All: could you please not post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments? There are a ton of them in this thread, unfortunately. They're tedious and not what HN is for. HN is for curious conversation, not boo-vs.-yay celebrity wars or mudslinging (or mud wrestling for that matter).
"@LindaYacc will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology."
Looks like he found somebody to have the CEO title, while he keeps deciding the product strategy. So still runs Twitter while saying he kept the promise from his Twitter poll...
> Mr. Musk, who has been CEO since buying the company in October, said his role will shift to executive chairman and chief technology officer. But Mr. Musk also made clear he wasn’t about to yield control over the platform, saying he would maintain responsibility for product, software and system operations.
From what I can see of where his interests are, and his attention span...does he really WANT to deal with reliability/uptime/systems engineering? Seems like a poor fit (AFAIK, the businesses that do well have Gwynne Shotwells at the helm who are good at milking him for selective insights, then insulating the staff from his worse impulses...not really a great fit for the DNA of a cloud services company)
He's only handing off the fiduciary duty. Basically he'll do what he wants with the platform and make someone else figure out how to make money with what he does.
Advertising and product are not separate concerns. Advertising _is_ the business. If he doesn't take orders from her, the business will just get worse. His vision of "free speech" is in direct antagonism to the kind of brand-safe content that advertisers want.
He's not going to take orders from her. That's not her role. And him being a lightning rod of controversy is the only thing that hurt the company. They are grinding out features faster than ever, the got rid of a ton of staff but are moving faster than at any time in the past.
You, and others like you want to paint Twitter as some huge failure because you dislike Musk, and that's fine, but in reality the biggest advertisers have come back and with her at the helm even more will.
First of all, if you want to see some real crazy racist stuff go on LinkedIn or Facebook. People there are even worse than Twitter.
All advertising companies took a hit, and Twitter is actually almost profitable at this point, so if she improves things it WILL be profitable. As soon as he can start paying down that 12 billion loan things will get even better.
I thought I liked Musk. Fwiw. Space, mars, pushing the automotive industry towarss electrical vehicles faster than they would otherwise. I mean that stuff was awesome. I don't care whether he had or had not some initial seed money from his personal inheritance, that's just bullshit, plenty of rich people just sit on their asses. That guy was doing cool stuff; useful stuff.
Then I saw what he did to twitter, the way he stirred everybody up creating chaos for reasons that were quite explicitly personal motivations.
I used to follow a few people and topics I care about. I now get a lot of unrelated stuff I don't care about. The system is tuned so I have to see the outrage even if I don't care about it.
This is either intentional or non intentional (a bug). In either case it's a mistake that Mr. Musk bears direct responsibility for.
Why? What happened? Was it COVID that drove him mad? That he had to close the factories and offices and whatnot? Was he already like that but I wasn't aware because I don't care about celebrities unless they literally appear in my timeline even if I unsubscribe and mute them?
Maybe you are purposely ignoring many data points of how badly things are going. Musk instituted blue checkmarks that are purchased by a subset of customers with particular views. If you question this, look at the responses to Biden tweets and see the positions of anti- vs pro-Biden comments.
Because of this, Twitter is ridiculously partisan on my feed. I’ve limited my consumption of it to very small subject matters and will likely jump ship totally to BlueSky with some Mastodon thrown in. I know a lot of people in science who have completely abandoned Twitter.
Yes and even if the motivation of all the people leaving Twitter were futile, it still happened. I no longer see the content I once saw and that is an objective measurable effect which not only happened during Musk's watch but arguably happened in direct reaction to what he said and did.
Should that be taken at face value? The man has repeatedly lied through his teeth, exaggerated, and misled the public for reason ranging from making money selling stock, inflating a meme coin's valuation because the mascot is the same breed of dog that he owns, hyping tech fantasies, up to petty rivalry.
I know that every business leader lies and or stretches truth, but his reputation for outright deception on all levels, especially when it comes to his businesses, is fairly established.
About as much as the word of any billionaire. The issue is we’ll only ever have his word, since Twitter is private, and being honest about financials when poor is bad for business.
I’m willing to believe it’s closer to the truth than not, though. For one cutting out ~5,700 employees, or around ~75% of your work force, is a massive cost reduction. According to Payscale[0] the average salary at Twitter was ~$117,000/yr. A quick calculation shows that annually he shaves off $666.9M (which is hilarious). Alongside decommissioning unneeded offices and removing all the completely unnecessary and expensive time-wasters I can imagine he’s at least saved $1B or more annually.
In true leveraged buyout fashion however, those cost savings are going straight back to the banks that provided Musk with financing. Twitter has paid $600m in two interest payments this calendar year.
Ok let’s assume your numbers are in the ballpark and he’s saving $1b annually on salaries and ancillary expenses.
Problem is he’s also loaded Twitter with significant debt to take it private. Estimated interest payments alone total to over $1.2b annually - so… we are actually losing an additional $200m annually even after firing 75% of the staff.
He's said in a Twitter spaces that he's reduced the expenditures down to basically the interest payment and another billion and a half on top of that. A large part of the reduction was shutting down a lot of the unused servers.
So 2.5 billion in expenses. In 2021 Twitter had Revenue of 5 Billion. So obviously they have lost a lot of revenue, as Elon himself has admitted. But between the cuts they are close to breakeven.
Now with a new CEO who is much more advertiser friendly they are going to get a lot more advertisers back. She will be the new face of the company. Then, likely they will start paying down that debt. Each time they do their burden will be less.
Tesla is the most profitable car company per car. Musk isn't going to have a problem making Twitter profitable, though he put himself behind the 8 ball.
Way behind the eight ball. He managed to take an already toxic platform and make it worse (somehow). When I visit it, not logged in, all I see are promoted Musk tweets and stupid memes totally unrelated to the content I just viewed. Makes it entirely unpalatable for me.
As they say, at least it’s not rocket science. Except in this case apparently running a social media site is actually more difficult than rocket science.
but in reality the biggest advertisers have come back and with her at the helm even more will.
I would bet advertisers like Apple got a huge sweetheart deal. The majority of advertising I see is (by volume), crappy "As Seen On TV" type products fronted by MANY different accounts (I can't block them fast enough), accounts promoting whatever thought leader angle they are working (also insta-blocked), and finally large brands that Twitter probably would like a lot more of.
> And him being a lightning rod of controversy is the only thing that hurt the company.
Even if I take as granted the advertiser problem is solved, it seems like Twitter has still been hurt by much more than having a controversial CEO:
1. Musk took on significant debt in order to buy a company already slightly losing money. Because of this, it's not good enough for advertisers to just "come back", they need to greatly increase their ad spend on twitter.
2. Twitter's attempt to find an alternative revenue source (the significant changes to Twitter Blue) seem to have largely failed.
3. The disaster with verification is driving away some of Twitter's most important posters that generated content on the website for free.
4. Twitter's reputation as an employer has plummetted and they are presumably not attracting anywhere near the amount of talent they previously did.
1. This would be true if he didn't massively axe the staff. So they are almost profitable now as he said. He has a lot of debt but even with the debt he's nearly break even.
2.First of all you don't really know the numbers, it's a guess at best.
3. They are getting bohemoth players who are going to be running shows on Twitter now. This is a huge deal and wasn't even possible on old Twitter.
4. People are desperate for jobs in tech right now. Besides they haven't been struggling to hire, they've been mostly laying off people.
As they run a profit they will pay that debt down (or refinance if rates go lower).
They are launching a lot of new stuff and the future looks way brighter
If they add 1000 new features but continue to roll back content moderation the platform will be unequivocally worse. Doubly so if the new features are as poorly thought out as the blue checkmarks. That guy Halli that he got into a public spat with is probably the most brilliant designer I've ever worked with and Musk treated him like shit while whining about API calls. He also treated the head of Trust and Safety like shit.
This is a great listen to see both the intellectual might and capricious irrationality of Musk's leadership:
Twitter is a failure because of Musk. It’s ‘you’ who want to make it into something other than that.
The ‘new features’ are basically irrelevant and much of it has been chaos or failure. The fact is there’s not much in terms of basic feature churn that’s going to make Twitter much better.
Brand Trust is incredibly hard to build easy to lose and incredibly hard to rebuild.
Musk is a stain on Twitter there is no avoiding it. He could have accomplished faster feature dev without losing half of revenue and also could have done a better job rolling out verified and blue. In fact most CEOs probably could have done that.
It’s a pretty big fail he needs to replace himself and go do something else.
We don't know what "advertisers want", because there is no objective advertiser milieu. It has been ruined by pressure campaigns from political groups that are propped up by an extremist media. The only significant drama originates from these pressure campaigns, from groups who are upset that Twitter no longer acts as their de facto partisan agent.
The way to seek even ground is for corporations to stop responding to media pressure, and for the press to abandon that role once society rejects it for them. Until then, the pendulum is going to swing too heavily in both directions.
Advertisers on cable can't be local car dealers and the rest; it's the nature of cable after all. This leaves national US companies, and most of those have global operations and must tread carefully.
Here's an example: Carlson is calling for an invasion of Canada. Think advertisers with business there don't see a potential risk with advertising on his show? They're one grassroots movement away from having to vouch they'll stop advertising on his show. Better to steer clear anyway.
If you watch the video, it's clearly said in rhetorical jest. Some media outlets don't seem to understand this concept, which is why their hysterics are not taken seriously by many people.
"We are spending all this money to liberate Ukraine from the Russians, why are we not we spending all this money to liberate Canada from Trudeau?"
Tucker Carlson is objectively worse than anyone on the left. He advocates blatant racism and fascism, got served with an $800M lawsuit over being caught red-handed telling deliberate lies intended to weaken democracy and got fired for relentlessly abusing his staff. And that comes from Fox and his own text messages. The entire Fox org (and OAN and Newsmax) are now all thoroughly and completely exposed as selling coverage to advance a political and financial agenda. Hannity was coordinating his show with the Trump White House. They are about as corrupt and untrustworthy as any fascist state media.
You absolutely cannot in any semblance of seriousness say anything remotely equivalent of MSM or left wing media. There's plenty to critique but it's marginal compared to right-wing media. And Elon has aligned himself squarely with the propagandists.
Tucker needs advertisers like Blac Chyna needed them on OnlyFans. Millions of people pay for cable news largely to watch Tucker. If he gets 2M people to pay him $1 a month, he can make his $20M salary plus $4M for production team to run his operation. All without ads. I bet he can do much much better than this. I would think he could get 5M paying $5 in first 6 months with election approaching. That would be $300M a year in subscription revenue and no ads.
> We may be seeing a quiet struggle set up where the views of the advertising execs are so far out of line with mainstream beliefs that it becomes a material issue.
I mean this makes sense when you look at who goes into advertising as a career.
Tucker had a big pull but it’s still niche and controversial. He doesn’t represent mainstream anything. The recent releases of some of his behind the scenes actions pretty much put him out of range of mainstream advertisers.
That said I am surprised some execs don’t go for him as being in their brand zone.
Yes, and the 'most watched cable show' just isn't that big.
Radio personalities in 1950 used to get 50 million listeners nightly.
In the 1970's almost everyone watched 'Walter Cronkite'
And as 'old timey' as it seems, 'Network TV' is still much bigger than Cable.
He's the king of a very, very wide field and it's still a narrow audience, and a much more narrow core.
Throw in the negative public bits and the toxic behind the scenes bits and that leaves out a lot of brands.
I can't really see any major brand buying in - not really even a beer or a truck, because there are other parts of the product line they have to protect.
Cars, drugs, consumer apparel, electronics, gas, retail, energy, entertainment, internet/mobile ... seriously which brand is going to go with him? Probably not even Under Armour.
And by the way, in the US advertisers have incredibly influence, and the 'Pillow Guy' who was a major advertiser pulled Tucker into saying things he wouldn't have otherwise said in terms of coverage - which is a serious credibility problem.
I think Tucker is going to be the new Rush Limbaugh - big audience, nice paycheque, influential, but not really mainstream.
He had a big piece of a small pie. Cable TV is peanuts for advertisers. It is a dwindling market, and even being thoroughly dominating in is not relevant if it means you'll lose out in more relevant markets (such as FB or YT advertising).
Fox earns exorbitant carriage fees from cable companies because they are one of the most watched among the demos that still cling to cable TV. They could practically run their business without ads and still stay afloat. Tucker will be 100% dependent on ads. And the advertisers will have to be willing to directly associate with his brand. More likely he'll have a small number of dedicated sponsors from ideological partners.
That's just not a good argument. Pineapple on pizza can be one of the most popular toppings but still niche and controversial. Right wing media is relatively consolidated: there's one major cable channel that markets to their interests, and they have room for ~one opinion show in a daily primetime slot. Obviously whatever goes in that slot is going to be hugely popular.
Or to put it more boring, mathematical terms, the mode is not the same as the median. Even if somehow one in three people were huge fans of Carlson, that would still count as relatively niche - and strongly controversial - because that would be the 1/3 most hard right of the US population.
I didn't argue that Carlson should or should not be cut. I argued that Carlson being niche and controversial was compatible with also being one of the most popular television shows.
He’s no where close to “one of the most popular television shows”.
He was one of the most popular cable, non-sports shows (his show and The Five, also on Fox News, swapped to the top spot back and forth recently), but cable-specific shows other than sports are (individually) niche.
That's fine. I'm responding to people who are making an argument along the lines of "Carlson had one of the most popular television shows, therefore he is not niche or controversial". My point is that this is pure non sequitur. The consequent does not follow from the antecedent.
If it turns out that Carlson's popularity is so tenuous that the truth of the antecedent in the argument is doubtful, that's great. But the argument is completely bogus regardless.
> Even if somehow one in three people were huge fans...
This definition would make eating pizza itself a niche thing, topping or otherwise. 33% of the population is mainstream and it isn't an option to claim otherwise. Less popular? Yes. Fringe? No. Fringe is something like Linux on the desktop at sub-1% of the market. It is not feasible to ignore or marginalise 1 person in 3.
I'm certainly impressed by the position that the most popular show is the fringe one. In theory it is possible, but practically that is a hard sell.
Not mainstream, but not fringe; he's popular on Cable but not popular overall, especially in a world where people under 50 don't even watch cable news. If you combine with the lack of integrity and the personal toxicity, he locks himself in that small category. Everyone in the US knew Rush Limbaugh but he didn't get GM sponsorships.
Tucker absolutely represents Mainstream public opinion, better than most other pundits for roughly half of the country. To believe otherwise is harmful self-delusion. With the caveat that no pundit is going to be on-beat all of the time.
I think it's delusional to suggest that Tucker represents mainstream public opinion more than other entities.
In fact, I suggest a lot of Tucker fans believe that, and that's partly what's wrong with them.
That said, Tucker does represents a bigger chunk of America than his naysayers would like to admit.
Importantly - it's not fair to say he 'represents' anything. He lies and spins, and says whatever will get him clicks. The SMS releases during the Fox trial very clearly highlighted that they have completely different perspective on-camera than off, and that they are obsessed with both advertiser revenue and throwing red meat to their audience, willing to say things that are completely at odds with reality, and even their own conscience, in order to garner ratings, which has the negative effect of spreading disinformation or lies, such as for example that the 'election was rigged or stolen' - a falsehood which about 1/3 of Americans have come to believe because supposedly legitimate sources such as POTUS and 'News' have been completely corrupted, liked a 3rd world country.
Tucker has morphed into a cross between ranting right wing antagonist, Rush Limbaugh, and Alex Jones - taking the 'Hard Alt' position on basically every issue. The difference is that classical right wing were ultra nationalist, Tucker is Alt Nationalist.
One of the most interesting revelations is the extent to which he embraces the ultra antagonist perspective, even for the smallest inane things - he was doing it behind the scenes, in meetings, with interns, almost like he was practising his shtick.
Note that Tucker didn't used to be like this, and that if you watch Russia One channel right now the main propagandists are uttering some truly fascist stuff on a daily basis (aka 'We should nuke Berlin', or about some government guy 'we should have shot him' etc.) - but almost all of them, less than 20 years ago, would have been considered 'strong reformer liberals'. Even Medvedev was the same - big time liberal reformer - now he's the Tucker of Russia.
It's fake, it's a game.
Finally, they are all playing characters, even Musk, even Linda, it's a matter of the degree to which the character is legit.
Remember that while democrats are a slight majority (most of the time—right now they’re a slight minority by self-identification) only half of democrats identify as liberal. My mom votes democrat because she’s an immigrant—on race, gender, policing, sexuality, etc. issues she’d be somewhat to the right of Carlson.
That data data does not support your argument aka "Tucker is not niche because his audience has more political balance" than we'd otherwise expect.
Except - Cable News audiences are small, and 25-54 Cable News audience is a tiny fraction of that already small audience, not very representative of much.
'TV' is a minority of viewership: Streaming is now bigger than TV.
'TV News' is a small segment of TV and is mostly a 50+ type of program.
'Cable News' is a small tranche of news, compared to local/broadcast.
'25-54 Cable News' is a small tranche of Cable News.
'Wheel of Fortune' gets considerably more viewers than Tucker - that show is 'mainstream' and is going to reel in advertisers for obvious reasons.
He'll carve out a 'Ruch Limbaugh' type audience on Twitter. In 2005 everyone knew who Rush was, that didn't make him mainstream or appealing to advertisers. I should note that I'm doubtful many even remotely controversial Cable TV personalities are big with advertisers.
Also, maybe notable, is that 'empathy and inclusion' is not going to be generally harmful to ad buyers whereas 'concern and judgement' probably are. I'm not saying one of those
ethos has moral superiority, rather, one is just an easier thing to ride a message on.
Look at LinkedIn: it's all 'happy happy happy, you can do it, go for it, that person is amazing' - there's hardly any criticism.
I think it's a mistake to treat Tucker (similarly Trump) as the center of a personality cult. There's a great deal of popular support for low-level conservatism that corporate media owners won't tolerate and aren't interested in, so a vacuum builds up and the only thing that's left for that half of Americans to support is bombastic blowhards. "Vote red, no matter who" looks hideous because there's nobody constantly covering up the blemishes.
Sorry to be obtuse here, but does "killed it" mean that she brought in great revenues or did it mean that she sent it headed to oblivion? Slang can be kind of dangerous sometimes.
Who knows, but the question is more of unit economics than company profitability. Falcon could be profitable on a per-launch basis, and all the profit gets shuttled back into R&D.
"Our widgets are profitable, but all of the R&D, sales people, back-office people, etc. etc. required to actually run a business makes us unprofitable"
So ummm who's gonna pay all of those people to make sure the robots and people make the widgets every day?
SpaceX has the vast majority of the worldwide private launch market. It's the only company with a reusable first-stage booster. The cost-per-KG is 10-20% of the competition.
This isn't me speculating wildly, everyone with even passing familiarity with the industry knows this.
> This isn't me speculating wildly, everyone with even passing familiarity with the industry knows this.
I never questioned their market dominance, I questioned their overall company profitability. The cost of building a rocket can be easily fudged to create whatever financial picture you want. Not to mention Elon Musk is notorious for doing this. Unless you have access to their financial statements, all of this conjecture.
> The cost-per-KG is 10-20% of the competition.
Uhh might wanna check your source, from Wikipedia: "These varying cost and requirements makes market analysis imprecise."...
Elon Musk said in his Twitter Space interview right after Starship test launch that SpaceX doesn't need to raise money for a while, other than letting employees cashing out some shares twice a year.
Not that I disagree, but what Elon Musk says about financials of his companies, is 100% driven but the picture of it he wants to paint, and can have 0% relation to the reality.
I believe he borrowed a big chunk of the cash. So he owes these folks something for funding it. It might be kind of limited but he can't just treat it like his own fiefdom.
He owns the majority of the company, but not all of it. There are other partial owners as well (Qatar, A Saudia Prince, Larry Ellison, Jack Dorsey, a venture capitalist or two, etc).
I can't see how that could be correct. Firstly, if he runs product then there needs to be deep strategic alignment and he can't leave it to the CEO to "figure out how to make money", secondly, it's not just fiduciary duties for the CEO (or at least that is a gross simplification) - my bet is Elon is thrilled to hand over some of the organisational structure, marketing, sales, people and finance operational and strategic aspects that aren't directly related to the unique vision of Twitter and the product and engineering processes itself. And as the owner and chair he'll still be very much involved with things at a high level too.
What change "destroyed" it for you? Was it extending the tweet length limit? Opening up verification for individuals? Organization labels? Bringing back a "following" timeline?
From my POV, it's gotten objectively better at a rapid clip over the past 6 months and I've been seeing less off-topic stuff in my feed (which is basically anything not programming-related) or a few other accounts I follow.
You can fix that by not clicking on things you don't like, because it shows you more of what you click. You can end up with a feed with fascists or communists or both because free speech applies to all. But again, you can choose what you want to see by training the algo or by using the feed of who you are following.
The problem with those assertions is that it didn't use to show me any of this content. It used to show me content I was reasonably happy with. Then the content showing up for me very rapidly changed towards including a huge amount of extreme right-wing content and bigotry over a period that I was hardly active, and only used the "Followers" tab and clicked on content I enjoyed from people who don't in any way fit the profile of the type of accounts I complained about earlier.
At best the quality of their recommendation system has dramatically declined. At worst they're intentionally favouring different stuff. In between there are slightly more palatable (than the worst case) options, such as that they're favouring overall popularity of content more over your individual preferences, but in any case all I know is that it's turned from a relatively pleasant experience to pushing content in my face that disgusts me.
I've also written recommendation systems. In fact, I've written one I used to run on top of Twitters API. And so I know from first-hand experience that it's trivial to get better quality recommendations more aligned with what I click on than what I'm currently getting. Something is seriously wrong, whether accidentally or intentionally.
The complete destruction of content moderation and his personal beefs with users. He has been preaching "free speech" but he is enabling the worst people in the world while laying dishonest criticism on anyone he doesn't personally like.
Three of those four changes (tweet length, paid checks, timeline changes) have made Twitter substantially worse to use. Now every reasonably popular tweet's replies are drowning in irrelevant novel-length screeds and emoji-laden nonsense from paying users.
My feed is no longer related to my interests and I don’t know how to get it back on track. That and losing the confidence that the blue check posting is actually someone relevant. Really kills the enjoyment for me.
I get pushed openly Nazi content. Like Nazi symbology (the obvious ones, not the deep cut pseudo ambiguous ones) memes and art and quote accounts. I used to report but they get turned down or only suspended for some days.
I also now get pushed a lot of fight and public freak out videos specifically of black people with pages of replies talking about eugenics
The app pushes me back to “for you” repeatedly where this stuff mostly is, or I get a push notification, or it shows up in following feed sometimes for people I don’t follow
I hadn't realized how lost Sam had gotten until I saw his Triggernometry interview [0]. I had a lot of respect for him once but he's clearly lost the plot.
>I've never been under any illusion that he is Orange Hitler.
>I supported censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story because it helped Biden
>I’ve said on several occasions that I think Donald Trump is a worse person than Osama bin Laden
>Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared. There’s nothing, it’s Hunter Biden, it’s not Joe Biden. Whatever the scope of Joe Biden’s corruption is…it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in. It’s like a firefly to the sun.
That's sounds like a radical leftist to me with a severe case of TDS.
I'm having trouble finding another one I saw yesterday he tweeted basically implying black women were an order of magnitude more violent than white women.
Edit: ah, found it, along with a couple inane conspiracies to boot, which has become standard for him these days:
The links you posted are inflammatory nonsense that try to draw a line between concern over mainstream media coverage of race and crime and "fascism". It's contrived at best.
Are the statistics wrong? Is it wrong to say that media coverage is slanted and focuses on the minority of racist white-on-black crime while ignoring the reverse? Seems like this is all fairly well documented. Slapping slurs on the posts that point that out and calling for the posters to be "cancelled" or suppressed by calling them "dangerous" - that, if anything, strikes me as fascistic.
They have been purposefully stripped of context and misrepresented to imply that black people are more violent than white people. The author literally worked backwards from the originally expressed percentages to deceive! It's not the statistics that are wrong, it's the way they've been presented.
