[ulkesh]

All this does is point out that smart people worked at Twitter who may now no longer work there, whether on their own accord, or due to Elon’s bulldogging tactics.

Elon thinks he knows what he’s doing, but what he is going to be left with are people who are willing to work hard by his standards, but not necessarily smart.

The simple truth is Elon knows nothing about the actual work involved in tech. He knows words or elicits help from others on what to say that sounds like tech speak (RPCs!), but when it comes to being truly knowledgeable in this space, he is losing his most valuable assets because of his amazingly poor managerial and ownership style.

I know there are a lot of Elon fans on this site, and will disagree with all of this; but his abilities have not at all been proven. Yes, he knows how to spend money to claim credit for technical advances, but until he actually has his hands dirty in the muck of the hard work of tech, he will always be a glorified self-promoter with no substance.

And Twitter will suffer for it.

[memish]

John Carmack, "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."

Kevin Watson, who developed the avionics for Falcon 9 and Dragon and previously managed the Advanced Computer Systems and Technologies Group within the Autonomous Systems Division at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory: "Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.

He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.

He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years."

[karpathy]

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).

[jiggawatts]

I think what upsets a lot of the Silicon Valley types here on HN is that people just like them are being called on their bullshit and fired en-masse for it. That has got to be uncomfortable.

You know the old saying: "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It."

That's what's happening here.

That engineer that was humiliated publicly for defending a slow-as-molasses JavaScript-heavy microservices Rube Goldberg machine? Hacker News is filled with people just like him that have built near identical software in other orgs.

Understandably they're upset and are looking for any excuse to dismiss Elon's criticism of not just Twitter, but their entire industry.

[phphphphp]

I doubt you'll find many people arguing that the value of employee output is evenly distributed across all people in a company: regardless of discipline, there's always a minority who are delivering the most value. There's always the most valuable software engineers, the most valuable sales people, the most valuable executives. The problem with Elon's specific brand of this take is that it's ignorant of the real-world human aspect: Elon could pick the best software engineer he has ever worked with, and helicopter them into a dysfunctional environment, and they would struggle to deliver value.

If Elon had joined Twitter, and spent time understanding the business and environment and then excised the people he felt weren't contributing towards his vision, that would be one thing... but he has made arbitrary judgements based on absurd metrics like lines of code or willingness to show up at 1am to draw on a whiteboard, he has not made judgements based on the quality of the work or the value people have delivered.

Likewise, to suggest that a software engineer is bad because they were a part of a team that built a "...slow-as-molasses JavaScript-heavy microservices Rube Goldberg machine..." is absurd: what if that person was the only reason that it wasn't 10x slower? What if, they were the lynchpin in that team ensuring that brought everyone else up to a much higher standard which ensured that what they built was usable (even if it was bad)? You cannot judge the contribution of an individual without considering the wider context.

I have no problem with a company cutting most of their software engineers (I encourage clients to minimise their exposure to software engineers, I encourage careful hiring over volume) but what Elon is doing is... not that.

[jiggawatts]

> ...spent time understanding the business and environment...

You're probably right, but there's a decent chance that Elon's heavy-handed approach was necessary.

I've seen the "gentle" approach fail.

For example, at $dayjob a bunch of on-prem stuff is being slowly modernised into the cloud. Very slowly. Slow enough to give the dinosaurs time to play politics and protect their turf.

For example, the networks teams that are used to legacy in-line firewalls will cozy up to some non-technical senior manager with a budget and get them to approve a project to roll out this legacy technology in the cloud. That way they don't have to retrain or -- worse -- risk being made redundant.

If instead some team comes in and simply bulk-migrates workloads from on-prem to the cloud... breaking a handful in the process and just fixing forward, then it appears to be messy and crazy, but the effect is that the legacy data centre teams are made redundant virtually overnight. Now they've got no clout, no time, and no pull. They're simply walked, and will find jobs elsewhere.

I've seen both approaches, and the latter style worked better long-term.

