- Elon has never operated: a social media company, a freemium product, or an ad-driven company. He so doesn't understand advertising, that he famously dropped Teslas marketing department.
- If you read accounts of the way he treats Tesla and SpaceX workers, the treatment of Twitter employees is on brand.
- Elon has always used Twitter as a way of getting attention for himself and his companies. It's his primary platform. Even ignoring his ego, it makes sense he would bump up his own content.
- "Ridiculous amounts" is relative to what you earn. What sounds reasonable to a billionaire will sound ridiculous to you or me.
- The blue-check mark was one of the few things of value (excluding ads) that Twitter could trade for money. It was a thing that people wanted, and therefore could have a price attached. Selling blue check marks is more similar to selling a tesla, than the roundabout way ad sales generates money.
- A lot of the speech he unblocks, he agrees with. If you dont believe that, and want to believe he wants unlimited free speech thats fine.. but that unlimited free speech belief is from an misunderstanding of the business reason that social media blocks certain content (legal, ad-friendliness, etc).
- Unreliability is from implementing ideas without listening to feedback and planning properly.. and exactly what he does at Tesla. Example: removing the radar from Teslas and updating the software later.
- It's not the symbol of death to Elon. It's the cool brand they wouldnt let him rename PayPal to.
I've seen nothing in Elons behavior that indicates he's behaving any differently that he has at his other companies. Why is it assumed that this guy who has no background in this industry knows what he's doing? When you start a company, you get time while it's small to make all kinds of dumb mistakes. Elon doesnt have that experience, and every mistake is at-scale.
>Elon doesnt have that experience, and every mistake is at-scale.
Several of his mistakes have, I am sure, been born out of ignorance. This is not a good explanation for his decisionmaking in general. Nearly everyone, whether in the industry or not, has been able to foresee the consequences of his actions better than he has.
His worst decisions have been born out of emotion. He has throttled access to websites like the New York Times and slandered organizations like NPR because they don't praise him enough. He rebranded the company to 'X' because he is still hung up on his failures in the '90s. He writes pathetic and incoherent rants at 2:00 AM and demands every user see them because he is deeply insecure. He desperately wants to feel popular, even if it has to be by fiat. He has done the wrong thing, time and time again, because he is weak.
> Elon has always used Twitter as a way of getting attention for himself and his companies. It's his primary platform. Even ignoring his ego, it makes sense he would bump up his own content
also so he can deflect or downboost criticisms of him and his companies
The amount of self-control it takes for people in these positions to restrain themselves is fascinating. Musk seemingly has very poor impulse control, and he veers all over the place accordingly, with the wealth and fame doing the classic thing and amplifying.
Steve Jobs could have veered all over the map. He was anointed with the title of genius by the public broadly (and Jobs may have indeed been a genius at what he was great at, narrowly speaking). He successfully rebuilt a globally iconic company and his leadership resulted in Apple producing extraordinary products that hundreds of millions of people have enjoyed. He was also one of the richest people in the world when he died and quite famous. Instead of veering widely, he had the self-control to stay on task, stay focused, and more or less had the discipline to not veer far outside his sphere of competency. The self-control to stay on task seems to have been something Jobs intentionally made himself get better at over the years. He recognized the more important thing was to do fewer things and do them well and he preached that to anyone that would listen. He recognized that our time limitations (and time-productivity limitations (you can only be highly productive for a fraction of a day)) are aggressive, so you're better off focusing heavily rather than sprawling. We're quite finite in our capabilities, at best. Even when Jobs was doing Pixar, he was very careful not to go too far away from focusing on Apple, and he didn't attempt to keep sprawling his focus even though he easily could have (this is a big separation for Jobs and Musk; maybe someone with high productivity potential can do an Apple + Pixar simultaneously, with good management; do more than that? I think Musk has potently found the point of imploding returns on sprawling focus).
Musk is at risk of producing a lot of duds as he sprawls his focus, and maybe he doesn't care if that happens, however there is a significant time-productivity cost to what he is doing (and a huge monetary cost). The Twitter time and $40 billion could have been spent on getting to Mars. $40 billion would probably get SpaceX to Mars. This is something that makes me understand why some people like to hurl invective at him. Guy spends two decades with a supposed overarching goal of chasing Mars, acquires a quarter of a trillion dollars, some of which he can liquidate to accelerate the mission, and then he does this. Talk about veering off. Jobs would have sold $20 billion of Tesla and pumped it into chasing Mars, if that were his primary goal.
Despite how much certain people hate Musk now (in the same way they hate Trump, and for similar reasons), he is brilliant at what he's good at. No matter how much his detractors wish to tear him down, and no matter how much he makes it easier for them, it's simply true that he is a very intelligent person and at least narrowly highly competent. Most of the HN crowd would instantly vaporize when confronted with what he has taken on over the past 10-15 years (being worth $200+ billion and globally hyper famous would melt nearly everybody on HN, and that's just one point). Trying to do things well outside your competency, when you're already stretched thin on your primary mission/s, is a very bad mistake of impulse control / focus. Your line: "Why is it assumed that this guy who has no background in this industry knows what he's doing?" pretty well nails it. It reminds me of the average Joe thinking they have an idea for a restaurant or bar, and that that'd be a great business to pursue (because they've eaten at restaurants before and like most people they have strong opinions on food/service); Musk's mistake on Twitter comes from a similar place, he was a heavy social media user just as Joe eats at restaurants.
