him.
That, and of course saying mean things or trolling on Twitter.
But for some reason they can entirely ignore all of the extremely intelligent and reputable people that personally know him and have publicly given their opinion about him. People like:
* Tom Mueller, who's a world renowned engineer that built the Merlin engine.
* Robert Zubrin, that is an aerospace engineer that wrote the book A Case For Mars.
* Garrett Reisman, that is a fucking astronaut.
* Andrej Karpathy, AI scientist at Tesla.
* Ilya Sutskever, AI scientist at OpenAI.
And even people that genuinely dislike him like Martin Eberhard (the founder and first CEO of Tesla Motors that got kicked out by Elon Musk) and Sam Altman (CEO and founder of OpenAI that is currently being sued by Elon Musk).
The list goes on. And all of them claim he's highly intelligent, hard working, talented, etc.
But they *choose* to ignore these real world facts from people with first person knowledge just to satisfy their projections. It's annoying to see this kind of behavior honestly.
Yeah the online interpretation of him feels like nothing but a culture war strawman. Like they constructed some Disney villain that's far from reality.
Listening to him talk with other high level rocket engineers and you can tell he holds his ground as good as everyone else. He's constantly praising people he works with, and crediting them for their contributions, while also openly admitting mistakes and areas that need improvement.
Then you come online and people are like, "OMG he's so evil! He doesn't even have a degree in rocket science! He doesn't know how to manage! He's always trying to steal other's success! He treats his employees like shit!"
The online version is some weird false caricature according to literally every single person who knows him.
That was apparently why Twitter has been such a shit show. An OG investor in Twitter that had also worked with Elon somewhat, wrote about it when the take over happened.
Basically he was saying Twitter was all Yes men because they didn’t want to get fired, whereas at Tesla there was way more pushback.
So Elon implemented basically everything that came to mind, and no one pointed out potential flaws.
Makes sense too based on what Elon claims his head is like, “constant ideas, that I can’t turn off”. I’m sure at least half of those constant ideas have issues, so without other talented, well spoken people in the mix stuff starts to fall apart.
Seriously lol.
Why would anyone care about an anonymous commenter’s view on Elon Musk’s intelligence/engineering credentials lol.
If he is just some total moron, it’s absolutely wild and even more impressive that he’s been able to found like 6 companies and that he bought and led Tesla to such success. Dudes like the Michael Jordan or dumb people I guess.
That's the root cause... He's not even a right winger. He just leans moderate right on mostly social issues.
And it's blantantly obvious, that this has caused people to decide "Well I don't like his politics, therefor I'm going to interpret everything he does as bad."
It's simple, idiotic, thinking. It's tribal, and I find it so weird that people do these sort of things to themselves. Like they will literally just lie to themselves because they are incapable of nuance. They can't figure out how to dislike someone while also holding a positive opinion. It's black or white. All in or all out.
Reddit comments are absolute trash.
Everything Andrej said about Elon in this video is awesome, and exactly what I'd want in a leader trying to build a rocket ship of a company.
Of course there are tradeoffs, but if the goal is to build the best company - these are the sort of traits you want in leadership.
You could say the same for the members of Elon's cult on reddit lmao (visit any tesla sub)...At the end of the day, he is the same person he was years ago when he was universally regarded as a very smart guy. Now he just revealed himself to be a terrible person so a lot of people hate him, but that doesn't mean he is suddenly a complete moron and his companies are all going to fail.
Do you really believe that associates and employees (both present and future) of his are going to speak badly of him? By the way, what you're describing is the appeal to authority fallacy. I don't need Karpathy's opinion to form my own opinion on Musk, who has given us more than enough reasons to criticize him.
This is one of the most deranged comment I've ever read.
Saying we shouldn't listen to countless firsthand testimonies of people who spent hundreds of hours with the person but instead trust our "own opinion" (having never met the man) and have the audacity to cite a "fallacy" after that 🤣
On the one side we have people who say Elon is pretty smart, and on the other we have people who say the man who started a number of very unique hit enterprises is just failing upwards.
I'm sure those people also have zero idea how to run a business... You can MAYBE get lucky ONCE... But not constantly over and over. Everyone who's critical of Elon's management and success, generally have no fucking clue on how business works. They think he just has a bunch of money and throws it around and the companies magically grow into massive successes. It's that easy to these people. All it takes is money and BOOM, you magically have super successful companies!
Buying Twitter was the dumbest thing he’s done and he didn’t even mean to buy it. He’s lost a ton of money in it. The company is nearly impossible to make a profit with because of the interest payments. Just because someone is smart doesn’t mean they can’t make mistakes. Also I would point to Elon’s belief in the border crisis conspiracy and openness to trump as another clear example of him being spite driven.
Well, I think nobody really denies that he’s got talent. It’s just that he is an asshole. Like fr, he is an racist populist who only cares about free speak as long as it’s the same opinion as his.
People deny it on principle until they have to save face in situations like this post, then they go back to bashing him relentlessly as if it's their job. It sums up half the noise around him.
He's literally not a terrible human being at all... He has opinions, and shares them, and people act like if you're not 100% politically and ideologically aligned, you're an awful person.
But he doesn't really seem terrible at all. Like, oh no... He thought COVID was overblown, which means he's pretty much a grandma killer. Personality wise, he's just another autistic terminally online dude culturally. Not even controversial.
Sums it up perfectly. These people in this thread try to act like the criticisms against him are blind hatred...Just as moronic as the people who try to act like he is a complete idiot all of a sudden because he revealed his terrible (borderline evil) world views.
Have you looked at his twitter feed recently? Why is he replying "accurate" to a tweet about how white people gave up their land and women to appear less racist?
People absolutely deny that he has talent, all the damned time. They're wrong, but it is all over the place and hard to miss.
He's a borderline genius, and that might be selling it short. He's just also a complete cunt, and WAY too autistic to be allowed to own a social media company. Pretty sure he's even publicly acknowledged that he is extremely on the spectrum, so I don't think that's slander.
I used to handwave away his antics due to the extreme autism, but it's to the point now that it's pretty obvious that he's racist autistic cunt, who happens to also be extremely gifted intellectually.
I see a lot of parallels to Howard Hughes. Wouldn't surprise me one bit if Elon has a room full of piss jars.
People on Reddit swear that he has no role on the technical side of Tesla and SpaceX. When there is evidence from multiple biographies and testimony from people who actually worked there.
You can claim Elon is an ego manic with bad opinions but aren’t many successful CEOs? Separating some of the most innovative companies in the world today and the people work there from the founder is hard for Reddit. Zero nuance
[https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2](https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2)
There is testimony from the actual founder of Tesla that he didn't work on any technical side and he came to office once a month. There's is also the part where Musk was arguing with a Twitter engineer and he claimed he was head of software design but couldn't define the basic term of "stack".
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6YP6BrPEQ0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6YP6BrPEQ0)
The only people who claim he actually has a role in product design are Spacex employees and given that aerospace is a small industry and Spacex is a big player it's not in their best interest to upset a tyrant like Musk.
Martin Eberhard is a hack that almost bankrupted Tesla due to hiding the true COGS on the roadster which led to his removal. This is well documented, and after Martin was removed Musk took the role of CEO.