[sgu999]

> That engineer that was humiliated publicly for defending a slow-as-molasses JavaScript-heavy microservices Rube Goldberg machine?

Citation needed ;D

[MockObject]

https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/14/musk_twitter_rpc_spat...

[roguas]

Every org has slow-as-molasses, badly designed, illogical components. It is about ratio.

Time will tell. I don't think Musk/twitter's case will set any precedent. He is too much of a character to provide broad meaningful insights into industry. Also he has accumulated a list of failures which are rarely mentioned.

[saagarjha]

If that is the case, why has he been making mistakes that seem fairly elementary on Twitter? Like, I understand not understanding a problem space and wanting to learn more. But you say he has good intuitions and mental models–I would've expected at least some basic background research before posting online. Why aren't we seeing that?

[lupire]

Has he ever make a public statement, at least a paragraph in length, explaining something technical?

It's hard to blame people based on his decades of public behavior and lying about his education, falsely claiming to have a physics degree and to have been admitted to grad school.

[3eto]

Thank you for taking the time to write and share your unique and relevant insight.

[lawrenceyan]

This is why I still regularly read HN. I appreciate your commentary.

[thefz]

> "Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2 pm today. Before doing so, please email a bullet point summary of what your code commands have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code"

Actual quote. Anyone using the term "code commands" comes out a little detached from programming reality, let alone the rest of this request, it is out of a Dilbert strip.

[no_op]

"Code commands" is very plausibly an autocomplete flub of what was supposed to be "code commits." When I type "code comm" my iPhone offers up "commands" as the completion.

I've seen a lot of mockery of this request, but I suspect people aren't considering the wide variance in employee quality that can exist within a mismanaged organization. What Musk was asking for here wouldn't be a good way to evaluate skilled, conscientious developers, but it would be a pretty effective way to rapidly identify people who are basically incompetent or just aren't really doing anything.

[sundarurfriend]

> What Musk was asking for here wouldn't be a good way to evaluate skilled, conscientious developers, but it would be a pretty effective way to rapidly identify people who are basically incompetent or just aren't really doing anything.

So it's basically a FizzBuzz test, but for existing employees?

[mlindner]

Thanks for the note about autocomplete. That explains it very well what he actually meant.

[lupire]

What about "most salient lines of code"?

[minhazm]

Many people who have worked with Musk have shared similar sentiments in interviews. But it seems that people just refuse to believe any of it. People think that there's no way it's possible for someone to be that deeply technical and be a CEO of multiple companies at the same time. I've talked to people about it and they straight up refuse to believe it saying that it's impossible and that any evidence of him being technical in interviews is all set up and that he was trained on the materials and questions ahead of time.

[akira2501]

With a handful of tricks or a patsy in your pocket, it's easy enough to pull things like this off. These are all self-reported encounters, which lends some doubt to them; as I've never seen any public performance of his that suggests he has this exceptional intelligence or that he isn't subject to the same amount of irrational thinking that most humans are. You may be able to do some type of rocket equation in your head, but if you constantly promise things that aren't ultimately delivered.. people have good reason to question this narrative.

He clearly does know how to make incredible sums of money. Why that's not enough and people need to find excuses to exaggerate or demean his intelligence is beyond me.

[minhazm]

> but if you constantly promise things that aren't ultimately delivered.. people have good reason to question this narrative.

This is the insane thing to me. He's promised a lot of things, but he has also delivered some pretty huge things. Tesla kicked off the electric car migration and has millions of EVs on the road. SpaceX has reusable first stages on their rockets and are the only private company to send humans to space. Just those two things alone are massive achievements. But people look at some things he's promised but has not yet delivered and that somehow is more important than what he has delivered?

[mlindner]

Maybe I'm a particularly dull engineer, but I've taken several aspects of personal advice from what he has said in interviews (the especially technical ones, not the ones aimed at a mass audience where he repeats his standard canned speech) and found them useful for myself personally.

Here's two examples I've found particularly insightful that shows he has some ability to talk about engineering details.