Musk will require another beating (akin to Tesla and SpaceX nearly failing simultaneously) to pull his focus back to Earth. Otherwise he'll just continue to sprawl, his impulse control is too mediocre to self-impose that course correction without hefty pain prompting it. Something sharp and negative has to affect him, in proportion to his financial capabilities and or something very bad has to happen to Tesla or SpaceX. Maybe he'll remain hyper rich and just waste his twilight days sprawling around, either occasionally getting in the way of the SpaceX mission or being fortunate enough that it succeeds in spite of his erratic approach.
What is that exactly? Seems like he is primarily good at having money, well at least until he set so much of it on fire with his Twitter acquisition. Otherwise, what is his achievement that isn't effectively just throwing money at a problem in a way that no one had previously done?
I think it should be ok to complain about things that you benefit from, and I don't think it is hypocrisy. I benefit from the world's growing inequality but I still think it's a bad thing and will be long term detrimental and I complain about it to anyone who will listen.
Musk complains that taxes on him are too high. He's fine receiving subsidies paid for by my taxes and your taxes. It's worse than simply being hypocritical it's being sociopathic. It's not at all like you complaining about a system that's unfair to others.
You've summed it up perfectly: "40 billion would probably get SpaceX to Mars."
He could have spent that money on practically anything else and benefitted humanity. People would have been awarding him Nobel prizes and fawning over him for the rest of his life.
Instead he bought twitter and let the fascists run riot.
> The smartest people are the ones who know the limits of their expertise and say so.
No.
This is the most common mistake the anti-Musk crowd makes. They fail to differentiate between a person being intelligent and having good self-control. They are not the same thing.
Musk failing at Twitter doesn't make him stupid. Musk having poor impulse control does not make him stupid. What you see in the Musk detractors is their own idiocy and or poor impulse control on display, in the way they go after him by proclaiming that he's stupid or the equivalent, it shows off their inability to think deeply and to control their own emotional impulses (to lash out; a failure to think rationally, a failure to be able to dissect a topic dispassionately). It's rather interesting that Musk's poor impulse control lures the same behavior out of his detractors (which is exactly what Trump's wild behavior did to his detractors, they have been wildly rabid for seven years non-stop; Trump acted wild, they reacted wild).
Intelligence is no guarantee of self-control, discipline, focus, integrity, work ethic, et al.
Smart people can be cruel. Smart people can be very lazy. Smart people can be liars. Smart people can be x y z. And in exactly the same way, smart people can have poor impulse control, behavioral disorders of all sorts, or just be lazy and not develop their work/task focus capabilities throughout adulthood.
There is also an interesting difference between smart/intelligent and wise. Musk is very intelligent, he may not be particularly wise. Knowing, understanding and accepting your limits is generally an area of wisdom rather than smartness. Properly acting on your acquired understanding of your limits would be maturity / personal responsibility (integrity is typically a major factor in that mixture). I don't think Musk is a very mature person, and of course his tweets have put that on display for many years now.
>This is the most common mistake the anti-Musk crowd makes. They fail to differentiate between a person being intelligent and having good self-control. They are not the same thing.
"Smart" does not just mean "high intelligence", as you very well know. In common parlance people use "smart" to mean an ill-defined combination of intelligent, knowledgeable, careful, and wise. A smart person is one who can deal with complexity and make good decisions.
Deliberately misinterpreting what someone has said in such a way that it is obvious nonsense, then claiming what they said is obvious nonsense, is not a clever trick. All too often effective, but not clever.
I am not willing to conclude Musk is especially smart, for the record. SpaceX seems pretty competent, but Tesla, Twitter, Neuralink, and several failed projects are technically dreadful in numerous ways. What can be attributed to Musk's intelligence, what can be attributed to his behavior, and what can be attributed to the fact that any fool with a big enough bag of money can hire brilliant people? I do not know.
What I do know is that every time he speaks on a subject I know well his remarks are word salad.
This is a well thought out post, and the blindness rage causes will lead people to continue to underestimate people, and wonder why things don’t turn out the way they expected.
- If you read accounts of the way he treats Tesla and SpaceX workers, the treatment of Twitter employees is on brand.
- Elon has always used Twitter as a way of getting attention for himself and his companies. It's his primary platform. Even ignoring his ego, it makes sense he would bump up his own content.
- "Ridiculous amounts" is relative to what you earn. What sounds reasonable to a billionaire will sound ridiculous to you or me.
- The blue-check mark was one of the few things of value (excluding ads) that Twitter could trade for money. It was a thing that people wanted, and therefore could have a price attached. Selling blue check marks is more similar to selling a tesla, than the roundabout way ad sales generates money.
- A lot of the speech he unblocks, he agrees with. If you dont believe that, and want to believe he wants unlimited free speech thats fine.. but that unlimited free speech belief is from an misunderstanding of the business reason that social media blocks certain content (legal, ad-friendliness, etc).
- Unreliability is from implementing ideas without listening to feedback and planning properly.. and exactly what he does at Tesla. Example: removing the radar from Teslas and updating the software later.
- It's not the symbol of death to Elon. It's the cool brand they wouldnt let him rename PayPal to.
I've seen nothing in Elons behavior that indicates he's behaving any differently that he has at his other companies. Why is it assumed that this guy who has no background in this industry knows what he's doing? When you start a company, you get time while it's small to make all kinds of dumb mistakes. Elon doesnt have that experience, and every mistake is at-scale.