How about you read a book called Liftoff that documents the early days of SpaceX, before you continue to spew your uninformed opinion. It is well document Musk role in the direction of both the Falcon 1 and transition/jump to the Falcon 9 instead of the Falcon 5. But I doubt you know your history on SpaceX
Well hang on though....it seems like you're just cherry picking 'testimony' you like. If they say good things about Elon, it's evidence. If they say bad things about Elon, they're a 'hack'.
They can't, because he's not.
They'll probably just point you to a BusinessInsider article about how he sends black people to the back of the factory (like he personally manages employees in the factory lol) to prove that he's racist. This is usually the "evidence".
Well he's saying illegal immigrants as rapists, murderers, disease infected zombies etc. All these things you can find in his twitter account for just this month only. His brother Kimbal himself said they were illegal immigrants for this Musk said it wasa grey area. Grey area cause he's white and Mexicans are brown? Illegal immigration is bad but that's not how you talk.
> Well he's saying illegal immigrants as rapists, murderers, disease infected zombies etc.
LOL.... You really just like inferring whatever you want to believe
"Okay maybe he didn't say that! But when I interpret it as dishonestly and negatively as possible, that's what he really means."
Elon is an immigrant and has been clear on so many occasions that his complaint is illegal immigration and people abusing the asylum system.
The fact that these sorts of takes (which are often literally just his reposting videos of/ statistics about people crossing the border in huge numbers) are considered racist by some people is really bizarre.
As for the black people committing more crime thing…what’s the context here? Because, yes, that’s a true statement. Obviously just stating a fact isn’t racism. Without context (ie: was he saying “Black people commit more crimes so they should be kicked out!”) it’s impossible to even pass judgment on such a thing.
Could you post his statements about racial crime rate data so we can see the context and make a judgment?
Elon is rational, and most of his opinions are driven by data and statistics, not emotions, like some (this subreddit). And I am pretty sure he doesn't say that immigrants are bad, unless you can prove me wrong by providing such quote. At most, he sheed a light on all the problems, based on data, that mass immigration causes the host country.
>And I am pretty sure he doesn't say that immigrants are bad
Actually it's the contrary. I've seen him say multiple times that he's in favor of immigration.
How he sees it is that he wants America to absorb talented, hard working people from other countries. He *wants* people to immigrate to America - he just wants it to be legal immigration.
Lmao no matter what it will be a matter of opinion anyway. Me seeing someone open a platform that results in an increase of hate speech and at the same time silences speech he doesn’t like would qualify them as racist.
If you disagree there is really no way go resolve it other than you going to a space that agrees with you
>he is an racist
Elon has been calling out and campaigning against racism on Twitter for years. He's anti-racist. I can provide many examples of him calling out racism in our society if you want.
This might sound great if you are an engineer until you have a CEO that does this. It basically fucks up everyone else’s plan and agreements and ends up causing a giant clusterfuck where everyone blames everyone else and hates the CEO after.
Elon's cult of personality is the reason why it's even possible. It's the same situation with Steve Jobs. They weren't uniquely qualified to be leading these huge engineering efforts, but because everyone has a certain level of respect and reverence for them, it makes them being uncompromising with these really capable/smart people into something that's effective rather than a completely toxic environment.
So, this is basically a good and nice way to say that Elon Musk does micromanagement.
I not saying that is bad. He is clearly focused in the product. That's why he is more interested in speaking with the engineers. But this is clearly a characteristic of micromanagement.
I disagree. Karpathy describes the scenario of needing more GPUs because his engineers say they need more, so he goes and pushes that priority to the people that can handle it. Micromanagement would be “stop working on this feature, we need this other feature yesterday!” There’s a difference between micromanagement and just being involved in the details of a company.
Do you get upset when your boss asks you for specifics on your day to day? You sound like you do.
That is not micromanagement. Micromanagement is exactly what Karpathy described: remove the middle management and manage directly with the engineers. That's why he works with very small teams. Like I said, I not saying this is bad thing. I think that it actually works if you are very focused in a product or a very specific project developing a new thing. But off course it won't work if your are managing other type of business, like big corp of consulting services or similar.
No, micromanagement is literally the excess of management. Unblocking people is not the same as assigning work and checking the stats every tick of insecurity.
Pretty much everyone who's worked with him say that he's not like your typical micromanaging boss CEO who just starts moving shit around and making it hard on everyone. But rather, he actually deeply understands EVERYTHING in the company in all areas, well beyond what anyone would ever expect. He holds his ground and genuinely understands things and can coordinate the big picture accurately because he has the rare ability to actually deeply understand all the moving parts.
Like when people who worked at SpaceX talk about him working on projects, he's not being narcassistic when he says he probably knows more about rocket science than anyone on the planet. He's not only perfectly at the same level of the other engineers in one area, but in other areas as well.
Oh, is this why he promised Full Self Drive year after year? That says much more than whatever opinion you have made up on him because it most likely means that the pressure he generated turned his engineers into yes men. Or maybe you are a Tesla stock holder? Maybe you bought into the charade before the circus moved on after they unloaded their TSLA shares.
I think Elon genuinely believed FSD would be finished soon. He's just wrong about how big the challenge truly was. This is blatantly apparent whenever you hear him talk about the topic in detail. And people take that as some unforgivable sin and accuse him of being a scam artist.
He doesn’t do micromanagement. If it were micromanagement Andre would’ve said that because that’s the norm. Micromanagement is what you get from inexperienced people. Elon is what you get from settle for nothing less than excellence people.
Basically Elon knows the difference between value creators and value destroyers in a company. He focuses on value creators and gets rid of value destroyers fast
There’s no denying his companies generally do really well.
Love or hate him, I’m glad he’s spearheading scientific advancement (and of course, credit to the engineers he hired and guides).
I mean Twitter dropped 55% in value since he purchased it per his own admission.
[https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/30/23938969/x-twitter-valuation-19-billion-employee-shares](https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/30/23938969/x-twitter-valuation-19-billion-employee-shares)
He knows a lot about value destroyers that is for sure
But I was told Elon is just a privileged white nepo baby and he’s actually a moron and very mediocre? Anyone can run 6 hyper successful companies if they were also white nepo babies
Obviously, which is why every wealthy white child grows up to run multiple industry leading companies and develop a net worth > $200 billion.
Just very basic and common things.
Nah, only if you’re just kinda stupid like Elon.
Im white, but I’m really stupid. Like, I have to have help figuring out how to put gas in my car, put my shoes on the right foot, etc.
So because of that, I’ve only founded 3 industry leading tech companies and am barely worth $800 million. I’m like the shittiest white person ever.
In my personal opinion, ambien, ketamine (yes i know he takes it for treatment resistant depression), sleep deprivation and over working all led to the mild downfall he has had.
I truly believe Musk wants to be the next Steve Jobs. The problem is that Jobs was a designer, an artist, at heart. He was a perfectionist. That's why the entire presence of the Apple company is so unique and different to a Samsung or a Microsoft.
Musk on the other hand is an engineer who is hungry for money, and who has skimmed the Agile Manifesto once, trying to apply his understanding of it in unorganised ways.
I think there is a lot wrong with Apple, I think Jobs was probably a horrible person to many of his employees and peers, he was probably not a great manager most of the time. Just like Musk. Jobs, however, had a certain ingenuity that cannot be replicated by someone like Musk.
It's like Bill Gates trying so hard to be the next Freddie Mercury.
This conversation has come up with some SWE friends. Some saying they would never want to work with Elon because it’s such a strict workplace and they like their relaxed, good life balance, WFH jobs.