This example where he talks about the choice of steel for Starship as opposed to any other metal, something that would be an otherwise unsual choice: https://youtu.be/vLC5W53Fsyg?t=936

This example that I've personally incorporated into my own thinking where he talks about his "five step process" for engineering design refinement (watch at least until he starts talking about Tesla Model 3 battery stuff): https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=805

[NaturalPhallacy]

>This example that I've personally incorporated into my own thinking where he talks about his "five step process" for engineering design refinement (watch at least until he starts talking about Tesla Model 3 battery stuff): https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=805

I knew what you were talking about when I started reading your comment. "Make your requirements less dumb" first seems so obvious once you've learned it.

All the denigration directed at him seems to come from people who've only read headlines about him from sources who hate him.

[wraptile]

Something doesn't compute in this scenario though. Either his tricking everyone around him or is unfortunate enough to slip up publically. Not knowing what GraphQL is and talking about RPCs in HTTP is a very revealing slip up.

My guess would be that he has some knowledge but also is very good at faking it which is not necessarily a bad thing - those are good traits for a CEO. Though people should be aware of this fact when evaluating the whole persona.

[Thorentis]

What's wrong with his RPCs tweet? If Twitter is using microservices that make RPCs to fetch data and render content then it makes sense.

[h11h]

I'm inclined to believe this is true. The problem is that Twitter's challenges are social/political, not technical, and Musk has demonstrated little competence in this area.

[overthemoon]

This is the absolute root of what's going on, right here. Twitter is only nominally a tech company; it's a media company. It may be that he had to cut the fat over there, I don't take issue with that necessarily (though I certainly do take issue with the disrespectful way he went about it), but image is incredibly important at a media company and he's notoriously bad at comms except with a small subset of people. Twitter needs sensible policy and thoughtful communication, and he wants to ram his ideology through it like he would shake up any technical process.

[Tiktaalik]

Another area where Musk's "brilliance" has faltered is in his transportation ideas and there's a connection here to twitter in that the challenges here again are not technical, but rather political around land use.

Brute forcing a problem with better technology not always the actual solution when technical problems aren't actually the problem.

[hackfrednews]

Channing Robertson, the face of Stanford chemical engineering department and the associate dean of Stanford’s School of Engineering, who taught and mentored Elizabeth Holmes, has said the following to say about her:

“She had somehow been able to take and synthesize these pieces of science and engineering and technology in ways that I had never thought of.”

“I never encountered a student like this before of the then thousands of students that I had talked”

“You start to realize you are looking in the eyes of another Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs.”

He also maintained that Holmes was a once-in-a-generation genius, comparing her to Newton, Einstein, Mozart, and Leonardo da Vinci.

Excerpt from: "Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup" by John Carreyrou.

[alsodumb]

Adding another datapoint from one of my previous comments:

In response to someone saying on Twitter how Elon doesn't understand the technical stuff of rocketry, Tom Meuller, former CTO of Propulsion at SpaceX and the designer of many of their engines responded

"I worked for Elon directly for 18 1/2 years, and I can assure you, you are wrong"

https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929?s=20&...

[lelanthran]

You know, I think Musk is an ass, and would never work for him, but don't you think that someone who has managed to launch and then run many successful and complex technology projects might actually know a thing or two about launching and running simpler technology projects?

And if you're going to claim that his successes have been due to the people surrounding him who actually know what they are doing, then all that tells me is that you are acknowledging that he knows how to surround himself with people who know what they are doing.

We're not fans (I'm certainly not), but it takes a special kind of mind to look at Musk's track record of successes and conclude that his latest project is doomed.

[gjulianm]

Well, I think the issue is precisely considering Twitter a "simple technology project", and it's the same mistake that Musk does. Twitter isn't a "software and servers business" as he said. Twitter is a social community, and while in some regards it might be easier, it's also far more difficult in others. Just compare how many business and institutions can reliably launch rockets or create cars, and how many can reliably create social networks.

[lelanthran]

> Well, I think the issue is precisely considering Twitter a "simple technology project"

But I didn't call it "simple", I called it "simpler", and it is.

