[93po]

> The illusion of Elon Musk, David Sacks and Jason Calcanis as savvy operators is completely gone.

Elon has owned Twiter for less than a week. How is it that everyone is already declaring it a failure? How can you argue the richest man on the planet is bad at running businesses?

[WorldMaker]

> How is it that everyone is already declaring it a failure?

The article does touch on this a bit. Elon went in "with a red pen": his entire first week from an outside perspective was spent looking for costs to cut, departments to toss, and things to shutdown. It culminated in a 50% (!) layoff in the first week. That's not usually the sign of a healthy start, especially if you assume that the previous owners weren't that crazy and had somewhere upwards of 100% redundancy where you can just fire 50% of the company without consequences.

> How can you argue the richest man on the planet is bad at running businesses?

1) The Peter Principle: incompetency has a way of failing upward in businesses.

2) The "Gravity" Constant of Money: once you've made enough net worth it attracts more automatically. Billionaires are basically "black holes" of passive income no matter what they think their day job is.

[beeboop]

Cutting costs in a company that's almost never been profitable is failure? A huge layout isn't a suggestion of an unhealthy start, it's a suggestion of an unhealthy status quo.

What material business failings has Elon had so far that you would include in him failing upwards? Is Tesla and SpaceX successful despite Elon's bad decisions, and if so, what were those bad decisions?

[WorldMaker]

> Cutting costs in a company that's almost never been profitable is failure? A huge layout isn't a suggestion of an unhealthy start, it's a suggestion of an unhealthy status quo.

Maybe? It's not just that's an early layoff. It's that it is an early layoff of a huge magnitude. Again, a 50% layoff means that the previous status quo had upwards of 100% redundancy. That is unbelievable for any company, no matter how unprofitable. (I could believe it of a very profitable company with money to "waste", but a publicly traded company getting asked every quarter why they aren't profitable yet? I can't believe it. If it were that simple to cut overhead, shareholders would have demanded it years ago.) Feel free to give Musk the benefit of the doubt and assume Twitter really was that unhealthy. I feel there's a lot more reason to be skeptical here.

> What material business failings has Elon had so far that you would include in him failing upwards? Is Tesla and SpaceX successful despite Elon's bad decisions, and if so, what were those bad decisions?

I may be a bit hyperbolic claiming that the Peter Principle must especially apply to billionaires.

But, it is entirely possible to believe that Musk succeeded entirely on luck and his decisions didn't matter (for good or bad) in the long run. EVs were a huge gamble 15 years ago, but it also didn't take that much of a crystal ball to know that they were "the future". Space is always a giant gamble and the most successful always seem to just be the luckiest. (That was one of Heinlein's hypotheses early in the space race. I think a lot of sci-fi writers still believe it to be true today. Admittedly sci-fi writers don't have the most hard data to prove/disprove such a hypothesis, but it is still a useful hypothesis.)

None of that requires "proving" that the companies were successful "despite" Musk. I think there is evidence of some questionable business model practices, too (and there's plenty on Musk's business decisions out there to find; it's not "new" criticism), and I have provided some of it in at least one other thread, but at the end of the day: when you are judging someone based on the number of poker chips they have on the table, it's fair to question if it was all just random luck, especially when that someone is also acting a bit as the Dealer and getting a chunk of House money too.

[reducesuffering]

The guy did just buy a $15b business for $45b, instantly losing $30b...

[beeboop]

The measure of success isn't how much Twitter fell before he had anything to do with it. It's where it ends up after he's had more than a couple days to improve it.

[reducesuffering]

By any measure, Twitter is currently far worse off than a week ago. Yes, a measure of success is purchasing something for 3x the price, losing $30b because someone was foolish enough to initiate that purchase. You should question the competence of someone doing that.