Naturally prompted by the current Twitter situation, I've come to the point where I just have to write down my thoughts.
I have no doubt that Elon Musk is a genius, both of thought and action. He can formulate visions and execute them. He has two truly epic feats under his belt - starting a viable car company from scratch (the first since the 1930s) and bringing about the next generation of space technology and exploration, after a long, long winter. This is definitely not the work of an "emerald mine heir, just investing his money."
He is however not an infallible genius, which is particularly noticeable in areas outside of his core expertise. And that includes social networks. In some sense, it might be the kind of venture least amiable to an engineering, top-down approach. The product is made of a fickle, unpredictable human mass and there are no good instruments or levers to make it do what you want.
The first thing about the whole Twitter situation which really gave me a pause was the fact that Musk had apparently waived due diligence as a part of the $44B takeover bid. This is completely incomprehensible to me. From an M&A perspective, it's like a story of someone who picks up a skank at a seedy dive bar and proceeds to raw-dog her. Incredibly irresponsible. Are you sure you don't want to use a condom? Things might seem easier in the moment, but the potential for future regret is rather alarming! The rebuke I've heard was that Dorsey had already told him all the important stuff anyway, but that's just not how the process works. For one, the due diligence could have given him a way out of the bid (and boy, wouldn't that turn out to be handy...) It's not guaranteed, but rare indeed is the DD that doesn't uncover some sort of irregularity or dubious representation that could have served as ammo in the lawsuit. Secondly, the DD would have mapped out the exact internal structure, external relations, responsibilities and exposures. Even if (or rather precisely because) the plan was to mow through the ranks, this would have been extremely useful to have. If you're going in with an axe, you should at least have a map of the areas you intend to clear-cut. The whaling system deployed by Musk might have been effective at selecting for a combination of competence, drive and vision alignment (and/or desperation) - but that's not the same as critical institutional knowledge. Twitter is vast and something like 80% of the people who knew what went where and why are gone. The sole irreplaceable value of Twitter is in its existing user network - but this is inextricable from the pulsing, living IT snarl containing the accounts and their connections, which is in turn inextricable from the human apparatus building it and maintaining it. With cars or rockets, as long as you have the tech packages, you can always just bring in new competent engineers to continue the work. But there isn't any objective singular blueprint of Twitter. No single person has the whole picture. It's dubious whether it can even be successfully cold-reset. It's just... why go about it that way? Why not put on the condom?
The second incident was the checkmark fiasco: 1. Blow up the old and opaque verification system 2. Concoct an $8/month pay-to-play scheme 3. Discover why the verification system had been there in the first place 4. Clumsily return to a variant of the old opaque verification system. I'm sure the advertisers were thrilled. How am I not looking at an impulsive, poorly though-out spiteful action here? There are people stuck with GIANT PENIS handles to this day...
The thirds aspect is Musk ostensibly sleeping over at Twitter HQ, wildly coding into the night with the bros. The problem is that either his ethos of "You can't put in less than 80 hours a week and expect a thing to work." is wrong or Tesla and SpaceX are getting the shaft here. And the stock price sure seems to indicate the belief in the latter. More than half of the value gone, YOY, as of the time of this writing. And heaven knows what's happening to Neuralink or the Boring Company. Precisely to the degree that Musk is an irreplaceable genius, the Twitter stunt is coming at the expense of projects he himself considers vital for the survival of human consciousness. What are the priorities here?
The further unmentioned elephant in the room is stimulant abuse and, even worse, the attendant lack of sleep. At this point, it would take a lot to persuade me he isn't up to his gills in some Chinese designer hyper-opti-MegaAdderall regimen, which just appears as both the likeliest cause and result of his recent actions and decisions.
The historical parallel I'm most reminded of is Napoleon. Certainly no rando of middling qualities - but also somebody who, past his initial bout of success and innovation, slumped into the belief in his own brand of unerring radical decisions, with well-known consequences.
So I'm out. Not that it should matter to anyone in any practical terms, but my confidence in Elon Musk's process and vision is gone. At this point, it mostly looks like the driver's seat is occupied by erratic hyperconfidence. I'm not expecting Twitter to disappear any time soon, in fact I still consider it somewhat more likely than not that the company will ultimately stabilize. It's not that any single action had caused irreparable damage - but the series of unforced errors, starting with the bid itself, isn't inspiring any future confidence in me. I will not be getting on that rocket to Mars, thank you very much.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I never thought Musk was any kind of genius. I disliked him even more with the whole Thai paedophile cave diver thing. When the first news that he was thinking of buying Twitter came out, I thought this was just more shitposting on his part and wouldn't go anywhere.
The thing is, the amount of pure toddler foot-stamping tantrums that I am seeing about him running Twitter is forcing me to sort of admire Musk. I don't want to! But all the online social media (and I don't know how the hell it turned out that a lot of people I am sharing spaces with are so progressive, it's a spandrel of being in fandom spaces) is absolutely screeching about this, because of the perception that "free speech" means Musk would let everyone who had been banned by Twitter back on, and this would be the first step to the fascist dictatorship.