[panda-giddiness]

I think it's somewhat reductionist to call Twitter "simpler". The technical challenges faced by SpaceX, for example, are almost completely orthogonal to those faced by Twitter. Imagine swapping a random engineer at SpaceX with a random software engineer at Twitter -- do you think either would thrive in their new role?

[type-r]

Are you claiming that it's similarly difficult to launch and run a satellite manufacturing / launching company vs. a social network? Wow.

[panda-giddiness]

On the contrary, I'm pointing out that "simpler" is meaningless in this context. The two companies face fundamentally different challenges and require completely separate skill sets. Some people will be better suited for Twitter, whereas some people will be better suited for SpaceX. For the same reason that you shouldn't commission a mathematician to remodel your bathroom, you shouldn't expect the CEO of SpaceX to successfully manage a social media company.

For further reading, I'd recommend this article in the Atlantic. The relevant portion is about midway through.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/elon-musk-...

[gjulianm]

Compare how many companies can reliably launch rockets vs how many can reliably create social networks that aren’t dead in a year. I think it’s clear what’s more difficult

[gjulianm]

Point still stands if you call it a "simpler technology project". It's not about the tech, it's about the community, and communities are far harder to predict and manage than a rocket or a car.

[lelanthran]

> Point still stands if you call it a "simpler technology project".

Which point?

> It's not about the tech, it's about the community, and communities are far harder to predict and manage than a rocket or a car.

While I broadly agree with you, and also agree that twitters founders and/or leaders are better equipped to manage a community than Musk is, I fail to see how having someone with a track record of success (some in turning around failing businesses) automatically dooms the company.

That was the point I was responding to, in the original post. It's also why I ended of with "it takes a special kind of mind to automatically assume something is doomed just because someone with a track record of successes took it over".

[gjulianm]

I don't think Twitter is automatically doomed, but I think there are more things to consider than just Musk's "track record of successes". And one of the important things is that he doesn't look like he actually understands Twitter. He keeps calling it a "software and servers company", keeps talking about "hardcore coding", alienating and angering users and advertisers... People would be be more confident in his abilities if he actually looked humble enough to recognize the parts where his expertise is lacking.

[WalterBright]

America is such a great country that a random person can just fecklessly blunder into creating a revolutionary electric car company and cluelessly blunder into creating a rocket company that is the envy of the world.

[edmundsauto]

Automotive and aerospace are not that similar to social media. People buying into the vision of "get the planet off fossil fuels for transport" and "get this species to Mars" are probably willing to make sacrifices that people working on social media are not.

It's the Halo Effect fallacy to think competence in one field automatically translates to another. Especially when the founder in question has displayed increasingly erratic behavior in the meantime.

Is today's Elon capable of doing what Elon from 15 years ago did at Tesla? I don't think that is necessarily in evidence, much less in a very different industry.

[WalterBright]

Automotive and aerospace are not similar to each other, either. I don't know any other outfit that was successful at both.

> It's the Halo Effect fallacy to think competence in one field automatically translates to another

I didn't say it was. I was responding the notion that Musk blundered into success at Tesla and SpaceX.

[duckmysick]

> Automotive and aerospace are not similar to each other, either. I don't know any other outfit that was successful at both.

Rolls-Royce (of the last century) would qualify, but it was more aero than space.

[bumby]

Saab as well, but that could be a point either way since they went eventually defunct as a car manufacturer

[edmundsauto]

There's a lot to unpack here, for one do we consider those two enterprises to be successes? It seems too early to tell - they do appear to be influential, but the C64 and Palm Pilot were influential without being successful. It's also not clear if they are long term successful (I think Tesla will be, but SpaceX is very much currently dependent on government funding). Finally, it's not clear whether Musk was a critical driver of success - evaluating his contributions based on the outcome of a company is basically resulting.

Look, I don't know if Elon is a genius or an opportunistic parasite with really good PR. It seems unlikely if we ever will know that. What I object to is people pointing at his ultimate financial success and crediting him with the current result of 2 big companies whose future is very much not determined.