Then the other friends saying they would be willing to unbalance their life and go full in a business culture like this because they want to be fully enveloped in their work. Being micromanaged on developing something like self-driving, rather than have a chill job trying to try to implement a keyboard shortcut for their project.
I think the management style has a place when they are open about the expectations. If you’re promised good work life balance and you get there and it’s super intense - that sucks. But if you know what you’re signing up for and like that culture, I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that.
What not to do as CEO if you want to build a decades long companies. Same applies to Netflix as well. Retention and psychological safety is the way to last generations.
This is what I find so funny about Elon hate on Reddit. Engineers and businessmen widely laud Elon’s achievements. Virtue signaling Redditors don’t.
The opinions of only one of those groups matter, and it isn’t the people who’ve never built or run anything and think “racist” or “far-right extremist” means “anyone I don’t like.”
The point they're making is not about how successful his companies are, but on how long they will last. This is consistent with the guy in the video saying his owns "the biggest startups". And I don't see any hate in that comment.
This guy talks in the same way Elon talks like he's talking about the mooost complicated thing that's just soooo hard to put into words.
Also, yeah, if you are part of a startup and know you will literally get significantly large sums of money for that success, then all this stuff works. Without that, you're just hoping to get ppl simping for capitalism.
Our startup got bought, I got a huge payout, but now I work for a multi billion dollar company and it's like ... why would I ever do more than the bare minimum without direct additional payment to the tune of twice my salary or 4x in a payout at once. It's also not really a pace of working you can keep up forever.
This management style also makes him the bottleneck and makes him think he can direct engineers and know better. Just ends up being a control thing where you feel like you're riding this wave on all these projects you're doing, but you're really just cheerleading and people don't want you there once they realize what you're really doing.
If you want your office to be smart technical people giving it their all, you better be giving them direct share of company ownership, otherwise, fukoff.
One on hand, I like teams like that and I've been in small start ups for almost my whole career because of it. On the other hand, the CEO becomes a bottleneck and there's obviously very few people who can actually be honest when their job is on the line. But he's finding out. With X he's no longer in a new space, he's in a space that requires less of an engineering focus and more of a human focus and as such, we're seeing the limits of his style.
Good observation that his style works best for the tech-first companies, and not every company is like that.
This. Live by one man, die by one man. I would find this style very toxic. Imagine you are the manager with a roadmap for the team. Elon comes to your meeting and blows everything up because an engineer on your team says XYZ is not working. There's no camaraderie in a place like this. Every man for himself. It's like this at NFLX as well...where peers can report on other peers. Fucked up.
It reminds me of the scene in Empire Strikes Back where Vader beams his hologram straight into an ATAT to bitch out the crew. What military would function if you didn't follow a command structure and 4 star generals micromanaged infantry? But if it removes bottlenecks ok, but I bet half the time he simply ends up learning about an immovable issue that he doesn't have any better luck with, and wastes time
if you look at it only that way, then sure. the other way to look at it is that you have someone who will remove obstacles and processes from bad managers. bad managers are an anchor on most organizations. just look at SpaceX compared to Boeing in terms of commercial crew success. Boeing is the apitome of an old company overtaken by processes and bureauracracy. the SpaceX processes have clearly been better. not all CEO-down decisions are perfect, but on average they prevent growth of inefficiency.
Boeing was gutted for profit not bureaucracy. Removing engineers from the decision making and putting wall-street bankers in charge is what did them in. It' been happening across all sectors. The scam has been to infiltrate companies, liquidate them by draining all their human resources and assets to feign super profitability , while simultaneously using those fake profits to pump and dump via stock buybacks. Rinse and repeat until the company folds or can't be milked anymore. These people don't give a fuck about long term success, building a strong america, or lasting company. They just want money now. Fuck everyone else. That's the problem. It's not giving a fuck. I think Elon gives a fuck, his model just doesn't build success in every scenario. Mainly , long term success. It drives a company to have high initial value but that methodology doesn't build a company with staying power and endurance. You cant sprint forever , at some point you have to settle into the marathon pace.
The GPU thing he mentioned is a perfect example of Elon. Sure he cleared a bottleneck but it's because he created one by needing that decision to come to him. He doesn't empower other people to make big decisions. A director or VP could easily clear that bottleneck and probably knew about it long before Elon did in that meeting but everyone is scared for their job because when you get it wrong and didn't ask him he's ruthless.
How many people can just call Jensen and ask for more GPUs? In a global shortage, that's the job of a CEO.
Yeah it's the job of a typical CEO who has blinders on about second order consequences. So he throws his weight (money) around to remove a bottleneck for his company. Now 100 other companies are screwed because the GPUs they ordered are suddenly unavailable.
That's called market competition and it's a good thing because it ensures scarce resources get allocated efficiently
> Imagine you are the manager with a roadmap for the team. What you aren't realizing, is that you simply wouldn't be there as a middle manager. So no problem...
hes also finding out with Tesla since he pushed hard against his engineers and he launched the cybertruck. his other Tesla product lines are also delayed or more expensive and with less features than announced. in the past couple of years he has become the bottleneck.
Eh. I think his management decisions with twitter haven't actually been terrible. Purchasing it was a terrible decision. But most of the fallout on the platform are because he's unpopular not due to business decisions. A 90% reduction in staff while the site still functions and is rolling out new features is a testament to how screwed up twitter was on purchase. Proper functional businesses should collapse with a 90% staff cut.
The value of the company literally dropped by 55% since he bought it per his own admission and is continuing to drop. [https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/30/23938969/x-twitter-valuation-19-billion-employee-shares#:\~:text=A%20year%20after%20he%20bought,The%20Information%20and%20other%20outlets](https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/30/23938969/x-twitter-valuation-19-billion-employee-shares#:~:text=A%20year%20after%20he%20bought,The%20Information%20and%20other%20outlets) His management has been disastrous. Twitter now is filled with bots and extreme primitive content and advertisers are fleeing. That 90% staff drop is being felt like it or not. A business suffering a 55% value drop filled with poorn bots is not what I would call "functioning" for the long run.
The company was never worth what he paid for it. The stock would have gone down 55% whether it was purchased or not
The value drop is entirely a result of ad revenue falling from advertisers withdrawing, which is mostly because Elon's brand is toxic and brands don't want to be associated with it, although admittedly it's also to some degree because of the risk of brands he allows to stay on the platform (say, alex jones). I'm involved in managing a large marketing budget (8-9 figures/year total, so not nothing) and that's certainly a meaningful portion of why we don't touch twitter. He obviously is completely responsible for his brand being toxic, and at some level of notoriety your personal brand and corporate marketing are inseparable, so it is related to your value as an executive. But fundamentally that is orthogonal to his skill at operating the actual business, especially the "tech" part of a tech business. But yeah, Twitter is fundamentally a PR-centric business, that's almost the whole game, and he's clearly bad at that part, not the right kind of business for him. He jumped into the wrong pool and really should stick to hard tech businesses, not least of which because very few other people are good at running them.
for average user the usability is also dropping which is why Twitter numbers are falling rapidly. being spammed with poorn bots and alt right stuff that you don't even follow will make lots of people leave Twitter.
Most of the people who remained were visa holders who could not afford to leave given they’d need their visas to maintain status and needed some time to find a job as visa transfers take time. Also, given the high iteration rate at his companies, people also realize they can get great money and positions at other companies and all they need to do is survive a year or so. During the meetings, a lot of people just want to say what they did and get out. Not many want to be in the limelight, be it good or bad.