Over the last 10+ years on this site, I have mostly found this to be one of the higher quality places for discussion on the internet, but occasionally over the last few years I have questioned whether this is the right place for me. The responses to this have once again made me rethink whether this community is one I want to be a part of.
Having looked up what that means: am I missing something or is it the case that you don't want to interact with people who mention facts that can be used to support unpleasant narratives?
Because if so, that seems like a way of ending up with a very biased view of the world... while the murder ratio fact might be old news to you and something that shouldn't be dwelled on, there's bound to be one of the 10,000[1] just learning it for the first time and sometimes you'd be one of those 10,000 unless you cut yourself off from it.
You are missing that this is one of many racist signalers and memes white supremacists and nazis use to justify their hatred. They're based on incomplete and misleading statistics designed to manipulate people without critical thinking skills.
The best solution there seems to be teaching people critical thinking, statistics and how to look things up tbh... rather than cutting them off from these sorts of figures.
(I've personally been advocating that for a decade to anyone who'll sit still for a minute)
It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed here and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of what they're battling for or against, so please don't.
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? and please not use HN for ideological battle, regardless of what you're battling for or against? You've unfortunately been doing these things a lot lately. They're not what the site is for, and they destroy what it is for.
It's pseudoscientific bunk (in this case, statistics manipulated to deceive) designed push a narrative of a specific race being more violent. It is no more moral, intelligent, or useful than phrenology.
I think saying that it amounts to phrenology is a manipulation designed to push a narrative. I expected something completely different than what you’ve presented. I think you aren’t better than Elon Musk in that regard.
If the worst racism possible is complaining about disproportionate media focus on white on black crime then I think we can safely declare the problem of racism solved. :)
To be a bit more constructive: looking at those links it seems obvious to me that the main point is about media focus, not the actual crime statistics.
Complaining about "disproportionate media coverage" is a thin veil for the delivery of the more insidious message the dishonest graphic is conveying: why aren't they covering the real problem of all these black people committing violence.
And I didn't say it's the "worst" racism. It's cheap, low effort, dishonest, unintelligent, and designed to manipulate morons, which brings me back to my original comparison to phrenology.
Well, from my somewhat uninformed un-american perspective, the question of "how can we fix the problem of violence in black American communities?" does indeed seem much more important than the one of "how can we fix the problem of white Americans doing violence against black ones?" due to its relative size. So I'm unclear on why the message you claim is being delivered is bad.
It's completely removing intra-racial statistics that would make the problem much more apparent, which is that there are far more white people in America than black people, and thus, there are far more white victims of crime than black victims. Expressing absolute numbers rather than percentages is a bald faced misrepresentation, and the creator of the graphic went out of their way to represent it that way (the cited source has the data correctly expressed as a percentage and includes intra-racial statistics too).
The fundamental problem: this is designed to mislead people like you and it works. And I'm struggling not to be rude here, but it is really hard for me not to see how someone with even the most rudimentary critical thinking skills couldn't look at a graphic like that and immediately see the red flags.
Uh... the big media narrative that Elon seems to be pushing back against is that there's a big inter-racial thing making white people attack and kill blacks. Showing that there is 10x more violence going the other way seems to directly address that by making people notice that they're being shown a non-representative slice of reality.
Also, if violence was randomly targeted irrespective of race you still wouldn't expect 10x as many black on white as white on black, you'd expect approximately the same absolute numbers (10x as many white violent people but only 0.1x as many victims being black cancelling out to 1x). This even holds true in a segregated society as long as black Americans and white Americans are equally segregated (e.g. 70% of whites only being around whites and 70% of blacks being around blacks).
Let’s disregard the comparison to phrenology, now it’s clear it was done in bad faith. But what exactly is your position? Do you think it is impossible to not be racist and believe in racial media bias at the same time? Is it an obvious dog whistle that someone has to be either stupid or autistic to misunderstand?
It would be really interesting to meet you and see what you're actually like in person, the people who display this sort of incurious, black and white, us and them attitude I encounter online aren't possible to talk to and have an extended conversation with.
But I'd really like to know how you guys think... do you genuinely only look at the everything through the lense of "which political views does this fact support?" and "what type of people repeat this sort of fact? Are they outgroup?"?
You said he promotes "what amounts to phrenology" and then linked to a tweet where someone calls Musk a white supremacist for commenting "wow" on a post about illegal immigration. That whole chain of justification looks to me like a total non sequitur.
That doesn't seem like phrenology to me. Yes, there's a lack of context, but the fundamental points about media (both traditional and social) amplifying certain things (to get more shares mostly) seems sound... I certainly have been exposed to at least 10x as many reports of USA whites killing blacks than the reverse.
I'm skeptical given how often I've seen people be accused of being nazis and upon investigating discovering to my disappointment some rather milktoast views that would have been mainstream in 1990.
He brought back anyone previously banned for open naziism such as Andrew Anglin and more recently Patriotic Alternative. And some suspicious several “14 88” referencing tweets. There’s also the Nazi meme he posted. Then the Nazi with several huge Nazi tattoos that he defended as unlikely to be a Nazi. Or the groyper memeing. Then the Angelicism / Milady Maker memeing, an nft project made by crypto neonazis with anime swastika homepages
I checked just now and Andrew Anglin's account is suspended.
I wasnt able to find a Patriotic Alternative account and when I searched on it, the overwhelming majority of the tweets were critical.
And the content of the so-called nazi meme appears to have nothing to do with Nazism other than the shape of a helmet. It's actually about the speed of technology change. And from what I can tell Nick Fuentes/Groyper thing was on twitter for 24hrs before being suspended.
So I dunno....it looks like you are providing a distorted view to support a narrative.
If I wanted to I'm sure I could find all kinds of other hate content on the fringes that is equally nasty but sits outside the "narrative" we are constantly being force-fed.
you haven't looked much. those are also people who were let back and again suspended after obvious and newsworthy pressure from advertisers. lmk if you want more detail... or if you're unserious about this
I didn’t say he’s very effective so far at whatever he’s doing. He caves to pressure and material realities like anyone and covers ass
Sure if you have some links although Im assuming itll be some leftwing news outlets doing what you appear to be doing, which is dressing up supposition and hearsay as fact.
Generally for me I mostly ignore the media as I find its largely distortions and half-truths.
Not to mention Twitter is increasingly their competitor so unlikely to be objective anyway.
I just go on what I see with my own eyes and it seems pretty clean to me.
ok my experience is very different.
Here's a short video on this exact topic of an interview with Elon Musk and a BBC "journalist" (I use that label very loosely).
It always makes me laugh how, for years, we mocked journalists because of their inflated blue check egos, and now every "free thinker" out there is eager to pay to be just like them. Verification is meaningless for most individuals since there's no real need to verify if @ronny2938742 is indeed Mr. Ron Whatever.
However, it's crucial to know if an account claiming to be a big company, government agency, journalist, politician, etc. is legitimate. Opening verification to subscribers is absolutely scammy, just a way to make a couple of bucks off the victims of culture war brainwashing.
At least in my circles blue check marks were mocked because they became a symbol of endorsement of certain viewpoints by Twitter rather than a symbol of verified identity.
And yet the process to grant bluecheck was to literally check personal id, and grant it to whoever had media presence. For years, you could request verification, send a couple of links citing you, provide a government-issued ID and that was it.
Twitter verified literally every public figure it could - regardless of politics - even those who didn't seem to need verification. However, being a niche contrarian blogger does not make you a public figure, and that's where I feel the resentment is located.
Funny. I see it differently. I pay for the blue check because it adds legitimacy. If I'm replying and having conversations with people with similar blue checks then I know I'm talking to real humans not hiding behind fake usernames. Also, any threats or anything from bad actors could otherwise be tracked based on payment method.
When having conversations in HN does it bother you that you have no way to know if you're talking to a real human, not hiding behind fake usernames? What do you think underlies this feeling you seem to have?
EDIT: what I do think was a tremendous success is the publicity stunt. I've never seen any platform where people felt they should pay to let people know they were who they claimed to be. Kudos to the people doing the whole "twitter is filled with bots" psyop, it worked.
> When having conversations in HN does it bother you that you have no way to know if you're talking to a real human, not hiding behind fake usernames?
On HN, I'm not bothered at all. If I see the username "dang" for example, I know it's YC moderator dang also same with "patio11". I see HN as more of a private group discourse vs Twitter where it's public and where blue makes more sense. Akin to a forum, where I frequent like home-barista, the community is smaller and more focused so I don't see why having blue makes sense.
The accounts of companies, government agencies and people linked to those two have a different color of check or a special icon. This seems like an actual improvement on everyone being blue to me.
I acknowledge they're shipping changes to the frontend - some of which are not bad at all - but it sounds surreal to me that we keep talking about UI changes as if they were major features, and pretend twitter circles aren't broken, that notifications are as in near real time as they were, etc. There were major losses of service quality in basically everything backend related, and no amount of frontend tweaking can compensate that.
Likewise, especially because (1) he still owns it and (2) he can revert this at the drop of a hat and (3) he will likely be one heck of a backseat driver while she takes all the heat for his fuckups.
Not going back either, but mostly because it gave me the impetus to get off and discover what a useless timesink it was for me from the start. So Elon does get my thanks for that. I don't miss it just like I don't miss FB since dropping off that ~10 yrs ago.
This is actually a smart model given Musk’s strengths have always been in building things and not in the day to day running of companies.
They are different skill sets.
It’s worked remarkably well to have Gwynne Shotwell run things at SpaceX (she’s an awesome COO and also an aerospace engineer). I have wished for years that he do that at Tesla.
Having an ad exec run Twitter will take care of all the “how do we pay the bills” part of running the business while he does the “fun” stuff of focusing on product.
Update: Updated Gwynne Shotwell's title to COO, not CEO (and fixed spelling of her name).
It's an awkward structure to have the executive chairman and/or majority shareholder take a position (usually CTO or CPO) elsewhere in the org chart, because it means that that person is simultaneously the boss and subordinate of the CEO.
It can work - most famously, this was the structure that Google had in its golden years (2001-2011) with Eric as CEO and Larry & Sergey as presidents of Product & Technology, respectively. It also was sort of the structure of Apple with Steve Wozniak as an IC & founder. But it puts the CEO in a very awkward spot where they're in charge of the organization but not really in charge of the organization, which in turn requires leadership with great humility. That's not really what Elon is known for.
The structure of SpaceX or Facebook or Apple 1998+, where you have a visionary CEO and then strong COO under them that makes the trains run on time, is much more common and less fraught with conflicting reporting lines.
The complexity with the Executive Chairman -> CEO -> CTO sandwich is that Elon also has a day-to-day operating role at the company.
That means that he's visible in the office (because bye-bye remote work), and when there are product/technical questions, it's unclear to employees whether Elon or Linda is the ultimate decider. It's normally not a problem that the board can fire the CEO, because employees never interact with the board and often don't know who they are. But when the chairman of the board is also an ordinary employee, some fraction of employees will follow the official reporting structure and do what the CEO wants, while some other fraction of employees will follow the "power behind the throne" and do what Elon wants. The result will be a company that can't agree what it's doing, with multiple competing groups working at cross purposes.
This was a huge problem at Google, both in the early days and today. Larry and Sergey would go directly to engineers with ideas, and then those engineers (hoping to get a coveted Founder's Award, and out of respect for the founders) would drop what they were doing and work on Larry's ideas. It worked in the 2000s, because Larry & Sergey's product judgment actually was really good - that's how we got GMail, and Chrome, and YouTube, and Android. But it's also the root cause of much of the organizational dysfunction that affects Google today. Google culture follows competence, not reporting lines, which means that one giant company is actually 1000+ small groups of unrelated projects, most of which duplicate each other, that never integrate quite right, which will often be technically brilliant but then blocked or unlaunched as soon as they cross some competing executive's path.
> and when there are product/technical questions, it's unclear to employees whether Elon or Linda is the ultimate decider.
Linda, because she is the one who is there every day. If Linda thinks Elon has made the wrong call, she just has to work out how to talk him out of it while soothing his ego, and in the meantime get her team to focus on how to implement the right one. She probably already has that skill, but if she needs mentoring, Gwynne Shotwell can help her out
With Musk in the CTO role, he's either going to be there every day, or Twitter is going to have an absent CTO. Both of them are bad for decision-making efficiency.
Then he's going to be the absent (or worse, inconsistently-present) CTO, which is worse. If he's there then there's at least a chance of him and Linda working out clear roles and responsibilities. If he's totally absent then technical decisions are not going to get decided, which holds up engineering. If he's inconsistently absent then decisions may get decided when he's absent and then reversed when he shows up to the office, which makes it impossible to do any sort of long-term planning.
He obviously can't be at all three full time. Investors in SpaceX and Tesla have complained he's spending significant time in the Twitter office and neglecting the other two. Just because it would make business sense for him to focus less on Twitter doesn't mean you can assume he will - surely we can all agree, regardless of our opinion on Musk, that he frequently bucks the conventional wisdom on how a CEO should behave?
The difference is that normally, the CEO answers to the board every few months. And the board doesn't tell the CEO what to do; the point of a CEO is that they can be trusted to do the right move. If they can't, then they serve no purpose and will be fired.
In this structure, Elon is embedded in the decision making loop directly. The CEO normally is responsible for the company, but instead, Elon has decided that the CEO will deal with making money while he makes all of the decisions as to how the product works. Which essentially cuts the CEO of of any decision making aside from business partnerships, making her more of a VP of Sales than CEO.
Easier to sell if you’re CEO (in title, if not in actual job) than VP of Sales though.
If the issue is the advertisers need someone to escalate too (and someone who Elon would listen to when he needs talking out of some half baked idea), then it is a good fit.
If the idea is to have Twitter actually functional as a product driven engineering company, then yeah that won’t work. But baby steps.
Private companies still have boards of directors. It's possible to have a board of directors with only one member but this is a rarity; even non-profits and pre-funding startups will usually have a board with more than one person.
> It's possible to have a board of directors with only one member but this is a rarity
It is actually extremely common for corporations which aren’t regular business as such - for example, trustees of family trusts are commonly corporations with a single director who is the person who ultimately controls the trust. Also a common structure for sole proprietorship businesses that want some protection from legal liability.
I own a company which never has done anything (I was daydreaming). Its board of directors has one member-me. Legally, I am required to hold annual board meetings with myself, although I believe the legal obligation is met if I hold them in my head. “This year’s financial results: zero revenue, zero expenses, zero assets, zero liabilities, zero employees-another great year at does-nothing-corp!”
Minutes would be important if my company actually did anything. A company that literally does nothing doesn’t have to worry about the piercing of the corporate veil, because you first need to do something before you can become liable for it
I'm a little confused by this comment because a sole proprietorship cannot exist in the form of a corporation. Of course, one person can have a corporation all to themselves, but the definition of a sole proprietorship is a business without a more complex form.
I'm guessing what you actually mean is "Also a common structure for one person who does business on their own, who has incorporated, and who is their own sole board member." Is my inference correct?
What I mean is a person who has a sole proprietorship desires greater legal protection, so they set up a corporation to replace their sole proprietorship, but it is still just a one natural person-owned business-in legal terms it is no longer a sole proprietorship, but in non-legal terms nothing has changed
This is common in the US too, usually they need to file with their state. Going private will often remove the need to file publicly with the SEC though (though even then, that depends on things like how many shareholders there are, not the trading status as such).
All companies have boards of directors, even privately owned ones
Small firms it is common to have a single person board of directors, where that single person is the 100% owner.
When private equity takes a large firm private, they’ll often appoint a board full of their own partners and consultants/advisers-if you own 20 different firms, you don’t want to deal with all their CEOs, you want a layer between the CEO and you-which is where the board helps.
100% subsidiaries (such as a large multinational firm’s local subsidiary in each country) commonly have multi-person boards of directors, with a handful of local senior staff on it (e.g. country director, head of local finance, HR and general counsel) - they usually all just rubber stamp whatever HQ wants, although occasionally they might refuse (e.g if local counsel insists HQ’s demands are illegal and complying with them would make the directors personally liable)
It depends on the country. Where I live (Australia), we don’t have “LLCs”, we do have “PTY LTDs”, which are like an LLC - but it is a corporation and all corporations have directors, although the majority of PTY LTDs are sole director sole shareholder. Here, all companies are corporations
I should point out that in the traditional legal sense of the term, even US LLCs are corporations-it is just that people in the US have adopted some weird redefinition of “corporation” which excludes them. Under Australian law, a US LLC is a corporation, albeit a foreign one. Worldwide, I think most countries legal systems would reach the same conclusion
The British monarchy is a corporation (a corporation sole) - actually, a whole bunch of distinct single member corporations (the monarch), one for each Commonwealth realm, and also one for each Australian state and Canadian province - each called “the Crown in right of X”. Maybe that’s an example of a corporation without any directors, although one might (rather meaninglessly) claim the monarch is the sole director
Oracle has had Larry Ellison as chairman/CTO, and someone else as CEO, for almost 10 years now - and they’ve done well (financially at least) over the period. They even started out with two joint CEOs (Mark Hurd and Safra Catz), but were reduced to one by Mark Hurd’s sudden untimely death. Ellison isn’t majority owner, but he does own over a third of the stock.
Oracle, what a crazy company. Its only goal seems to be to buy things, and then destroy them.
I interviewed there a decade ago. Response: someone told me I wasn't a culture fit.
But this wasn't the normal "culture fit" response, oh no. You could tell it was a "you aren't willing to drink the coolaid" type of response. I feel I dodged a bullet.
I worked for Oracle for almost 10 years. My memories of working there is of just a lot of totally normal everyday people doing the same things as at any other large corporation. Some of the business and technical decisions were disappointing, yet somehow they found a way to just keep on making boatloads of money anyway.
Oracle isn't exactly a shining example. If you ask anyone technical who professionally came of age in the last 25 years what they're known for, the answer will be "lawsuits".
Your comment is a pretty good example of the kind of organizational dysfunction that results from unclear reporting and leadership vacuums. From the inside, lots of people are doing their job and doing their job well. From the outside, all this activity and all these highly-paid and highly-talented employees don't result in anything novel or useful. The company keeps chugging along, making boatloads of cash from its existing customers because old habits die hard, but gradually loses its capacity to adapt to market shifts. Then when a market shift happens, it goes out of business.
Twitter's problem is that a market shift is already underway, and their financials are precarious. Companies like Oracle or IBM can limp along for decades as long as their customers stay in business. Google is in the middle - their business is probably more precarious now than it's been in 20 years. Twitter is at imminent risk of death in the next 1-3 years if they don't turn the ship around.
I’ve seen people choose Oracle Cloud because it was cheaper than AWS/GCP/Azure. Maybe Oracle is selling at a loss to gain more market share, but if you design things right, moving to another provider isn’t that hard. In practice, AWS seems to have much more vendor lock-in
Oracle has so many acquired products, many businesses are paying for one and people don’t even notice. For example, NetSuite for accounting. Cerner runs hospitals. Lots of industry-specific software in utilities, insurance, manufacturing, etc
Compared to (say) IBM, Oracle is much keener on killing legacy products
i use oracle cloud for its extraordinarily generous free tier but it is straight up the worst website for any cloud service i've ever encountered, it reminds me of going into a retail shop that is clearly a money laundering front. the dashboard page seems purposefully designed to prevent you from managing your assets and i had to contact a support agent to figure out how to attach a credit card to my account.
I'm not talking about free usage, I'm talking about people spending serious money on cloud services. Cases I've heard about, Oracle sales were willing to engage in much more aggressive discounting on a large deal than AWS or GCP or Azure were, making going with Oracle pretty much a no-brainer from a cost viewpoint. I've heard similar stories about IBM as well. I suppose the second-tier players feel a need to fight for business that the first-tier players don't.
No idea about their web UI (although it can't possibly be as bad as the UIs of some of their legacy on-premise products) – but serious usage one tends to use the APIs much more than the web UI.
I used to work very closely with Oracle sales teams in Australia-and I never saw anyone I worked with directly do anything “amoral”.
I heard about a few things on the grapevine, but in a 100,000 person company things are going to happen, you can’t really generalise from the occasional incident.
> It's an awkward structure to have the executive chairman and/or majority shareholder take a position (usually CTO or CPO) elsewhere in the org chart, because it means that that person is simultaneously the boss and subordinate of the CEO.
That's a good description and it is the de facto structure of a great many companies I've worked in/with. I would say it's relatively normal to be honest
Yes! How could I forget one of my favorite examples, Eric Schmidt at google. It was a brilliant move.
But you have a great point about CEO vs COO. As the technical CEO of a small company myself (who loves building things), I know you just have to deal with certain things directly and dedicate your name and time (not complaining, that's just the job) and that takes time away from the day to day building.
To make money she has to sell ads, to sell ads she needs to make the platform palatable for advertisers, which means going back to pre-Elon content moderation, which he clearly doesn't want to do. Her title might as well be VP of Sales given the power dynamic he's communicating.
> which means going back to pre-Elon content moderation
Not necessarily, it depends how things get implemented.
There isn't any reason Twitter couldn't build content classification tools that allowed advertisers to select which content to cluster and be targeted with and which content to exclude for perception reasons. The latter is easier than full moderation because it is much more tolerant of false positives.
Or it could focus on distinct product, like whatever their new video content platform thing is going to be.
Or maybe DM based ads.
Or opening up the third party ecosystem again and doing more on the channel side.
Or Musk has said a bunch of things about payment platforms that he wanted to do a paypal and wasn't able to implement but now has an opportunity to try. Similarly for things like identity/IAM products or other internet glue.
Or they could pivot into other advertising platforms and manage spend and and automation across different social media properties in addition to Twitter's own.
given the number of (far) right figureheads she follows[1], appealing to advertisers that care about these kinds of optics doesn't seem to be part of the plan
That doesn't seem a useful metric, as surely that isn't an exhaustive list, and following someone on twitter is not a useful signal that you share their philosophy. Lot's of "hate" following on twitter.
But I don't think advertisers GAF about her personal beliefs or philosophy, as long as their ads don't show up next to beheadings or nazis. She is already an advertising executive
Nah dude, the huge companies that use record profits to buy back stock instead of giving raises to their employees struggling to afford their cost of living and who routinely pull shit like laying off and rehiring people to new positions so they have a reason not to give them raises and closing down stores that even discuss the idea of unionizing would totally draw the line at advertising at a company that has a CEO that follows rightoids instead of leftists.
If there’s one thing that massive for profit corporations can’t stand it’s capitalism.
> Having an ad exec run Twitter will take care of all the “how do we pay the bills” part of running the business while he does the “fun” stuff of focusing on product.
And apparently, Twitter has millions of dollars in bills that it hasn't been paying. See this other interesting article, posted today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35918253
Not paying vendors and landlords as a negotiation tactic seems slimy. I assume they will eventually sue Twitter and win, but is there any punitive damages? If not, I am guessing Twitter will be rewarded for not paying by getting better terms on existing contracts.
I don't think it's uncommon. Big companies have always played dumb games with billing and contracting unless you can nail them to the wall with an ironclad "you pay us X on Y day or you pay us an extra Z per day" contract.
Big companies have a lot of leverage. Vendors don’t want to antagonize them in hope of getting paid eventually and due to a risk of retaliation. Going to court might be a suicide by legal expenses.
Large companies not paying their bills because they can get away with it is such bullshit. Trump famously did this with small business contractors at some of his casinos.
The reason it's such bullshit is that it's essentially hostage taking: "Why yes, I know we owe you $10 million and that's what we agreed to, but we're just not going to pay. You can sue us, but we have top notch lawyers that can drag it out for a long time, or else you can settle with us for $7 million right now."
I think there should be an equivalent of "small claims court" for cases like these where flat out missed payments are handled quickly and without the need for expensive lawyers, e.g. "Here's our contract, there is no disagreement that we delivered, so freeze their bank accounts if they don't pay us immediately."
Drag it out? Force you to have to hire a lawyer to get paid?
Point being, I don't think a top notch lawyer will win, but given the cost of litigation (plus the time value of money), expensive corporate lawyers can force small vendors to settle with a sizable discount.
The baseless myth that Elon inherited millions still won't die it seems...
