Elon Musk | Owner of X

Revan

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Always makes me laugh when people keep up with many myths about Musk;

He founded Paypal - False
He founded Tesla - False
He is a physicist - False
He is a rocket scientist - False
He is an engineer - False

If you check out plainsite.org and Aaron Greenspan (who left twitter the week or so before Musk took over) you can see all of the law suits and fraudulent activity of Musk and Tesla.
He kind of did. Paypal was created when Elon Musk (X.com) and Peter Thiel (confinity) merged their companies in a 50-50 merge, with Musk being the initial CEO (he was ousted in favor of Thiel, I think 8 months later). The merge is described in length in Peter Thiel's book, but essentially, both him and Musk realized that if they continue competing against each other, both companies would be screwed.

He definitely did not found Tesla, but as far as I know, Tesla had built less than 100 cars when Musk invested there. While the idea of Tesla/electric cars has nothing to do with Musk, he essentially was in charge of transforming a small startup into a car company that last year was more valuable than the rest of car companies combined, and is still by far the most valuable car company.

He is not a physicist, he is not a rocket scientist (does anyone claim it), and he is not an engineer. He is also not an AI scientist, and every time he talks about AI, it is clear that he knows feck all about it. At the same time, he was pivotal in building 3 multi-billion dollar companies (one of which is valued at over 100B, and another at its peak was valued over 1 trillion). I guess you can be lucky once by chance, but three times is a bit too much. Of course, that doesn't mean that he knows what he is doing for many things (as clearly we can see from Twitter), and he definitely seems to have a massive Dunning-Kruger effect, which wouldn't surprise me if it becomes his downfall.

He should just stick to Tesla and XSpace, instead of thinking that he is saving the world, when in fact, he is just elevating his ego. Kind of the Kevin Durant of entrepreneurs.
 

stoinz

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I'm not sure if I will miss it so much now. I use it mainly for news feed but I've been getting loads of conspiracy stuffs on my feeds. I've blocked more people in the last 2 weeks than I did in the last 10 years.
 

Carl

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Find it hard to believe Twitter is actually going to go anywhere, and that most of this isn't just hysterical people being hysterical.
 

Carl

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That's not to say it isn't producing some fabulous content though :lol:
 

Mike Smalling

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Does anyone else think he's doing this on purpose? I just cant believe that this all is not intentional. As a programmer some of the stupidity is like buying a Michelin stared restaurant and serving burnt toast. Its too ridiculous to be accidental. I cant figure the reasoning but there must be one.
I genuinely think he's just been surrounded by yes men for too long, and has bought into his own hype from his adoring fan base, to the point where he thinks he knows best on every single topic. When things go to shit, he doesn't know how to deal with it, because he refuses to face the possibility that he may be wrong on something. He won't solve this without showing some humility and listening to others, and that doesn't seem likely to happen.

It might be insignificant, but think back to when he brought that sink into the office. His shit-eating grin just screamed that he thought he was incredibly clever and witty.
 

sun_tzu

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I genuinely think he's just been surrounded by yes men for too long, and has bought into his own hype from his adoring fan base, to the point where he thinks he knows best on every single topic. When things go to shit, he doesn't know how to deal with it, because he refuses to face the possibility that he may be wrong on something. He won't solve this without showing some humility and listening to others, and that doesn't seem likely to happen.

It might be insignificant, but think back to when he brought that sink into the office. His shit-eating grin just screamed that he thought he was incredibly clever and witty.
He will say its beneath him... appoint somebody else to run it ... probably turn it into a musky trump fest of top G's owning the libs and milk it for all the crypto / political advertising he can get out of it for a few years?

And anybody who disagrees with the direction he will just tweet that they are a peado
 

Pexbo

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Find it hard to believe Twitter is actually going to go anywhere, and that most of this isn't just hysterical people being hysterical.
It’s not his shit posting which is getting people hysterical. It’s the fact he’s firing/losing almost the entire dev team.

There seems to be this idea that web applications like Twitter just work without any maintenance once they are up and running but it couldn’t be further from the truth.

As much as anything, Twitter is dependent on other tools and frameworks at every layer of the tech stack and these need to be kept up to the latest version as security updates are released. Leaving it stagnate is not an option and it’s a prime candidate for a major hack.
 