When I look at his process from this ant's perspective, I think he is an abusive unstable individual who takes credit for everyone's work and lies a lot. He also flip-flops depending on the wind. Is that success? Not based on my personal values. Have his companies accomplished a lot? Some of them, absolutely.

The definitions and evidence matter a lot, and I personally don't think any of us are qualified to make blanket statements based on incomplete outcomes. Further, I don't think his other companies that require primarily good engineering are very relevant to inherently people problems, like Twitter. My evaluation of how Musk handles people problems is that he is very bad at them, and I anchor my prediction about his Twitter leadership based on that.

[vba616]

What I think makes people skeptical of him is that deep down we all believe in nominative determinism. Who do you think runs a rocket company behind the scenes, "Shotwell" or "Musk"?

[spaceman_2020]

> Automotive and aerospace are not that similar to social media.

Yes. Social media is easier.

> It's the Halo Effect fallacy to think competence in one field automatically translates to another.

This is precisely about leveraging the Halo Effect fallacy. Elon Musk might not know social media, but the markets don't know that, nor do they care. The average retail trader sees "Elon Musk's company" and buys and holds, regardless of absurd PEs.

Musk knows the power his brand has. He's simply going to use that to pump up Twitter's valuation, all through the virtue of his "halo"

[saagarjha]

Dealing with people is generally far harder than pretty much any engineering problem. The same is true of Twitter, because there are no easy answers or even clear goals.

[type-r]

Exactly! I can't fathom that people don't seem to understand there's a comparable amount of new companies started every year in the space, automotive, and social network categories.

[naasking]

> The same is true of Twitter, because there are no easy answers or even clear goals.

There are no easy answers if you want to satisfy everybody. One easy answer is to stop trying to satisfy everybody.

[edmundsauto]

The easiest way to do this would be to make the site completely free of moderation, but that quickly becomes a cesspool. Are there other ways to define the core audience?

[trollerator23]

I _think_ you are joking. No?

[WalterBright]

I'm ridiculing the popular notion that Musk is the poster boy for "you didn't build that".

[trollerator23]

Ok, you were joking. I agree.

BTW I am a fan of your work.

[bumby]

98% of SpaceX contracts are govt. That business has no viability without taxpayer money.

Tesla, to this day but especially early, had the govt subsidize their products to help make them more competitive.

I don’t think those are even a bad thing, but it isn’t a supportive argument that he’s a great free market capitalist.

[WalterBright]

Nobody else did it, including NASA.

[bumby]

>Nobody else did it, including NASA.

This is just a misdirection. I could just as easily said, nobody did it by themselves, including Musk.

What is “it” in this case?

NASA (and the DoD) had vertically landing reusable rockets designed for orbital flights back in the early 1990s. They were being successfully tested but budget cuts killed the program. They weren’t doing “it” because it wasn’t the same priority in that era. NASA has been researching COPVs for decades, etc.

The SpaceAct agreement between NASA and SpaceX allows for sharing of this kind of information. If you think SpaceX has done all their great work alone, you are misinformed and likely making you data fit your conclusion instead of the other way around.

SpaceX has some competitive advantages, but I don’t think they are what you think they are.

[nverno]

Judging by some of the old patents he's filed [1], I'd guess he has at least a decent understanding of the tech involved. Probably less so, when it comes to the details of more modern distributed systems, but I also wouldn't be surprised if he's spent some effort towards all that as well - he's been working in/around pretty cutting edge tech for quite a while. Could he sit down and code it himself? probably not, but that's hardly required in his situation.

1. https://patents.justia.com/inventor/elon-musk

[HyperSane]

Musk was fired from PayPal because he wanted to replace all the Unix servers with Windows.

[mapme]

Source?

[timmytokyo]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#X.com_and_PayPal

[lupire]

The CEO get to put his name on the company's patents, yes.

[acknorabotr]

It's crazy to think a guy who builds reusable rockets thinks he can run a complex technology operation like Twitter.