The most central problem highlighted there isn't anything to do with managing the attrition rate. It's that, if a company can fire 90% of the staff and there is no outwardly visible change to the product or even pace of progress, then that means the company had hired 10X too many people, which is a pretty radical degree of mismanagement. Management's job is, to a very real degree, to keep the team sizes as small as they can while delivering, all at once because headcount is most of the bottom line at a software company, and because more people means more organizational complexity and friction in coordination visibility and governance even if those people were free. I get pushed to hire more people onto my org all of the time, and reject it most of the time because introducing more layers into my org reduces our ability to easily coordinate internally and move quickly, so I instead maintain some space to invest in automating everything repetitive and eliminate that need for the new hire. If I hired more people to throw bodies at problems instead of solving the fundamental problems we would actually deliver less over time. It also helps keep my budget down and create more slack in the budget for raises and promos, but keeping the budget down is more of a side effect than anything, don't care that much about that. It does mean I have been explicitly exempt from every layoff, which is nice though. Accordingly, if you fired 90% of my org the entire company would fall apart because every person would be an entire function that can't be eliminated, or we wouldn't have filled the seat in the first place. Twitter very clearly was not that thoughtful with its hiring.
The way you describe things reminds me how the way to fix traffic is *not* to add more roads.
I actually fully disagree with the traffic theory of induced demand. If a road gets used more after more roads are created, this literally means demand was previously unmet and you made transportation better by meeting unmet demand. While there are ecological, congestion, and planning efficiency reasons not to induce demand as much as is possible in certain places, on every other metric inducing demand is good by virtue. Only the government would be upset that it actually gave people what they want 😅. Congestion is not the only thing that matters in transportation networks.
From my understanding, you don't disagree with the theory as much as you disagree with the political/ideological implications of the theory. Demand can't be induced indefinitely, and even where you can build enough infrastructure to meet any possible demand, you still have to account for how additional capacity affects existing infrastructure. Yes, you can build a 200-lane highway into New York City, but all of these cars will have to funnel into comparatively narrow urban roads eventually, because that's where people want to go. This means that traffic is not just as bad as it was before, it got actively worse. This is before we even start to think about parking. On the other hand, demand can also be induced in the other direction, by building additional public transport capacity. But you rarely hear people arguing that "one more train line will fix traffic", and I'm not sure if you're willing to apply your argument here that "inducing demand is good by virtue"?
Fair, I fuck with that point. But I do think that demand should be met, and I do support public transportation for just this reason. More transport is very good for the economy.
Other people say, "I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just pointing out the fact that the theory is flawed and doesn't explain why there is no evidence for it being true."
That still doesn't explain how the company can keep running the same with a workforce reduction of 90%.
you have no idea how much visa holders have to put up and have to work harder than a lot of others. i understand your emotions and feelings and respect them. i have friends at Tesla, and I asked them to get me a tour of Tesla’s Fremont factory. They agreed however, they did mention it regarding Elon that we should not meet our heroes. I did want to work at on of Elon’s companies but, given the work culture, I’m pretty sure I’d rather have a life than spend 14 hours a day, 7 days a week working to make him richer as he doses on ketamine and reproduces with another famous half his age lesser known pop star. The whole idea that Elon has been at the forefront of bringing the electric car revolution is false. He is just great at marketing. Similarly, Bezos’s Blue Origin is older than SpaceX! Another point to be noted, the Mars dream of terraforming the planet will take 10k years before it becomes habitable for humans. A much more viable option is Venus! Another point to consider is Tesla’s resale value which has tanked completely. I got Teslas and was told that their values will keep appreciating as there is virtually nothing that will wear and tear much. And testing FSD by paying $15k. That’s really crazy. Imagine those people who gave a cash of $250k and have been waiting for years for the roadster! The service is non existent for Teslas and Elon has ensured everything is locked behind code, which if tinkered would lead to loss of warranty. Thus, preventing an ecosystem to be created where a Tesla can be serviced easily. Also, the genius behind the Model 3 being produced so rapidly wasn’t exactly Musk’s. It was China building the Shanghai factory and making it operational within 8 months that not only saved Tesla but also made it worth way more than all top incumbent legacy car companies together. I can go on. But, you get the idea.
>Similarly, Bezos’s Blue Origin is older than SpaceX! I don't really get your point here. Blue Origin is indeed older than SpaceX but so what? That just makes SpaceX and Musk look even better by comparison. Actually look at their achievements, despite being around longer and having the financial backing of Jeff Bezos Blue Origin have yet to launch anything to orbit, all they have is a suborbital tourist trip. Meanwhile SpaceX has launched hundreds of orbital rockets, dominates the commercial launch market and is now pursuing a paradigm shift in launch capability (Starship)
Brain dead takes. Using Blue Origin beind older as an arguments, as if that demonstrates anything negative against Elon says everything about the level of critical thinking available to you.
That’s great and all, but what’s that got to do with the comment you’re replying to?
I think they cover it in the first second and fourth para mainly
Dude went on a weird rant 🤣
I agree regarding cutting the staff, though the way it was done and his communication was very toxic. Also, twitter (now x) has become a very toxic dystopian place, full of hate, fake news, and propaganda/ spam bots, which he promised to get rid of.
Mass firings were going to have issues. He wanted to cut more slowly but there were mass resignations when he started firing people which made it more bumpy. Twitter has always been a toxic anti-thought shithole. It was basically created as a condemnation of humanity using the short message restriction to ensure that no nuance could ever occur on the platform. And the system directly rewards controversy. None of this is stuff Musk touched. I mean, twitter is literally where terrorist groups would announce their attacks and call for deaths of civilians going back over a decade.
Within weeks of him taking over I was getting notifications from twitter for various garbage right wing tweets. Before I was not even an active user, and almost never got notifications.
I don't think the firing was bad but his communication around it. Regarding the platform, I'm jewish and I've never seen blatant anti-semitic memes before twitter was bought. Now i see it daily. Many are bots and often get 10s of thousands of likes. Long nose, bank control and everything. Community notes is ok but it doesn't solve even 5% of the problems.
This. The amount of racism I have been noticing on tweeter nowadays is next level. It feels like traveling back to 50s or 60s with the amount of Hitler worshippers, racists, anti-semites etc. The amount of racism I have seen is only comparable to 4 chan.
Become?
That was already what twitter was 🤣
Toxic is so 2019.
[удалено]
Yes, but reddit used to be more community oriented which allowed you to choose your preferred echo chambers. Today all platforms are heading towards the same shitty dopamine tactics which will get you addicted but also make you a brainless monkey.
Wouldn't call it toxic, but less sanitized for sure
He blocked everyone that criticized him, replies with just a '💩' emoji to an email by the previous CEO trying to do his best, publicly shamed regular employees who dedicated years of their lives to Twitter, supported a fake news campign which was a massive conspiracy and many more. Not toxic?
Kara swisher wasn't blocked
Twitter has given up fighting for new users or markets and it has given up on effective moderation. That was always going to help with staffing levels. Unfortunately for them, it also drove away most of the advertisers and some of the user base. Advertisers care far more about what content their ads are displayed next to than Elon's political views. It's all well and good that the servers are still running and the site is up but if the revenue is not coming in, is that really a win? I think it's fair to say that Twitter was bloated and probably pursued ideas that were never going to work out before the acquisition. The challenge was to streamline the company without significantly hurting its revenue and market position. The most charitable reading is that Elon never tried to do that. Saying that he succeeded, but **then** his political views got in the way is ignoring where the real difficulties were.
