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.
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Notes -
The apologia for the richest guy who started rich and picked right twice is funny to me, as always. Dude really is the modern day Timothy Dexter.
YOU are smarter than Elon Musk, he just had money and the blind self confidence to parley his way into a leadership position where his staff carefully wrangles him to making correct decisions sometimes. Testimonials from everyone who has ever touched his technical work are universally negative, strip it down and build it again right style shit.
But! That doesn't matter. HIS JOB ISN'T ENGINEERING, he is the fucking CEO. He can hire 99th percentile STEMlords to do STEM stuff, he needs to do CEO stuff.
The place you can say he is actually a genius: He is a fucking sublime marketing machine. He never turns off, he is 25/8 looking for ways to promote himself and his sources of revenue, both directly and indirectly, both positively and negatively.
He managed to fill the Steve Jobs shaped hole in the zeitgeist, and that is enough to make up for 95% of all boneheaded financial decisions.
Many people are smarter than Musk. But why can't they beat him in the marketplace? Why couldn't Toyota, GM, Ford, etc. beat Tesla at electric cars despite being so much bigger at the time? I don't think anyone is better at execution than Elon. He is only limited by time, not ambition.
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Everyone knew that car companies were east to build. Elon got lucky!
Everyone knew that rocket companies were east to build. Elon got lucky!
Everyone knew that online banking was easy. Elon got lucky!
Everyone knew that Starlink was east to build. Elon got lucky!
As my sarcasm hopefully comes through, this line of argument just seems like cope. I’m pretty successful in life but I can readily admit Elon is a lot more successful than I am and if someone choose to invest a dollar I’d recommend they invest with Elon compared to me. No shame in that. But for some reason some people are so invested in trying to bring down a guy who is just better at business compared to them they latch on to absurd arguments that Elon was just “lucky.”
However, a big success early on, such as PayPal, increases the odds of subsequent successes, so these are not totally mutually exclusive events. But I agree this is demonstrative of some skill on Elon's part, such as execution.
True. On the other hand, who would think online banking relates at all to car companies?
easier to get funding
Well that’s why I said “true.” But only marginally easier because (1) car companies are really difficult to successfully run and (2) success in PayPal didn’t auger success in Tesla.
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This is false. I know those aren't the only quotes ever, so I'd love to see your sources, but when I dig a little deeper the juxtapositions still look like "the retired head of Merlin development defending Musk's technical work" versus "some anonymous guy who claimed to be a SpaceX intern attacking it".
The balance is nice, but ironically this is also false. You could say he's merely feigning being a bad public speaker for nerd-credibility, I guess, but look at the outcomes too: it seems like everybody right down to Wesley freaking Crusher (who was the victim of a Two Minute Hate himself not too many years back!) either hates the guy or is at best kinda worried for the guy right now, and so he may have just lost tens of billions of dollars to an acquisition where he only needed to get the marketing right, all because he even couldn't stop shitposting long enough to reassure users and advertisers that he wasn't going to break Twitter outright or turn it into Gab! In the past his marketing didn't always matter, because with a completely technological perspective when there's a conflict between "Neil Armstrong himself says he probably can't do it" and "he did it", "he did it" wins, but with Twitter he's in a social space dominated by Schelling-point/Keynesian-beauty-contest/network-effect dynamics and there he might just be doomed.
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