(To cut to the chase there, Elon seems to have gotten around $90k from his father, of which $28k was a loan. You can check out Errol Musk's Sun interview and the wikipedia article for more info)
I didn't say anything about the emerald mine rumor that Elon himself is responsible for. It was his quote from a 2014 Forbes article no longer live on their site. [1]
> Elon Musk: "... In South Africa, my father had a private plane we’d fly in incredibly dangerous weather and barely make it back. This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia."
I was talking about how a lot of his success came from Tesla, where he wasn't a founder, but instead an early investor. He started calling himself a founder one day, and the actual founders sued him. They settled. [2]
In the case of both Apple and Meta the (then, in the case of the former) founder-CEOs delegated the "how do we pay the bills" thing to a trusted COO instead, a markedly different approach from what Musk did.
Musk, CEO and “Chief Engineer”, mainly just fucks things up like causing DOD investigations into his pot use (a disagreeable government contracting clause due to the War of Drugs), and now most famously overruling the real engineers and thus overseeing the destruction of the Starship launch pad, and promoting an FAA and environmental investigation.
See also: Overruling Tesla engineers and ordering the removal of radars, directly leading to multiple preventable accidents.
No she doesn't, and she wouldn't agree that this is the case. Only anti-Musk haters claim this.
> mainly just fucks things up
Funny thing to say about the most successful space company in history. Shotwell wasn't even COO for the initial success of the company.
> causing DOD investigations into his pot use
A literally 100% inconsequential thing that changed absolutely nothing and had no effect what so ever.You are really grasping at straws with this one.
> most famously overruling the real epromoting an FAA and environmental investigationngineers and thus overseeing the destruction of the Starship launch pad
He has the finial decision on all things at SpaceX and had them since Falcon 1 days. He didn't 'overrule' his engineers, at SpaceX decisions are usually made in big meeting with input from everybody and Musk makes the final call. Doing the launchpad upgrades before the first launch would have meant further delay of first launch, thus delaying getting flight data. Now they can evaluate the flight and fix the pad at the same time. Also the launch pad isn't destroyed, its slightly damaged. It was the wrong decision in hindsight but it isn't that relevant going forward.
He takes responsibility for things he gets wrong. He also decided not to have slosh baffles on Falcon 1. That led to its failure. He made other mistakes, if you want you can go threw the history of SpaceX and point all of them out. He also insisted on Deep Cryo fuel that lead to Amos-6 but it also helped SpaceX in the long run. And he takes ownership for these mistakes. When you make a lot of important technical choices, you get some of them wrong.
But its downright sad of you do cherry pick a few things SpaceX got wrong when SpaceX threw-out its history, with Musk as the final decision maker has clearly gotten things right far more often then they have gotten things wrong. Again, SpaceX is literally the most successful space company ever and it isn't really close. Musk has also been the longest serving CEO of pretty much any space company in the industry.
> promoting an FAA and environmental investigation
The amount of times the Musk haters people have claimed that some federal agency will destroy SpaceX because of 'evil Elon' is ridiculous. They knew the risk and some non toxic concrete wont change anything.
If we actually go by factual evidence, companies that Musk was in charge off. How successful are these companies. The result is clearly, Musk is one of the most successful business people ever.
You can personally dislike him and dislike him for choices he made, but saying he is not responsible for SpaceX and Tesla success is ridiculous.
Nice deflection. Im sure you’ll be on the B-Ark not problem.
My position is that the companies would be MORE successful if they fired his ass. SpaceX is the most successful venture, because he’s actually the least involved.
But yes, every major decision can be traced back to him, and it’s an epic fail. Hell, I even forgot about him insisting that robots could do finally assembly, even though every company that tried it failed — repeatedly.
Face it. Sempai is a screwup, and he wont let you on the B-Ark either.
> My position is that the companies would be MORE successful if they fired his ass.
So being the single most successful companies in their industry is not enough. You certainty have incredibly high opinion all the leadership behind these companies. And how do you come to this conclusion?
Shotwell is the only one being very public. She had a good career before, but not one that would suggest she could have lead an even more successful company. Most of the rest of SpaceX leaders after the initial set were promoted internally.
Nobody in the leadership of Tesla had such an amazing CV to believe the could do even better.
It seems pretty simple, you don't like him, therefore you just choice to believe that everything would be better without him even if there is no evidence that this is true.
> But yes, every major decision can be traced back to him, and it’s an epic fail.
So every major decision is a fail yet the company is hugely successful both in technology and business. You are so fucking deluded on this issue, it hurts my head to even try to understand your logic.
> Hell, I even forgot about him insisting that robots could do finally assembly, even though every company that tried it failed — repeatedly.
And yet now Tesla has some of the best manufacturing in the world. Their initial approach was flawed in execution but the direction was correct, they corrected and improved, within a year of this issue Tesla had solved the issue and had a highly profitable mass produced EV that changed the industry.
Now lots of companies are copying their processes that came out of that experience. The CEO of VW admitted the the threw-put of Tesla factories was far superior to their own.
You just repeating the same pattern over and over, blame Musk for all bad, don't give credit for good.
Your line of argument is just embracing and you would laugh at anybody making such arguments if it wasn't about Musk. This is just a simple case of you having some sort of personal hangup about Musk therefore you need to somehow justify your position.
> Sempai is a screwup
Man, I wish I had screwed up so much as to be one of the richest people in the world. What a fucking loser.
Musk is not a engineer and has never been good at making things. What he is good at is marketing and raising ridiculous gobs of money which he plows into various companies. All credit for engineering successes at those companies is entirely because of the leadership of those companies, like Gwynne Shotwell, and despite Musk's interference which we have seen time and time again to be actively detrimental to engineering success.
That is not to say that Musk's interference is "bad" from a company valuation standpoint as he clearly has a pretty good idea of what features he can effectively market to customers, it is just that those features are not markers of good engineering or actively detract from good engineering. For instance, selling FSD to the general public despite it not working is a criminal engineering decision, but it has done wonders for cash flow and their stock price.
I'm no Elon fan but as an aerospace engineer, I can at least vouch that he knows what he is talking about when it comes to rockets (wasn't the case when SpaceX started) and has steered his army of engineers in useful directions that weren't obvious to other people at the time (reusable rockets, Starlink, etc.)
If you have watched Everyday Astronaut's tours of Starbase with Elon[0], where he explains in significant detail pretty much everything that is going on with the various prototypes, you'll know what I mean.
He's not a guy with an MBA that has somehow lucked out by throwing gobs of cash at various Hard Engineering Problems (although there's that, too.) Of course the bulk of the work is done by "rank and file" engineers.
No, at the level of knowing off hand the design considerations down to thermodynamics for practically every design decision that Tim asks about. In many cases to a much greater depth than I, an average engineer, know about these things.
I'm not sure about Elon's proficiency with software, but based on his comments on twitter I'd lean on him being out of touch there. He does seem to be knowledgeable on the AI/DL side though, see Andrej Karpathy's comment:
The amount of effort people take to try to convince themselves Elon is just a relatively average (or even moronic!) intellect who got successful via non virtuous means is absolutely impressive.
To attempt to be civil, I will also state I find the hero worshiping of Elon to be similarly deranged.
The stochastic parrot argument. It seems there’s no evidence that will change your opinion.
Also, have a look at recent unedited videos of Tesla’s self driving. It’s not everything that was promised and it’s much later than promised, but it sure is impressive. However I agree it is being oversold and that’s extremely scummy.
In my noob eyes, I think he just doesn't care much about software. He kinda have the same radical motto (delete, reduce, combine, forget the past, forget the mainstream.. basically what he says around min 20 in the video above. which is not far from move fast and break things) and he got a lot of success before with that so he just barged in twitter applying this brainlessly.
This comment is ridiculous. The guy understands every single facet of every process at his companies. If he "sputters," it's because that's how he normally speaks.
My favorite from John Carmack:
John Carmack (Twitter, Wikipedia) is a programmer, video game developer and engineer. He's the founder of Armadillo Aerospace and current CTO of Oculus VR.
"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."
His title at the company is Founder and Chief Engineer, and there are tons of anecdotes from employees, as well as statements directly from Musk that major engineering decisions go directly through him.
They said Steve Jobs was not a coder or hardware engineer but I just found undeniable proof. It was not Wozniak but instead, Steve Jobs that was doing the software development at Apple": - https://photos5.appleinsider.com/gallery/30494-50055-001-Job...
Yeah I’m not sure either TBH, I’m not a CAD person, just a programmer.
I do think the picture painted of him tracks with what I know life is like as a senior engineer.
Above L5 at Google, most engineers do not spend much time coding. Most time is spent approving CLs, mentoring, collaborating on design docs, and helping to make major engineering decisions.
Same with other faangs. This tracks with Carmack’s (and others’) description of Musk’s role.
Ya know I was doubtful of Elons engineering chops but that pic certainly seals the deal. Elon is in fact a rocket engineer and the proof is in the pudding. The pudding being that pic that is.
Well if you don’t like that pic you can also read the other links, which themselves include sources. You could also read his biography, which details his early life, credentials, and daily work life, and includes sources. I included the picture as just another detail.
Elon Musk is a compulsive serial liar about his personal qualitys.
In Paypal’s S-1 filing with the SEC in 2002 [1] to go public Elon Musk is listed as a director of the board and is reported as having graduated from UPenn in 1995. Elon Musk received his degrees in 1997 [2]. I do not know about you, but I do not know any college graduate who can not tell me the exact year of their graduation after a little thinking even if they graduated decades ago, but in this case he could not even accurately recall what occurred 5 years ago and he reported that in a SEC filing of a company where he was on the board (and formerly CEO?). Sometimes people forget the year they graduated, but not in SEC filings reviewed by lawyers, that is 100% deliberate.
Elon Musk viciously attacks his critics like when he viciously accused Vernon Unsworth, the cave diver, of being a pedophile, doubled down, and sent a investigator to harass him [3].
Elon Musk actively cultivates a cult of personality and directs them to attack his critics [4] causing them to be fired or quit due to the harassment.
He is also well known to impulsively fire employees that speak out against him. Also to harass employees who are being fired such as when he declared that the Iceland Person of the Year was faking his lifelong disability to get out of work [5].
Elon Musk does not get the benefit of the doubt when discussing his personal qualitys and when looking for 3rd party support since he makes significant effort to actively shape the narrative.
His personal statements are useless as support. Most of the people quoted were employees speaking on the record. You would be hard pressed in any company to find employees who would speak negatively on the record, let alone in a Elon company where he would fire, harass, and sue you if you did so. So, those are worthless. The rest of the people are then largely people who have not worked with Elon or are not experts in the field. And frankly, since Elon does not get the benefit of the doubt, the burden of proof is not on me to discredit their statements, but on the opposing perspective to provide proof that their statements are informed and credible.
As to the photos, the first one is obviously staged. The photo of him looking at wreckage unrelated to demonstrating engineering competence. It is also likely staged. No other images presented are relevant.
Labeling yourself as a Chief Engineer does not make you a engineer. In anything it lends support to the opposite because what actual engineer constantly broadcasts that at every possible opportunity so that everybody knows.
It might not even be raising money that he's good at but rather structuring business to optimize around government subsidies (ev credits, government space contracts).
Nah, he is shockingly good at raising money. SpaceX has been losing billions of dollars per year and making it up by raising money to cover the shortfall. In the last year or so they raised $1.7B at a $137B valuation [1]. This is a company that is only estimated to make $4.6B in revenue [2] in a industry with a total addressable market (TAM) of ~$13.5B. SpaceX is being valued at ~30x revenue and ~10x the revenue of the entire industry, not earnings, revenue.
Of course, this is all small potatoes compared to the immense amount of money Musk has raised for Tesla from consumers by falsely claiming they will have autonomous vehicles next year, every year, for 7+ years.
These raises are distinct from any government support they may have received, though his ability to structure the companys to receive government support and the cash flow generated from those activitys may have been helpful in supporting the companys and the narratives they built to achieve the valuations and funding levels they got. It really just all leads back to him being amazing at getting his hands on huge gobs of money.
But the logical question is, could any of that been possible without the government subsidies he received? I think without that prior optimization for subsidies, he's not given the creditability or ever actual credit to do any of the other shenanigans.
EV subsidies were made as a way for the government to encourage consumers to buy electric cars and encourage car producers to make electric cars. It’s not like they were made with the purpose of making Musk rich and literally any other car manufacturer or rich person wanting to make a car manufacture could have done the same. Should the US have never subsidized electric vehicles or should have all the car manufacturers have ignored the subsidies and continued to to completely ignore the EV market?
Complaining that someone filled a market niche that the government very intentionally created just seems so weird to me.
What's the point of making up misleading arguments? Are you that blinded by your dislike of one person?
SpaceX has been spending billions on R&D, that's what the fund raising is for, that's why their spending is greater than revenue, the results of which are clearly visible in the weekly Starlink launches and rapid development of Starship and which have a strong business case.
This sort of bad faith analysis is exactly why companies in industries with significant "front heavy" investment have such a hard time.
This is nonsense. I have many comments disproving this nonsense. And EV credits only happened long after Tesla was already well underway. And it was also something that all car companies could and did use.
In fact, credit hurt Tesla quite a bit because they burned threw them very early on when lithium batteries were super expensive and then later foreign competitors could undercut Tesla using mass market vehicles by using the credits.
And fuel credits are an enforcement mechanism that gives rewards and penalties to car companies based on how well they follow regulations, its not a government subsidy.
> government space contracts
If you want to see how well space companies do when they only do government work, look at ULA and Boeing.
SpaceX from the beginning attacked the commercial market with great success and the US went from 0% of the commercial market to like 60-70% in like 5 years.
Yes of course SpaceX gets government space contracts, its fucking space, governments are involved. But SpaceX was literally the least government oriented rocket company in history.
If you actually compare SpaceX to other space companies and Tesla to other car companies, the claim that these companies are uniquely depended on government totally collapse.
Just one example, Tesla got 400M$ loan to produce Model S (advanced vehicle manufacture), Tesla paid this loan back with profit for the tax payer before they had to and change the car industry, Ford and GM took multi-billion $ loans built a few compliance vehicle and have since delayed the return of those loans.
But yeah, Tesla is evil subsidy company, when they received less and did more.
And the claim about his companies raising huge amount of money is also false, compare Tesla and SpaceX with its peers, like Lucid, Rivian, Blue Origin, Relativity and that story falls competently apart.
People love to claim this but its just not true. Compare how much money Tesla raised to other EV companies. Tesla did far, far better with far less money.
The accusation that his companies are successful because he can just magically create money comes from tech people who have no idea how much it costs to grow capital intensive business.
Both SpaceX and Tesla have comparatively raised very little. Compare how much Lucid, Rivian, Blue Origin or Relativity Space raise and then compare the results after similar time-frames.
> All credit for engineering successes at those companies is entirely because of the leadership of those companies, like Gwynne Shotwell
Shotwell wasn't even the COO of SpaceX before Falcon 9 days. And magically Tesla doesn't even have a Shotwell figure and is still incredibly successful.
And even if Shotwell is great, Musk hired her, Musk promoted her, Musk empowered her. Putting the right engineers into the right places is maybe the most important skill in leading a tech team. Musk putting Mueller, Königsmann, Buzza, Shotwell in those positions and gave them all what the needed to succeed, while he coordinated and made the final decisions. That is what 'Chief Engineers' generally do.
> we have seen time and time again to be actively detrimental to engineering success
Except that far more often we have seen it to be extremely successful. I'm always astonished at how people who seem to dislike Musk can selectively read history. Anything bad at SpaceX, Musk is at fault. Anything good, Musk wasn't involved.
> but it has done wonders for cash flow and their stock price
It really hasn't, if you actually look at their cashflow. But maybe I'm not looking at the fantasy investor report you have in your head. I just looking at the one that is publicly disclosed by Tesla.
And in terms of stock price, if you actually look at all the major wall street analysts, the majority of them never had a huge amount of believe in FSD being a major driver of Tesla and only included it into their most optimistic long run bull cases.
Tesla stock really jumped when they showed profitable margin Model 3 mass production and spiked for a while when the market went crazy for all EV stocks. Not just those who claimed to have 'FSD'.
This might hold up on Twitter or maybe some reddit.
If you actually want to argue on HN, you need to actually provide some analysis.
Because factually speaking, if you actually compare Tesla and SpaceX with peer companies rather then by themselves they have not raised a lot of money relative to what you achieved.
Go and actually compared Tesla, Rivian, Lucid (not to mention other bullshit companies like Nikola, Faraday Future, Better Place) and so many others. You will see that Tesla for a such a capital intensive business didn't raise that much.
A few times they optimistically raised when the stock jumped, but that's just good business. And if you actually look at their cash balance, that money was never even spent. It permanently raised the balance. Tesla would have been totally fine without the last 2 cash raises.
And for SpaceX its far harder to do the pump and raise shit you are talking about. Its only large institutional investors who don't randomly just buy lots because of some 'pump'. The funds investing in SpaceX have a lot of their own technical knowlage and evaluate things deeply.
So in summation, your claims have zero bases in reality, its just away to justify your hate for a person.
It's funny how you've created the mental gymnastics needed to conceptualize Twitter as a healthy, profitable non propagandist and non leftist controlled company before Elon bought it.
Elon just wants to build things, have autonomy and also dictatorial control of the process. He doesn't care about how things are monitized (although in the case of Twitter, where he didn't build it from the start, he has to worry about it quite deeply).
There is nothing more complicated in his decision here. Elon is a visionary and a builder. That's all his ventures.
> Elon is a visionary and a builder. That's all his ventures.
I don't understand how people view him as a product person. How is he making the product (Twitter) better?
Taking away an existing feature like verification and selling an objectively worse version back to people doesn't make the product better. Strengthening the silo effect by banning talk about competitors doesn't make the product better. Charging $50k / month for business verification doesn't make the product better, especially for businesses users.
I thought Twitter might improve because I believed the rhetoric about Musk being a product person, but I don't believe that any more. All of his moves have been short sighted cash grabs.
Is there a single thing about the (technical) product that's improved since Musk took over?
He also added a ton of features. Bookmarks, encrypted DMs, subscriptions, longform text, pushed the chronological feed, view count, improved video, added meetings, improved notes. I'm probably forgetting something but Twitter has definitely added more features under Musk than the previous 10 years.
I'm trying to find the source, but I read the other day (I think from a Twitter exec on Bluesky) that all of the features launched since Musk bought Twitter were being worked on long before Musk bought Twitter. Which is as you'd expect, at least for the majority. These things don't happen overnight, or even in the space of a few months.
Also, bookmarks have been there for years. As have subscriptions, and Community Notes.
Chronological feed was always a thing, I've used it for years. In fact, one of the first noticeable changes was that this config stopped being persistent. I had to manually switch to chronological for months and still get "For You" as the default. Community notes precedes Musk too. View count is not only unreliable (because counting things is hard) but of dubious value. What do you get from it? Longform text is literally what twitter is not about, and a major turn-off for so many people.
Twitter as of 2020 was fantastic, and these features added essentially no value to it. On the other hand, the public API is now a mess, twitter circle tweets are being shown to people who were not supposed to see them, I get logged out of all my accounts at least once a week and most notifications have serious delays.
I've been using twitter since the whale days back in 2010, and it feels like we lost a decade of SRE progress.
Yes, that's why I wrote "pushed". Before Musk it was hidden behind a stars button. After Musk it became a huge button at the top of your feed.
> Community notes precedes Musk too.
Which is why I wrote "improved".
> Longform text is literally what twitter is not about, and a major turn-off for so many people.
People have circumvented that since the start with screenshots or 15 tweet long threads. It makes a lot of sense to offer the option that a lot of people have been asking for and using through different hacks.
> I've been using twitter since the whale days back in 2010, and it feels like we lost a decade of SRE progress.
I joined in 2008 and my experience is that the development has been nonexistent for 10+ years. Rebranding bookmarks into likes was probably the worst idea. The fact that it doesn't do video well despite being the #1 news source for breaking news surprises me the most.
There was definitely development and new features - remember tweetpic and "RT @something"? They did the huge work it takes to go from 99% to >99,99% uptime. What did rebranding bookmarks into likes did that you think was so bad? I'm indifferent to it, but I could be wrong. Chronological TL needed only a couple of button clicks - then, after the acquisition, a couple of clicks every time you opened the TL because why not - so "hidden" seems like an exaggeration. Now it's 1, so, kudos to twtr 2.0 I guess?
Let's suppose for a moment none of the objections to these "features" I raise are valid. Why are people not talking about twitter circles being flat out broken? What about the constant changes to the UI which no sane design team would approve - like removing the "RT by @account" text out of nowhere, then putting it back up a few days later. Improvisation and rollbacks to major decisions? Remember when a couple of weeks in they just let people pay to get bluechecks and major advertisers had to deal with verified accounts posing as them? The whole "remove legacy bluecheck" thing?
Twitter was afloat and since 2020Q3, posting profits every quarter, but revenue has crashed as a result of all this. I can't really get why these details like "improved community notes" are more relevant to some people than the blatant mismanagement.
I believe Bookmarks existed before Elon, he just made it more visible in the UI (or approved the change, or however it happened).
> pushed the chronological feed
It's funny how many people who did not even know they weren't using a chronological feed before, are now cussing him out for showing a "For You" page - when he just made it much more visible and easier to switch to the "Following" feed.
Bookmarks was already there. Adding bookmark and view counts was a bad idea designed to cause people to fight more.
Only use of long form text posts is so you know to block the person without reading them.
He did fix the awful old algorithmic recommendations by just firing the team who were bad at them, but it only worked once; it's not like ad targeting is any better. The new UI is just a slightly different version of forcing you onto the algorithm feed.
Maybe your confusion is because of the scope you're using. If someone says Elon is a product person or a visionary. The judgement was with high likelihood formed well before Musk's involvement with Twitter. As new information comes it will continue to inform that judgement.
There are some people for whom Elon Musk could stroll into their house with a sledge hammer, smash through the walls, douse it with gasoline, and set it on fire---and they would still call him a visionary and a genius.
He's not working on making Twitter better. He bought twitter because it had a ton of users and he can push his X vision to them for free without working to build his own network. This is why the spam account numbers were so important to him. Basically imagine everything WeChat does and put that functionality into twitter for western audiences.
That doesn't work with Twitter, though. You can't just build stuff with total autonomy without worrying about how it'll make money when your company is in a deep, deep financial hole.
Because of the way Elon bought the company it needs to make a shit-ton of money and fast. Elon can't just sidestep that responsibility by vacating the CEO role.
He announced that he was looking for a CEO straight after acquisition. Twitter hasn't been profitable for 11 years straight from 2006 to 2017 and even after that it revenue was relatively low. Atm company is financially break even, so I wouldn't panic much.
It's kinda funny that some US advertisers left the platform after some rednecks were unbanned, yet they were totally okay with things before when Taliban and other state terrorist organizations were literally using it as an official PR platform (with huge success btw, if you read the articles of that time). Or the fact that Twitter has been flooded with porn made by teenagers. But that's typical corporate America))
> Atm company is financially break even, so I wouldn't panic much.
Do you have a source for this? All I can find is an interview remark from Musk about the company "roughly breaking even," without any actual numbers cited.
Ad revenue is down 40% from $5B in 2021 to a projected $3B in 2023. For reference, most other social media ad companies have had flat or slightly negative (~2%) revenue growth.
Damn, if it wasn't for the debt he dragged the company into that could actually be manageable. There is a possible steady state for twitter to be more focused on right wing minded people who don't like being told unhappy truths or have their lies questioned, like tumbler has for dumb teens. It could very well just be smaller and continue on with that "niche" because it's a big niche. But that debt really puts some limits on future options.
I haven't seen any official statements to that effect. This is from a month ago:
> Last November, General Motors Corp. (NYSE: GM) was among the first companies to announce pausing Twitter ads. Among those that took a similar path were General Mills, Inc. (NYSE: GIS) and Volkswagen AG’s Audi unit.
> Brands such as Mondelez International Inc. (NASDAQ: MDLZ), Coca-Cola Co. (NYSE: KO), Merck & Co Inc. (NYSE: MRK), Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. (NYSE: HLT) and AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) have also not returned to Twitter in terms of advertising as of February, Bloomberg noted.