[nikau]

s/builds/obtains funding to get other people to build

[tiborsaas]

Well, he's definitely not afraid of blowing up complex systems :)

[mcosta]

Run fast, break things

[emodendroket]

You aren't wrong, but his playbook is familiar to anyone who's gone through acquisitions (especially leveraged ones) and many companies were in a strong enough position to start with that they do manage to limp through and get sold off despite all the abuse.

[jillesvangurp]

You underestimate Elon Musk. Many people have done that before and lost that bet. If anything, he repeatedly succeeded in building world class software and hardware teams for Tesla, SpaceX, and a few other companies. The notion that he won't be able to attract world class talent is ludicrous. Yes, he is a bit of a liability and his management style is obnoxious and unconventional. But he does get things right once in a while.

And he hates bloated inefficient teams. His decrees on meetings are infamous. Tripling the team at Twitter implies a lot of internal politics, fiefdoms, communication overhead, and generally a lot of headless chickens running around. There's no nice way to fix such a team. A sledge hammer is one way to fix it and obviously he likes getting results quickly.

So, the notion of laying off most of that team was a foregone conclusion. The notion that a lot of the better people would get upset about that and leave as well is also highly predictable. What's left is a team with some gaps but also a lot of breathing room. And he can always lure key people back in by throwing money at them.

Simple plan. It might actually work. At the cost of a bit of drama, temporary instability, and lots of free publicity. Exactly his style. Cringe worthy and effective. I can see the logic here.

[mazurnification]

Agree, I wonder how much it is thought through strategy and how much is just "natural" style applied indiscriminately. I think one more important part is that he has money/resources to be able to make mistakes without bankrupting and stubbornness to plough thru even when things go wrong.

[gjulianm]

> If anything, he repeatedly succeeded in building world class software and hardware teams for Tesla, SpaceX, and a few other companies

The point is that Twitter doesn't really needed someone to build a world class software and hardware team. The technical challenges in reliability and speed seemed pretty much solved or on track to be solved already. The problem of Twitter was that they never knew how to properly manage the community and make the company profitable.

Twitter doesn't have a tech problem, it has a community problem.

[jillesvangurp]

Exactly. it had a team problem. I think it's safe to use past tense now because that team is mostly gone now. It still has some team challenges but those he can fix with strategic hires and hard work.

Fixing the community starts with rolling back all the things that clearly did not work. He's using the sledge hammer method there too. So, not very subtle but generally just getting of rid of a lot of failed and failing policy.

The technical challenges in speed and scaling are not challenges at all anymore. Twitter built a lot of stuff in house when you couldn't get that stuff as a commodity. That has changed since then. You need a cache, you can get one from any number of cloud providers or spin up something off the shelf you run yourself. Same with databases, CDNs, large scale object storage, search infrastructure, message brokers, and all the rest. So, yes, there might be a need for changing some of that necessitated by some key people disappearing but it's not a massive technical challenge.

[gjulianm]

> Fixing the community starts with rolling back all the things that clearly did not work.

And which ones are those? Knowing what did and did not work is an actual challenge by itself.

> You need a cache, you can get one from any number of cloud providers or spin up something off the shelf you run yourself. Same with databases, CDNs, large scale object storage, search infrastructure, message brokers, and all the rest. So, yes, there might be a need for changing some of that necessitated by some key people disappearing but it's not a massive technical challenge.

The massive technical challenge is migrating existing infrastructure to something off the shelf, then finding and fixing the new bugs in that existing infrastructure and/or your deployment/configuration. That shouldn't be underestimated.

[jillesvangurp]

> The massive technical challenge is migrating existing infrastructure to something off the shelf

It's short term disruptive and might involve some fail whales. And then it is solved again. Break it, fix it. Like it or not, that seems to be the plan. If you accept things might temporarily break, it's going to be a lot easier to act.

It's a microblog, not star ship. At least from Elon Musk's point of view, there's going to be a difference between those two and the amount of brain cycles he's going to dedicate to things breaking or not. He's not going to be afraid to break the team (check), the platform (still running fine), or the community (in progress, engagement seems up so far).

