[nailer]

Why is Musk obsessed with being liked? There was a hoax last month about the algorithm being tweaked to make everyone view Elon’s tweets which was provably false.

It is very much likely to be the CEO a company wanting to understand his companies product.

[debugnik]

> a hoax last month about the algorithm being tweaked to make everyone view Elon’s tweets

Didn't this just reveal that they're A/B testing on Musk's tweet performance? At the very least they're avoiding regressions, and I guess any incidental improvements to it won't be reversed, so isn't it fundamentally the same? Unless we're taking the word "everyone" literally, I guess.

[jrsj]

I don’t remember the specifics but I think there was a case where they accidentally amplified his tweets too much and they did reverse that change. He tweeted about it but I think it was a couple months back so it would take a bit to find.

[nailer]

Tabloid sites (Verge, Vice, etc) reported it as making Elon’s tweets appear in everyone’s timeline all based on the same blog article.

[tomberin]

not tabloids, not a hoax, did you go on Twitter during that period? I have him blocked and saw his tweets

[nailer]

Yes tabloids, both known for making up stories and sensationalism, all sourced from the same single blog article, easily confirmable looking as false at the view count for Elon’s tweets, explained by engineers as exactly what we saw here (logging output not changing output) and I don’t believe you re: seeing his tweets despite blocking him. Nobody else had that happen.

[jefftk]

I saw several people say they were seeing his tweets despite having him blocked during that incident

[inferiorhuman]

They're no more tabloids than Tucker Carlsen is a news anchor.

[nailer]

This was a very odd comment

I don’t know why you think I’d like Tucker Carlson or why Tucker being sensational would make Verge and Vice not clickbait.

[tomberin]

We can't comment on why, but there's no rational way to watch his behavior and assume he isn't obsessed with being liked. He constantly tweets about his own tweets performance, makes humiliating appearances on stages, and pretty much terrified that someone might do something 1/100000th as awful to him as he and his family have done to others.

he is isn't a CEO, he is a whining baby

[nailer]

> He constantly tweets about his own tweets performance, makes humiliating appearances on stages, and pretty much terrified that someone might do something 1/100000th as awful to him as he and his family have done to others.

Ah so he makes jokes, and is well known enough to need security precautions. This makes him “a whiny baby”. Solid argument.

[zpeti]

The guy is literally creating the next gen intercontinental ballistic missile system and military delivery for the US, but according to HN it’s whiny for him to need security. Right.

Oh and I forgot, he also helps ukranians vs the Russians. Not a good idea if you want a risk free life.

[Fuzzwah]

Hard to see the difference between that or someone so obsessed with twitter that he paid a huge premium to own it.

[api]

The alcoholic bought his favorite bar.

[scubbo]

I've enjoyed Matt Levine's metaphor in Money Stuff - an MMO-addict bought the maker of his favourite game.

[nailer]

Someone wants to measure their business after paying what was a reasonable figure when they offered it, but that became overpriced once the market changed.

Sounds like fairly rational behaviour.

HN isn’t a site for making unfounded personal attacks on others.

[status200]

His offer included a meme number and was overvalued even in April '22 (by 54% !), claimed he was going to combat the spam bots, and then tried to back out, citing the same spam bots. The event was described as a "hostile takeover" at the time [0], a term which has stuck all the way through to most summaries of the event [1]

[0] https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/elon-musk-offering-to-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...

[somenameforme]

A hostile takeover has a specific meaning. It's simply a takeover attempt where a buyer approaches shareholders instead of the company's management, this is usually (if not always) because the latter fails. And it always comes with a premium and drama, precisely because it goes against the wishes of the management of a company. And the premium is also logical because presumably shareholders of a company "believe" in that company, and an outsider now wants to take it over. A good example [1] is when Inbev (massive multinational beer company) purchased Anheuser-Busch (Budweiser). It made the purchase of Twitter look downright cordial, but was probably outside of most of our bubbles.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anheuser-Busch#Acquisition_by_...