> Last month, Musk said that Twitter’s revenue had fallen by 50% since October because of a decline in advertising.
An LBO. It’s become clear Musk’s employment cuts haven’t brought Armageddon. He’s now installing an advertising executive as CEO, which portends a return to the status quo business model. This is a classic cut-the-fat corporate raid.
Is an LBO possible with the huge debt Twitter now has? Elon is barely able to break even, even after firing most of the company, due to the interest payments. It seems like the LBO has already been done, by Elon, and that a second one on top of the first will be like squeezing water from a stone that someone already squeezed the little water out of.
> seems like the LBO has already been done, by Elon
This is what I meant. The vision is that of a classic LBO play. Cut the fat. Survive long enough to pay down the debt. Now you own a profitable company.
> It’s become clear Musk’s employment cuts haven’t brought Armageddon.
Is it clear? I haven't really used Twitter since well before the acquisition, but I've heard nothing but complaints about bugs, ad revenue falling off a cliff and replies being nothing but right-wing reply guys.
> This is a classic cut-the-fat corporate raid.
If this were true, Elon would have cut the actual fat. Instead he (directly and indirectly) destroyed Twitter's relationship with advertisers, which was the only meat in the company. All that's left is fat.
I use twitter basically non-stop. I haven't noticed anything like armageddon. I have noticed a few things going wrong, and i have noticed people who hate Musk crowing over every one of these as if it was the opening of the first seal.
(i should perhaps disclose that i have a very low opinion of Musk, but don't hate him)
At the moment it's hard to say whether the stream of small bugs (the one that annoys me is that the unread notifications indicator seems to be perenially out of sync) is just normal enshittification, or the foreshocks before The Big One.
> I've heard nothing but complaints about bugs, ad revenue falling off a cliff and replies being nothing but right-wing reply guys
They’re allegedly approaching cash-flow breakeven [1]. Musk is notoriously unreliable with timelines, but he tends to be conservative with purely financial ones. That, assuming this is actual cash flow and not an unlevered metric like Ebitda, signals stability.
I’m not calling it a success. But Twitter is operational. People complained but, largely, haven’t left. The new product initiatives were busts, but quickly withdrawn when the data showed they didn’t work. Stability is on the horizon; it’s not Armageddon.
> Elon would have cut the actual fat. Instead he (directly and indirectly) destroyed Twitter's relationship with advertisers
He did both. He’s now trying to reverse on the latter. Given the financial stability, Yaccarino has a solid foundation from which to do so.
> Is it clear? I haven't really used Twitter since well before the acquisition, but I've heard nothing but complaints about bugs, ad revenue falling off a cliff and replies being nothing but right-wing reply guys.
I think it's pretty clear that there was a lot of fat to cut. From a technical perspective Twitter hardly seems to be suffering at all.
The biz move (to pivot to a right-leaning social network) is what scared off users and advertisers, not the layoffs per se. In a counterfactual world where Elon slashed staff but left the existing policies and target demographics in place, Twitter would've been a lot healthier.
> From a technical perspective Twitter hardly seems to be suffering at all.
Posts and quotes fairly frequently don't load (though QRTs were never reliable) but more importantly they've stopped moderating everything, which is why searching for "cat" has returned animal abuse videos for the last week, and their solution was to turn off autocomplete of search terms.
He made some statements about making Twitter into the one place to do everything before he bought it, and it sounded a lot like WeChat. He might of even mentioned WeChat directly but I don't recall
I'm not surprised, if you don't follow Elon closely and only read the nonstop clickbait headlines, you will be severely misinformed. Elon has been talking about the "everything app" forever. Elon has had the idea going back to the X.com days, that's what he wanted to do with Paypal.
Another thing you may not know: Twitter will soon be competing with Youtube.
I'm pleased that speed control has appeared on many videos recently. I'm not sure if this is brand new, or restored, but anyway it makes videos a lot more useful to me at least.
Occasionally when I try to full screen a video, it results in a different video popping up. There seems to be some connection between the videos but I can't totally understand what that is. One time the video I ended up seeing was street violence, I assume it will be porno at some point.
A platform for everything, competitor to YouTube etc., but more centrist. I'm getting the impression that the whole placate-the-right "free-speech" thing was meant to get the people back from TruthSocial and get street cred.
Now he'll move left again and cash in. Also of course there are considerations like Tesla subsidies and DoD contracts. But perhaps those institutions approved the above plan to restore centrist views.
Meh, the plan is to turn Twitter into an American TikTok. Great pivot given the timing, but he first had to destroy the “liberal stronghold” image it had acquired. It’s cynical af, but yeah… also the milquetoast Jack was appeasement all the way down
Their entire platform is geared to be maximum advertiser friendly, aka the status quo.
It really isn't like YouTube doesn't discriminate equally, I'd even say in some cases they do so more strongly towards certain groups that tend to be left wing (e.g. queer people immediately being demonitized when not shrouding words like "biosexual").
It seems to me the YT algorithm doesn't care about left/right.
Sometimes I watch a rightwing video, and then all I get is more and more extreme rightwing videos suggested.
Then I have to watch some leftwing video to get back to more balanced content :D... but there seems to be plenty of content on both sides, with suggestions leaning heavily on which side you watched the most.
Youtube algorithm only cares about "engagement". How long do you watch, do you stay on youtube and watch another video, do you click any of the buttons like subscribe, do you comment.
Content that gets an extreme emotional reaction is strictly better at causing engagement, that's just like a basic sociological thing.
The result is that youtube pretty much constantly tries to radicalize everyone. It doesn't care if you get radicalized left or right, it cares that you go into rabbit holes that make you angry or emotional and have a reaction. I watched youtube attempt to do this to me, as I watched a singular video by a more radical than average leftist youtuber, and youtube immediately started recommending me the classic "angry incel right wing" content that so many young men are deeply entrenched in, but I have never been recommended in my 15 year old youtube account. Depending on your beliefs or research I'm not aware of, right wing radicalization might be more effective, as "it's not your fault, we just have to hurt and remove certain people" is more palatable to certain people than "the system is fucked and we have to gut it and work hard to build it back". In that case, it would naturally push right wing radicalization over left wing radicalization.
None of this has to be purposeful. However, willfully ignoring this outcome because it makes you a lot of money is actively evil in my opinion.
You're describing the YouTube algorithm from 2016 or so. It doesn't do that anymore because people yelled at them enough; that's why the comment sections are a nice experience now.
Left wing radicalization makes you depressed, right wing radicalization is congruent with fascism in the absoluteness of not just us versus them, but us or an apocalyptic, demonic, absolute and all-encompassing evil them. My favorite Innuendo Studios essay is dealing with this concept.
It feels like Twitter was always designed as an echo chamber with the occasional deliberate clash between different kinds of echo chambers. Flip-flopping well enough between outraged debate and friendly clout-chase space to keep engagement going.
Idk it amazes me a lot more that people online think that they're so privy to the internal workings of _twitter_ that they feel confident enough to proclaim that everything elon does is actually going to destroy the company. The vitriol in this thread is so absurd, you'd think elon killed puppies as a hobby or something.
I don't think you need to be privy to the internal workings of Twitter, Elon's public actions make it very clear he's been extremely erratic up until this point. I'm not saying it's going to destroy the company but at the current moment it's very difficult to see his involvement as an overall positive.
I don't personally have any special insight into the internal workings of twitter, but we don't need to rely on anecdotes to know that Elon is objectively not delivering on "Free, non-government controlled or censored speech":
> Twitter has fully complied with more than 80% of government and courts’ requests to remove or alter content since Elon Musk bought the company, up from around 50% before he took over, according to a report from the technology publication Rest of World, reflecting a discordance with the billionaire’s promises to limit political censorship.
> The majority of recent requests have come from foreign governments, such as India, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Germany, all of which have increased internet regulations in the past year, according to the report—none came from the U.S.
Jack just didn't do anything. He spent the whole time meditating under waterfalls, but that means he didn't mess with the platform and become the "main character".
Hey, obviously you can't post like this on HN regardless of how sad someone is or you feel they are. We have to ban accounts that do, and unfortunately you have a history of doing it.
> Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app.
I wish this notion of the "everything app" would die in the West. Yes, China has a highly successful everything app, but it exists because the government wants a centralized place to control digital activity. Such a model makes no sense in the west. We already have an everything app, it's called "App Store."
So many apps try to this strategy. For instance, Snapchat added games to the app. Why would I want to play a game in Snapchat when I have a nearly unlimited selection of games in the app store?
Browsers also meet the everything app definition. The only gap I see is that there's not a single identity provider in front of Twitter, Venmo, and Robinhood, which seems to be Musk's vision. When you think of it that way it becomes clear it's about building a single social graph and the lock-in and surveillance risks become really glaring.
> Why would I want to play a game in Snapchat when I have a nearly unlimited selection of games in the app store?
I agree with you for that specific case: Snapchat games. But for a lot of other things, like payments (as Elon himself discussed doing) I appreciate some degree of convergence. Google has already done this sort of thing to a large degree and it's one of the reasons I like using their products. The reason it's desirable is convenience: using one UI and one login can be a pleasant experience.
Twitter has a long way to go though. I dislike their UI and my recent attempts to log in to their Android app resulted in me just deleting the app and using their web UI instead.
The payments thing is nonsense. Why would anyone want to use Twitter for payments when they could use a ton of existing options that work fine? Remember, Snapchat tried payments too. And that at least sort of made sense, since people already message their friends on Snapchat, and sending payments to friends is a common use-case. But Twitter?
He’s throwing stuff at the wall and hoping something sticks. Blue check subscriptions were a bust, so now he’ll try hiring someone to woo advertisers back. If that doesn’t work I guess he’ll try payments or something.
If all they want to do is supplant Patreon, fine, maybe they can? But Patreon’s valuation seems to be 1-2B. That doesn’t move the needle and is anyway far less ambitious than the stated “everything app” goal for payments.
> but it exists because the government wants a centralized place to control digital activity
Speaking as someone who witnessed them from 0 to everything - it really has not much to do with that.
It has to do with how fast mobile payment swept through the country to be the connecting factor for all online services and it has to do with how easy it was and is for big players to out compete or swallow small innovators and harvest their innovations.
It already did, that was what CompuServe, AOL, and arguably Facebook etc. were. Musk seems to be calling back to things that were big when he was growing up. I don't think there's such a demand for the return of the internet portal.
I think everything apps are actually sort of a logical conclusion for HCI. The one that my job uses has redundancies everywhere, i.e. a global search bar, multiple links to the same page spread across the website, etc. It's very disorganized, but I've also found it to be strangely useful.
Maybe take this with a grain of salt but when I'm drunk I hate backtracking through UIs and being hampered by organization. I think an everything app would be useful in that case. And in the same vein as "the average human has less than two arms", I feel like the average end user is basically drunk.
Diamonds are beautiful. Blood diamonds are horrific tragedies.
Elon Musk is in charge of some projects that have amazing outcomes, yes. But does he actually know the engineering (which is kind of not a very interesting question to me), and is he horrible to work for?
A famous anecdote from the Steve Jobs official biography was where he was telling the CEO of Corning glass about the specifics of glass manufacturing. The CEO just smiled and played along, because they wanted Apple's business.
The custommer is always right; even when they bloviate well beyond their area of expertise.
> 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.
Quotes like that give me the impression he's very much involved technically.
For me at least, this perception comes from the level of hubris that Elon exhibits in public. Statements like "At this point, I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on earth" is not something you hear from good engineers very often because it reeks of Dunning Kruger. Elon also frequently chooses to make statements with high certainty about areas far outside his expertise ("Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April") and consistency overpromises and under-delivers with some technologies (FSD).
So I don't know. Maybe he's a good engineer when he's not on camera. But as a public figure I think he's massively overexposed, largely by choice, and it's doing him no favours in terms of perception lately.
I remember my perception changed when I watched an interview with musk talk about the material science challenges of panel gaps on teslas. You can't have that level of knowledge unless you worked very close to the problem.
I mean, he might pay very close attention to everything at his company. That doesn't mean he's deeply involved with the engineering.
For all you know he had some technical presentations given to him by his engineers and is just repeating the info within. I don't doubt he himself has enough engineering background to follow or contribute to the technical conversations at Tesla et al, but yeah.
At some point you just have to reason about how many companies he has and how much work he already has merely being CEO or chairman of these firms and how he could possibly be doing day-to-day engineering decision-making on top of that. And given the very public and embarassing exposes we've gotten from engineers at Twitter, I have deep, deep reservations that Elon is really a saavy engineer.
Not sure why people gate keep so hard around "he'S NOt An engiNEER". Even if he's not writing the code anymore, having deep technical understanding of important day to day tasks is an important quality in any leader in an engineering organization.
I wasn't taking a position on Musk with that specific comment, and I don't disagree with your latter point at all.
Broadly speaking, I wouldn't rush to consider anyone a doctor, an engineer, a pilot, so on and so forth simply because I watched a video of them speaking so well to a very specific problem that they just so happened to work so closely on. That's all I was getting at.
I am an engineer, though not at all involved in materials science/engineering, and I've known what galvanic corrosion is since I was a teenager. It's not exactly an obscure phenomenon.
We covered that in high school chemistry, along with an in-class demo and a section in the book on sacrificial anodes and how they're used to prevent corrosion in things like oil pipelines. It was a US public school.
every one who has ever owned an aluminum boat, or generally worked with aluminum that's anywhere near electricity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_anode It's not an obscure thing; field specific maybe, but it's very much sub-table-stakes.
Every single electrician I know is familiar with galvanic corrosion as well as how to mitigate it with insulation, dielectric grease, sacrificial anodes, etc. Steel and aluminum are the two most common metals that we use to make things. Galvanized steel has a zinc coating that acts as a sacrificial anode, almost any steel that is installed outside that isn’t stainless is galvanized.
There's a difference between "an engineer" and "a good engineer".
So those saying he's not an engineer at all are probably wrong, but those saying he's a good engineer probably aren't correct either.
I think it's also the case where his misses are more evident. If you said "We'll get to Mars in 10 years", people will likely have forgotten you said that after 5 years, much less 2 years after your boasted time frame expires. So people credit you for big ideas while not having to deliver on anything. Every year, we've been about a year away from fully autonomous self-driving cars.
Complaining about twitter and saying how you'd fix it is easy when you don't control twitter. But actually fixing it is a different story once you have all the control.
I don't know man. I'll often hear things to the effect of I can't believe how incompetent the developers of this app are, regardless of the complexity of the app.
>But as a public figure I think he's massively overexposed, largely by choice, and it's doing him no favours in terms of perception lately.
I think you'll find there's a significant split in perception between, for example, the average American and the pseudo-elites who inhabit Bluesky and Hacker News. Or the latter and the average actual hacker, for that matter.
Is there direct evidence of Elon's personal engineering prowess? All I can find are his own boasting and second hand reports of folks impressed by his familiarity with jargon.
Second and third hand accounts are nice. Even better when they come from folks no longer financially dependent on Elon's good graces.
But I was hoping to see some of his source code for Zip2, some CAD he'd done himself, or even a video of him solving some intractable problem in one of these rooms full of stumped geniuses.
So this guy has founded multiple successful engineering-heavy companies, did not receive any actual financial support past 18 (despite inflated myths of an "emerald mine"), is attested by multiple skilled engineers, and has given videos where he talks in depth about engineering, but we're still looking for new & different kinds of evidence that he has skills?
Are we testing whether he knows anything at this point, or whether he's a literal Tony Stark? This thread started with discussion of whether he's any kind of engineer at all now we're looking for "rooms full of stumped geniuses" as if this was something every random engineer experienced.
Didn't see any links to talks by Musk. Perhaps you can share some?
Look I can go read Gates' code, so I have some direct evidence of whether his reputation as an engineer is worth the paper it's written on. The story for Musk is much less direct. Still, I'm open to studying the evidence of Musk's engineering chops.
I would characterize him as a bad engineer. Which for a CEO is a lot better than nothing, if one does not become too arrogant and stops listening. Which, by now he seems to have done. He clearly can do the math of rocket science, but that math is not actually super hard, but its still better than your average CEO he can do. He can understand math and physics based arguments.
But he has never understood people, politics, etc. Which is what twitter is all about.
I'm not the person you replied to, but I'm struck by two things about that Reddit post. First, all but one of the quoted people who are engineers [1], are also Musk's subordinates. And second, there are suspiciously few (as in zero) dissenters listed.
I've no doubt Musk can talk convincingly about engines or whatever, and maybe even about physics, but I don't think he could function as a professional engineer. I'm just not getting the impression that he has much depth.
[1] discounting Carmack who is brilliant but is a different kind of engineer
Carmack is widely considered one of the greatest software engineers ever, and knows Musk well. Either he's outright lying to make his friend look good, or I'll take his opinion over basically anyone. He certainly isn't Musk's "subordinate" in any meaningful sense.
Even when Carmack was Zuckerberg's "subordinate" he was independently wealthy and could do whatever the fuck he wanted, and has been for a long time. You didn't see him going around, even then, talking up Zuckerberg's engineering chops. Despite the fact that we know Zuck did in fact write a lot of the early code for FB.
Carmack is also not a "different kind of engineer". Guy is primarily famous for his software, but he had a rocket company of his own, ran Meta's VR labs which involved quite a bit of hardware, etc.
All due respect to John, but what the hell qualifies him to classify Elon as an engineer of rockets?
I trust John Carmack in his wheelhouse, but without knowing him better I wouldn’t trust him to fix my car or recommend a beer, just because he’s prolifically qualified at building and shipping software.
I would even argue his recent work on VR for Facebook makes me question if he’s still “got it”, considering how wildly that seems to have flopped.
I’m excited to see what he does with his new AI startup, but let’s not canonize the man.
Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace landed rockets vertically, years before SpaceX did (albeit much smaller ones). He built the company as a hobbyist labor of love and it won NASA's Lunar Lander Challenge in 2008.
Carmack is absolutely qualified to talk about aerospace engineering. He also knows quite a bit about cars, FWIW.
I think the point is: There is a long list of legendary engineers in various domains who've worked with Elon and attest to his engineering talent and technical contributions to the companies he's founded.
Where is the list of legendary engineers who've worked with him who say the opposite? Seriously, even one example would be interesting to me. I'm not aware of any.
A) it's not a long list and B) it can be career limiting to speak poorly of anyone, so I don't think "no engineer has said bad things about him" is a fair assessment.
I dunno how many rooms with people like Elon you've been in, but people heap praise on people like that; it's free for them to do, and makes the Elon-type feel good about themselves, which materially impacts how much money those praisers have access to.
Once you get into the rank and file engineers, where the folks have a lot less to lose by speaking their mind, the praise has been much harder to come by, and you have incidents like at Twitter, where engineers called out Musk's apparent inability to comprehend Twitter's architecture, resulting in at least one heated exchange during a Twitter spaces chat.
I trust the celebrity engineers less than I trust the nameless engineers, at least when it comes to matters of PR.
Also, not for nothing, but if you haven't seen any negative comments about Elon from "celeb" engineers, you should probably look up the stuff Woz has said about Elon, it's not all positive, at all.
> A) it's not a long list and B) it can be career limiting to speak poorly of anyone, so I don't think "no engineer has said bad things about him" is a fair assessment.
That's a fair statement, it could even be true. But the fact remains, what is confidently asserted by many lacks evidence to substantiate it.
> Once you get into the rank and file engineers, where the folks have a lot less to lose by speaking their mind, the praise has been much harder to come by, and you have incidents like at Twitter, where engineers called out Musk's apparent inability to comprehend Twitter's architecture, resulting in at least one heated exchange during a Twitter spaces chat.
I think it is useful here to refer to exactly what it is that you mean. I am aware of a few such instances, but the instances I am aware of are Musk being mostly right and the engineers in question being mostly wrong. Perhaps you are aware of different incidents.
> Also, not for nothing, but if you haven't seen any negative comments about Elon from "celeb" engineers, you should probably look up the stuff Woz has said about Elon, it's not all positive, at all.
Woz hasn't actually worked with Elon. Anyway in a cursory search, I can't find the quotes you seem to be referring to. I'm not disputing their existence, but a link would be helpful to make this concrete.
As other commenters have pointed out, Carmack founded a rocket company before Elon did. So he has plenty right to speak to Elon's credibility on the question of rockets. But let's not forget that Tom Mueller at JPL was also on the list that praised Elon's engineering abilities, and I'm not sure how much more rocket credibility you can get. And more to the point, I didn't say Carmack was some kind of absolute arbiter of truth here. The baseline isn't God.
The baseline is the median HN commenter. And Carmack's opinion carries infinitely more weight than that. I would argue it carries substantially more weight than the 99th percentile HN commenter.
The point is: All of the people who have worked directly with him and are also famous for their engineering talent in various domains respect him. I'm literally not aware of a single example in the opposite category. And I'll take the opinion of widely respected engineers who've worked with the guy over the commentariat on an internet forum any day.
In the Isaacson biography, Steve Jobs viewed himself as an "engineer." It comes up in some of the quotes when they were working at Atari and early in Apple's existence. I don't have a copy of the book anymore, but it's hinted at here:
But he had a way with words, seemed to have a passion for technology, and probably lied about having worked at Hewlett-Packard. "I figured, this guy's gotta be cheap, man. He really doesn't have much skills at all," Alcorn remembers. "So I figured I'd hire him." A Diet Of Air And Water Jobs was hired as Atari employee #40, as a technician fixing up and tweaking circuit board designs. One of his first roles was finishing the technical design of Touch Me, a simple arcade memory game similar to Ralph Baer's later Simon toy.
The idea that HN commenters who have never met the guy have opinions that contradict the statements of John Carmack, Jim Keller, Tom Mueller, Andrej Karpathy, etc.
These people are not sycophants. These people do not need Musk. They have plenty of their own money. They are not speaking highly of him because they want a promotion, or they want to be in his good graces, or they're afraid of being fired.
You can still hate him for the way he behaves. You can still think he's a bad guy. But if you think your opinion of his talent or engineering depth is better than these people's who've worked with him, you should seriously reconsider your epistemic blind spots.
It's ok for him to be a good engineer and a bad person. Von Braun designed rockets for the Nazis and later the US space program. Nobody doubts his engineering brilliance.
As much as I don't like Musk behaviour lately, or how he try to picture himself as the founder of Tesla, it's really ridiculous to deny his achievements. And the money argument - "oh he just paid good engineers to create the companies" - is pretty dumb too - he wasn't that rich until 2 years ago, so why other billionaires didn't do the same thing ? Or all those other more talented engineers.
Tesla as we know it wouldn't exist without him. IE, the company that almost single handedly (yes, with governments subsides etc etc - they were available to everybody) changed the car industry.
But, the way Musk tells the story or tries to push the narrative is very fishy. I remember reading Ashlee Vance biography of Musk, without knowing too much of him at the time, and while I was in awe about the achievements and boldness, it was also pretty obvious that the guy is childish and a dick.
The reality is Musk wanted to create an EV company. And somebody told him, there are some guys who started doing that, and instead of cutting them out he said, ok, let me and my guy join and ill finance the company.
Tesla was dead in the water before Musk, they couldn't raise money, they had so far only invested a minimal amount from founders themselves and were going nowhere.
Musk brought the money and the chief engineer that actually made Tesla car initially go. The founder CEO then over the next 6 years drove the company straight into the ground.
Musk then took over invested more money and 10 years later its the dominate car company in the EV transition.
I don't give a shit if he is the founder by some definition 'founder' where 'founder' means the guy who created the initial business plan (a business plan that kind of sucked btw). He is what made Tesla actually a real company rather then a joke for Detroit to laugh at.
> The idea that HN commenters who have never met the guy have opinions that contradict the statements of John Carmack, Jim Keller, Tom Mueller, Andrej Karpathy, etc.
Those people can also be wrong about stuff. This is just an appeal to the reputation of those names. It doesn't give weight pro se.