Because anyone the blue check marks (and how did that turn from "this just signifies that if this guys says he is Joe Schmo, it is the real Joe Schmo and not a fake account" into "blue check mark means Moses handing down the Law from Mount Sinai"?) considered beyond the pale with comments that were not "Brb, just dropping off my three year old genderfluid toddler to the Drag Your Kids To Pride show in the local dive bar/strip club!" had to be banned Or Else.
And now the Bad People are getting their chance to go online again, and this simply will not do. So everything Musk does must be mocked and the failure of Twitter is something to be hoped for, in order to teach him a lesson.
I don't know if he's running the place the right way. He may indeed be an idiot. Twitter may indeed fail (and I won't miss it for a second). But damn it, when he's posting video of "here's a cupboard full of #StayWoke t-shirts I found at Twitter HQ", I find myself laughing. And hoping he'll succeed.
Why are you all forcing me to kinda like Musk????
EDIT: Again, a lot of the comments I see are scolding/jeering that he fired all the engineers and vital people keeping the systems running, and now has to try and entice them back lest the entire thing collapses.
And then I read pieces where this is the kind of employee who was working there, and presumably either quit (because she didn't want to work for a bad guy) or was one of the laid-off:
Ah yes, how will they ever keep the lights on without a live event programming associate producer on hand?
You can laugh at libs screeching at Sen. Tommy Tubbytummy (R-BUMFUCK) without liking him, you can cringe at conservatives make unfunny after unfunny joke at AOC without liking her - same goes for musk. There's no need to think he's brave and competent in twitter because you think he's a good head clown at the circus.
I think this is what has bothered me most about the people rushing to defend Musk. It's "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" mindset, and it's quite silly. There is no need to pick a side here. Both Musk and the people getting hysterical about Musk are acting like children.
You have to reward people for aligning with your goals or else they won't have any incentive to do so anymore. This is where the woke cult loses people -- there is never any redemption, only eternally ongoing penance, shame and punishment. Nothing you do is good enough. So why bother?
Man, I've been reading a lot of Climate Justice And Atonement blogs lately, and there is definitely a certain demographic that is all about unending shame and punishment. I feel like it's a natural urge that used to be filled by religion, and was significantly neglected by humanist types until it was seized on by the woke.
For some of these people the only reward they want for spending their retirement savings on this stuff is for Greta Thunberg to step on their balls and yell that it's not enough. And I think any group trying to craft a counter-narrative has to acknowledge and engage with them somehow, a la Scott's "they love being berated" bit in his advice to conservatives post.
(Look I know that last part sounds uncharitable, but this dude literally had a post about how good it feels to imagine being scolded by the figurine of her he keeps on his desk. Far be it from me to criticize a man for his waifu, but come on bro: just go to a dominatrix club, it's a lot cheaper and I'm sure they have some angry goblins with pigtails)
Well, it's not. She wants them to spend your retirement savings, too.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
being a good clown does take bravery
trolling powerful people does take bravery
you don't have to like what he does with his positive virtues to recognize when he demonstrates them
I'll support musk's bravery as much as I do a naked drag queen at a pride parade!
That's not entirely ironic, being a parasite has value in the long run, being able to fight them off makes one stronger. But the virtue of 'destroying the woke' and the virtue of 'unbanning the n word' (which he has not done) are different.
it doesn't need to be ironic at all; both can be acts of bravery for people
different, but necessary and sufficient
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I've seen the very same thing in the circles I'm in. I can't stop hearing this self-satisfied gloating from people about how Twitter is going to be gone in six months to a year and about how they have left Twitter for good after Musk's acquisition.
And yeah, there's also the profoundly disturbing talk about how the Shepherds Of Culture need to be allowed to censor things and control the informational environment to prevent people from seeing or even thinking about certain ideas because certain types of speech are just too dangerous to be allowed. Much better to have a centralised authority determine what Truth is for the unwashed masses!
It really makes me root for Musk.
That's incredible, somehow I missed this. It's pretty indicative of what the political bent was at Twitter, despite complaints of progressive bias so often being derided as baseless by the mainstream.
The thing is, 90% of the population will always be making unfunny, low-IQ jokes about their $outgroup. The pro-musk people are incredibly unfunny and cringe being pro-musk, anti-musk people are the same. Picking a side off of that is dumb.
larping the objective, enlightened centrist is far more cringe than the pro-musk, anti-musk people
More options
Context Copy link
I agree, but optics are not the foundational basis from which I've picked a side - my position is that Twitter is a social media platform with an incredible amount of reach which was essentially utilised as an activism tool by a specific group, it was where all the progressive elites went to evangelise to others and to themselves, and the moderation was effectively unequally enforced so that dissidents were treated far harsher. Regardless of whether Musk actually succeeds at changing Twitter or just kills it, I can't see things being worse.
I also don't tend to see too many pro-Musk sentiments around outside of certain specific threads and communities either, it seems to me that he's persona non grata in the mainstream and the right thing to do now in polite society is to flame him repeatedly. And I will admit, my positions get strengthened even further when their objections (to freedom of speech on social media) seem to be so poorly considered.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You can take the guy out of reddit, but you can't take the reddit out of him.
What else do you think we should call the combination of very high intelligence, very low agreeablness, eccentricity and drive that led to everyone deciding that yes, reusable boosters are the way to go?
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, I was not a fan of him previously, but have to grudgingly admire someone so dedicated to something that makes my outgroup seethe.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link