[nailer]

Yea, to make people buy your company you need to offer a premium. He backed out saying he was lied to about the current level of fake accounts, which is also reasonable if that was the case.

[heavyset_go]

> which is also reasonable if that was the case.

It would have been reasonable if he had performed due diligence and came to that conclusion, but he explicitly chose to waive due diligence, and then tried to renege anyway.

[jdub]

It is very difficult to describe anything Elon has done to Twitter since (and including) buying it as "rational".

[somenameforme]

As a person who occasionally uses Twitter, but has no interest in having an account, he has dramatically improved the experience. Before he took over it was made impossible to view replies from a user, users were spammed with popup login dialogues that could not be closed with a single click, and more. I expect Twitter probably drove more people away from the site with all this nonsense, than they coerced into registering.

I also think many of the changes to make Twitter more open, such as now open sourcing the recommendation algorithm, publishing view counts (which indirectly makes it clear when something or somebody has been shadow banned), and more are all big steps forward in creating a much better and open service for all. Really most of every change he's pursued since taking over Twitter, from my perspective at least, seems to have been big steps forward.

What would you say has been irrational?

[random314]

> What would you say has been irrational?

Really? You can't even think of one single thing?

[s__s]

It sounds like you can’t either. Do you have an example to share?

[jasonwatkinspdx]

I absolutely will criticize Elon for his behavior around the twitter buyout. He's handled layoff/firing decisions extremely poorly. He's alienated a large portion of the ad buyers. These are not unfounded attacks.

Elon does not need you going around personally trying to shut down other people's discussion. That's cult like behavior.

[nailer]

It was going to be tough to cut Twitter regardless of who did it. Advertisers were pulling out before the deal was even closed, mainly because of Tiktok.

How are the people that disagree with you in this thread trying to shut down your discussion?

[threeseed]

a) Musk is a public figure therefore personal attacks are legal and normal.

b) Nothing I have said is untrue.

c) This is not a normal way of measuring the health of a business. Standard metrics include EBITDA, DAU, MAU, LTV, CAC etc.

d) This is not normal behaviour from a CEO. You don't see Mark Zuckerberg, Shou Zi Chew, Evan Spiegel etc using their products the same way Elon does.

[jrsj]

If the “normal way” of doing things worked then Twitter wouldn’t have been in such a bad state when he took over in the first place. An unconventional approach brings more risk but can also end up being worth it.

Would I do things differently if it were up to me? Sure, but it isn’t, and I can at least appreciate that they are trying to move quickly & try different things. I’m reserving my judgement for whether or not this approach works in the long run.

[matwood]

Twitter wasn't in that bad of state. If anything, it just needed tweaking to unlock the value it should have had given it's place in the media. Now, Twitter is in a terrible state financially given the debt Musk loaded onto it for the purchase.

The problem is Musk is learning the hard way when taking something over is that the old crew is never as dumb as he hoped they were, and he wasn't as smart as he thought he was.

[jrsj]

A company that is 16 years old, still not profitable, & with no concrete plans to achieve profitability is totally dysfunctional and probably wouldn’t survive a high interest rate + likely recessionary environment anyways.

[tlholaday]

> If the “normal way” of doing things worked then Twitter wouldn’t have been in such a bad state when he took over in the first place.

The normal ways of measuring the business, namely EBIDITA, DAU, MAU .., worked. They reliably reported the state of the business. Elon Musk was the only person in the financial market who looked at those measures and interpreted them as meaning “add US$1B annual debt service.”

[jrsj]

The state of the business being…perpetually unprofitable with no plans to change that? That seems functional.

[shanebellone]

He measured the business into halves; then lost one of those halves.

[freehorse]

That is "measuring their business" only if one of the main goals for their business is for it to promote them; because this is exactly what they measure here.

[nailer]

It’s the CEO being able to write something and see where it ends up after going through the pipeline. It does not increase views. I can repeat this, other can repeat this, or you can look at the code.

[nailer]

Or he saw something was wrong (which has now been publicly revealed to be true) and had the money to fix it