I don't have an opinion on Musk's skills as an engineer. I know I've seen him be very arrogantly and confidently wrong about things I know pretty well. That's a bit of a red flag trait that probably bleeds into other areas of his life and work. But also, i don't draw this conclusion out of hate or prejudice for the man. I don't care.
> Those people can also be wrong about stuff. This is just an appeal to the reputation of those names. It doesn't give weight pro se.
Err. Sure. It is, in principle, possible for all of these people to be wrong. But where are the well known engineers who've actually worked with him who say he's not? There should be quite a few by now, right?
> I don't have an opinion on Musk's skills as an engineer. I know I've seen him be very arrogantly and confidently wrong about things I know pretty well. That's a bit of a red flag trait that probably bleeds into other areas of his life and work. But also, i don't draw this conclusion out of hate or prejudice for the man. I don't care.
I've seen a lot of people make this claim. But every time I've seen this claim made in a field I know well, it was the person making the claim that was wrong, not Musk. Maybe in your case you're right. But my experience is that every time i've seen him dunked on for something technical, he was mostly right and they were mostly wrong.
I guess some of the examples I'm thinking about are trashing on stuff that isn't technical, but there's little doubt to me that they bleed into technical things, because you can't have these personality traits and not have it affect technical decisions.
For example, he was writing about the Bob Lee stabbing as if it was a random violent attack. I wasn't 100% certain but at the time I was extremely suspicious of this claim, based on knowing the block where it happened, it was basically guaranteed that Lee and the assailant were the only two people on the block and it was dubious a homeless person could have camped there. He started trolling the district attorney, who is more conservative about these topics than the last guy, but even she told him to STFU.
There was another example where he questioned the ethics of a place I've worked at. He didn't have a leg to stand on but he made public pronouncements.
Somebody who does that is not likely to be a good engineer. A good engineer waits for the facts to come in before reaching conclusions. He's clearly not level headed. I've seen loads of bad engineers who act like Musk in these circumstances. Sometimes they have good reputations in their orgs because overconfident narcissists sometimes get rewarded.
> For example, he was writing about the Bob Lee stabbing as if it was a random violent attack. I wasn't 100% certain but at the time I was extremely suspicious of this claim, based on knowing the block where it happened, it was basically guaranteed that Lee and the assailant were the only two people on the block and it was dubious a homeless person could have camped there. He started trolling the district attorney, who is more conservative about these topics than the last guy, but even she told him to STFU.
I think you can still be a pretty good engineer and believe that a stabbing in SF is probably perpetrated by a random homeless person absent other information. It may have been wrong for him to jump to this conclusion, but I don't think it has any bearing on his technical skills.
> There was another example where he questioned the ethics of a place I've worked at. He didn't have a leg to stand on but he made public pronouncements.
Again you may be perfectly right, but this has nothing to do with engineering talent. Lots of great engineers are famously assholes (in various ways): see, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, etc.
> Somebody who does that is not likely to be a good engineer. A good engineer waits for the facts to come in before reaching conclusions. He's clearly not level headed. I've seen loads of bad engineers who act like Musk in these circumstances. Sometimes they have good reputations in their orgs because overconfident narcissists sometimes get rewarded.
This is just not the case as any kind of rule. Like, sure, a perfectly rational Bayesian optimizer may not do these things. But real engineering at the highest level isn't about that - it's about intuition from experience about which system design choices will be good and which won't, and acting quickly and efficiently on that information.
The very small intersection of incredible engineers who are also very good people have the humility to quickly pivot when they've been proven wrong, admit it, and move on. Elon is obviously not in this category.
But I think you have to admit that it's telling that when pressed for examples of his technical failures in public, all you could come up with were completely non-technical examples.
See, you're wrong on every count. Talented engineers don't jump to conclusions with this high frequency. It is totally predictave of engineering ability. You don't build a bridge by making public, arrogant statements that it will stand, when you are actually full of shit and haven't looked into any details. This clearly permeates all of Elon's thinking. He has financial success which blinds him to this problem at this point.
This is different from Torvalds or Stallman. Torvalds is still writing commits for Linux, and they work. His public opinions are sometimes delivered sharply, but I have usually found them to be well based in fact. He's not going off on Twitter with a bunch of baseless personal attacks. Good engineers do not.
Also, it sounds a lot to me like you neglect the relationship between sociability and engineering work. It is a huge thing. It absolutely cannot be ignored to be a successful engineer. Linus, despite criticisms, is quite sociable and socially aware, and it's a big part of his success.
You still haven't come up with a single example of his technical failure in public, and I think that is more telling than any discussion of how social ineptitude relates to engineering talent.
> Also, it sounds a lot to me like you neglect the relationship between sociability and engineering work. It is a huge thing. It absolutely cannot be ignored to be a successful engineer. Linus, despite criticisms, is quite sociable and socially aware, and it's a big part of his success.
Agree completely. But it is an objective fact that Elon Musk has inspired lots of engineers to work for him, and to do so at an incredibly high level of productivity.
But given a conflict between the opinions of a random person on HN and prominent engineers who've worked directly with Musk, I'll place more emphasis on the words of the prominent engineers. It's not that they can't be wrong, it's that they're less likely to be wrong than people whose only interaction with Musk is reading his Twitter.
I just read the comments in the reddit thread. It seems like the sort of vague platitudes people say when they've worked with a person, regardless of their actual competence. Especially in a higher level position, people say this stuff all the time out of BS. I wouldn't take it for much.
Yeah what do these people have to gain by saying anything but platitudes? Why make an enemy out of the richest guy on earth who also happens to have a very passionate fanbase? Of course anyone who has other stuff to do besides looking for a fight is going to praise him when asked.
Yeah but those people went in many directions. Some have their own independent business and fanbase. Some went into education and turned into tenured professors. Some created their own new companies after SpaceX/Tesla and turned into quasi competitors. And yet all of them said all these things only to stay in the good graces of Musk, not likely. Musk might care what Bezos, Gates and co say about him, but some former head of engineer that went into academia, I don't think so.
And of course it also disregards what they actually said, its not just 'platitudes'. Some explained in great detail what he does and why they are so impressed with him.
Some of them like Tom Mueller went out of their way, years after leaving the company, to tell people not to assign all credit to them. Why would they do that, if they wanted that they could have just remained silent.
If a 'chief engineers' job is to coordinate multiple teams of engineers and make high level decisions to lead to a larger strategic goal, then that is what Musk clearly does and does pretty well and that is hard to question.
If he himself can design a rocket engine or an electric motor from scratch is questionable but I don't think that's what being an engineer is.
I can believe he's very smart, but he's also wildly irrational. He's also been caught out since taking over Twitter of broadcasting very inaccurate things about the state of Twitters software stack. Hyperfocus on the software is also definitely the wrong thing to be worrying about when it comes to running a content company and he's only made the product worse in his time there and has shown close to zero understanding what makes the site valuable.
> I can believe he's very smart, but he's also wildly irrational.
Yes, this is more or less what I believe. Or to be more precise, I think over the past 5-7 years his fame, attention, and power have corrupted him.
> He's also been caught out since taking over Twitter of broadcasting very inaccurate things about the state of Twitters software stack.
I don't remember ever seeing a valid example of this. I do remember people dunking on things he said at various times, but those people were wrong, and he was right. Nearly all the Musk haters predicted Twitter would collapse after he fired half the staff, that it would fall apart. Former engineers wrote op eds about how it would happen. None of it did.
The particular instance to which I think you're referring was some front-end enginee attempting to falsify Musks's claims about how content was loaded, but the frontend engineer clearly didn't understand that Musk was talking about the micro-services that stitch together the feeds loaded by the front end code. Now, Musk may have been wrong - I don't know what Twitter's architecture looks like inside, but the guy who was criticizing him didn't either.
> Hyperfocus on the software is also definitely the wrong thing to be worrying about when it comes to running a content company and he's only made the product worse in his time there and has shown close to zero understanding what makes the site valuable.
I'm not sure I agree. I did think that at first, but I think he actually does understand what makes the site valuable - the users, and diversified revenue streams. He hasn't fully achieved that, but he has time. A social media site where you actually buy the product instead of being the product is what people have claimed to want here for quite a while.
He could certainly be lying. He no longer has the kind of obligations not to that a public company does. But the idea that Twitter is dying or dead is just not the case. He certainly overpaid for it, and I don't think every move he's made has been good, but he's iterated rapidly, and been willing to revert unpopular changes quickly.
I don't know if he's a good engineer or not, but people that don't like him want it to be true and will propagate it regardless. All negative news or rumors about him--twitter is failing, his companies succeed despite him, SpaceX launchpad exploded, Tesla kills pedestrian, stock is tanking, etc..." grants a huge dopamine boost to these people. Unfortunately I understand this well as I have my own areas where this is true.
The top replies to this tweet are batshit crazy and a great representation of why I nuked my Twitter account.
Twitter was never my favorite web property and I checked out a long time ago, but I would come back to read long form tweets, developing stories, and the occasional rant. Now? Few people I look up to are using it and I feel like every time I look at a reply it’s flooded with blue check marks spouting absolute nonsense or hate.
Elon tweets have always had terrible replies, I have no idea if they are better or worse than it used to be. Probably about the same.
In general I think twitter is slightly better since the takeover. I'm sure that someone who follows and engages with different people could come to completely the opposite opinion.
Blue check on the app: probably 70/30 negative, with all the negative comments focusing on Yaccarino's official WEF involvement. Zero gender based or notably biolus comments, even after going back to try to scroll down into the content you're describing.
Incognito on the web: all negative, mostly WEF new world order scaremongering, anti-woke hand wringing, and outright offensive comments.
> The top replies to this tweet are batshit crazy and a great representation of why I nuked my Twitter account.
Ironically, if you had not nuked your account you would probably see better replies. Twitter does after all, tailor which replies you see first to your account and followings.
I have not nuked my account. But according to recent headlines Musk will do it for me because I have not logged in for 1.5 years or so. In some special occasions it was handy, but in general I would agree with the parent: Are any normal people still using Twitter?
I think this is exactly the right profile for him to have hired. She led advertising (sales) at a top 3 media publisher. This is probably Elon's greatest area of weakness, and she's particularly good at it.
I imagine this will be a bit like SpaceX where Sales and Ops is done by someone very good at that, and engineering is done by Elon.
It takes a realistic, self-aware person to hire someone who's better than them at their weaknesses, and is harder done than said.
Engineer, especially in rocket science, is a protected term, and I don't think Elon has obtained his PE, nor has he even gotten an informal education in the requisite engineering discipline.
Yeah I'm just considering actual missions where a customer is paying them to deliver something to space (crew or satellites). If you include tests then they obviously have a much worse record.
Wow the slant in this entire thread. When did HN become such a fervent Elon hate machine. Honestly curious, is most of this from his actions at Twitter?
It was exactly the moment the media started calling him a fascist for supporting free speech. I noticed the immediate transition of the rhetoric about Elon change here overnight.
My guess is one or more of the billionaires that Elon pissed off started funding a persistent anti-elon narrative, and that has shown up as bot farms especially on reddit. Then people who don't think for themselves started propagating it wherever they go... Because of how fun it is to argue on the internet and all of that.
It started as an anti Tesla narrative which was obviously paid for by the Tesla shorts, but this new supercharged anti Elon narrative ramped up when it started to become clear he was actually going to buy Twitter. So my guess is it's related to the interests of whoever was benefiting from the old regime at Twitter.
Not bot here. I don’t have enough digits to count the reasons I loathe him. I’ve yet to understand why the “media brainwashing” crowd never have a response to the very real argument that these types of people have made themselves so obnoxiously loud that you can’t help but see every one of the unfiltered thought they have — no third party media bias swaying the impression needed.
You don't have to go that far. Elon just got more involved in politics than before (or at least more publicly than before - all billionaires are probably influential in politics, just not so explicitly), and the best move in that game is not to play. Politics is a mind killer, and instant enemy-creator.
I'm not a big elon fan but that was objectively not a failed mission. They were very upfront that they expected it to destruct, and wanted to see how far it got.
Their entire launch, navigation, communication, engine/fuel/structure, and the self-destruction teams/systems all performed, and they assuredly learned a ton from that - both sensor data - and other things such as concrete debris from the launch pad being a problem.
From my understanding they were primarily were concerned about the launch stages and getting into an ascent and anything beyond that was icing on the cake. There was no payload, it's destination was to crash off the coast of hawaii.
IMHO, Twitter fundamentally needed a huge shakeup, which Elon has done. I've enjoyed and used my account more since he took over than in any of the years prior. Still, it's obvious a lot of people are unhappy with the changes; but it's hard to judge how many people are quietly happy with them. Personally, I hope for Twitter's success under Yaccarino's leadership.
For me it's mostly been (1) seeing less content from people I actually follow (because prioritization of Twitter Blue subscribers) while my own tweets are shown less; and (2) awkward conversations with people, where I can type 280 characters, but they can respond with infinitely long answers.
I never used Twitter much, but one change I noticed is that there is more "angry political commentary" than before. Twitter has always been politically polarizing, but I feel like angry comments pop up on every thread now. For instance, when Musk announced he had picked a new CEO and referred to to her as "she", one of the replies visible at the top was how this specific Twitter user didn't want to use a product run by a woman.
huh? Twitter has always had chronological timelines. Only thing Musk added in that regard is a buggy even more magic "For You" that's harder to ignore. On my phone at least the app switched to the For You tab every restart and on many of my refreshes.
That’s not true. Twitter hid the chronological feed behind a small button barely anyone knew about. And before that there was a multi-year period where the only way to get chronological tweets was via using Lists. Which was extremely frustrating.
I’m happy Twitter has made the followers only feed a prominent two-tab UI. The algorithmic one was always completely useless. If Twitter can do what YouTube did to their feeds recommendations feeds Twitter can do very well but without TikTok style engagement metrics with videos are well suited for I have a feeling it’s always going to be bad on Twitter.
I get the feeling the only people who (ever) liked and engaged with the Twitter AI feeds are the same people who like Reddits r/all, which aren’t the sort of people I want to interact with anyway.
That's a fair point, I'd forgotten it was hard to discover. That's because it worked well for me. I looked it up at one point and then I had it configured how I want.
The new system is much more annoying for me, but it might be nicer for someone who wouldn't be able to learn about the old button.
As I said, it’s basically on every post, even a non-political post like announcing that a new Twitter CEO has been chosen. I used Babylon Bee as an example because you said that you didn’t see this trend and mentioned that you read the Babylon Bee.
> As I said, it’s basically on every post, even a non-political post like announcing that a new Twitter CEO has been chosen.
OK I think I understand what you're saying - every discussion turns political? Twitter has been that way since 2015. It's the world's public square. Only difference is people are allowed to disagree with Californian liberals.
It’s a gladiatorial arena (maybe WWE/performance art would be an even better metaphor) for the US culture wars. If they could please get it over with soon so we can return to normal programming, that would be great
Yep that too. I’ve often said twitter is a MOBA and it’s always been that way, way before October 2022. I once spent an awful morning having Jake Archibald and his 40K followers abuse me because I didn’t like the ’fetch’ spec.
English-language Twitter has always had a huge amount of inflammatory political commentary. I gave up on the platform for many years because I couldn't follow artists, film directors, or engineers without seeing their political opinions plastered all over my feed and I found it distracting and obnoxious. As others have pointed out, you're looking at the comment section of an account that posts political satire.
What do you mean by "these types of political statements"? Right-wing ones?
> As others have pointed out, you're looking at the comment section of an account that posts political satire.
Which account is political satire? The Babylon Bee or Elon Musk’s personal account? I kid.
> What do you mean by "these types of political statements"? Right-wing ones?
I intentionally didn’t label it. Where on the spectrum does a statement like “women can’t run companies” lie? To me, the issue isn’t political. It’s that people whose entire identity is founded upon fighting a culture war seem to be the loudest voices on Twitter. It makes the product very unpleasant.
> The 5th reply tags a number of republican politicians and was posted by someone whose Twitter tagline is simply "Patriot".
Which is labeled and is not particularly egregious, so that weakens your point.
I don't recall comment sections of popular or political accounts ever being respectful or interesting. But in some cases, the bots that used to plague every popular account's comments do seem preferable to that kind of stuff.
As a previous non-regular-Twitter user, every time I checked in to see what the hype was about, it was full of people trying to create "personal brand"s and sounding very artificial. It had a very LinkedIn-ish vibe. Regular Twitter users probably had a very different experience, of course, but this average initial experience was a turn off.
There are still faux-experts shilling their brand on Twitter for sure, but recently it feels like there are a lot more authentic and casual chat that's easy to get into.
It may just be that Elon shaking things up and causing some people to move out destabilized existing cliques, thus making things more approachable to an outsider. But I for one am enjoying the current Twitter a lot more than the past one.
My personal experience is that I like the addition of the “following” and “for you” tabs, since they make a lot more sense than the sparkle menu that used to be in their place. Unfortunately, I can’t use the “for you” tab anymore, since it no longer contains any content for me.
> Still, it's obvious a lot of people are unhappy with the changes; but it's hard to judge how many people are quietly happy with them.
I follow a number of accounts on Twitter. If someone tweets, previously it seemed the replies which would float to the top would be the ones which were liked the most - like on HN - or perhaps from users that had the equivalent of good karma. Since the sale of blue checkmarks, now the replies which float to the top are from those shilling out eight dollars a month for the blue checkmark, and those top replies are usually inane.
Previously, well-known people would get a verified checkmark. One example talked about on the net is the singer Dionne Warwick, who lost her checkmark as she does not want to pay the eight dollars a month for it. There are two Twitter accounts calling themselves Clint Eastwood's official account - one has a blue checkmark and less than 3500 followers, one does not and has over 100,000 followers - I have no idea which is the real one, if either is. This also makes the platform less useful to use.
The decision to kill third party clients has cut my usage dramatically.
Beyond that, the decision to show every single reply from a Twitter Blue subscriber above any reply from a non-subscriber is one of the worst changes I've seen in a social media product. Elon chose to brand subscribing to Twitter Blue as a political act, so now below every tweet there's nothing but people who have agreeing with Elon's politics as a significant part of their identity.
It's not like Twitter replies were all that good before, and yet somehow he's made them significantly worse.
The tricky thing about cutting third party clients is that those users were never counted as a 'mDAU' in their reports anyway. They could have brought other benefits (like 'power users' generating content to attract monetisable users).
second this, quietly happy. i know many that are as well. we just can't really voice it because people blow their lids if you are not part of the "Current Thing", which right now is hating everything that Elon touches.
Goes right into the textbook definition of "glass cliff". Musk still gets to sabotage the product, the CEO gets to be the chief executive of whatever Elon thinks is dull but not the company, and she still gets fired if things go sideways and Elon keeps doing whatever he's doing.
Top replies to tweets are from blue-checks (nowadays, generally the worst posters) so to see any good interactions you either have to scroll pretty far or have used a blocklist. Twitter Blue is now completely tarnished - even if you just want to pay $8/month for the ability to edit posts or include longer videos in your tweets and don't care about "verified" status you're going to be lumped in with a really odd group of people and mocked for your blue check (i.e. he turned a consumer choice into an unpopular political statement). I'm not personally a heavy user anymore (moved to mastodon when they killed Tweetbot's API access), but either there's a lot of downtime or I've been really unlucky when I have returned as I've encountered a lot of issues with accessing the app - being completely locked out for a couple of days once. Also he unbanned a bunch of really pretty shitty people, who have picked up where they left off in directing their substantial following to abuse whoever they feel wronged them (usually someone in the LGBTQ+ community).
It's still largely usable as a service, but it has absolutely gotten worse and to describe it as "sabotage" is definitely not a stretch.
I think you're mistaken in believing I am on "tech twitter" as you understand it. I had a serious account under my real name (which I barely used and followed serious tech people) and a fun account under a false name (which I heavily used and followed no tech people at all). I've no idea what "tech twitter" thinks about anything, last I checked on my serious account everyone was just getting on with their normal stuff without engaging in any of this, so it's something different from what you mean.
Also:
>> he turned a consumer choice into an unpopular political statement
> Only a few people on tech twitter and some hard core rightist actually believe that.
No, many legacy blue checks have observed it first-hand and talked about it, it's become a very common talking point - see "this mf paid for twitter". You must have a very sheltered existence on twitter and on the internet at large if you haven't seen this. Frankly I felt a bit cheap re-using that line because it's paraphrasing something that had already been said hundreds of times already.
I guess then we just don't really have the same experience. Hard to believe a account not involved in technology or partisan politics has a huge amount of discussion of these issues.
> see "this mf paid for twitter".
Ok so hardcore anti-Musk people and rightist believe the same thing and it reinforces each other. Great, I don't care.
Neither of these groups are interesting or relevant and such discussions mostly happen under popular posts, not most things I follow.
Alright I’ll bite, what reality am I denying here? I could’ve gone further but I thought in the interests of not aggravating the few remaining Elon fans I’d keep it simple, but apparently that didn’t work.
Exactly, I’ve outlined why I don’t particularly enjoy using the service for free, no idea why I should also pay for it. I’m surprised they didn’t also accuse me of being too poor to afford it, or of spending that daily on a “coffee with [my] name on it”
I guess the message has evolved to “pay Elon and shut up” - bold strategy, let’s see if it pays off…
I'm not a regular twitter user, but do people really get decent information from this platform? The comments to this tweet are a cesspool of anger and conspiracy theories.
Why would this tweet ever come to anyone's attention? I see tweets of people I follow, a few hundred users, most of whom I know in real life and the rest of whom are experts in fields of interest.
There's incredible content that is found on Twitter. It takes time to curate your feed though, but once curated, I would say it's definitely in the top 3 best sources of info on the internet.
I do the same and don't have the complaints that many people have. I never check the trending hashtags and recommended nonsense. I unfollow anyone who gets involved in and retweets a lot of Twitter/political drama (they are free to use their account how their like, but I don't need this sort of thing in my life).
Start by following people who do interesting stuff. Avoid the ones who post every day, because it doesn't scale. Once you are following a few hundred accounts, the frequent posters will drown out everyone else and the signal-to-noise ratio will be terrible.
Don't read the comments. Approximately 100% of them are garbage. Comments from the people you follow will appear in your feed anyway.
If the people you follow frequently retweet stuff from someone, consider following them. But only if you find their posts interesting and they don't post too often.
I guess this should still work, if the people you want to follow are still on Twitter.
This has been my experience across a number of platforms other than Twitter (I've not used it in any significant fashion).
On Mastodon (and previously on Google+), my strong advice is to use lists, and to essentially treat those as priority rather than topical classifications.
Usually that ends up being three tranches, high, medium, and low interest, where the high-interest list is about 10--20 active profiles (with time there may be inactives which accrue, though my tier-I list remains about 40--50 profiles). The 2nd and 3rd tiers are less selective, generally if someone doesn't seem to rate tier-I I'll bump them to II, and if they're getting too annoying there, to III.
Mastodon has the option to limit boosts (retoots) and replies by profile, so toggle those if someone's a good primary source but is overly profligate in their amplification.
On post/response type platforms (Google+, Diaspora* (yes, it's still around), good hosts are key, and what you're looking for is someone who posts interesting prompts and hauls out the trash in terms of low-quality comments. (HN's moderation team does a generally excellent-job-at-scale of that here ... present thread notwithstanding.)
Highly-voluable posters are almost never worth following directly --- what they lack is a self-editor, and you'll usually catch their interesting stuff through boosts or the equivalent. There's phenomenon I've noticed since the days of print newspapers where the highly-curated selected syndication of content gives a tremendously distorted view of the representative quality of a publication: when you're reading at the far end of a highly-selective filter, the crap and cruft has been cut and blocked. Prolific posters may achieve occasional hits and high notes, but the wheat::chaff ratio is often very, very low.
Similarly, there are profiles which post rarely but almost always with high salience. In a strictly streams-based view, these tend to get lost.