SmashedHombre

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It’s not his shit posting which is getting people hysterical. It’s the fact he’s firing/losing almost the entire dev team.

There seems to be this idea that web applications like Twitter just work without any maintenance once they are up and running but it couldn’t be further from the truth.

As much as anything, Twitter is dependent on other tools and frameworks at every layer of the tech stack and these need to be kept up to the latest version as security updates are released. Leaving it stagnate is not an option and it’s a prime candidate for a major hack.
Apparently the few staff that are still there are all that’s needed and Elon is a genius for seeing this. A lot of people seem to genuinely believe web devs, engineers etc don’t actually do much.

I’m really looking forward to them finding out otherwise.
 

Solius

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You'd like to think this will be a lesson to the dweebs who think rich people are smarter than everyone, but it won't be.
 

Pogue Mahone

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It’s not his shit posting which is getting people hysterical. It’s the fact he’s firing/losing almost the entire dev team.

There seems to be this idea that web applications like Twitter just work without any maintenance once they are up and running but it couldn’t be further from the truth.

As much as anything, Twitter is dependent on other tools and frameworks at every layer of the tech stack and these need to be kept up to the latest version as security updates are released. Leaving it stagnate is not an option and it’s a prime candidate for a major hack.
Oooh. Look at the computer nerd guy pretending computer nerd guys are important. If it really goes tits up we all know that Elon just needs to turn it off and back on again.
 

UpWithRivers

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I genuinely think he's just been surrounded by yes men for too long, and has bought into his own hype from his adoring fan base, to the point where he thinks he knows best on every single topic. When things go to shit, he doesn't know how to deal with it, because he refuses to face the possibility that he may be wrong on something. He won't solve this without showing some humility and listening to others, and that doesn't seem likely to happen.

It might be insignificant, but think back to when he brought that sink into the office. His shit-eating grin just screamed that he thought he was incredibly clever and witty.
There is egotistic. There is being surrounded by yes men. And then there is just plain stupidity. Things like charging for verification can be put down to him having a big ego. Things like pulling down services which result in users not being logged in or firing 80 percent of your workforce, or rating devs by lines of code makes absolutely no sense. To me thats not down to personality. Its intentional destruction.
 

jojojo

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Find it hard to believe Twitter is actually going to go anywhere, and that most of this isn't just hysterical people being hysterical.
I think most of us find ourselves in the peanut gallery on this one rather than hysterical over it. He knows he needs to cut costs but from the sounds of the effort/thought put into it, he might as well have done it by firing everyone whose surname begins with A to T.

Will Twitter just run itself? Of course, until something breaks or Musk orders his depleted workforce to switch off functions "because no one knows why it's there" or he decides to add a chargeable new feature to make up for the ad revenue it's lost.

He went from "free speech", "humour" to permanent bans on the wrong sort of comedy overnight. He's bought a new toy and it looks like he really did buy it for banter and giggles - which is why I reckon he'll be hiring someone to run the place soon.
 

Cassidy

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I reckon Twitter will turn out to be better and profitable within 24 months.
 

Mike Smalling

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There is egotistic. There is being surrounded by yes men. And then there is just plain stupidity. Things like charging for verification can be put down to him having a big ego. Things like pulling down services which result in users not being logged in or firing 80 percent of your workforce, or rating devs by lines of code makes absolutely no sense. To me thats not down to personality. Its intentional destruction.
Where’s the motive though? He is now facing a financial loss of tens of billions, impact that spills into his other ventures, and public humiliation (even if he doesn’t see it like that). I just don’t see it.
 

Brophs

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I reckon Twitter will turn out to be better and profitable within 24 months.
He does appear to have unwitting happened upon Twitter’s absolute sweet spot: the ability to call people paedos online without fear of consequence or retribution.
 

MadMike

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Where’s the motive though? He is now facing a financial loss of tens of billions, impact that spills into his other ventures, and public humiliation (even if he doesn’t see it like that). I just don’t see it.
We can't be certain of the motives, but there's a certain element of hubris for sure. A lot of stuff he's touched turned to gold and that inflated his ego and made him think he's infallible. I reckon he feels he's doing the right thing.
 

