[hourago]

> The absolute cruelty of Musk through this whole process is astounding.

That is by design. There is a mindset were powerful people feels that they need to show up their power, otherwise why do they have it? That is one of the reasons inequality causes many illnesses in society as the rich few feel the need to be cruel on people with less power. If it was not Musk it would be someone else.

[hectorlorenzo]

> If it was not Musk it would be someone else.

This is an argument that needs to be done really carefully: its logical conclusion is that his cruelty is deterministic and there is nothing he can do about it. People have a certain degree of agency, he actively chooses to be cruel amongst other options at his disposal.

[moonchrome]

That's a bulshit generalization. The way Musk is handling the entire Twitter situation is a shitshow and I don't really see many people in his position playing it that way. Musk is a controversial character even among rich/powerful and his behavior is in character but not something I'd expect from many of his peers.

[matwood]

Agreed. Anyone else who purchased Twitter would absolutely end up restructuring. There would have been layoffs, etc... But, I highly doubt it would have been this shitshow.

Fire, ask people back, then fire again. Roll out a feature that everyone tells you is going to cause impersonation issues, then roll it back when it....causes impersonation issues.

I mentioned in a comment the other day that I heard a take that's very simple. Because Musk overpaid by so much, there is zero path to success. Now he's just trying to stave off bankruptcy which seems inevitable.

He also seems to have zero vision. If he had a vision, getting rid of people doing the work is the last thing you want to do. The old adage, there are no bad teams, only bad leaders comes to mind. He appears to want to run Twitter as-is on a skeleton crew - more like a PE firm rather than visionary founder.

[moonchrome]

> Because Musk overpaid by so much, there is zero path to success. Now he's just trying to stave off bankruptcy which seems inevitable.

That's what it looks like from outside looking in. But it also exposes him as a loudmouth talking out of his ass for cheap PR. The whole Twitter mess is a result of an ego trip/PR stunts he thought he could get out of for free.

[Ekaros]

Restructuring and refocusing firm sized of Twitter should take weeks if not months. Not saying that it wasn't needed, but the approach taken seem just insane.

Then again, part of reason behind this might be that now he is playing with something he paid with it own money and lot of it. Not a "toy" project of couple million or dozen million.

[matwood]

> Restructuring and refocusing firm sized of Twitter should take weeks if not months. Not saying that it wasn't needed, but the approach taken seem just insane.

Agree completely. Part of my shitshow comment is how haphazard and plan free the layoffs have gone.

[SQueeeeeL]

Yeah, but didn't you know Musk is a "special person", so therefore can abuse the fuck out of anyone he wants. He isn't just some random emerald mine heir with some interest in technology.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/elon-...

[concordDance]

How much money do you think he got from that mine?

[SQueeeeeL]

Idk, emeralds are worth what, $10. And there are like, 1,000 of them in a mine, so $10,000

[bhaak]

> If it was not Musk it would be someone else.

I don’t know the name of this fallacy but the “if X doesn’t do it somebody will” doesn’t seem convincing.

Especially as the previous management of Twitter wasn’t like that so it’s actually already disproved by history.

[kqr]

Not only that: the power itself depends on other people believing in it.

If literally nobody in the company believes you to be the CEO, then you are no more powerful than anyone else. Similarly, even if you're not the CEO, but everyone believes you are, you have all the power of being one.

This means if you want to stay powerful, you have to exercise your power to remind people that you have it, thus reinforce their belief in it, and retain it so you can exercise it again to remind people and so on.

Of course, I would argue there are better ways to gain and display power.

[quantified]

True. Most CEOs don't run around displaying their power this way.

[quantified]

> If it was not Musk it would be someone else.

Do you mean that in the sense that some superrich person at a different company, or do you mean that in the sense that pretty much every superrich person who would run Twitter would act the same way?

[socialismisok]

Maybe it's time to consider whether we're better off not having such concentrations of wealth...

Let Musk keep $5B, he'll be able to live luxuriously forever on that. But he won't be able to ruin thousands of lives so easily.

[krapp]

The maximum value any human being should be able to control as wealth in any form - property, stock, rights, cash, what have you, is $1 million dollars. Anything more gets appropriated and redistributed by the state.

More than rich enough to live on, but nowhere near rich enough to buy governments and corporations on a whim.

[decafninja]

1 million is both a lot, but also not a lot, in 2022. Especially depending on where you live.

There are so many nuances in play that you can’t really put a hard number to this.

[kibwen]

Make it a billion and it would still be strictly better for society. Hell, burn the money in a pile if you object to it being given to the state and it would still suffice. You don't need to completely remove inequality, or even get anywhere close, you just need to prevent the unilateral exercise of such tremendous power. Power must be decentralized.