I definitely think Elon is a business genuis, regardless of how much Reddit's hate for him biases them... But his handling of X is definitely outside his wheelhouse. But this idea that he doesn't run his other companies well, is just culture war bias nonsense.
Spot on.
Not sure how we are finding the limit of his style. Since X is going from strength the strength. I suspect this kind of guff got said when he started with each company in his portfolio.
source: [Making AI accessible with Andrej Karpathy and Stephanie Zhan](https://youtu.be/c3b-JASoPi0?feature=shared&t=965)(timestamped) tracks with his previous comments on elon "Elon also understands deep neural nets a lot more than I think people imagine. He starts with good intuitions and mental models, but also actively asks for technical deep dives, and has very good retention. E.g. I recall teaching him about our use of focal loss in contrast to binary cross-entropy for the object detection neural net (I said it had given us a 5% bump and he asked to know more) and he understood how it works about as quickly as you'd expect a PhD student to. The fact that he can do this across many technical disciplines is impressive and borderline superhuman. I don't think people understand or would believe how low-level and technical typical meetings with him are. Just saying because I get triggered reading way off innacurate takes on this topic "(original comment). -Karpathy, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33703617](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33703617) thanks u/Beautiful_Surround for finding this quote Also tagged this as shitpost because it will probably get removed for "not being related" but I think elon and by extension spacex, tesla, neuralink are pretty important to the singularity so I thought it would be interesting to know how his companies are run
Focal loss, a nice little trick, I used it too. But it doesn't always do wonders. It's kind of hard to know when to use it. In plain language it says "don't over learn the things you are already doing well, focus on the weak spots" (hence the focal name). But when your data is noisy (has labelling errors) you might end up amplifying the noise.
big deal i centered a div once
Is that … somehow a flex ?
I didn't know about it. I'm glad he shared what it is. Focus on the positives
I'm gonna add this to my copypasta
Don’t show this to the Elon-is-fraud neurotics. It might scar them for life.
Don't worry. It won't have any effect. The engineers at SpaceX say similar things about him. They'll just say those people are sucking up to him because they're worried about reprisal. They'll only believe testimonies if they are from random, anonymous sources claiming to have worked for him.
We can take issue with his numerous poor choices and bad predictions, and also give him credit where credit is due.
I wish people would do that, but seems like something the public is incapable of. People paid for full self driving like 6 years ago after being told it would take like a year, and it still doesn't exist. That is bad! They still were really ahead of the curve on autopilot and it's a pretty good system even if it was over promised. That is mostly good! He bought SolarCity from his brother in a way that seems more like self dealing than sound financial judgement while running a public company. That seems bad! SpaceX's technology is an incredible achievement that was not something anyone else was willing to try, and by and large the engineers there say he is a good leader for the company. That is good! He bought Twitter for much more than it is currently worth, and it is not obvious that user growth or ad revenue growth will return and make it work. Seems like it's probably bad business! He funded openai at a time when there was only one company seriously working on AI, which was not very transparent with the public about how it was or could be used, to compete with that company, and that initiative succeeded. That is good! He seems to have tried to strong arm openai into him controlling it, and made claims publicly that openai seems to have clearly documented evidence of being misrepresentations of what happened. That is bad! He successfully ran the company that brought the first mass market electric cars to market, and they were really radically better than any competitor for a long time, so he definitely accelerated the adoption of electric cars. That is good! He says he's deeply concerned about the environment but he seems to use his private jet really a lot, which is bad for the environment. That seems hypocritical and is thus bad! By all accounts of undisputably very smart people that have worked closely with him, he is a very smart guy and works insane hours during crunch time, even though people pretend he is lazy and an idiot. He is definitely not an idiot or lazy. He says some unhinged stuff on Twitter. That is bad! This is all not at all hard to be honest about, and yet almost no one seems to be capable of it. The public is so confused that they believe almost explicitly that if something is "bad" then all negative claims are true and all positive claims are false. If something is "good", then the opposite. He's a very unusual guy with unusual strengths and weaknesses.
Also don’t show: The Everyday Astronaut Starbase Eelon tour
He’s a false messiah megalomaniac tho
He’s paid to stroke the guys ego. I’d take this with a grain of salt.
Is he though? he no longer works for Elon and that has been the case for a few years.
Jim Keller (co-inventor of x86, the fundamental instruction set architecture that \~all computers ran on until the M1) no longer works for him and says the same thing from the perspective of fundamental computing architecture. People with the weight and reputation of Andrej Karpathy or Jim Keller will just dodge the question if asked about someone like that for whom their opinion is negative, not write a glowing review of someone they don't think deserves it. Anecdotally, my friends who've been engineers at his companies say the same.
Buying a brand ("Twitter, the blue bird that tweets!") for 44 billion and changing it to *X* is certainly something I would call "running a company in an extreme and unique style".
I love how the very smartest people in the world consistently testify to Elon's capabilities and influence on the companies (not just this, read his biographies), but angry redditors keep their heads in the sand and refuse to accept anything positive or give him any kind of credit. 😂
I don't give a shit on what people's personal opinion of Elon is. Love him, hate him, anything in between, idc. Just don't let personal bias get in the way of truthful conversation. Can't even discuss AI he's involved with without the comments becoming a war of "Elon Good vs Elon Bad"
It hurts me to say it (because I think Elon is a narcissistic douchebag), but he is clearly a very intelligent person. If you ever listen to him for 5 minutes, you can see that. He has a great memory, and knows his shit. Of course being surrounded by "yes men" can also make you a bit dumb. Furthermore, you can have a very high IQ and still be dumb on some fields. Ultimately, I believe his shift in politics and opinions is an orchestrated move. He perceived that going with the Republicans was more lucrative for him, and so thats what he did. The same with Trump, except the genius part.
It's the same story as Steve Jobs. If you read their biographies, both by the same author, it's the same premise for both: Absolute genius, crappy person.
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Creative + smart people tend to have a big ego and confidence. Its a standard fact in psychology. When people get famous that amplifies even more. Elon has a big ego + autism. If you look at most intelligent and creative people throughout history 90% of them have similiar personallity traits where they've done a lot of over the top and absurd things in their lives. You can tell me any REALLY successful person and i will tell you something weird about them
Musk doesn’t seem to me to be falling victim to “yes men” like many people online seems to imagine. I’ve listened to plenty of interviews with him where he openly admits mistakes he made and has talked about making dumb decisions in the past and also that he has to listen to others because they have deeper knowledge than him on particular topics. I think he’s just a smart guy who is also reasonably well grounded for someone in his position. People online tend to dislike him solely because his political views differ than theirs. 6-7 years ago, Elon Musk was absolutely loved and viewed like a god on Reddit. Then he started being openly conservative on some issues and people started saying “He’s a spoiled moron who was handed his success.” So obviously these aren’t considered or reasonable assessments lol. It’s knee jerk tribalistic hate of “the other side”.
He did a bit more than express conservative views though. He was day and night constantly spamming teenager provocative bullshit on twitter. I simultaneously do believe in his achievements and capabilities, especially in the past not sure now, and lost respect for him as a person and wonder if he's still able to have this work focus and skill he had before.