Beachryan

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Ooohhh, it’s fun with math time.

he has owned Twitter for 21 day. Let’s assume a hundred dollar bill takes 30 seconds to burn and weights 1g

44 billion = 2.1 billion per day
= 87 million per hour
= 1.45 million per minute
= 730K per 30 sec
= 7,300 $100 bills per burn
= 7.3 kg burned every 30 seconds,
= 14.6 kg burned per min
= 876 kg burned per hour
= 21,000 kg burned per day
= 441,500 kg burned total
= mass of 4 blue whales, 3 747’s, or the ego of one gigantic billionaire prick.
This has made me morning, thank you good sir!
 

Cassidy

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It's like watching a plane on fire about to hit the ground and saying it's going to reach its destination safely but sure.
Not when the plane was already one fire before he took over
 

MadMike

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Not when the plane was already one fire before he took over
Narrator voice: it wasn't.

I disagree. Look at the numbers
It had a bad business model where it was struggling to capitalise on its user base and generate adequate revenue going forward. It's a struggle of a lot of fast growing internet companies, same was the case for Facebook and YouTube. The business model sure needed change. Hence the analogy of a plane leaking fuel is apt.

I don't see how releasing features with 0 forethought and getting an advertiser backlash or firing ~90% of your experienced worker base, changes the business model for the better. If anything it hugely jeopardises your operations. It sounds more like he lit the fuel on fire.
 
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weetee

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What I find most astonishing is the amount of time he seemingly spends with nonsense. Assuming it really is him tweeting all day long. Or call the just-fired-badge-master to come back because they locked themselves out in the process. I never followed him so no idea if he was always that much "hands on". I mean even the best can make a big bad business decision once in a while for whatever reason but I'd be interested in seeing a chart about the amount of time he spend on twitter/social media per day.
 

slyadams

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How many do we think will be left on Monday? They had 7500 when Musk took over.

I am thinking somewhere between one and two thousand.
Nowhere near 2000. It seems like basically 50% of the company was let go in the first round and around 75% accepted his "work yourself to death or take 3 months severence offering". If that's true you're looking at less than a thousand left.

Its hard to overstate how toxic he makes work environments. I work in the space industry and it was common knowledge that SpaceX was the worst place to work. The problem was there aren't that many options in that industry for some of those jobs, and the mission was also cool, which kept people there. For software engineers at Twitter there are millions of other jobs and Twitter really has no mission other than to grow. There's literally almost nothing attractive about working there now, I can see it being 90% those on sponsored visas that hang around.
 

slyadams

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He is not a physicist, he is not a rocket scientist (does anyone claim it), and he is not an engineer. He is also not an AI scientist, and every time he talks about AI, it is clear that he knows feck all about it. At the same time, he was pivotal in building 3 multi-billion dollar companies (one of which is valued at over 100B, and another at its peak was valued over 1 trillion). I guess you can be lucky once by chance, but three times is a bit too much. Of course, that doesn't mean that he knows what he is doing for many things (as clearly we can see from Twitter), and he definitely seems to have a massive Dunning-Kruger effect, which wouldn't surprise me if it becomes his downfall.
Well, he gave himself the title of "chief engineer" at a rocket company. The implication is clear.
 

Cassidy

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Narrator voice: it wasn't.



It had a bad business model where it was struggling to capitalise on its user base and generate adequate revenue going forward. It's a struggle of a lot of fast growing internet companies, same was the case for Facebook and YouTube. The business model sure needed change. Hence the analogy of a plane leaking fuel is apt.

I don't see how releasing features with 0 forethought, getting an advertiser backlash and firing ~90% of your worker base changes the business model for the better. If anything it hugely jeopardises your operations. It sounds more like he lit the fuel on fire.
The work force was bloated clearly (not just Twitter the entire industry). They will make mistakes and iterate quickly rather than suffer from paralysis and ship nothing (what has Twitter shipped in the last few years)

I wouldn’t judge this based soley on the first month, especially when a lot is based on dislike for Musk anyway.

Fail fast and iterate with a smaller more engaged team. I think what comes out at the end of that will be interesting.

Do not be suprised to see long form video coming to Twitter within that 2 years along with improvements in spaces.

I think the industry is going to get a shake up top once PE sees what happens at Twitter.