Another useful tool is directed search. Google+ actually had useful search at several points in its evolution (though it rather famously launched without any). HN's Algolia tool is a key value point to this site, and I mine both my own and others' content frequently, as well as search either articles or concepts as they appear or occur to me, with varying levels of success but at least the possibility is there. Occasional gems to appear. The Fediverse has taken a generally adversarial approach to comprehensive search (largely a futile effort as Alex Stamos has pointed out, and I strongly agree), though there are hashtags which can be searched, pinned, and/or followed, and some limited full-text search (your own toots, followers / local instance) which is quite useful. Platforms lacking effective search (Reddit, for comments, Diaspora* at all, Ello (back when it was more alive) in any useful sense) are severely handicapped. Yes, the feature can be abused, but it's also highly useful.
Twitter recently implemented a change to prioritize replies from Twitter Blue subscribers over all others, so the replies you're seeing first are all people who paid for Twitter. That means they're either people who support Elon, or people for whom Twitter is a significant part of their job, either way they're likely to be terminally online and probably insufferable. The top replies to any prominent account tend to be awful these days.
That’s Gwynne Shotwell, COO of SpaceX btw. Maybe the best that could happen to SpaceX. The other one is Shivon Zilis. What role does she have nowadays?
It certainly speaks to a level of professional conflict. If you have children with an employee it could very easily affect the way you treat that person in the workplace. It can easily undermine them in the eyes of co-workers.
She may well be perfectly happy with that but the OP was specifically holding her up as an example of Elon's track record with women in the workplace.
There are indications to the opposite. What you have pointed out is that he has hired two female executives across the dozens of individuals in his portfolio. Better than zero, I suppose.
Previously, Linda Yaccarino helped launch Peacock, the NBC/Comcast streaming service that was provided free with our Internet connection for a few months. I would have to give this strategy credit: we actually watched it quite a bit. Unfortunately, the Peacock UX is quite bad, since resuming an episode often simply doesn't work and jumping forward forces you to watch commercials twice. So we may not end up subscribing when the free period ends.
If this was Yaccarino's decision, that's good marketing. But you need some follow-through as well.
It does seem like Peacock's success was a factor in her getting chosen as Twitter CEO. I find it hard to believe there's any nefarious intent e.g. finding a scapegoat. Its more like there are not too many takers for the job and they had to go with the best possible choice.
Just like Musk will go away from being involved in Tesla that people claimed for many years. Or how all his leadership of all his companies always leave. Except his companies have much more stable leadership teams then their competitors.
Success is a lousy teacher. Mr. Musk has been dreaming about his "everything app" i.e. X.com for a very long time. The fact that he thinks the sinking Twitter ship will bring it to fruition is laughable.
I have to admit to eating crow. I thought for sure that Elon was quietly hoping people would forget about the "Should I step down" poll and he was going to stay on as CEO. I was wrong.
For me personally it's largely academic at this point since I'm not coming back to Twitter without Tweetbot. But it's nice to see the follow-through on this one.
I think you are not eating crow. He had no intention of stepping down. He thought he would be loved and tried but realized he is not going to be able to pull through the management stuff. I think the poll and this decision aren’t related.
Don't eat crow simply because he followed through on one thing. He's still a blatant liar and fascist, spewing bullshit about things like being a "free speech absolutist." Giving him credit on this one thing is playing into his hand by scrubbing his reputation in way that allows him to get away with his more insidious plans (e.g. making Twitter more right-wing).
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. Regardless of how right you are or feel, it's not what this site is for and destroys what it is for.
Hiring a new CEO won't erase the bad policy decisions that Elon made and what he stands for. Jack Dorsey has a better chance of success since he knows the game. However, I am truly hoping Mastodon or federated social network will succeed.
I agree. People are saying no one wants the blue check mark anymore because it is no longer “cool”. I say give it time. It will become cool again once people realize all the features they can get for only $8.
The value of the check mark (to twitter and non-verified users) was never that it was "cool", it was that you knew the account wasn't a random bot/troll/throwaway. That's something Musk clearly didn't understand because the blue check now has basically no value at all. The fact that a lot of people think it's uncool to have a checkmark now is just another self-inflicted challenge the company has to overcome.
People have been screaming for him to step down as CEO of Twitter for a long time, and he's doing it. It looks like the general reaction in this thread is that this is somehow even more evil than not stepping down. What makes this either a catastrophic mistake, or a malicious act?
He doesn't seem to be stepping down from much of anything. It's an online social media company and he's still going to be in charge of product and technology, so what exactly is this new CEO going to be doing? This just looks like he hired a VP of Advertising and decided to call her a CEO for no reason. What kind of tech CEO doesn't control product and technology?
The more realistic outcome would be that Elon promises a cure for cancer is coming next year and repeats saying that every year until all of his competitors have caught up.
Are you saying it's ok to call someone you're arguing with on the internet a pedophile with no evidence, if it's just one British person living in Thailand? What point are you making?
Edit: Looking at your post history, do you own a lot of SpaceX and Tesla stock? You do a lot of name calling to defend Elon, so your opinion defending one of the world's richest guys doesn't seem altruistic.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, we've warned you many times before, and if you keep doing it we're going to have to ban you.
Dan it’s not flamebait. The person tried to falsely paint a single example of behaviour as a common thing.
Unfortunately a lot of people seem to really hate Elon Musk, so “you’re right he only did this once but it was poor behaviour” turns into flagging anyone that points this out and then bringing up unrelated matters as an instance of whataboutism.
We’ve had three or four discussions over the last 16 years, one I’m fairly sure you’d now think you were in the wrong, so I’m not sure why you would say this is common.
Asking someone "Do you understand plurals?" is an insulting way of calling them dumb. Personal insults are certainly flamebait and definitely not allowed here.
OK fair enough. I did genuinely wonder how the parent did not understand that writing something happened multiple times when it happened once was untrue, but I should have used better language here.
I'm going to go out on a limb here with the way you've consistently dodged whether you think this is acceptable behavior and say that even if I brought up another example, Yoel Roth, you still would have a way of doing gymnastics around it.
I think that will turn out to be a great move for Twitter.
I don't get the negativity expressed by top comments.
Yeah things were hectic at the beginning, but Twitter nowadays is a much better product than it was a year ago for me. Find a good niche for yourself and it's a gold mine for socializing online with a bit of curating.
> I don't get the negativity expressed by top comments.
Basically HN is where bored Reddit user comes nowadays as most of the relevant/influential users are still on Twitter (as you said you just need to curate the feeds well). So who really cares what Reddit know-it-alls think?
>I don't get the negativity expressed by top comments.
Lots of ideologically-opinionated users are mad Twitter no longer censors and bans their opponents. They're upset that their patrons who enforced this got fired by Musk. Much seemingly unrelated criticism flows from this.
As to the actual Twitter experience, I've always used a chronological feed and never understood complaints about the algorithm. Step one to not being bothered by an opaque algorithm's control of your attention is withholding that control in the first place. I haven't noticed any change in my daily Twitter browsing in this regard under Musk.
By "their opponents," I meant opponents of the previous Twitter owners.
The neutral platform is gone. As we were so often and so smugly reminded, Twitter is a private company. They can ban who they like. This is the dog-eat-dog public discourse world you chose.
Too little too late. I left Twitter a few days ago after I saw some users complaining about animal torture videos showing up in their feeds and search suggestions, and this was on the heels of the footage of the shooting in Texas making the rounds.
It’s a completely unsurprising thing to see when you actively court channers after kneecapping content moderation.
Like CASM, there are groups of sociopaths who share these videos in private and occasionally in public. Everything from Facebook groups to small YouTube channels to private forums. The people who hunt them down, gather evidence and send it to the cops are true heroes in my view, alongside paid Facebook content moderators.
That’s cool, all manner of illegal shock content has always shown up on the chans as well, since day one. “Channer” as a term applies equally to all people in that ecosystem, even those that are reviled by the rest. :)
"The glass cliff is a hypothesized phenomenon of women being likelier than men to achieve leadership roles, such as executives in the corporate world and political election candidates, during periods of crisis or downturn, when the risk of failure is highest.Other research has expanded the definition of the glass cliff phenomenon to include racial and ethnic minority groups."
Usage is not really the metric that counts when Twitter's ad revenue is down 89% since Musk took over [1]. I find it hard to believe they're selling enough $8/mth subscriptions to fill the gap.
Furthermore, there's absolutely zero evidence that Twitter's usage is up. There's no actual data to draw that conclusion from, Twitter is now private and under no obligation to share.
If you ask for a source, you're gonna get linked to one tweet of his dated Dec 18th. In totally unrelated news, Dec 18th just happens to be the date when World Cup finals in Qatar were held, before all the mindblowingly stupid changes.
But even if it did increase, it's just bots. There's a crypto scam at the top of US trending every day, and when you click on it and then click on latest and scroll down a bit, you just see a bunch of random 5-10 words followed by a hashtag. There's one right now, #Kicks. About 12 hours ago it was #Wednesdaytoken. It's gonna get purged when some employee finally gets around to doing that, and then the next one's gonna happen tomorrow.
He is also chairman. He remains in control. Just hired somebody to take care of ad customer relations, which is a thing he certainly can't do and have her a good title.
Everybody seems to blame everything that goes wrong on Musk and everything that goes right on his employees, so if anything she'll get all the credit and no blame ever.
I think it's a win-win for her. If Twitter pulls out of its nosedive, she'll be seen as a genius. If it splatters all over the ground, everyone will blame Musk and agree that she was put in an impossible position.
I just hope she's getting paid upfront, given Twitter's current cashflow issues.
Yeah, it is. The only glaring issue I see is that Yaccarino will definitely have to compromise by kicking some of the more radical people off the platform to get the high-dollar accounts advertising on Twitter again, which will draw fire from what is now the most visible user base. Or at the very least, reducing the "freedom of reach" I've seen Elon refer to. Otherwise, she seems to be a decent hire, catering to a lot of groups.
I don't understand how other people can tolerate using Twitter.
I just want to view people's comments in a compact form - one line per tweet, even if RSS or equivalent is not supported. How do people have time in their day to scroll down the page to see all the tweets (&ads) on their timeline when they're following hundreds/thousands of people? If I can't integrate it into my RSS reader realistically I have <15 minutes per day to spend on such a platform.
My assumption is that we shouldn’t underestimate the volume of nonsense that a person can tolerate when their attention span has been reduced to banana skin fiber over the course of their lifetime. Combine that with the addictive qualities of the platforms and a desire to harvest maximum stimulation with minimal effort.
Recently I noticed how overwhelming some posts on HN can appear. 400-500 comments, the top rated comment alone splinters into 78 sub-narratives and criticisms. Contrarily I feel like parsing this takes a lot more effort than Twitter. People put a lot more effort in their HN comments compared to a Tweet, and we are held to a different standard here in terms as what we say and how we say it. Also consider the fact that Twitter offers a variety of content while HN offers one primary form (text; I’m purposely excluding what links that are shared offer and am discussing primarily the core of the HN experience which is the conversation on the actual site).
I say all of this to say, how do people have the time in their day to even scroll here? When you follow nobody (unless you subscribe to some users comments with an RSS reader, an option I’m becoming more fond of) and you actually have to do a lot of reading and thinking as compared to a deluge of Tweets that can be grasped in a matter of seconds.
On one hand, this is what makes HN an exceptional website in a way. On the other hand, what makes Twitter appealing to others is what makes it exceptional compared to other websites and why it’s doubtful that the majority of its user base will leave, unless the layout changes.
Overall, I think topics like literacy, intellectual curiosity, taste…and a lack thereof, contribute to why Twitter is either appealing and unappealing (I don’t tweet).
>how do people have the time in their day to even scroll here?
Yeah this site can be a massive time-waste. I try to only scroll through a thread if it's of significant interest to me or I'm on the train or something. Some days that effort fails and I spend too much time passively consuming trivia from here when I should be working. When it comes to non-tech topics I don't think the level of discussion on this site is particularly high but the quality of prose may give the wrong impression on first glance.
I get several thousand items in my RSS reader inbox each day (including HN headlines) - no way can I read a significant portion of that. Thankfully most news articles have limited new information beyond the title.
Fun fact, early in Twitter's life, RSS was supported. There was even a brief period where it supported XMPP! I remember following along with 2008 election tweets in Pidgin.
Twitter's answer to this is to use an algorithm to prioritize the content the user is mostly likely to want to see. Certainly, I never read every unread tweet in my feed.
Ironically that same algorithmic approach has been subject to complaint from all sides, with "shadow ban" accusations thrown around, including by Musk himself. So it's now less effective than it used to be, in the name of "equality".
Tweets are often rich media and aren't designed to be one line, but Twitter has a Lists function that does basically this if you're willing to make manual groupings of users by topic.
The Twitter frontend Nitter [1] has RSS built in for posts. I don't think it can do full threads, but it's a compact read-only design is much easier to read than proper Twitter.
Unfortunately the public instances can get overloaded and really slow.
To get a more real-time like experience it's better to stand up your own instance and put it behind something like Tailscale so only you are using it.
The appeal of twitter is the fame. They may look down upon traditional media, but it's those that give twitter users their megaphone. If you've got 1000 followers that may or may not glance upon your tweets, that nice. But to see your opinion broadcasted as the voice of the people, that's attractive.
there are two ways to use twitter: curate a small number of follows you read most tweets from, or follow many and treat twitter more like an endless river to sample from
Yeah I figure that's how people use it - for entertainment or sampling user sentiment. It's not even good at the latter because the act of following often is in essence cherry picking and the sample size from scrolling is so low.
Something so cripplingly limited shouldn't have a near-monopoly...
The vibe on Twitter has become totally noxious since bluechecks started getting promoted under every single tweet. I'm still on there because of inertia, but from my feed there are plenty of people like me waiting to jump ship to bluesky. Twitter's brand is toxic now. Maybe they'll make up the difference with users coming over from Parler or whatever, but I doubt it.
By his own admission the value of Twitter has dropped 50%, and he has suggested bankruptcy is on the table. This will be a case study of bad management in textbooks for decades to come.
Twitter never went down because of those engineers and the great work they did. Elon has been making all kinds of shit up as he goes. He is not an engineer, and never will be one. He can be a great businessman (and at times -- he has made great decisions for businesses.) and be a terrible engineer. He seems to be stuck on the latter even being possible.
> either he's a really good engineer or he's really good at hiring them, which means he's a really good engineer.
Or someone else at SpaceX is good at hiring engineers? Is your conclusion that everyone who owns a successful engineering company is a really good engineer?
I'm not saying Elon succeeds by accident. I think he's a very smart man who despite that, manages to think he's smarter than he is.
I think that his unique talents are not in engineering but sales. He's great at selling his vision to some people who will then bleed for him. He's great at fundraising and convince people to fund his ventures.
I don't think he's an engineering prodigy like Carmack or Wozniak. I don't think he's a product genius like Jobs. I think he's a fantastic salesman who finds bets that will pay off if you can keep at them for long enough, and uses his fundraising talents to keep his companies afloat until they do pay off.
Turning Twitter into pay-to-play will look “competent” in the beginning, but we’re not sure how it’ll work in the long run.
Lately, it looks like lower level (non-twitter blue) users have no incentive to come up with new content. If they do, high level users (twitter blue) will regurgitate it to their audience and it’ll be amplified to the top. Before, the playing field was level.
When I go from Musk's Tweet to Linda Yaccarino (@LindYacc) I see a tweet that starts with "If we abandon our history [..]" and ends with "You’re unable to view this Tweet because this account owner limits who can view their Tweets. Learn more"
Why does it say I cannot see a tweet in a tweet I can see?
I found it interesting to wonder how viable a CTO he'd be if he had to accede to somebody else's directional drive, or a board.
I suspect he wouldn't do too badly because he is sufficiently technical to know when he's being snowed and is also quite driven.
The problem isn't that he has no technical ability. The problem is he is unwise, and somewhat of an autodidact, convinced he's right irrespective of evidence. Lacking a source of directing force he is prone to making irrational, personally driven choices.
He also miscommunicates frequent. I doubt his "C suite" colleagues would welcome it, and so his directorate or board would be edgy all the time. Being in control makes me wonder if he's surrounded by yes-men and fires anyone who tries to argue back.
Whomever is in charge of manufacturing over there seems to be doing well. It took Tesla over five years to get their manufacturing act together. (Which is what the manufacturing experts who quit in 2016 said it was going to take.) But they finally did, and at long last, cost per unit started to come down.
New product development, though, is not going well. The Cybertruck is still not shipping. Nor is the big truck. A Model 2 has been announced, but is not shipping.
And, of course, there's Fake Self Driving, which isn't mentioned much any more.
Come to think about it, Tesla as a high volume car manufacturer now seems to work better when Musk isn't around.
The only reason for her to get this job is to have her name known in public. No one knew who she was until now (not saying it as a bad thing). She is taking a sinking ship with lots of issues she won't be able to fix, like the thousands of lawsuits the company is facing. Now Elon will have someone to blame for the disaster he created. Google luck Linda, you'll need it.
I haven't been logged in to my twitter account for probably more than a year. And when I see an interesting tweet somewhere, my first thought is, why can't that person use a more decent platform?
Twitter promoting “cat in blender” when you searched for “cat” is the last straw for me. Whatever Twitter might do, whether good or bad, I’m absolutely done with that platform.
IMHO, Twitter has so much network effect that it kept frozen in time lacking features. It's one of the best study case on MVPs as Craigslist, Reddit, Slashdot, 4Chan...
Musk just showed us how a "not anti-capitalism" product management, from top down, could make Twitter catch up and keep up on the Zeitgeist of Internet User Experience.
Twitter and part of the public discourse was saved, Musk companies can benefit a lot from the same leadership and governance model spearheaded by Google on the 'Alphabet move'.
It's sad that people just want to buy the media buzz and witch-hunting because 'it is too much power in one person's hands'. I don't see this amount of critical thinking about Sergey and Larry, Besos or Zuckerberg.
The biggest complaint I've seen hasn't been that it's too much power in one person's hands, it's that he's just been fucking around with the service and annoying people.
good she comes from advertising. seemed like Musk wrecked that aspect of Twitter. lets see if she has enough power to impact it given Musk is still the de facto boss
Bad tech CEOs all have the same playbook. Google “glass cliff.” Elon will step down and have this new CEO execute all his most unpopular decisions. Then he’ll swoop back in and be CEO again hoping to be the hero. Reddit did this. Yahoo did this. The lamest part is it kind of does help their image.
How do I sign up to volunteer as one of these sacrificial lamb CEOs? Because I'd absolutely love to fail at something and then get paid a bunch of money to look bad for a few months before people forget and I can retire into the sunset.
First step: get a title where it wouldn't embarrass the board to put you in the CEO position. This could be founder of a hot startup, or an executive at a competitor, or CEO of a smaller company.
Getting there is left as an exercise for the reader.
Everyone parrots the same glass gliff term they recently learned but Musk has actually a good track record putting women to lead companies and them very much succeeding.
Twitter is a well-established company with a huge userbase and existing infrastructure.
Gwynne was hired to make something out of nothing in an unproven space (no pun intended), having to build everything from the ground up (also no pun intended).
Framing is a fun exercise, you can do it a lot of ways.
Because he has an outdated leadership playbook for Twitter. He has had a good track record and he also runs his other companies surprisingly well. I think this decision is set up for the new CEO to fail.
Reverting to the status quo before be bought the company and limiting free speech again to attract advertisers.
When Tucker Carlson announced that he'd post his new show on Twitter, Musk already sent a cryptic mail saying that Carlson would be subject to the same "community notes" as everyone else.
We'll see how it goes, I'm just getting vibes that everything will be reverted to a standard SV company.
That makes sense - online raconteurs were trying to act as if Twitter had some kind of unique deal with Tucker Carlson, so reiterating that Twitter is interested in factual truth, rather than partisan politics was a solid response.
Not the same. Hiring a female CEO can and should happen often. But when a company is publicly failing, this is a tool used by male boards frequently enough to have its own Wikipedia page.
But it’s different when the founder/CEO is replaced only to return later. That’s a Steve Jobs play. When the CEO takes a new role, but still owns the company, that’s completely different (and certainly fits here).
> On July 2, 2015, Reddit fired communications director Victoria Taylor, an administrator who coordinated celebrity interviews from Reddit's New York office. In protest, volunteer moderators of the IAmA community set their forum to private, effectively turning it off, and other volunteer moderators followed suit because of "anger at the way the company routinely demands that the volunteers and community accept major changes that reduce [their] efficiency and increase [their] workload".[40] The following day, a moderator of IAmA posted that "Chooter (Victoria) was let go as an admin by u/kn0thing [Alexis Ohanian]",[41] an assertion that was not widely reported on.[42] Media outlets such as Variety blamed interim CEO Ellen Pao for the dismissal. Harassment, which was already being directed toward Pao in relation to other controversies, intensified and she resigned a week later.[43] However, on July 12, former CEO Yishan Wong informed the Reddit community that Taylor was fired by "the CEO's boss" and accused Ohanian of scapegoating.[42] In the aftermath of Pao's resignation, Ohanian elaborated on his role in Taylor's dismissal, countering that even though the AMA/IAmA changes came from him, he still reported to Pao.[44] In 2017, Pao criticized Ohanian for avoiding the fallout by attending Wimbledon in the days immediately following Taylor's firing.[45]
Ellen Pao. She fired Victory who was very popular for running AMAs (Ask me anythings) with a lot of high powered people. The popularity of those dropped a bit after that and they were never the same.
Edit: Someone clarified below that Knothing took responsibility for firing Victory but Pao definitely took the heat for firing victory on top of nuking several popular (edgy and outright bad) subs
That's kind of the point of my post. She was the initial fallguy for firing victory. Knothing may have clarified it was at his insistence but I can tell you that most people didn't read his silly little apology post.
Not sure you can do anything more unpopular than lay off 80% of your workspace, saddle your company with 13B debt and drive away advertisers only to bet everything on a $8 subscription paid by right wing simps. Like, what else unpopular would he need a scapegoat for?
Twitter has 400m users. At $8 that's $3.2b/month, $38b/year. This might be a decision most social networks didn't take, and an unpopular one, but if it works it can have massive payoff.
Best estimates are "somewhere around 450k" which is $3.6M/month or $43.2M/year. Which is only $956.8M short of the $1B/year debt servicing he saddled Twitter with. It's a GENIUS PLAN.
Which was November 2022, I think? Not entirely uncoincidentally, one of the most controversial World Cups of recent times was just about to take place which always generates a surge on social media platforms...
Can you explain? I find these threads fascinating because seemingly everyone has such ironclad logical reasons for thinking elon is actually just a big stinky doodoohead. Can you try to convince me?
I think people who are angry with Twitter, really tend to overestimate how many people leave. Only 1/61 of my followers left twitter after Musk took over, and this includes a few outright leftist/communist types who stayed.
call a spade a spade: this is a last-ditch effort coming about six months too late.
In the seven months since Musk bought the company he singlehandedly fired nearly every employee, accidentally locked the remainder out of the headquarters, turned blue-check validation into a living nightmare for international brands, un-banned some of the most notorious and repugnant users from white nationalists to bigots and racists, mis-branded news outlets as state-sponsored, threatened to open a news agency to impersonation on his platform, cancelled most of the API, and tried to extort the very brands his platform depended on in a cash-for-validation scheme that backfired spectacularly.
This is 44bn of musks backing investors finally waking up to the fact that the willy-wonka they trusted to shepherd a communications platform was in fact just a billionaire heir to an emerald mine on track to grift them out of their dosh for his own petty feud with 'the libs.' Frankly its astounding theyre permitting musk to continue to do anything at all, albeit i suspect his new r&d role is about as authentic as his college credentials.
The "Elon had it easy because he had a fortune from emerald mining" is total bollocks. He was certainly not "rich" when he came to US and was in university here, and when he badly needed money at the beginning of Tesla and SpaceX there was certainly no secret backup of "Emerald Mine" money.
I'm not sure where this rubbish conspiracy came from but if there was Emerald Mine money there wasn't much of it. You may not like to hear it, but Elon's big start came from the success of X and Paypal which then bankrolled the beginnings of SpaceX and Tesla, it wasn't from a rich daddy.
You're correct that Musk isn't a "billionaire heir to an emerald mine" but his own father has said the emerald mine was real and that it helped pay Musk's living expenses at college:
> Errol went as far as to say that emerald money paid for his son's move to the US, where Elon would go on to attend the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School on scholarship — with, apparently, emerald-generated cash in his pocket for living expenses.