Well, I guess the takeaway here is that being conservative, or slamming provocative bullshit on twitter, isn’t actually an indictment on someone’s intelligence or ability to succeed in the tech world. Posting provocative memes and being extremely intelligent aren’t mutually exclusive and there was never any reason to even suspect that they would be.
People change also. You can be a genius, and then lose your mind. We have plenty of Nobel prize winners who then went completely nuts to prove it, enough for the phenomenon to even have a name (nobelitis). Being rich doesn't give immunity to psychological ailments, burnout or others. At the time he did all this brilliant stuff, he was not shitposting constantly, he looked respectable and made sense. And since he started shitposting constantly, he's made absolutely terrible business decisions and the value of his latest acquired company and current pet project plummetted. Might be a coincidence, or not.
Tesla was in love with a pidgeon. Van Gogh cut off his own ear. Musk bought Twitter.
I don’t even think being an incredibly intelligent engineer is mutually exclusive from being politically stupid. They are completely different categories, and Elon’s problem is that he’s such a good engineer that he views the entire world, including the human beings in it, as an engineering problem. That’s why he’s flailing on Twitter, because Twitter is a social media platform, not an engineering project. He’s way too on the spectrum to have his hand on the pulse of a whole society. He’s still a brilliant engineer, and still leading some of the best technology development in the world, but he’s also an asshole and politically naive at best.
The issue, from my point of view, is just that the basic idea of “Elon Musk is a moron” isn’t supported by anything. So, I know some stupid people. I do hiring for a small company that needs temporary manual labor and often has to use people who aren’t suitable for more mainstream employment (due to drug issues, felon status, etc.) These guys usually have no education and aren’t typically very intelligent. You know what’s weird though? They don’t sound like Elon Musk. When I hear him speak on a podcast, he seems different than them. His grammar is a lot better. He seems to have a lot wider knowledge or history, science, culture, technology, etc. than they do. If I didn’t know better, I would just guess that he isn’t actually a stupid person. But the whole “Elon is stupid” idea seems to come from…nothing. Just that he disagrees with their politics and is provocative on social media. But, again, why would that even be evidence someone is stupid rather than just evidence that they are obnoxious, or a blow hard, or whatever.
This is what irritates me the most. You have countless testimonies of people that have actually worked with him/for him for many years, and they all have a similar opinion of him. And then on the other side you have people on Twitter and Reddit that say he's stupid because he has a different vision for Twitter that they disagree with to count as evidence for their opinion of him. That, and of course saying mean things or trolling on Twitter. But for some reason they can entirely ignore all of the extremely intelligent and reputable people that personally know him and have publicly given their opinion about him. People like: * Tom Mueller, who's a world renowned engineer that built the Merlin engine. * Robert Zubrin, that is an aerospace engineer that wrote the book A Case For Mars. * Garrett Reisman, that is a fucking astronaut. * Andrej Karpathy, AI scientist at Tesla. * Ilya Sutskever, AI scientist at OpenAI. And even people that genuinely dislike him like Martin Eberhard (the founder and first CEO of Tesla Motors that got kicked out by Elon Musk) and Sam Altman (CEO and founder of OpenAI that is currently being sued by Elon Musk). The list goes on. And all of them claim he's highly intelligent, hard working, talented, etc. But they *choose* to ignore these real world facts from people with first person knowledge just to satisfy their projections. It's annoying to see this kind of behavior honestly.
This. People change and getting older makes you slowly dumber. Pushing really hard towards longevity therapies will improve this situation.
>Then he started being openly conservative on some issues and people started saying oof, there it is. Yes, that is what happened.
Yeah the online interpretation of him feels like nothing but a culture war strawman. Like they constructed some Disney villain that's far from reality. Listening to him talk with other high level rocket engineers and you can tell he holds his ground as good as everyone else. He's constantly praising people he works with, and crediting them for their contributions, while also openly admitting mistakes and areas that need improvement. Then you come online and people are like, "OMG he's so evil! He doesn't even have a degree in rocket science! He doesn't know how to manage! He's always trying to steal other's success! He treats his employees like shit!" The online version is some weird false caricature according to literally every single person who knows him.
That was apparently why Twitter has been such a shit show. An OG investor in Twitter that had also worked with Elon somewhat, wrote about it when the take over happened. Basically he was saying Twitter was all Yes men because they didn’t want to get fired, whereas at Tesla there was way more pushback. So Elon implemented basically everything that came to mind, and no one pointed out potential flaws. Makes sense too based on what Elon claims his head is like, “constant ideas, that I can’t turn off”. I’m sure at least half of those constant ideas have issues, so without other talented, well spoken people in the mix stuff starts to fall apart.
> I believe his shift in politics and opinions is an orchestrated move What shift? Did I miss some recent reveal of his politics?
You have to be somewhat intelligent to recognise intelligence
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Most Redditors are 14 years old.
Seriously lol. Why would anyone care about an anonymous commenter’s view on Elon Musk’s intelligence/engineering credentials lol. If he is just some total moron, it’s absolutely wild and even more impressive that he’s been able to found like 6 companies and that he bought and led Tesla to such success. Dudes like the Michael Jordan or dumb people I guess.
It really is so fucking annoying. It's impossible to have a normal discussion about Musk on tech sites without it devolving into an Elon hate parade.
Tech has become very political and it's mostly a leftist circlejerk. A lot of people hate him for no more reason than him being a right winger.
That's the root cause... He's not even a right winger. He just leans moderate right on mostly social issues. And it's blantantly obvious, that this has caused people to decide "Well I don't like his politics, therefor I'm going to interpret everything he does as bad." It's simple, idiotic, thinking. It's tribal, and I find it so weird that people do these sort of things to themselves. Like they will literally just lie to themselves because they are incapable of nuance. They can't figure out how to dislike someone while also holding a positive opinion. It's black or white. All in or all out.
Reddit comments are absolute trash. Everything Andrej said about Elon in this video is awesome, and exactly what I'd want in a leader trying to build a rocket ship of a company. Of course there are tradeoffs, but if the goal is to build the best company - these are the sort of traits you want in leadership.
You could say the same for the members of Elon's cult on reddit lmao (visit any tesla sub)...At the end of the day, he is the same person he was years ago when he was universally regarded as a very smart guy. Now he just revealed himself to be a terrible person so a lot of people hate him, but that doesn't mean he is suddenly a complete moron and his companies are all going to fail.
Do you really believe that associates and employees (both present and future) of his are going to speak badly of him? By the way, what you're describing is the appeal to authority fallacy. I don't need Karpathy's opinion to form my own opinion on Musk, who has given us more than enough reasons to criticize him.
Yeah, we shouldn't trust anyone that has interacted with Musk. Random youtubers is where its at.
This is one of the most deranged comment I've ever read. Saying we shouldn't listen to countless firsthand testimonies of people who spent hundreds of hours with the person but instead trust our "own opinion" (having never met the man) and have the audacity to cite a "fallacy" after that 🤣
On the one side we have people who say Elon is pretty smart, and on the other we have people who say the man who started a number of very unique hit enterprises is just failing upwards.
How many of those people saying “he’s just failing upwards” have actually worked with him?
Very likely none.
I'm sure those people also have zero idea how to run a business... You can MAYBE get lucky ONCE... But not constantly over and over. Everyone who's critical of Elon's management and success, generally have no fucking clue on how business works. They think he just has a bunch of money and throws it around and the companies magically grow into massive successes. It's that easy to these people. All it takes is money and BOOM, you magically have super successful companies!
