[philliphaydon]

I'm not quite sure how I'm defending him. I don't really like him, especially after he voiced his opinions on Ukraine and Taiwan, I hope he loses all his money. And I'll never touch a Tesla.

All Elon has done by buying Twitter is reveal how much of a trash company it was internally. From management/board perspective, clearly they was never listening to the engineers and just doing the bare minimum to get inflated salaries and bonuses.

[lazide]

99% of companies would have imploded at the same pace.

Offending everyone who matters that runs the product you just bought and terrorizing all your employees is a fast and easy road to completely imploding any company.

[causi]

Indeed. I agree with most if not all of the changes Musk made, but it was obvious to anyone that he made them in the worst possible way on the worst possible schedule. He couldn't be doing more damage if he was deliberately trying to tank the company.

[ilyt]

He did that idiocy because company wasn't profitable in the first place tho.

Like, yeah, if he did that to well functioning company it would fall apart too, but Twitter wasn't a well-functioning company. And by that I mean "he would ruin it slower".

[dragonwriter]

> All Elon has done by buying Twitter is reveal how much of a trash company it was internally.

Except that's not true at all. What he did is saddle it with a bunch of debt and fire of a bunch of really-poorly-considered cosr cutting and revenue enhancement ideas that clearly weren’t thought through or part of a coherent strategy.

He might have and end-game vision, but he had no plausible roadmap to deal with the sucking wounded he inflcted with the acquisition, much less to get to his end-game vision.

[philliphaydon]

No sorry. When you have people on Twitter claiming that they should be fixing 10+ years of technical debt to improve performance. And the platform is overrun by bots and spam, issues are not resolved. Complaints dating back 10 years are not addressed in any way. There’s obviously internal problems.

If the platform cannot run for 5 minutes without someone pressing a button to keep it online then I have to question what 1000s of engineers are doing at Twitter.

Engineers not being good is probably not the issue. But I’m pretty sure it comes from higher up.

It’s also evident that Twitter was poorly managed by the fact it’s pretty much never made a profit.

[kamaal]

>>If the platform cannot run for 5 minutes without someone pressing a button to keep it online then I have to question what 1000s of engineers are doing at Twitter.

It is not just tech debt per se. In larger companies most middle managers have no incentive to fix things for the long term. And lack of automation means they get to hire more people, which is good for them, as it expands their fiefdom.

I know one company in California which hires H1-Bs by the thousands, many even make it to Green cards. Their work- Somebody sends a bunch of values from the India office, they manually edit shell scripts(written ages ago, by some dude who has long left), run it, get the values and enter those values into some internal application. The thought that all this could be done by web api's didn't cross their mind. Never mind that automating this simple thing could help cut employee count by the thousands. Another place that I heard of, similar things but with SQL. The whole thing could be automated. But somebody wrote a bunch of shell scripts and left shop. Now people need to take outputs from SQL scripts and feed to the next ones. And then cut paste the data into some system.

In the woke world that we live in, where everybody is supposed to be special, and we are supposed to lie to ensure nobody gets hurt feelings. Most people forget, these jobs should have never existed at the first place. Many a times cutting them actually leads to more profits, and saves lots of management effort. Sure people losing jobs is sad, but if you are doing a job that shouldn't exist at the first place, you should likely move before you are let go.

The world is full of wasted effort, it is many times even tolerated for all sorts of reasons. But some times it is not.

[BuckRogers]

He lost me on Ukraine and Taiwan too. Free democratic societies allowed him to become something. Dictators and Communism for everyone that stands in his way towards more wealth.

I was determined to buy a Tesla. Now we placed an order for a VW ID.4.

[concordDance]

I really don't get why people dislike his Ukraine stance.

"Beat up Russia a bunch, make peace and throw Russia a bone by letting them keep Crimea." seems like the death minimising stance to me and in the best interests of the inhabitants of the each region.

[tokai]

If Russia gets anything out of this war it would be anything but death minimising. It will signal to them, and all other states, that aggressive wars are viable. They are in Ukraine because war has worked out for them in Georgia and Chechnya. You are literally espousing a pro-imperialism stance masquerading as a moderate position.

[ilyt]

Why would you "throw a bone" to terrorists ?

That would be like saying "let's throw a bone to nazis and let them keep Poland"...

[wussboy]

Because appeasement worked out so well!

[Deukhoofd]

Because Russia has been taking pieces of land from Ukraine since 2014. If you'd hand over more land to Russia now, they'd invade again in a couple of years, with their army stronger than it is now.

Besides that, appeasement has never worked against aggressors in the past. It basically looks like Musk is calling for another Munich Agreement. It shows a complete lack of understanding of history, and of international relations.

[caskstrength]

Because it is dumb, insensitive to people losing their lives on the the front lines and makes it seem like Russia is _actually willing_ to get out of Ukraine if only it is allowed to keep Crimea, which it clearly is not?

[echelon]

I was a fan for all that Musk did with SpaceX. Single-handedly dropping costs to LEO and creating a civilian / commercial space industry -- mind blowingly impressive, and willed into existence by one man.

When he spoke against Taiwanese and Ukrainian sovereignty, he looked an awful lot like he was being controlled or having his arm twisted by foreign powers. These were hugely inflammatory remarks made back to back during a time of heightened geopolitical tensions.

I have to wonder if those high up in the ranks at the DoD are looking at ways to minimize Elon's risk or influence. Especially given the fact that he now launches classified payloads. Elon has enormous vested financial interests near or within two adversarial countries.

[phire]

I get the impression that others at SpaceX moderate and "manage" him.

Let him get distracted with micro-managing whatever cool project is currently takes his fancy, while they do the more boring job of keeping the company running, and making sure the customers are happy. I bet these people are extra happy when he is focusing on projects that don't have customers yet, like Starship/BFR.

Twitter might actually be the first time were he has 100% control over a large company without someone in the background moderating his more wild impulses.

[_djo_]

Exactly.

Gwynne Shotwell is the too seldom acknowledged hero of SpaceX, who has played exactly that role of keeping the lights on, moderating Musk’s worse impulses, and managing him into less destructive directions. It’s been evident for years.

There are similar people at Tesla, who focus on the endless operational tweaking and improvement that Musk finds boring, and who slowly fixed all the most critical issues on the Model 3 line while Musk increasingly took to politics and social media.

I’m not one of those who believes Musk hasn’t done anything or played no part in SpaceX or Tesla’s success, because that’s clearly false. But he also hasn’t been the sole genius responsible for all the success or infallible. But too many people have made him believe he was and we’re now seeing the result of that hubris and ignorance.

[pencilguin]

Yet, Gwynne seems happy to lie about suborbital freight for him, and about colonizing Mars. I have not encountered anyone prominent at Tesla supporting his lies about self-driving (though that doesn't mean none do).

[bmitc]

Does he really do anything at SpaceX?

[conradfr]

He fires people, at least.

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1593198409367756800

[cokeandpepsi]

The issue here is that he has idiots whispering in his ear this time, the majority of his other ventures he was partnered with decent people

it's pretty obvious there's a load of sv vultures egging him on

hard to imagine a worse direction for this to go

[kidme5]

SpaceX isn't really focused on going to Mars... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33510272#33510919

[d1sxeyes]

That “single-handedly” word is where I think the problem begins…