[addajones]

I felt the same reading the article. So much hate towards a single human. There are many ways to express dislike or disagreement with someone or their ideas and management styles without being so explicit and rude about it. It seems like its a badge of honor and prerequisite to say "I hate Elon, ok moving on about Mastodon..." I believe it's possible to dislike someones views and still have common ground and dialog, but I guess I'm in the minority (online) now.

[emkoemko]

because he told everyone that Tesla cars would be robotaxis that make you $30,000 a year and you would be dumb not to buy a Tesla...i know a few people who fell for this scam. I stay away from anything he is involved in after this. There are lots of reasons for people hating him and for good reasons.

[cbeach]

So he’s slow on delivering a very difficult and ground breaking technology (he has, however, delivered FSD to North America).

Is that really a reason to hate the man? “Hate” is a strong and emotionally loaded word.

[nedbat]

This is nothing personal against Musk. When you look at what he has done since taking over Twitter, it's nothing but chaos. He doesn't seem to have a clue how to run that company. I have liked Twitter, and I hate what he is doing to it.

[cbeach]

As someone who likely has opposing political views to yours I think the following outcomes were vital to a well-functioning public square for inclusive and civil discourse:

* taking the company private, and off the stock market, so decisions are no longer made with short term valuation / stock price movements in mind

* sacking the vast majority of bureaucratic staff, who have shown themselves to be politically biased. Suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story would NEVER have happened on an impartial social network

* trying out new ideas. Twitter was haemorrhaging money and was technically stuck in a rut

* sacking the board and C-suite (for the gross failures described above)

A lot of people will have their noses put out of joint by Musk’s moves so far. But there are tens, possibly hundreds, of millions of ordinary people out there who will feel they can trust the network again, since Musk’s changes. These people are not extremists, or racists, or bigots - they are just people who have right-of-centre views and who value fairness and freedom of expression.

[zimpenfish]

> Twitter was haemorrhaging money

Well, no, if not for the $800M lawsuit settlement (a one-off), they'd have made $580M profit in 2020.

> technically stuck in a rut

Being under an FTC consent decree where every feature has to be thoroughly documented, analysed, and approved re: user privacy before launch tends to slow development down.

Ol' Musky has made the first almost infinitely worse ($1B interest/year) and cannot do anything about the second.

[nedbat]

How do you feel about taking on a billion dollars of interest per year? Then fumbling new features to lose half the advertisers? What do you think of asking software engineers to bring screenshots of lines of code? It makes no sense.

[cbeach]

He's the world's richest man. He can take on big interest payments.

He experimented with some changes to Twitter, and his style is to rapidly try different things and see what works. I would expect him to continue like this. I hope he does. He's one of America's greatest innovators. This is how he works.

The screenshots of code thing wasn't so he could pick over the lines and analyse their style. It's so he had hard evidence of engineers who weren't writing code (many companies have them) and fire them immediately.