The irony is that if you want to believe in the power of a market economy (which I do, or at least did before the modern era), you must oppose the massive concentration of wealth because it distorts our markets to the point of irrational uselessness.

[ryandrake]

There has to be some kind of limit. Take an extreme example. Would it be OK to have a single individual (or company) worth $1e24? A septillionaire could give $1 trillion to every person on the planet every year for 100 years and still have 99.99% of his money left. How much power and influence over the world would someone like that have, while the rest have comparatively close to zero? I think we all agree that wouldn't work for a functioning society. We probably also agree that $1million is probably too low a limit. So it's not a question of whether there should be a limit but where that threshold is.

[SuoDuanDao]

I don't disagree that there has to be a limit. If the house of Windsor could own most of the world in the twentieth century and lose it, there's clearly a limit.

What I disagree with is the benefit of an explicit limit that's formally set once and can't be updated. And if it could be updated the limit would be constantly ahead of where the richest person is now and meaningless. Markets are an ecosystem, ecosystems are self-correcting. In large part, markets are the self-correcting behavior of humans valuing tangible things writ large. The market sets the limit, the idea of an autocratic limit set from outside such a system because we don't like the signal it's sending just strikes me as hubristic.

[Ekaros]

Million is not much, at very reasonable 2% or 3% it would be 30000 a year. Or just burning it straight up 50000 in 20 years. That is actually not that much money these days.

5 or 10 million starts to look lot more reasonable limit.

[concordDance]

So you think hedge fund account managers should only ever manage up to $1M in assets? Seems very inefficient...

(Snark aside, this idea is completely unfeasible for a number of reasons you can probably think of given a couple of minutes)

[SuoDuanDao]

I think GP's point was that 1 billion is also completely unfeasible.

'there should be no billionaires' is just a dumb idea put out for impact more than any hope of achieving it. When I try to steelman the idea I come up with the fact that smaller amounts of capital can be allocated more efficiently, and that society should therefore try to ensure capital naturally flows to individuals with less rather than more assets. Not a bad point, Warren Buffet definitely made higher returns early in his career and he credits that in large part to being able to pick targets better when investing millions than when investing billions.

But going from 'billionaires are a sign of capital inefficiency' to 'lets ban billionaires' rhetoric posits using violence to seize or suppress billionaires capital, which requires a larger concentration of capital than the billionaires have now. It's a statement at war with its own ideals, I shouldn't even be giving it the oxygen necessary to refute it.

[socialismisok]

10% annual tax on wealth above $1 billion would get us pretty close.

[concordDance]

Try and introduce that and you'll run right into the impossibility of measuring wealth. E.g. what if Bill Gates just gives all his many over 1 billion to a charity or trust? Say, the Gates foundation (see wikipedia for the good work that charity has done)? Is the wealth "his" given he still has a great deal of control over how it gets spent?

Try a wealth tax like that and the Musk charitable foundation is founded with the goals of fighting climate change via electric cars and making a Mars colony.

[SuoDuanDao]

once again, assuming someone can impose that tax already implies a greater concentration of power than the billionaire himself. It's a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease.

[socialismisok]

That's probably a bit extreme for me (and I'm a self described communist). A million dollars of property is a fraction of a house in major urban areas who have seen big upswings in home values.

That said, if we can decommidify housing, I'd be much more willing to discuss wealth caps in the millions of dollars.

[radu_floricica]

I agree it's probably by design, but I contest that it's a bad thing. People comment on this takeover with a mindset where the company is made only of employees and owner. There are quite a few more stakeholders in this, much more than usual in this case. There are its clients (advertisers), its users, and everybody that's indirectly affected by the dialogue that goes on Twitter.

From the mindset I mentioned, yes, Musk is needlessly cruel and a bully. But he was quite clear from the beginning that he's doing it in good part for society at large - so the normal priority of stakeholders is actually reversed. Society and discourse become most important, then users, then clients and employees.

[kibwen]

> But he was quite clear from the beginning that he's doing it in good part for society at large

Judge a man by his actions, not by his words. So far, his actions have been cruel and destructive, not only to Twitter's employees and Twitter's users, but also to everyone forced to share a society with the newly-chaotic, increasingly-bot-filled, resurgently-hateful, woefully-undermoderated Twitter. Musk is a liar. Stop worshiping this man.

[nickpp]

Haven’t seen any change at all as a Twitter user since the whole Elon brouhaha started.

[Volundr]

Really? I've seen 2fa break, the rules for parody accounts change multiple times, ones making fun of Elon banned and the blue checkmark fiasco where a bunch of people were able to purchase official looking accounts for prominent companies and people.

[nickpp]

Oh, I read about those but I saw absolutely no change in my daily use, other the tweets commenting, of course. The app worked fine. I am at most a casual user though.

[skinnymuch]

Okay. A lot of people were affected though.