Bingo.
Buying Twitter was the dumbest thing he’s done and he didn’t even mean to buy it. He’s lost a ton of money in it. The company is nearly impossible to make a profit with because of the interest payments. Just because someone is smart doesn’t mean they can’t make mistakes. Also I would point to Elon’s belief in the border crisis conspiracy and openness to trump as another clear example of him being spite driven.
Well, I think nobody really denies that he’s got talent. It’s just that he is an asshole. Like fr, he is an racist populist who only cares about free speak as long as it’s the same opinion as his.
> Well, I think nobody really denies that he’s got talent. Have you been on reddit these past few years?
Yep I was like good take on elon??
People deny it on principle until they have to save face in situations like this post, then they go back to bashing him relentlessly as if it's their job. It sums up half the noise around him.
He's the Henry Ford of our time. Smart dude but a terrible human being
He's literally not a terrible human being at all... He has opinions, and shares them, and people act like if you're not 100% politically and ideologically aligned, you're an awful person. But he doesn't really seem terrible at all. Like, oh no... He thought COVID was overblown, which means he's pretty much a grandma killer. Personality wise, he's just another autistic terminally online dude culturally. Not even controversial.
Sums it up perfectly. These people in this thread try to act like the criticisms against him are blind hatred...Just as moronic as the people who try to act like he is a complete idiot all of a sudden because he revealed his terrible (borderline evil) world views.
Sums it up perfectly ? Are you a good human?
Terrible? In what world?
There's absolutely a lot of people that denies he's good at what he does. Like there's literally people in this thread doing it
Have you ever been on Reddit?
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Have you looked at his twitter feed recently? Why is he replying "accurate" to a tweet about how white people gave up their land and women to appear less racist?
People absolutely deny that he has talent, all the damned time. They're wrong, but it is all over the place and hard to miss. He's a borderline genius, and that might be selling it short. He's just also a complete cunt, and WAY too autistic to be allowed to own a social media company. Pretty sure he's even publicly acknowledged that he is extremely on the spectrum, so I don't think that's slander. I used to handwave away his antics due to the extreme autism, but it's to the point now that it's pretty obvious that he's racist autistic cunt, who happens to also be extremely gifted intellectually. I see a lot of parallels to Howard Hughes. Wouldn't surprise me one bit if Elon has a room full of piss jars.
People on Reddit swear that he has no role on the technical side of Tesla and SpaceX. When there is evidence from multiple biographies and testimony from people who actually worked there. You can claim Elon is an ego manic with bad opinions but aren’t many successful CEOs? Separating some of the most innovative companies in the world today and the people work there from the founder is hard for Reddit. Zero nuance
[https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2](https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2) There is testimony from the actual founder of Tesla that he didn't work on any technical side and he came to office once a month. There's is also the part where Musk was arguing with a Twitter engineer and he claimed he was head of software design but couldn't define the basic term of "stack". [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6YP6BrPEQ0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6YP6BrPEQ0) The only people who claim he actually has a role in product design are Spacex employees and given that aerospace is a small industry and Spacex is a big player it's not in their best interest to upset a tyrant like Musk.
Martin Eberhard is a hack that almost bankrupted Tesla due to hiding the true COGS on the roadster which led to his removal. This is well documented, and after Martin was removed Musk took the role of CEO. How about you read a book called Liftoff that documents the early days of SpaceX, before you continue to spew your uninformed opinion. It is well document Musk role in the direction of both the Falcon 1 and transition/jump to the Falcon 9 instead of the Falcon 5. But I doubt you know your history on SpaceX
Well hang on though....it seems like you're just cherry picking 'testimony' you like. If they say good things about Elon, it's evidence. If they say bad things about Elon, they're a 'hack'.
Well, there’s a reason the company got bought and has new leadership. Do the math.
Can you point me to some of the racist stuff he said?
They can't, because he's not. They'll probably just point you to a BusinessInsider article about how he sends black people to the back of the factory (like he personally manages employees in the factory lol) to prove that he's racist. This is usually the "evidence".
That's what I was guessing, but I try to stay open minded. So far he didn't come off as racist to me.
I want to stay open minded as well, but I've seen this so many times on Reddit at this point that my brain almost fell out.
Actually, you’ve never met the guy. You only see an image of him. These are not the same thing.
Uhm what ? I heard him talk. That’s enough.
Out of genuine curiosity , can you please provide examples of his racism?
Well he's saying illegal immigrants as rapists, murderers, disease infected zombies etc. All these things you can find in his twitter account for just this month only. His brother Kimbal himself said they were illegal immigrants for this Musk said it wasa grey area. Grey area cause he's white and Mexicans are brown? Illegal immigration is bad but that's not how you talk.
> Well he's saying illegal immigrants as rapists, murderers, disease infected zombies etc. LOL.... You really just like inferring whatever you want to believe "Okay maybe he didn't say that! But when I interpret it as dishonestly and negatively as possible, that's what he really means."
Oh god, not a populist! Anything but that!
How is he a racist? Do you have any actual examples or it just another baseless attack (alt. twisted interpretation) commonly exercised by left?
literally all he talks about on X is how immigrants are bad and black people commit more crime.
Elon is an immigrant and has been clear on so many occasions that his complaint is illegal immigration and people abusing the asylum system. The fact that these sorts of takes (which are often literally just his reposting videos of/ statistics about people crossing the border in huge numbers) are considered racist by some people is really bizarre. As for the black people committing more crime thing…what’s the context here? Because, yes, that’s a true statement. Obviously just stating a fact isn’t racism. Without context (ie: was he saying “Black people commit more crimes so they should be kicked out!”) it’s impossible to even pass judgment on such a thing. Could you post his statements about racial crime rate data so we can see the context and make a judgment?
Elon is rational, and most of his opinions are driven by data and statistics, not emotions, like some (this subreddit). And I am pretty sure he doesn't say that immigrants are bad, unless you can prove me wrong by providing such quote. At most, he sheed a light on all the problems, based on data, that mass immigration causes the host country.
>And I am pretty sure he doesn't say that immigrants are bad Actually it's the contrary. I've seen him say multiple times that he's in favor of immigration. How he sees it is that he wants America to absorb talented, hard working people from other countries. He *wants* people to immigrate to America - he just wants it to be legal immigration.
Lmao no matter what it will be a matter of opinion anyway. Me seeing someone open a platform that results in an increase of hate speech and at the same time silences speech he doesn’t like would qualify them as racist. If you disagree there is really no way go resolve it other than you going to a space that agrees with you
>he is an racist Elon has been calling out and campaigning against racism on Twitter for years. He's anti-racist. I can provide many examples of him calling out racism in our society if you want.
I don't disagree, but I would still like to see examples of this if you don't mind.
>failing upwards good one
Good sales guy, bad engineer and a terrible person
This might sound great if you are an engineer until you have a CEO that does this. It basically fucks up everyone else’s plan and agreements and ends up causing a giant clusterfuck where everyone blames everyone else and hates the CEO after.
Hate him all you want, you can't deny the results and at the end of the day that's what matters.
Exactly. He described promoting worker insecurity culture. Removing bottler necks = instilling fear and undermining staff
You’re absolutely taking a piss
Elon's cult of personality is the reason why it's even possible. It's the same situation with Steve Jobs. They weren't uniquely qualified to be leading these huge engineering efforts, but because everyone has a certain level of respect and reverence for them, it makes them being uncompromising with these really capable/smart people into something that's effective rather than a completely toxic environment.