> when he badly needed money at the beginning of Tesla and SpaceX there was certainly no secret backup of "Emerald Mine" money
That's not personal wealth, that's company investment. Just because you (or your family) doesn't have spare money kicking around to finance a space rocket company doesn't mean that you're not personally rich and able to pay for things "regular" folks cannot and have connections they don't.
This says that Errol claims he managed to give his two sons about $115k in total. Which makes sense given he got his Emerald mine share for less than that.
There's also literally zero evidence that Errol had any useful connections here.
It really irritates me how many myths float around because people cannot be bothered to go find the original sources...
My dad worked in the non-profit world making federal senior executive salary, and my mom made over $100k/year as a retail salesperson in a furniture store. My parents managed to pay about $300k in college tuition between me and my brother.
I’d never claim to be anything other than upper middle class (even though my dad grew up in a village in Bangladesh and his elementary school had no walls). But at the same time, if I became a billionaire it would be extremely disingenuous to imply that it was the result of family wealth. This level of family wealth is mundane in top American schools. The journalists whining about Musk almost certainly had similar support from their parents.
If you look at inflation calculator 115K in 1997 is worth 290K today. I don't know a single parent that would or could hand over that amount of cash in 97 or today. It's wealthly regardless of how you slice it.
It's definitely closer to "doctor married a lawyer" levels of money than "single mother barista" levels of money, but "wealthy" normally implies enough money to live comfortably without working, not upper middle class.
For context, a doctor and lawyer family in a state capital will earn $2-3m per decade, which is MUCH more than any reasonable estimates of the Musk family's wealth or income.
I earn 2-3M per decade not including investments or IPO. I've sent multiple children to a University. Giving my children 60K-290K in cash while they were studying is not something that crossed my mind once. In fact I would argue you're supposed to struggle a little bit in college.
According to Elon's dad, he was rich:
‘I drove them to school in a convertible Rolls-Royce Corniche, they had thoroughbred horses to ride and motorbikes at the age of 14. They were spoilt, I suppose. Maybe that’s why Elon is acting like a spoilt child now,’.
Here's a video of Elon back in the day on CNN talking about sleeping on the floor and buying his first expensive car with the money he was making from x.com and Justine Musk saying she fears they will become spoiled brats:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9mczdODqzo
I think that people get too visceral on this topic.
Elon has obviously managed to create incredibly successful businesses. And he is also from an upper class background, which makes things easier, but hey, doesn't mean he isn't talented and that he worked really hard to get where he is.
Another thing that also seems pretty obvious is that he wants to hide his privileged background. Here is an archived interview from Forbes where he openly talks about his father's private plane and the emerald mine:
toronto had widespread rent control since 1975 without means testing so what this really means is that they rented in toronto. wow, we are just beginning to peel back the layers on this!
I was always confused because it seemed like his dad bought a handful of shares in a mining company and people think this means he owns it? Like if I went and bought 10 shares of Apple suddenly Tim Cook is answering to me? Elon seems to have had a nice upper-middle class/lower end rich childhood, but from what I've been able to discover he's not some trust fund baby. He wasn't the money guy at Paypal I don't think, but he did manage to turn his Paypal money into successful car and rocket companies.
You might be rich if you funded the 529 plan with proceeds from your emerald mine. Outside of that scenario, your kids' 529 plan doesn't really have anything to do with this.
Someone with an ownership stake in a mine that produces material with a variety of industrial and commercial uses is not necessarily rich. But that person is in a relatively tiny group compared to the group containing all parents who are able to contribute to their children's educational expenses. And the "owns <part of> a mine" group's average net worth is probably a fair bit higher than that of the "can contribute to the kid's college" group.
Hence, if you own an emerald mine, you might be rich.
And if you own a failed emerald mine you might be poor. If you own an emerald mine that just barely broke even (admittedly that is a bit unlikely), you might end up middle class in the end. Of course you can also end up being obscenely wealthy from such a venture.
I don't think anyone is suggesting elon musk rose from being a homeless person to a billionaire. I guess this internet dispute is whether he made his own money, or inherieted it (e.g. like trump). Whether or not his parents owned an emerald mine doesn't really shed much light on that debate. Its entirely possible they were moderately wealthy but the emerald mine wasn't super lucrative and musk still made money mostly by means of his own combination of skill and luck.
"Regarding the so-called “emerald mine”, there is no objective evidence whatsoever that this mine ever existed. He told me that he owned a share in a mine in Zambia, and I believed him for a while, but nobody has ever seen the mine, nor are there any records of its existence." - Elon Musk, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1654971702571331584
This thread is a good example of how silly the debate has gotten.
"You're trying to tell me Musk's family is rich? He couldn't even pay for SpaceX himself, how could he be rich?!"
"I've put away some cash for my child to go to college, are you saying I'm as rich as Elon Musk?!"
It's all just so ridiculous. A lot of people here seem convinced that there are only two arguments to be made: that Musk is a spoiled trust fund baby that deserves no credit for everything, or that Musk was a hard-scrabble self-starter that did everything on his own. Maybe, just maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle?
IIRC the claim is that Musk’s dad’s share was worth 50 grand USD when he bought it. There are individual emeralds worth that much. It likely wasn’t much of a mine if it did exist. A tiny artisanal mine.
I think the point is the only evidence that you provided for the argument that “Musk got his wealth from his family’s emerald mine” is that his parents paid for his college expenses. And that is, in my and many others minds, is a pathetically weak argument.
Full disclosure - my parents paid for a lot of my college expenses. At least half of the people who go to Ivy leagues have parents that will pay for their college expenses. It’s almost entirely, if not completely irrelevant to his work at PayPal, the founding of SpaceX, and the building of Tesla.
So it’s baffling (to me, at least) that it keeps getting brought up as a reason to hate Elon Musk. It feels that people want to find reasons to deeply hate this person, and they through anything they possibly can against him, nonsensical or not.
> I think the point is the only evidence that you provided for the argument that “Musk got his wealth from his family’s emerald mine”
But at no point was I making that argument. The OP suggested (as Musk has many times) that the mine literally didn't exist. I was simply pointing out that according to his father it very much did exist and paid for Elon's college.
I'm not arguing in bad faith. I'm making specific points that, for reasons unknown, @deelowe and yourself are making a wider inference from.
The post I replied to said:
> I'm not sure where this rubbish conspiracy came from but if there was Emerald Mine money there wasn't much of it.
My reply clarified that there was indeed an emerald mine (according to Musk's father) and that it paid for his college living expenses. I then went on to say that an inability to pay for SpaceX does not mean you are "not rich".
> you're either suggesting that @deelowe has family wealth or you're arguing in bad faith.
But that's silly too. With no numbers attached "family wealth" doesn't mean anything. Almost all families have "family wealth", if anything the bad faith argument here is trying to suggest that all wealth is somehow equal.
You'll note in my original reply I didn't even say that Elon's family was inordinately wealthy, just that the mine was real and that it paid for his college. Any "bad faith" on top of that is your own interpretation, not my words.
I don't know what 529 you guys invested in but Utah's 529 which anyone can use whether or not they live in Utah allows you to invest in regular old Vanguard funds like VSTSX. They also offer target dates funds that handle gradually shifting to a more conservative allocation as enrollment date nears if that's what you want.
I agree that not all 529s are good, only 2 plans received a gold rating from Morningstar in 2022: Utah & Michigan. I wouldn't choose anything other than those.
Bullshit. 529 plans are great for tax avoidance. If you picked the wrong plan, or the wrong investments within that plan, then that's on you. Try a reputable, low-cost plan from a company like Vanguard.
I'm starting to feel the same, honestly. Do you know if it was just your plan or is there something where I can find more info showing how these are not smart investments?
They are not smart investments because you have no control over where the money is pointed in the plan.
So if you call your advisor, and say "i want my 529 to only focus on X" they tell you that you have no control over the index and the plan will be the most conservative 50-year-old actuary data which has no fucking clue where the market is heading and then berate you for when their 529 index loses value...
I was ready to pay that investment banker's family a personal visit with skills that I have accumulated over a number of decades.
In 2004 VTI was about $55. It's now $200. On a 19-year time frame a broad market index fund like VTI is the only thing you ought to have been invested in.
Perhaps the scam is when banks let people choose their own investments rather than have it be fully managed.
Well, 529s are a good way to avoid capital gains taxes on investments dedicated for education. In your case, they wanted to be extra sure that you would avoid capital gains taxes, so they lost money.
I'm more than a little curious on this one. How did you lose money in a 529? Are you saying you lost opportunity cost of having put that money somewhere else?
I don't get why people argue like this. It's so obviously disingenuous. Owning a share of an emerald mine doesn't make your family super rich and it's obviously, demonstrably, not where Musk's wealth comes from.
Musk's wealth is well documented. It comes from founding and selling a series of companies - not an emerald mine. Repeating the emerald mine meme is just a way to declare yourself a dishonest participant in the conversation - or perhaps you genuinely think you can fool people with obvious lies?
Errol claims they sold two emeralds randomly for ~$1000, which was then listed for a 10x markup, certainly a far cry from the "low quality emeralds" Elon stated. So we already see three things here: access to your investment's goods, a nonchalance about emerald access, and Elon attempting to downplay.
According to Federal Reserve, only ~15% of American families directly hold any stock. We're not even talking about direct investments to a private company here and the % is already low. There seems to be an inability to determine direct relationship from Errol to mine owner (to justify a very low investment at an early stage), so using logic, Errol passed some figure needed to gain any access. Likely not as high as people assume, but also not the nothing you've been attempting to brand it as in this thread.
The reason I'm calling out your lack of integrity is because you're attempting to shift discussion away from Elon's inability to be honest as the focus is on his upbringing, and instead trying to make this about his current forms of wealth. The latter of which, is not what people are discussing. Certainly you understand how peculiar this is correct? Defending someone by shifting focus to another topic and calling those you disagree with disingenuous while you do the same is a very good indication this is no longer rational for you, it's purely emotional.
You've already established your brazen disregard for the truth and ideological motivations - you don't need to keep demonstrating them.
That someone might've marked up a couple emeralds Musk may have sold once (I believe the story is disputed) doesn't prove the quality of emeralds at the mine. Your point about Americans holding any stock is equally bizarre. "Directly" does a lot of work there, indirectly, it's closer to two thirds of American adults, so I'm not even sure what point you think you're making. Nobody, including Elon, disputes that his parents were relatively wealthy, so even if the 15% figure you're citing weren't misleading it would be irrelevant.
Your general pattern of argument here is to tell obvious lies and then, when confronted, to spin off on pointless digressions. Musk came from a relatively wealthy family - that was never disputed by anyone, Elon included, and it's obviously not the source of his present-day wealth. What I would like to return to is my original question of why you would do this? I mean, you understand this is totally transparent, right? I get why your politics or ideology might compel you to slander people you dislike, but why wouldn't you try to do a good job of it?
The apparent existence of the emerald mine does put some shade on musk's purely "self-made" story. Even though, in reality, no one is truly, completely self made. But Musk has fully denied the existence of an emerald mine. But now his father confirmed it. So I don't think we can trust Musk's account here and I'm not sure we can trust his father's. So I think it remains to be seen how much family money supported Elon while he became "self-made".
The evidence we have is his father claiming to have helped his sons out to the tune of $115k and said father becoming essentially bankrupt in the 90s.
The Emerald mine denial was shady and dishonest, Elon probably thinking he can get away with it as "technically correct" because there was no actual mine that anyone can point to, just paying locals for any emeralds they have found lying around.
Elon seems about as self made as you can get in the USA, with the approximate amount of support you'd expect from an upper middle class family (helping pay for college and a small $28k business loan).
The first company, Zip2, was started with $28k of his dad's money.
If he hadn't been given that, he might not have been in a position to sell Zip2 for a massive profit during the dotcom boom. That sale is what made Elon personally very wealthy.
Where did the $28k come from? How much money did Elon's dad provide for his living expenses, international moves, etc while going through college and the Zip2 startup? Where did that money come from?
Musk's father invested 20-30k in Zip2 out of a 200k angel investment. That doesn't seem like a huge deal to me. For context, Musk dropped out of a grad program at Stanford to pursue Zip2. How many Stanford graduate students could raise 30k from their parents for a business venture?
As for where the money came from, I believe Musk's father owned an engineering business. Or maybe it was profits from a share in an emerald mine - what does that matter though?
> I don't get why people argue like this. It's so obviously disingenuous. Owning a share of an emerald mine doesn't make your family super rich and it's obviously, demonstrably, not where Musk's wealth comes from.
Interestingly, the intelligence level of the observer very often seems to have no effect. It's a very interesting phenomenon, I simply can't understand why humanity essentially ignores it.
I don't get why people argue like this. It's so obviously disingenuous. Owning a share of an emerald mine makes your means your family is somewhat rich maybe not filthy rich but rich enough to own a share of an emerald mine, which trust me, isn't cheap.
You have no idea how large a share it is or how large a mine it is. You simply discredit yourself and your arguments by assuming things without evidence. The description of the mine I'm aware of comes from Erol Musk where he says he traded a used plane that he had bought for 50k for 120k plus a share of a mine. Musk describes the mine as "a deposit in the middle of nowhere rather than a modern mine" [1].
So, he has an unknown share of a mine of dubious value. "Trust me, that isn't cheap." I think you've done a very good job of explaining why people shouldn't trust you, because, unbothered by a lack of knowledge you are happy to leap to conclusions.
About 60% of households in the U.S. are living paycheck to paycheck according to Google. Most families don't have an extra 50K just lying around to invest in a mine If your family does ave that, I'm guessing you're. well off. Maybe not filthy rich, but well off.
It’s incredibly disingenuous to suggest that the people who are invoking Musk’s emerald mine are actually complaining about the “cash in his pocket for living expenses.”
"Heir to an emerald mine" is intended to paint a very specific picture, and "some occasional spending cash from a handshake claim to a chunk of namibian rock outcropping (if we believe a man who doesn't exactly present as super trustworthy)" is definitely not it.
I'm no fan of Musk, but I'm even less a fan of being intentionally misleading.
This is certainly the image he would love people to have: a humble immigrant from the poor South Africa, hustling his way into the American dream.
The reality is that he is from a wealthy, well-connected, post-apartheid white family. They funded his coming to Canada, the US, University, and getting first business off the ground. The reality is that he has had a silver spoon his entire life.
Not to defend him, but having your parents pay for your education is hardly a rare circumstance. It's not the case for everyone, sure, but it is for plenty of ordinary people. I don't understand why Musk is supposed to be outstanding in this regard.
> Not to defend him, but having your parents pay for your education is hardly a rare circumstance.
This. Parents have worked their tails off to build a better life for their kids for millenia. Calling it a form of privilege seems like a gross misunderstanding of human behavior.
I think the way to take this comment is "He didn't pull himself up by his own bootstraps. And people need to stop pretending like any of his history means that he did."
Being born with privilege is not a choice, and so you are right people should not be shamed for that. The problem is something else. Details here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35919637
Maybe not rare in a very small bubble. That bubble of graduates, for example. But certainly rare given the entire world population. And even rare, within a generic western, white, culture (hardly a fraction goes to university of those, let alone being paid for it by family).
He's outstanding because he cannot be honest about the situation. Even his father contradicts Elon's claims. Elon claims he was in 100k debt during schooling, it's revealed he had scholarships and his father paid living expenses. It's revealed his father had involvement with emerald mines, going as far as to state they were regularly sold for upwards of $500 a piece, Elon then claims he doesn't remember anything except seeing a small jewelry box filled with "low quality emeralds".
Do you sense the pattern? It would be as if Paris Hilton went around repeatedly saying she was dirt poor and used her galaxy sized brain to start her own business without any help. People would, obviously and quite reasonably, mock it for its absurdity. Yet when the same happens to Elon Musk, there are endless hysterical defenses ready. As if you are telling a child that Santa isn't real.
Two thirds of Americans don't have a college degree. The most common professions in the country are clerk, cashier, food prep worker and truck driver. If your parents were able to pay for your university education you probably grew up at the upper end of the upper middle class, which is already a very lucky position to be in.
Ordinary people make about 35k per year, half make less. They're not paying for an expensive college education.
"having your parents pay for your education is hardly a rare circumstance" - What is your source for this? Why do you think the President wanted to forgive student loan if paying for education was not such a big problem?
Median American household income is $70k before taxes. Do you think this household can afford college tuition and expenses?
And the median family income of a U Penn undergraduate is almost $200,000 annually. Heck at Georgia Tech, where I went, it’s $130,000, and almost 1/4 of the students come from the top 5%. To put it another way—Musk’s level of family support is hardly unusual compared to that of the thousands of engineers who work for him.
Journalism at the national level is extremely competitive, and draws from a highly credentialed talent pool. The reason people with such credentials pursue such a low paying job is because their families are often quite affluent—they are often doctors, lawyers, etc.
University is far more expensive today than back then, too. Ironically this supports your point in Elon’s case, but today it’s very much not a given that parents can even minimally help their kids get through college. My wife’s couldn’t.
There is no evidence his family was wealthy by American standards. Errol has claimed in the interview with the Sun to have helped his sons at uni to the tune of $115k and gave them a $28k loan (as part of a $200k round of seed funding) for their first business. The only sources on the emerald mine are the Musks, where the claim is they acquired a share of an informal mine by trading in a small plane they owned (likely a $70k Cessna). Errol Musk went bust in the 90s and there's no evidence of any other family wealth flowing to Elon.
There is no evidence they had any useful connections to speak of and no evidence any family gave more than a fraction of his uni (half of $115k) and business ($28k) funding.
Yeah, and you had an authoctonous whose family bankrolled him all the way up to the White House and all you got was the Second Gulf War! And daddy’s boy even managed to drive into the ground all the businesses that he laid out for him to manage. Musk’s track record is at least better than that
Let me be more specific: why do the people speaking out about his "fortunate" past care so much? As long as it didn't come from something unethical, why does it matter to you?
I don't want read between the lines, but it's hard not to think it's a way for people to feel better about their own accomplishments by saying someone else had a massive head start.
Whether others do or don't, we should all be trying our best, be grateful for what we have, and proud of where we came from.
There are at least two big points for people to care about.
The money did come from something unethical--his family was enriched by segregation; racism; apartheid. That emerald money is dirty and is likely a key reason why Elon would deny its existence.
This brings us to the second thing: Elon lying about this. He has demonstrated that he is willing to lie about something this significant, which should do real damage to his credibility and trustworthiness if we are being logical and objective. What else is he willing to lie about?
Nope, they also conviently leave out that Errol was an anti-apartheid member of a city council and actively tried to abloish Apartheid. If Errol is to be believed, his role in the history of Apartheid is probably the most commendable thing about him.
The Emerald mine money (whatever small amount it was, likely under $70k given that seems to be the value of the plane he traded for the share) came from Zimbabwe. Its cleaner that Errol's propery money.
And Elon was misleading and disingenuous but could still make a case that he hasn't explicitly lied on these things.
I'm a former Rhodesian (present day Zimbabwe) who moved to South Africa after things went south in Zim. For context, I'm white, so it's not like I have a racial gripe against Musk. Elon went to one of the fanciest private schools in the country's capital and lived in one of its richest suburbs. Yes, technically Boys High is a public school, but people from outside South Africa don't know what the Model C school policy was. His father was extraordinarily wealthy and if you do read interviews by both Elon and Errol, they both admit this. His mother was an international supermodel and his family was generally pretty well connected in the greater scheme of things. The entire story about him struggling during college (where he went to an Ivy League university paid for by his father) is complete bullshit. I don't dispute his ingenuity in starting Zip2 (funded by his father too by the way), but he wasn't starting from the bottom with no help - that's the grossly inaccurate part that Elon still pushes for optics and people who are too stupid or unaware of how SA works lap it up.
> Elon's big start came from the success of X and Paypal
Funny you mention this as why he was self-made, where by all accounts he was considered an awful coder in this Paypal position, and was only able to be in the country (illegally) at the time, or secure this job, was because of his family's money and connections.
He was CEO of X.com for less than a year and was fired by the board. Then they merged with the predecessor to PayPal, which was more successful. He become CEO of the merged company, but was again fired for poor technical decision making (among other things, he insisted that the company build on the Windows stack instead of Linux) before the company rebranded itself as PayPal.
So, technically he was never the CEO of "PayPal", just the company that became PayPal, and he got himself fired by the boards of both the companies that turned into PayPal. He retained 11% ownership of PayPal and ended up making a decent amount of money from the EBay acquisition.
I understand all that, my question was why would it matter if he was an awful coder. Or they people thought he was an awful coder.
It is objectively true that he was ceo of x.com and PayPal, but neither of those positions require coding skills.
I’m not defending Musk as a CEO or human or anything. I’m just curious why it matters to bring up people thought his coding sucked. Was he a good chef? Was he terrible at Mario Kart? Want to list off other random complaints as well?
> This is an odd criticism as he was the CEO of PayPal.
He was an awful CEO of X (which is why he was forced out as CEO twice, and was never CEO of PayPal), too, which may be more to the point, and the successful product X named itself for after forcing himself out the second time was acquired (and was the occasion of his brief return) after Musk’s visions had failed.
> Why would it be important if he was an awful coder or not?
It probably wouldn’t, if he didn’t spend his time as CEO trying to do some other job instead. It’s not always bad if your CEO is doing some other role as well as being CEO, but its a doubly bad thing if they are doing some other role and they are a poor choice for the other job.
I wouldn't say awful but it's clear that he and Max Levchin did not see eye to eye, at least judging from Levchin's interview in Founders At Work. Musk pushed for them to move from Unix to Windows and Levchin disagreed with that move.
"...Peter took some time off. The guy who ran X.com became the CEO, and
I remained the CTO. He was really into Windows, and I was really into Unix.
So there was this bad blood for a while between the engineering teams. He was
convinced that Windows was where it’s at and that we have to switch to
Windows, but the platform that we used was, I thought, built really well and I
wanted to keep it. I wanted to stay on Unix..."
"...I had this intern that I hired before the merger, and we thought, “We built
all these cool Unix projects, but it’s kind of pointless now because they are going to scrap the platform. We might as well do something else.” So he and I decided we were going to find ourselves fun projects. We did one kind of mean project where we built a load tester package that would beat up on the Windows prototype (the next version was going to be in Windows). We built a load tester that
would test against the Unix platform and the new Windows one and show in
beautiful graphs that the Windows version had 1 percent of the scalability of
the Unix one. “Do you really want to do that?”...
...It was me acting out, but it was kind of a low time for me because I was not
happy with the way we were going..."
"...At the time, already I had
hated the guy’s guts for forcing me to do Windows, and then, in the end, I was
like, “You gotta go, man.” My whole argument to him was, “We can’t switch to
Windows now. This fraud thing is most important to the company. You can’t
allow any additional changes. It’s one of these things where you want to change
one big thing at a time, and the fraud is a pretty big thing. So introducing a new
platform or doing anything major—you just don’t want to do it right now.” That
was sort of the trigger for a fairly substantial conflict that resulted in him leaving
and Peter coming back and me taking over fraud...."
> Musk pushed for them to move from Unix to Windows and Levchin disagreed with that move.
Because Musk's push came from no objective reason beyond he "didn't know it". The Board said "you're the CEO, you don't need to know all the technologies".
I'd love to hear what people who talk about these family connections actually think they were and where they got this idea from.
I've heard it claimed hundreds of times but with no clear idea what these connections were, how they came about or what they were used for. Or even any evidence whatsoever that they existed...
Except even that also implies that Elon had some say in PayPal, when in reality, Confinity had already developed what would become PayPal, including filing trademarks and such, at the merger.
Musk's tenure in the newly merged company consisted of complaining incessently that he didn't like/know Solaris and Java so the working POC/prototype should be thrown away and rebuilt in Windows/ASP, for four months until the board had enough and terminated him as CEO.
>he didn't like/know Solaris and Java so the working POC/prototype should be thrown away and rebuilt in Windows/ASP, for four months until the board had enough and terminated him as CEO.
