[gochi]

This is hilarious, it assumes Saudi investors would value silencing dissenters at $44BN.

It also requires believing that these machiavellian Saudi investors are so dumb they can't tell how much power they would have by keeping Twitter growing so they can more effectively silence dissenters before it becomes news.

[lamontcg]

People can't accept that Elon could do something this stupid, so they assert that he has to be playing some kind of 4D chess.

[3cats-in-a-coat]

Just an hour ago on some news show from a US TV channel, NBC or Fox or what was it, the host said (about the X rebrand) "it doesn't make sense, so there should be a bigger plan here".

And that indeed sums up so much of the mentality of Elon's supporters. The more stupid things it does, the grander the delusion becomes.

[lamontcg]

Common falsehood that people believe is that smart people simply can't do stupid shit.

[kamel3d]

I agree with you even the saudi investors are also stupid just look at to that line city project

[hef19898]

Also, SoftBank.

[hnbad]

Common falsehood that people believe is that rich people are smart.

The biggest early factor to Elon Musk's wealth was lucking into Peter Thiel merging X.com into Confinity/PayPal. Thiel likely anticipated that Musk would have tanked X.com eventually but it would have been much worse for Confinity if it had done so given its market share and the rippling affect that could have caused in the market and user trust. X.com largely operated on hot air, riding the Dot Com bubble. The massive jumps after that directly stem from his Tesla shares, which are massively overvalued.

Basically he bought an EV company right when greenwashing and solar/electric was the new hotness and founded SpaceX mid-way to the tail end of a space optimism/tourism and "nerd-cool" (i.e. rise of super hero movies in mainstream media, widespread enthusiasm for "tech gadgets", etc) trend. He used SpaceX to make grandiose claims about technological developments which in turn fed into a hype cycle of vaporware projects like the Hyperloop, eventually allowing him to position himself as "real-life Tony Stark" further boosting his credibility with no actual qualifications.

I'm not saying his success isn't real, but his success doesn't come down to him being a clever business person but more to being a meme. He turned himself into a brand and that brand carried Tesla stock to absurd heights but with Twitter's failure that brand is becoming increasingly toxic and he's stuck turning dials and checking if people are still cheering while also trying to relive his young adulthood high of X.com, except we're no longer in the Dot-Com bubble and he doesn't understand PayPal did him a favor by kicking him out.

[lamontcg]

> Common falsehood that people believe is that rich people are smart.

I agree with all the rest of your points, but I think the problem with this is that Elon really is smart. It is just that you can see that he was mostly a really good salesperson of his personal brand. He also had his finger on the pulse of what was "cool" (internet, space, electric cars) for awhile (a lot of that is probably luck, but there has to be a certain amount of talent there I think--but that talent for fashion always wears off).

He's also smart enough to be able to regurgitate what SpaceX engineers tell him and to manage to sound like he's got a PhD. He must actually study that pretty well and be at least decent enough at physics/engineering that he's clearly above-average intelligent. But it is other people making the breakthroughs in the mathematics of how to hoverslam rockets, he's a bit more like a CEO version of a science communicator.

The thing is that people are largely just ignorant about where all the technology comes from (Lars Blackmore worked at NASA JPL when he published the first articles on successive convexification of the landing problem -- so the US Government really invented hoverslamming rockets), and they are horrible at judging what kind of intelligence a public personality actually has. They also think that smart people are smart at literally everything.

And as much as I hate to admit it, Donald Trump was also smart, but his talents are almost purely sociopathic. And one of those talents is being able to actually lean-in to a shitstorm of stupid that he creates around him, and make his sycophants write it all off as 4D chess. That is actually a talent. A genuinely stupid person wouldn't be able to pull that off.

[mavhc]

And now all he has is the best space company and the best car company, poor bastard.

It was so easy everyone else also did it

[hnbad]

By what measure is Tesla "the best car company"? According to every metric I could find the company is clearly overvalued and stock price is the only measure it seems to truly excel in.

Elon Musk is listed as the CEO of Neuralink, SpaceX and Tesla. Do you genuinely think Elon Musk is so good at being a CEO that he can run three vastly different companies (4 including X Corp which he formally ceded his position as CEO) at the same time? Or do you think that his primary function was founding/buying the companies? Most of his interference in his companies (especially Tesla) seems to have been detrimental: from an atrocious workplace accident rate in Tesla factories because he "doesn't like yellow" to laying off most of Twitter before establishing any persistence/transfer of knowledge.