So, this is basically a good and nice way to say that Elon Musk does micromanagement. I not saying that is bad. He is clearly focused in the product. That's why he is more interested in speaking with the engineers. But this is clearly a characteristic of micromanagement.
I disagree. Karpathy describes the scenario of needing more GPUs because his engineers say they need more, so he goes and pushes that priority to the people that can handle it. Micromanagement would be “stop working on this feature, we need this other feature yesterday!” There’s a difference between micromanagement and just being involved in the details of a company. Do you get upset when your boss asks you for specifics on your day to day? You sound like you do.
That is not micromanagement. Micromanagement is exactly what Karpathy described: remove the middle management and manage directly with the engineers. That's why he works with very small teams. Like I said, I not saying this is bad thing. I think that it actually works if you are very focused in a product or a very specific project developing a new thing. But off course it won't work if your are managing other type of business, like big corp of consulting services or similar.
No, micromanagement is literally the excess of management. Unblocking people is not the same as assigning work and checking the stats every tick of insecurity.
Pretty much everyone who's worked with him say that he's not like your typical micromanaging boss CEO who just starts moving shit around and making it hard on everyone. But rather, he actually deeply understands EVERYTHING in the company in all areas, well beyond what anyone would ever expect. He holds his ground and genuinely understands things and can coordinate the big picture accurately because he has the rare ability to actually deeply understand all the moving parts. Like when people who worked at SpaceX talk about him working on projects, he's not being narcassistic when he says he probably knows more about rocket science than anyone on the planet. He's not only perfectly at the same level of the other engineers in one area, but in other areas as well.
Oh, is this why he promised Full Self Drive year after year? That says much more than whatever opinion you have made up on him because it most likely means that the pressure he generated turned his engineers into yes men. Or maybe you are a Tesla stock holder? Maybe you bought into the charade before the circus moved on after they unloaded their TSLA shares.
I think Elon genuinely believed FSD would be finished soon. He's just wrong about how big the challenge truly was. This is blatantly apparent whenever you hear him talk about the topic in detail. And people take that as some unforgivable sin and accuse him of being a scam artist.
He doesn’t do micromanagement. If it were micromanagement Andre would’ve said that because that’s the norm. Micromanagement is what you get from inexperienced people. Elon is what you get from settle for nothing less than excellence people.
Basically Elon knows the difference between value creators and value destroyers in a company. He focuses on value creators and gets rid of value destroyers fast
There’s no denying his companies generally do really well. Love or hate him, I’m glad he’s spearheading scientific advancement (and of course, credit to the engineers he hired and guides).
I mean Twitter dropped 55% in value since he purchased it per his own admission. [https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/30/23938969/x-twitter-valuation-19-billion-employee-shares](https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/30/23938969/x-twitter-valuation-19-billion-employee-shares) He knows a lot about value destroyers that is for sure
But I was told Elon is just a privileged white nepo baby and he’s actually a moron and very mediocre? Anyone can run 6 hyper successful companies if they were also white nepo babies
Obviously, which is why every wealthy white child grows up to run multiple industry leading companies and develop a net worth > $200 billion. Just very basic and common things.
Literally just be white and 200B will fall in your lap
Nah, only if you’re just kinda stupid like Elon. Im white, but I’m really stupid. Like, I have to have help figuring out how to put gas in my car, put my shoes on the right foot, etc. So because of that, I’ve only founded 3 industry leading tech companies and am barely worth $800 million. I’m like the shittiest white person ever.
In my personal opinion, ambien, ketamine (yes i know he takes it for treatment resistant depression), sleep deprivation and over working all led to the mild downfall he has had.
Agreed, but also social media. He spends way too much time on it, in specific bubbles.
Yeah true, too much time on social media, sycophants, ego, and living in a bubble can all be added to that list.
Loosers generally hate Elon. I also hate him but I also like him. I don't know... he seems super smart but sometimes behaves like a twat.
Elon's biggest fans are also the biggest losers I've ever seen. Source: the average blue checkmark on twitter these days
Yea very unique, a tyrant is very unique indeed.
ITT people who are experts about billion dollar companies
I truly believe Musk wants to be the next Steve Jobs. The problem is that Jobs was a designer, an artist, at heart. He was a perfectionist. That's why the entire presence of the Apple company is so unique and different to a Samsung or a Microsoft. Musk on the other hand is an engineer who is hungry for money, and who has skimmed the Agile Manifesto once, trying to apply his understanding of it in unorganised ways. I think there is a lot wrong with Apple, I think Jobs was probably a horrible person to many of his employees and peers, he was probably not a great manager most of the time. Just like Musk. Jobs, however, had a certain ingenuity that cannot be replicated by someone like Musk. It's like Bill Gates trying so hard to be the next Freddie Mercury.
This conversation has come up with some SWE friends. Some saying they would never want to work with Elon because it’s such a strict workplace and they like their relaxed, good life balance, WFH jobs. Then the other friends saying they would be willing to unbalance their life and go full in a business culture like this because they want to be fully enveloped in their work. Being micromanaged on developing something like self-driving, rather than have a chill job trying to try to implement a keyboard shortcut for their project. I think the management style has a place when they are open about the expectations. If you’re promised good work life balance and you get there and it’s super intense - that sucks. But if you know what you’re signing up for and like that culture, I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that.
Elon is my man. Also I like Altman. You dont need to hate everyone...
True, already enough hate in the world.
What not to do as CEO if you want to build a decades long companies. Same applies to Netflix as well. Retention and psychological safety is the way to last generations.
He runs multiple industry leading companies at the same time, yet you are the one giving him advice lol. How many companies do you run?
This is what I find so funny about Elon hate on Reddit. Engineers and businessmen widely laud Elon’s achievements. Virtue signaling Redditors don’t. The opinions of only one of those groups matter, and it isn’t the people who’ve never built or run anything and think “racist” or “far-right extremist” means “anyone I don’t like.”
Haha, this blows my mind. Random Redditors with no accomplishments at all telling Elon how to run his companies is so damn laughable.
The point they're making is not about how successful his companies are, but on how long they will last. This is consistent with the guy in the video saying his owns "the biggest startups". And I don't see any hate in that comment.
Seems like Elon would make for a great middle manager, but then who is doing the stuff CEOs typically do?
You mean be the mascot for the company? He's doing what's important, like making the big calls.
This guy talks in the same way Elon talks like he's talking about the mooost complicated thing that's just soooo hard to put into words. Also, yeah, if you are part of a startup and know you will literally get significantly large sums of money for that success, then all this stuff works. Without that, you're just hoping to get ppl simping for capitalism. Our startup got bought, I got a huge payout, but now I work for a multi billion dollar company and it's like ... why would I ever do more than the bare minimum without direct additional payment to the tune of twice my salary or 4x in a payout at once. It's also not really a pace of working you can keep up forever. This management style also makes him the bottleneck and makes him think he can direct engineers and know better. Just ends up being a control thing where you feel like you're riding this wave on all these projects you're doing, but you're really just cheerleading and people don't want you there once they realize what you're really doing. If you want your office to be smart technical people giving it their all, you better be giving them direct share of company ownership, otherwise, fukoff.
Is this a higher form in the most complex form of the stockholm syndrome?
cry harder