[headsoup]

Nothing beats an internet random telling us how much a successful person is silly and also can't meet their own superior standards.

It's not about being a fan or not, it's that you're not actually providing any real insight other than signalling how smart you are.

[theclansman]

These people behave just like the irrational fanboys, except they just do the exact opposite. Being a sheep and being a contrarian sheep are the same thing.

[intelVISA]

I've no dog in this race but I'm excited to see what influence, if any, this will have on the topology of similarly inflated tech companies.

[Loughla]

Honestly, I'm hopeful that other coastal tech companies do clean house. I genuinely believe it could lead to a resurgence in the lives of Midwest/middle American states and cities.

There is an absolute vacuum of technology specialists in the middle of the US, because no one wants to "live in the middle of nowhere," and they don't want to earn less than FAANG (MAMAA?) salaries, when half of those salaries can give you an amazing life in the middle of the country (source: my piss-poor salary compared to yours).

[memish]

"Knowing that haters are just fanboys with the sign bit flipped makes it much easier to deal with them"

http://paulgraham.com/fh.html

[triggercut]

Years ago I had a massively downvoted comment when I criticised his AR for CAD vapour ware. As someone who was fully in that area at the time, what he was showing while looking fancy had no practical application in the area of design he was talking about.

Ever watch someone do CAD/CAM modelling? They need extreme precision of input that AR sausage fingers just aren't going to help with. You need a num-pad and a good mouse with a stepped click wheel.

I get it. We share some similar neurodivergence traits. He wants to be right in the detail. Constantly jumping from interest to interest, seeing the hidden patterns and connections that aren't apparent to others. But there are a times when I know I just need to shut up and let someone more experienced talk despite my brain wanting to lead every discussion right into solution mode, or providing additional context mode.

I've spent the last 6 years in management consulting (without formal business education), I agree with him when he says MBAs are useless. We know that the best solutions come from diverse teams with diverse backgrounds, skills and knowledge. Not 5 clones who know how to build value driver trees, not to say the tools they bring aren't useful, but they can be incredibly limiting.

For someone who hates MBAs he's sure going about this take-over like someone who barely passed one (i.e. knows more than enough to be dangerous). Sure, you're hemorrhaging money in operations. You need to cut costs and find new revenue streams.

What are your biggest costs?

Labor. Slash / Burn. The old McKinsey 7% FTE reduction will give you some extra operating cash from the years remaining budget and you know it's not so much that people (in fear of their jobs) won't just pick up the slack to keep everything moving. Do it quick because you need to rip the band-aid off and get rid of all that accrued leave, restricted cash etc. off your books too.

Equipment. Redundancy? Sounds like unused resources we can fire sale.

Contracts. Renegotiate? The only two meaningful levers are price and quantity. Start cutting quantity now, renegotiate price later.

This is all dummies guide stuff and tends to go terribly in reality when implemented all at once all together.

For instance, research has shown companies that lay-off when under pressure end up underperforming against the ones who chose not to.

Now who's going to help build and operate those new revenue streams?

Quick fixes for a quick buck and a whole lot of extra risk.

[philistine]

And Twitter's problem are nowhere near technological. The site needed to make more money, not reengineer the whole thing while advertisers are fleeing because Trump is back on on a whim!

[taolegal]

So should the platform be guided by advertisers? Especially one that’s apparently the de facto public square?

[acdha]

What choice do they have? The company was hovering around profitable (2021 would’ve been without a lawsuit settlement) but that was before they were saddled with a ton of new debt. It’s possible that they could find new revenue models - that pay for checkmark scheme isn’t it but maybe a smart businessman could come up with a better variant - but that takes time and has to be done carefully since they have to keep the lights on in the middle. Driving away advertisers before finding that new revenue source doesn’t leave much time to iterate.

[naveen99]

Debt and equity are just different ways for investors to invest in a company. If company isn’t generating any return on investment, keeping the lights on is not sustainable.

