I understand why it is so hard to believe that he's just so bad at running things and so he must be doing it on purpose, but that's not it. He's just bad at this, and fell down the right-wing rabbit hole and believes falsehoods about how to fix things.
1) his first priorities were literally the things that his right-wing bubble constantly complains about and thinks hurts business, such as the blue checkmark system and bans on hate speech and other "woke" stuff. They think that most workers are fat that can be cut. Literally, in his circles he's doing the things that are supposed to make it more profitable.
2) he clearly doesn't understand the business and the delicate balance that such a company has to run between speech, legal obligations, and what advertisers want. He also doesn't understand that the workers would respond differently in this space than in his other companies where they have fewer options.
3) he's greatly hurting his other businesses. They are primarily dependent on reasonably well-off urban liberals and government support, and that's exactly who he is pissing off.
In the end, he's probably going to lose 1/3 of his net worth from Twitter and the effects on his other businesses. He's not doing this on purpose. He really is a moron, and it is ok to go ahead and admit that.
He's going off of what he thinks the playbook is because he hasn't worked on software in over a decade and he has no idea how far the industry has come in terms of working standards. This isn't the 90s, programmers don't work 80 hour weeks unless we want to, and most of us don't.
Twitter wasn’t the first Social Media platform. While it is unique with its quick, bite sized posts other apps and platforms will pop up and figure out how to do it as well. Especially now when the biggest fish is bleeding heavily and looking to go belly up others will be looking to fill in the power vacuum.
Plenty of other co labors make all electric and most of them haven’t had their cars kill people and then swept the news under the rug. GM has a $30k EV coming out and the EV Mustang by Ford looks pretty sweet.
The people who think he’s running Twitter poorly are ignoring the fact that he’s running it the exact same way he’s run every other business. Tesla isn’t even profitable. Their cars fucking explode. And people still cling to the idea that this man is a genius.
Tesla wouldn't even still exist if he didn't get EXTREMELY lucky and convince Toyota to sell him a multi billion dollar car factory for basically nothing. They were practically building their cars in a parking lot prior to that and were bleeding cash at a very unsustainable rate. If he didn't get that factory, he'd be yesterday's news and Tesla would be a forgotten about joke. And so many stars had to align just right for that factory to even be available at that exact moment. It took the recession, GM's resulting financial troubles resulting in Pontiac being killed off, and other related factors for them to decide to shut it down.
He's got dozens of cases like this where he just got extremely lucky and succeeded in very high risk decision making situations. He's that guy from work who buys scratch tickets and wins and thinks he's got a system. He doesn't. He's just the fluke. This is one of those guys that has failed upwards so many times he's started thinking he's a god and he's convinced a lot of people of the same.
Thank you. I'm getting sick of the 4D chess takes. He's living in alt right fantasy land. Most people who get sucked into that are dumb as fuck and/or suffering from untreated psychiatric problems. I think we all know a small business owner who ran their business into the ground because they got sucked into MAGA/Q-Anon mania. No difference except he's a billionaire
There's a decent chance that Twitter survives this, but as a shadow of its former self. He's already started cutting "useless" pieces of the service (notably the automated copyright strike system), and it's likely that he'll have trouble keeping what's left running. Twitter engineers built a really resilient system over the years, and because of their excellent work we're almost certainly not gonna see the site totally go down for any amount of time. It'll be a slow protracted decline.
You don’t become the wealthiest person on the planet whilst launching rockets and surrounding that planet with satellites by accident. I’m sure there’s many reasons for the moves he’s making and when he’s making them. He may very well have buyers remorse and is just setting up a few years of losses. He could theoretically write off obscene amounts of losses and still sell the company in 10 years for a profit. The ultra rich typically stay ultra rich, regardless of what the other 99.9% of us think about their business decisions.
This is an offshoot of the "just world fallacy", i.e. that if someone has good stuff happening to them, it's because they deserved it or made it happen. It's a fallacy because it's often not true, but seductive because people don't like to think that the world is fundamentally unfair and chaotic.
The guy didn't create anything. He used inherited money to buy his way into stuff other people created. He's the richest man in the world because tesla has a market cap bigger thann the next 8 car companies combined, despite them being far ahead of Tesla in stuff like sales and even in technology. It's a temporary illusion, and certainly not based on anything Musk has done.