Goddamn the man hasn't changed one iota in twenty years.
Btw Musk had little to do with the success of X. The revenue of PayPal was merely $61 million at the time Musk was fired as CEO of X.com(later PayPal).
There's an unimaginable gulf between buying books paying tuition to college (especially back when that was affordable), and an investment in a business that's the equivalent of about $350k today.
Elon was never going to have to eat rice and beans, or go work in a cubicle for a big corp to pay the bills if any of his ventures failed.
You're reading that wrong. Elon is claiming his dad invested 10% OF a $200k round of seed funding. The actual amount was $28k. (See wiki: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip2 )
I was being more charitable to Elon by trusting what he said himself. I know the $28k number. Almost 40% of the households with college age kids earn less than 70k before taxes. How many would be able to afford to give a $28k loan to their kids?
You weren't being charitable to Elon, you just either misread what was in the tweet or mistyped and claimed his dad invested $200k.
Median household income is $70k, so I'd expect you'd need to be upper middle class or quite good with money to loan $28k to your kids. I certainly won't argue that the Musks were poor, but there's a very big difference between "able to help their kids through college and loan $28k" and "silver spoon trust fund kids".
What’s hilarious is that okay, even if his dad made it up…
Elon has -also- said that he and his family would stuff their pockets with money and stones that wouldn’t fit in the safe from overflowing.
What next? “I only said I did it, but I never actually saw myself doing it?”
At some point there is a recognition that (at least) one of two things is accurate: 1) that a mine exists, or 2) that Elon is a serial liar.
Also, “get a million dogecoin”… is that before or after he hires a PI to go into your background for a little light character assassination for making him look foolish?
> Elon’s big start came from the success of X and Paypal
To which Elon contributed, AFAICT, money (both directly and in his ability to scare up capital), not management.
He was forced out as CEO of X when they had no product success, X bought the company that owned PayPal and briefly brought him back as CEO then forced him out against six months later, after which X renamed itself after its one successful product, which it had acquired.
The funny thing about it is that, even if the emerald mine had been real, it would explain maybe 1/10000 of Musk's wealth. If those who talk about the "emerald mine" had managed to multiply the wealth of their family by 10000 they would consider it an incredible success.
Back in those days, emerald mines were literally the equivalent of present-day tech IPO money. And if you read his biography by Ashlee Vance, you'll find out how the family would take vacations and travel to places by private plane.
> if there was Emerald Mine money there wasn't much of it.
You don't go to an American University as anything but a very rich African, or as a sponsorship. Source: I am a born African. I sure hope it was emerald money, else his father has some explaining to do to SARS.
Elon received a lot of money from his Father during his college years, and the very reason why he was in college in America is that he was bankrolled by a South African entrepreneur. Without this father he would be nowhere close to where he is.
Can’t you say the same about anyone who grows up upper middle class or above in the US? Paying for kids’ college is pretty standard. Many middle class families do it too.
There’s plenty to criticize Elon about, but this one’s a bit of a reach.
And even if he had been fabulously wealthy since childhood, it still wouldn't discredit his accomplishments. There's how many tens of thousands of mega-rich kids right now who won't do a single thing of note with their lives?
It does not matter if Musk had an emerald mine or not. For sure he turned a diamond mine (Twitter) to a shit pool. Do you trust him to be the CEO of your company? Ask yourself. I personally want a level headed guy.
You not agreeing with his choices != Twitter is doomed.
I've noticed zero difference as a too-frequent daily user. In fact, Twitter seems more fun now. Plus, community notes are sorely needed. In addition to all that, I'm also seeing an uptick in activity on my business account.
> I've noticed zero difference as a too-frequent daily user.
I assumed this was how it would go for me too, but after the change to elevate tweets and replies by blue check accounts I actually stopped using it because now, every time I look at it, it's just an orgy of the dullest and most ignorant and intellectually dishonest people in the world posting the worst crap I've ever seen. Last time I checked twitter.com the tweet at the top of my timeline was somebody "questioning" whether a recent mass shooter's multiple tattoos of nazi iconography could reasonably be interpreted to mean that he was in fact some flavor of neo-nazi. And so on and so forth.
I don't follow any of these fucking people! and I don't want to see this shit. It's absolutely soul-draining.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who'll say I'm using Twitter wrong, blah blah, whatever. I don't really care—all I know is I was enjoying using it in the way its UX encouraged me to use it and now it's horrible and I've stopped, probably for good. I do wonder how many others had/are having a similar experience.
I used to be addicted to Twitter, checking it 10+ times a day at the very least. Now the content I get is awful, and I only end up there whenever I follow someone else's link :/
I don’t get why people complain about the content they get on Twitter. Curate carefully who you follow, only follow people who stick to a topic of interest and don’t intermix pics of their dinner or other random BS.
Then change the option at the top of your timeline from “For You” to “Following” to only see posts from people you follow. Voila, now you get decent content that’s of interest to you.
I follow a few folks writing on war in Ukraine, but since maybe Nov-Dec they all disappeared from page, and I have to go all the way to the bottom of the barrel to see anything tangentially related. Only after the algo was released I understood that was a decision by Elon, for whatever reason...
It was in beta for a limited number of users exclusively in the US, but it certainly already existed before he took over. The feature was announced as "Birdwatch" at the beginning of 2021, Elons only contributions were renaming it to "Community Notes", and getting it out of beta if you're feeling generous, but that probably would have happened without him.
I used to have a lot of fun reading Twitter while watching eurovision.
It's way worse now. It may be less content. Or it's showing me less relevant content. Or it may be due to eurovision apperatly dropping hashtags from onscrean promotion.
Twitter isn't doomed. But rumors are that it is even more of a money pit than before, now that numerous advertisers have left the platform or reduced their spending.
The hiring of a mass media ad-exec seems to support the validity of those rumors.
I completely stopped using the app after his choice to elevate blue check replies instead of relevant ones. The app genuinely made me angry and it felt like my curation was pointless, especially since it would keep feeding me drivel from people I didn't follow
So Twitter is now like…everyone else? Instagram, Facebook and even Reddit (on mobile) don’t let you see their content without a login prompt either. Yet there are no 100 articles about Reddit dying.
I believe that I represent the average user, and in my opinion, Twitter has become worse than before, especially regarding the comments section. It appears that comments are no longer sorted by relevance, but rather by whether the user has paid for Twitter or not.
Every popular political thread on there is now a blue-check right-wing echo chamber. I guess if that's your personal political bubble it feels great, but I don't think that's the "average" user.
If this stops every political threads then I’m all for it. It’s weird to me how people were so into it and I had a few friends who became tough to talk to because it was always trying to convey some esoteric (to me) twitter screaming match.
This doesn’t seem like a loss to me as I feel that kind of stuff isn’t only boring to me but kind of worse to have people so angry about politics. So this seems like a positive development to me if it’s now clearly just a right-wing echo chamber that people can now ignore.
I’m not a heavy user and haven’t noticed any changes really, but I never interacted with blue check mark people and always thought it was kind of a lame feature. And is still lame that people can pay for it.
Wow, a much more vitriolic first comment than I would expect from HN. The last six months has not lacked for Musk-hating enthusiasts howling “Twitter is dead.” But when I look at Google Trends, its story is that interest in Twitter is almost identical to where it was 5 years ago. Doesn’t seem so dead to me?
Have Musks changes have been net positive or negative? No shortage of internet opinion on that Q. Regardless of one’s personal feelings on it, it seems hard to dispute that Twitter moves faster than before. I consider that no small feat given how much legacy code and bureaucracy the company had at the time of his acquisition.
If he can free more of his time by making this hire, I am looking forward to seeing whether that translates to even faster iteration times. pg and all the others I followed are still there, so still plenty of potential to create quality entertainment/learning w less regret than Facebook
This is very well written and made me laugh.
When you're objective about it, it's all accurate, and pretty shocking.
What's shocking to me is that Elon could be so successful at Tesla, and fail so spectacularly at Twitter. Of course the skills are different, but the general skillset of being a COE and not making stupid business decisions should be universal.
Also, he claimed Twitter was losing millions per day and that's why he had to fire everyone, when in reality, the millions per day in loses were interest on the loan he'd used to buy Twitter. So he created the problem, and then blamed that. Pretty shocking.
Twitter was pretty awfully run even before he bought it. Their business metrics were absolute crap for a business of their scale and in the pandemic environment.
The jury is still out if new Twitter has failed or not.
Before his purchase, twitter was a company that had hope of profitability as a regular occurrence, if they could adjust some spend on infrastructure and engineering.
That's a lot harder to do with a giant debt crushing your soul, by a guy who can't really put any extra money into it to give it runway. All of the changes Elon has made to twitter have been desperate attempts to get some cash to stay alive, because the company is in a desperate position. At one point, they were down something like 50% in ad spend. Not many places can survive with new billions in debt and half the revenue. I don't know if he has been able to convince advertisers to come back, but they are fickle, stupid, and have no memory so surely that's a possibility, and this new CEO might be an attempt to convince advertisers his hands are off the wheel.
If your mature social media site that’s been around for over a decade and has hundreds of millions of users has a 1% margin and effectively lost money in 2020, you’re not a well-run organization.
To give you an idea of their incompetence, when you create a Twitter Ads account, you’re asked to choose your time zone. I’m in UTC+5:30. Except you can’t choose half hour increments, so I was forced to choose UTC+5:00. All the data and reports had the time error.
My time zone is home to over 1.4 billion people.
If your billion dollar corporation that depends on ads can’t even be bothered to fix the time zone selection for 1/6th of the world’s population in its flagship product, its not a well-run business.
I wonder if part of his "effectiveness" is that he seems so willing to burn everything down. As long as he preserves this image, he can maintain a level of control that other CEOs can't. Kind of the CEO version of the Madman Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory
Reportedly the leadership of SpaceX manages him like he's a medieval boy king. They spend a lot of time figuring out how to get him to come to the right conclusions and making him feel like he's in charge. I would bet that Tesla does the same thing.
Twitter didn't have this management layer, and we have now seen the result.
> Reportedly the leadership of SpaceX manages him like he's a medieval boy king
A family friend who works closely with Elon at SpaceX puts it like, "you have to make him believe that your technical conclusions and recommendations are actually his to have any hope of traction." Otherwise, even if you're proven right years later when Elon's strategy fails, he will hold you to task for, "not convincing him hard enough."
I think the answer is pretty obvious: the skills are wildly different, and Musk obviously didn't even understand what he's supposed to be doing at Twitter.
Tesla is relatively simple: you've got to make cool cars. They have to work and people have to want to buy them.
SpaceX is relatively simple: you've got to make rockets. They have to work, and be cheaper than the competition.
With Twitter it seems he doesn't understand that there's nothing to build really. The software's already there. Twitter's main job is purely social, trying to please a whole bunch of governments and advertising agencies, as well as understanding why people post there and how to make them post more. There's no straightforward technical test to it, it's a delicate social balancing problem, and one awfully ill-suited to Musk's typical "move fast and break things" approach.
I, for one, believe that Twitter is better now than it was before. But I'm a free speech proponent, and very not in favour of a previous approach of banning and muffling anyone who fell out of party line.
I think the stance on this issue greatly influences how one perceives changes at twitter.
> cancelled most of the API, and tried to extort the very brands his platform depended on in a cash-for-validation scheme that backfired spectacularly.
Rumor has it they lacked the manpower to actually keep the API running and it was a last-ditch attempt at getting rid of bots. Same bots who flocked to the platform after the layoffs started since people in charge of mitigating these were fired.
Firing abuse and content moderation teams meant there was a lot more unsavory spam on the platform and advertisers didn't want any of it near their brand. In a few week Twitter lost half of it's top 100 biggest advertisers [0] and it doesn't seem they are coming back.
What's crazy to think about is that, despite being "bloated" Twitter managed to have profitable quarters pre-acquisition.
>he singlehandedly fired nearly every employee, accidentally locked the remainder out of the headquarters
And yet the site still works and engagement is up.
>mis-branded news outlets as state-sponsored,
BBC is state sponsored as long as they larp as an arm of the government with their fake “TV Licensing” arm with threats of government punishment for not paying. If they want to stop doing that then they can claim independence but while they use government powers and police to fund themselves through threats, they’re state sponsored.
Yet, twitter has been going along just fine, despite all the negative press, nay sayers and nonsense you have been talking about.
Not to say Musk has been a little careless with his communication through all of this, but still, people want to sit in front of there computer and think they know better.
Musk has some good ideas among the bad ones, I'm kind of happy with the developments. It was fun to watch removing pieces of the company and infrastructure, it was fun to see him expose himself as Free-speech NIMBY. It was fun to see how much people are willing to pay for status. All the risks about the fascists and media manipulations? Well, all those had been realised already, Twitter was horrible place. It kind of improved actually.
If everything goes south, It's on the Musk and company's tab anyway. So, en expensive drama to watch on some rich people's dime.
what's crystal clear to me is that your specific echo bubble (we all have one), advertises constant negative press about him. it doesn't make it real, twitter is booming and people love him more than ever
i hope you someday find the happiness to stop micro-observing everything about what elon is doing in his day to day life
> In the seven months since Musk bought the company he singlehandedly fired nearly every employee, accidentally locked the remainder out of the headquarters, turned blue-check validation into a living nightmare for international brands, un-banned some of the most notorious and repugnant users from white nationalists to bigots and racists, mis-branded news outlets as state-sponsored, threatened to open a news agency to impersonation on his platform, cancelled most of the API, and tried to extort the very brands his platform depended on in a cash-for-validation scheme that backfired spectacularly.
The emerald mine + hand wavy dismissal of his achievements is pretty wishful thinking. You can be totally repulsed by his behavior and trolling. But he has taken a few giant swings and hit them out of the park.
- effective $$$ from cutting the workforce by a small stadium worth of people
- ad revenue sharing in development
- long form video in development
- streaming video/podcasts in development
- encrypted dms being tested
And that's all there or coming in hot over the next few months. Pretty damn good for a company that apparently just barely operates if you listen to its detractors.
Over a couple of years it will morph into #1 news and media site on the planet (it's not really a social network).
By all metrics the blue revenue are much smaller than the drop in advertising dollar they experienced.
You live in an echo chamber if you think advertising has returned to the same level, it’s been well reported through various sources.
Anyway it’s all private so we can only argue against imaginary number. If you think that Elon is getting rich from this 44 billion purchase, only time will tell.
Yeah whenever I visit twitter now the adverts are really frequent, so maybe they just think "oh lots of ads, I guess the advertising revenue is normal". Like for every 5 normal tweets I see one "promoted" tweet, and about a third of the time it's some scammy product or service. I just went to twitter.com now and scrolled to check "normal tweets" (tweets or RTs from people I follow) and which were adverts:
- 3 x normal tweets
- advert (alza.cz)
- 3 x normal tweets
- advert (some scammy weight loss program called "mad muscles")
- 4 x normal tweets
- advert (t-mobile)
- 4 x normal tweets
- advert (some rubber feet product for washing machines so they don't jump around or fall over? is this a problem people have?)
It's going to collapse when the lawsuits from the former employees (from the C-suite down to janitors) catch up, and when the fines from the FCC and EU hit.
That could be 3 months or 18, but it's going to happen unless there's a complete about face at Twitter.
All the fired employees Musk didn't treat as he was obligated to. From the former CEO [1], to the rank and file [2], down to the contracted out janitors [3].
most of what you said rang true. except the "wealth from emerald mine" attack. that appears to be a myth
his big score was PayPal, and it seeded what followed. Tesla and SpaceX very early almost wrecked him financially
we can criticize his Twitter shenanigans. but he's clearly a workaholic, highly effective, and helped put humanity in a better place (via SpaceX and Tesla, anyway
The @CommunityNotes feature is genius but it's too slow on disinfo related to the Russia/Ukraine war and it doesn't work against people like AOC and Tucker Carlson who have big extremely loyal fanbases that mark notes as "not needed".
I agree with all this, except for the part where he accurately described US media as state sponsored. The US state works for US corporations and US corporations own the media. Also, NPR does get some public money.
Less than 1% of NPR funding is from govt. Tesla and SpaceX get far more public money than NPR does. $7500 per vehicle subsidy. Lucrative NASA contracts.
Care to elaborate on how mid-level air force officers are "benefitting" from ULA contracts? A rocket is a rocket, buyers should be fairly vendor-agnostic.
Wikipedia says more like 11%, but it’s pretty complex. NPR produces programs that local stations play, and pay for. So while you might hear someone say they’re listening to NPR, they’re listening to a “member station,” that is paying NPR. They might get some money from federal grants, some from the corporation for public broadcasting, which is federally funded, some from member stations who get some federal grants. So I’m not sure if all the info you’d need to figure it out completely is public. I assume corporate sponsorship beats out federal funds by quite a bit though.
You're forgetting the corporate funding and that their editorial line parrots the state department.
Also, SpaceX deployed Starlink to provide guidance to (US provided) Ukrainian weapons. Field commanders said without it they wouldn't be in the fight. That sounds aligned with US foreign policy and statecraft to me.
They backpedaled after the use of the technology became so aggressive it would be reputationally damaging for starlink.
"Federal funding is essential to public radio's service to the American public and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR."
> This is 44bn of musks backing investors finally waking up to the fact that the willy-wonka they trusted to shepherd a communications platform was in fact just a billionaire heir to an emerald mine
In his investors’ defense, Elon had a singular track record prior to Twitter. And his proposal to turn Twitter into X, aka US—based WeChat, was not a terrible one. It was an expensive investment, but there was a plausible positive outcome.
His complete and total bungling of it all would have been difficult to predict in advance based only on what was known then. He is seemingly oblivious to the unintended consequences and second order effects of both his actual decisions, and their rash and heavy-handed manner. It’s odd, and not surprising they forced a professional CEO on him.
The thing is he really could have done it. But he went "rich person crazy" and lost it all instead. Really sad to see. Marc Andreessen said something like "
Taylor Swift announces her concert on Twitter and then you go buy the tickets on Ticketmaster - why not buy them on Twitter?"
You are severely misinformed. You just repeated all the BS talking points from the MSM. Stop reading clickbait and actually follow the guy closely if you want to know what's going on.
have to agree, I love new Twitter. No complaints, it's working great for me. The content matching is just fine... and as a blue subscriber I seem to actually get interactions when I post, which makes me want to keep posting.
Where exactly did that $44 billion go? With the tax incentives Twitter had from SF, and the massive layoffs... There was a fuck-ton of money that went somplace... to where?
None of the boo vs. yay wars that plague this topic are interesting; it's really just "I feel boo" and "I feel yay". We're trying for something else here.
Is it though? The new verified system was rolled out really poorly.
There should have been a migration path from legacy to new verified, but instead they just unverified everyone (including obviously government accounts that under the new rule should retain a grey check).
I must be using a different site from you. Letting people pay to get boosted has turned the top of every thread into a hive of emoji-pasting, cruel, low-effort cretins.
I think for most Elon lovers here, claiming people don't like him because he's "not being sufficiently left-wing" is a way to distract from the fact that his stewardship of Twitter has thus far been an embarrassing disaster of unforced errors.
Twitter is running fine with lots of improvements in the pipeline (video and E2E DMs due soon). It will be interesting to see how it evolves now that the company is back to focusing on the product rather than activism/censorship etc.
I legitimately think it's trendy to hate on Elon. Both Elon and Zuckerberg seem to have come to the conclusion that there was a lot of dead weight on their staff. One is hated on, the other is not.
I'm still using Twitter and only seeing improvements to the platform, plus promise of upcoming improvements.
Community Notes is a big deal. Company badges are helpful. The "Show more" gate is now properly hiding SPAM instead of "wrong think". The "For you" algorithm has actually improved, too.
Uhh Musk and Zuckerberg both get a lot of hate (rightfully in my opinion, but that’s not the point). People definitely hate Facebook and Zuckerburg. They even made a major motion picture about how much of an “asshole”[0] he is!
[0] Literally quoting part of a line from the movie:
“But you're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole.”
Overall, that movie painted him in a good light. "Strong leader bucks the system and makes a product that we all love" was the message I got from it.
My point is that the recent mass layoffs have negatively affected Musk's reputation and has not had an impact on Zuckerberg's. I think your illustration of his rep having a negative aspect as far back as the movie is in line with that.
With Musk's purchase of Twitter we've seen a lot more attention on alternative platforms such as Mastodon and Bluesky (?). I don't see anything like that with Facebook, other than the old struggles of any aging hangout spot. Also, note the difference in reaction to paying for verification on Twitter Vs. Instagram. People get mocked on Twitter for having the "blue checkmark". It's just silly.
There's been more new features and innovation on Twitter in the last 6 months then there has been in the last 6 years. The mental gymnastics you have to do to say Twitter is failing makes me tired just thinking about it.
Just to be clear we're talking about the same platform that while under Elon's ownership has censored references to outside platforms like Mastodon, censored users globally at the whims of foreign governments and outright banned individuals for their political beliefs.
> The people who hate on him have never done a single important thing in their entire lives.
That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it? For one thing, who gets to decide what’s important? If you want to take a utilitarian perspective, that’s fine; but you can’t legitimately condemn as unimportant the work and lives of others who happen to dislike Musk.
It is indeed resentment. It is also hilarious to see this sentiment in the comment sections in HN, Mastodon, Reddit, etc.
In reality, almost no-one cares and the 220M+ users continue to use the platform.
All the eternal Twitter doomsters are still praying for the downfall that never happened, which is why they are very emotional and angry at Elon Musk and the fact that Twitter did not collapse as they expected either.
- spreading conspiracy theories about the attack on Paul Pelosi
- spreading conspiracy theories about the Allen, TX shooter
I could go on. I do care about his character, because he's influential and because he's decided he's willing to tweet about whatever pops into his head, shaped by his biases and independent of confirmation or fact checking.
Per the link seems she believes in science in regards to vaccines. So I guess this is an improvement I guess. The thread in there are some rather nasty comments.
> there was never any good reason to give them to children
Except for lower rates and severity of SARS-CoV-2 infection in this population. See for example this recent meta-analysis: JAMA Pediatr. 2023;177(4):384-394. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2022.6243[1]
That's what I'm saying. The risks of testing this technology on children does not outweigh the possible benefits. More children have died of drowning in pool accidents than covid-19. Furthermore, young men and boys are at higher risk of vaccine-induced myocarditis, which is why some countries have stopped giving them this jab altogether.
In the study it notes "Moreover, the risk of vaccine-related serious adverse events (AEs), including myocarditis, in this age group was reported to be low.16,18."
What is he thinking? Putting this person in charge, with her ties to the global censorship-obsessed WEF, seems contrary to Elon's mission to make Twitter a place for free speech.
My best guess is that he wants to raze it to the ground and salt the earth on which it once stood so that nothing can grow there again. Not just destroy it, but destroy it so thoroughly and comprehensively that it cannot be rebuilt.
I mean you could apply "What is he thinking?" to almost anything he's done with Twitter. Which leads you to the obvious conclusion... he does not think.
He's trying to turn it into the Fox News of social media, a hardcore or uses being bombarded with my pillow ads. Seeing how profitable Fox is he seems to want to follow that path.
> The glass cliff is a hypothesized phenomenon of women being likelier than men to achieve leadership roles, such as executives in the corporate world and political election candidates, during periods of crisis or downturn, when the risk of failure is highest.
I could care less about who is in charge of Twitter or if there is such a platform.
Twitter is a private corporation and therefore has no legal obligation to provide nor promote "free speech." To imply that it has this authority is to flatter it, over-state its power, and misrepresent it as having any interest in or obligation to the US Constitution, which it clearly does not.
That said, prior to Musk, the Twitter owners/leaders behaved terribly by "de-platforming" voices and sources of information. In so doing they debased themselves, demonstrating that they have no moral compass and demolishing what little trust there was in the technocracy and its faux institutions.
Musk claims to intend to restore "trust" in Twitter (I guess for those naive bubble people who obediently believe everything they read on the Internet). I could care less if he means what he says.
But Musk's stated positive mission is there for all to witness. So I don't get why he's being pilloried for it. What's all the clamor about? Just another stage-play from the Drama Dept, I imagine.
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