[etchalon]

I don't think "should" is really a function here.

"Must" might be.

No one has figured out a way to monetize a social network without advertising, at least not at the scale Twitter has to operate.

[hotpotamus]

I say everyone can join for free and gets one post a day. $8/month plan includes 10 posts a day, and unlimited for $20. While I have no interest in Twitter, I'm told it's quite addictive, so make the first taste free and then reel them in once they're hooked.

[wrycoder]

It would be great if 99% would stay in the free tier.

[etchalon]

I don't think it'd work.

[headsoup]

$8 blue check marks :p Not sure that has long term profitability...

I think the statement probably is more like "no one has figured out an easier way to monetize a social network"...

[etchalon]

There are no successful subscription-only social networks. It's been tried. It has not worked.

[busymom0]

Spacex and Tesla were also first time successful concepts. Elon is used to somehow achieving the impossible.

[wwweston]

If that's it's business model then sure, that's how it works.

A "de facto public square" would be public in conception, construction, and support from the start, which is one of the ways we know that Twitter is no such thing. Though it would likely also have some rules for how speech is/isn't conducted.

And all things considered, advertiser-friendliness is a sort of low-resolution but approximate passable democratic mechanism for marking boundaries of civilized discourse.

[taolegal]

> advertiser-friendliness is a sort of low-resolution but approximate passable democratic mechanism for marking boundaries of civilized discourse

This reminds me that progressives have historically always supported corporations as complex hierarchies, scientific enterprises, run (ideally) by “experts.”

[wwweston]

Nowhere was a claim forwarded it was progressive or ideal. The claim is more or less that advertisers have some of the same concerns that elected representatives do because consumers have something like a vote.

But then again, if you're scare-quoting expertise, maybe that's not the conversation you're here to have.

[taolegal]

I'm scare-quoting expertise because it seems like you think there's an expert way to run a corporation.

And that's a very progressive sensibility towards corporations, and precisely why they actually like them (what's more appealing to a progressive other than a huge centrally-planned organization run by credentialed experts) despite claiming otherwise.

[NineStarPoint]

That depends on Musk’s goals. If his goal is to make money to pay off the massive amount of debt he gained as part of buying twitter, (as the attempted quick roll out of twitter blue would indicate), then yes he probably needs to care about what advertisers think. If he just wanted to leverage his position as one of the richest men in the world to ensure that twitter was a haven for free speech and screw the profitability, then no he wouldn’t need to be guided by advertisers. He probably can’t both want immediate returns on his investment and to quickly rock the boat though.

[lr4444lr]

Television and radio pretty much works that way. Print media too.

[bergenty]

In this case yes because you need to be profitable.

[headsoup]

Was Twitter 'good' aside Musk purchased it? Without that event, would it still need substantial changes to be profitable and useful going forward?

[NaturalPhallacy]

>while advertisers are fleeing because Trump is back on

[citation needed]

CNN's ratings were never better than under Trump. He's fantastic for advertising. So is Musk. All controversial figures are. That, oddly, isn't controversial in advertising.

>on a whim!

He created a public poll, and when people voted for Trump to be allowed back won, he unbanned him, tweeting "vox populi, vox dei" ("the will of the people is the will of god"). Had he unbanned him despite the poll saying "no" you could argue it was a whim, but that isn't the reality we're in. He also refused to unban Alex Jones, citing exploitation of child deaths and a personal story. Not unbanning Alex Jones was more whimsical than unbanning Trump was, factually speaking. Why do people always misrepresent his actions? And why is it always upvoted and not flagged here?

[philistine]

Let me ask you this: did he need to make a poll about Trump's return?

[spaceman_2020]

Man, it's not about tech. This is simply about leveraging the "Musk halo effect" on a highly visible, failing business.

You can screenshot this: Musk will cut down costs, make Twitter profitable, and take it public again when markets are better placed.

The markets will give the newly listed Twitter the same "Musk-boost" as Tesla and ramp up the valuation to $100B.