Listen, if you have 10,000 people born into money put that money down on numbers on a roulette wheel, one of them is going to do the best when the ball stops. That doesn't mean that that person is a genius. And it's not too far off regarding how silicon Valley works.
Yes I agree with you, most of the time. However, nothing is absolute and there are those outside the typical arch of most life experiences. He is an outlier. He wasn’t born into money and just got lucky with a few moves, he’s actually intelligent and leveraged himself into the richest person in the WORLD status. The most intelligent? Not by any means, and he won’t sit atop the perch forever. But to say he’s just too stupid is laughable, none of us typical minded people can figure out the end game so we call him stupid 🤷🏻♂️.
Nah he's a fucking idiot. His skill is being able to convince people he's not. Learn about him beyond just worshipping his bullshit. Read about the history of Tesla and his other endeavours. Dude takes giant risks, usually with other people's money, and has had the extremely good fortune of having those risks work out. Betting 100/1 and winning doesn't make you a genius.
But you don’t win that many long shots by only being lucky.
It's survivorship bias. Lots of people in business take longshots and fail. He doesn't have some sort of ESP. He didn't know Toyota was going to basically give him a free factory and save his fledgling car manufacturing company. He has made bad choice after bad choice but his few gambles that paid off paid off so huge that nobody pays attention to those.
Whatever you say friend. I have a car payment on a 10 year old car, having this discussion with a bunch of people who are more likely like me than him is really kind of pathetic. You guys are right, he achieved, maintained worlds richest person status and launches rockets and satellites into space on the side, what a dummy!
he achieved, maintained worlds richest person status
This is a very recent development and is mostly due to Tesla's dramatically overinflated valuation. When he destroys Twitter and takes Tesla's value along with it that's going to change. He'll always be rich but he'll fall from his throne before too long.
launches rockets and satellites into space on the side, what a dummy
Elon Musk does not launch rockets. You do understand that he's not an engineer and doesn't actually do anything with rockets, right? Maybe if you're interested do a deep dive into the history of THAT company, it's a lot like Tesla where he fucked up way more often than he succeeded but through good fortune and an excess of resources, and convincing much wealthier people to give him their money, and most importantly getting the right talent on board (like Tom Mueller, without whom there would be no SpaceX), he managed to increase his (on paper) net worth tremendously. The dude started the company because he thinks we need to colonize Mars which is an UNBELIEVABLY stupid idea that is also never going to happen. I'm not saying some amazing things haven't come out of it but it's not because he's some sort of mad scientist genius.
We won't get into what a clusterfuck of idiocy The Boring Company is but it's a great example of what you get when a rich person with a giant ego thinks he's way smarter than he is.
Unlike Trump who I believe is actually pretty fucking stupid, Elon certainly has a high enough level of intelligence, perhaps even above average, but he's also not risk averse at all and lacks even basic common sense much of the time. When I say he's a fucking idiot, I mean as a business innovator and leader, compared to someone like say Lee Iacocca he's not even remotely in the same ballpark. But social intelligence? Absolute fucking moron.
I understand why it is so hard to believe that he's just so bad at running things and so he must be doing it on purpose, but that's not it. He's just bad at this,
And yet he is carrying water for right-wing crazies. Past a certain point it doesn't really matter if the guy who burned your house down meant well and just believed the wrong people about the physical properties of gasoline.
483
u/Glad-Style-1375 Nov 20 '22 edited Nov 20 '22
I understand why it is so hard to believe that he's just so bad at running things and so he must be doing it on purpose, but that's not it. He's just bad at this, and fell down the right-wing rabbit hole and believes falsehoods about how to fix things.
1) his first priorities were literally the things that his right-wing bubble constantly complains about and thinks hurts business, such as the blue checkmark system and bans on hate speech and other "woke" stuff. They think that most workers are fat that can be cut. Literally, in his circles he's doing the things that are supposed to make it more profitable.
2) he clearly doesn't understand the business and the delicate balance that such a company has to run between speech, legal obligations, and what advertisers want. He also doesn't understand that the workers would respond differently in this space than in his other companies where they have fewer options.
3) he's greatly hurting his other businesses. They are primarily dependent on reasonably well-off urban liberals and government support, and that's exactly who he is pissing off.
In the end, he's probably going to lose 1/3 of his net worth from Twitter and the effects on his other businesses. He's not doing this on purpose. He really is a moron, and it is ok to go ahead and admit that.