If you listen to him talk about any subject you're professionally familiar with, it's evident he knows how to mix in buzzwords but doesn't understand the underlying technology or how any of it actually works. His Twitter Spaces interview was a perfect example for software developers, his recent interview about Twitter/X as an "everything app" was an example for anyone working in (or remotely informed about) fintech.

His wealth is almost entirely tied to Tesla's share price and Tesla's share price is tied to his public perception as "real-life Tony Stark". SpaceX mostly runs on government contracts - incidentally most of Tesla's actual revenue also stems from public funds in the form of emissions trading.

[ljm]

I imagine it's like turning to religion to make the universe feel less chaotic and random, but the reality is that most people are repeatedly playing the bongcloud opening and simply getting lucky.

That doesn't feel quite as fair as having earned success, so 4D chess it is.

[wkat4242]

That's a good point. Chopping them into little pieces is bound to be a lot cheaper.

[devnullbrain]

Yesterday they valued a football player playing 34 games for them at 1 billion.

[mschuster91]

> it assumes Saudi investors would value silencing dissenters at $44BN.

Why not? For the Saudis it's pocket money.

> It also requires believing that these machiavellian Saudi investors are so dumb they can't tell how much power they would have by keeping Twitter growing so they can more effectively silence dissenters before it becomes news.

The thing is, reach-wise there is no replacement for Twitter:

- Meta's platforms forbid sharing of non family friendly content and enforce that ban through rigorous moderation, which means reports from violent protests have a very hard time there; on top of that the user base of Facebook has declined to mostly Boomers and people using it for the messenger only.

- Telegram has no problem with violence or unrest, see the coverage of the Russian invasion, but people need to already be in the groups that share such information - it's a good tool for organizing protests, but less so for spreading the word to the general public.

- Reddit has a similar problem, unless you make the post rise in one of the default subs, no one will care, and Reddit's format doesn't lend itself to real-time updates.

- Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse suffer from a lack of cross-instance content discoverability. The "trends" on most of the Mastodon servers are completely broken, disabled or useless and the platform doesn't have a concept of geotagging to make it easier to discover regional content - the best it can do is language, but Arabic or English is spoken worldwide. And search isn't fediverse-wide, just the toots that the server the user is active on has gotten into their global feed view.

The USP of Twitter was that everyone could connect with everyone, worldwide, and get their issue trending in a matter of minutes if need be.

[ffhhttt]

> it's pocket money

It’s not.

[mschuster91]

The Saudis are making a billion dollars a day from oil [1], the personal wealth of the dictator clan is estimated at 1.4 trillion dollars [2] and the real value is likely significantly higher than that, especially if you include assets owned nominally by the government or national companies, but factually under clan control.

So yes, this is absolutely pocket money, particularly if it makes sure that they can't be toppled from the money spigot or that their neighborhood gets destabilized in a second Arabian Spring again. Smaller Qatar spent four times than that on the World Cup infrastructure that was nothing more than a couple weeks worth of sports whitewashing.

We can't apply Western values of "worth it" to people who can sink billions of dollars on a whim in European soccer clubs just because they can.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-26/saudi-ara...

[2] https://www.trtworld.com/middle-east/saudi-royal-familys-dol...

[3] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/10/influence-game-...

[ffhhttt]

> The Saudis are making a billion dollars a day from oil [1]

That was revenue (?) when oil prices were much higher.

> particularly if it makes sure that they can't be toppled from the

But yeah, I guess arguing about monetary amounts is a but pointless since I think the whole premise is just absurd..

Organizing the WC or buying European fotball clubs is a much better investment (if there only reason they invested in Twitter is what you’re suggesting, which of course makes no sense).

[yreg]

The cost would be much more than $44B, but even if it wasn't 3% of total house assets is certainly not pocket money.

This commenter's analysis seems more credible to me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36858613

[mschuster91]

Raises some good points indeed, however it assumes that the Saudis ordered Musk to buy and crash Twitter directly, and it assumes that the Tesla shares he used as collateral would go to zero.

It's also possible that they got approached by Musk and saw a good timing to exploit a rich Western idiot to further their interests. I mean, Musk being deranged enough to call a rescue diver a pedo, smoking weed in Joe Rogan's podcast or give names to his children that are completely bonkers even for celebrities?

The signs that he's not completely well mentally were there for years. Loaning him 20 billion or whatever dollars was an extremely high risk move alone for that factor, so either the Saudis have gone off the rails as well or they see some hidden aspect that makes the deal worth their while even if the risk event materializes.