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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   27864 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Six years ago, Sarah A. Hoyt coined "roll hard left and die".

Years ago, watching science fiction magazines and newspapers of various sorts come and go, I identified a process I called “roll hard left and die.”

When a magazine or a newspaper or any news or entertainment media was in real trouble, they went hard, hard left, then died.

It took me a little while to realize this was a sane strategy. In a field completely controlled by the left, when you knew that your job was in peril be it through missmanagement or whatever, your last hope was to go incredibly hard left, so you could blame the failure on ideology. And instead of not being able to find a job, you found yourself lionized by all the “right” (left) “thinking people.” New jobs were assured.

In his December 15th newsletter, Josh Barro wrote the following about Elon Musk:

Some people are spinning out baroque theories of what the underlying business strategy is, but my strong feeling is that there isn’t one. I think what’s happened is that Musk has greatly overpaid for this company, he’s not running it in a way that’s likely to produce financial returns that come close to justifying the price he paid, and leaning into the idea that he is serving a great social mission (vanquishing the proprietors of the “woke mind virus” who were trying to destroy our society) helps him feel better about the unpleasant business position he’s gotten himself into.

If you’re going to lose money, it’s best to feel like you’re losing it for a cause [...]

The difference here is that I can't see Musk's root motivation as "not being able to find a job" when all is said and done.

And if that's the case, it makes me reconsider how much of "roll hard left and die" really does boil down to Hoyt's lifeboat theory, and how much is "losing money for a cause".

I'm not going to try to do the thing that Trump supporters still do where they justify all of the actions in some 4D chess move. I've been quite disappointed by a lot of Musk's handling on Twitter. That said the doom posting on it seem incredibly excessive. It would not surprise me if Musk has lost and will not recover a lot of twitter value. It also wouldn't surprise me if behind the scenes all that really mattered was cutting the costs by firing tons of people and this will all come up Milhouse. What I really object to are all the people that are pretending they have any clue whatsoever what the future holds on this matter. Sometimes the skeptic is a fool for not seeing the obvious but I think far more people are going to seem far more foolish when we do a retrospective in 5 years.

It would not surprise me if Musk has lost and will not recover a lot of twitter value.

That isn't really even the issue right now (he almost certainly overpaid which is why he tried to wriggle out at first), the question is how much Tesla stock is backing this purchase and what the drop in its price means.

We'll see how things are going when Tesla hits its bottom.

His net worth is still very high. He could just cut a check and just cover the remaining debt ending these problems now and it would not hurt him much. Twitter was decent financial shape before Elon's purchase. Twitter is only losing lots of money now because of the debt Elon took on to buy twitter. He began selling tesla shares early this year at near peak, which was good for him.

I've been quite disappointed by a lot of Musk's handling on Twitter.

Yeah, he didn't seem to come in with a clear plan for how to address the issues of uneven content moderation and how the tone of Twitter discourse is toxic. He's fumbled haphazardly with the first issue, and leaned into toxicity on the second.

I mean, isn't that a good sign for the acquisition? (If a bad sign for the public internet.) If toxicity is how Twitter farms ad impressions, then Musk leaning into the toxicity promises that eyeballs may remain high, or at least won't be depressed by a prosocial attempt to reduce drama.

In 2019 tesla seemed close to dying and then it went up 10x. Twitter could see a similar revival. Who knows. Musk has shown an ability to defy naysayers over and over.

I think this is similar to what Carlous Rex told himself when deciding to advance ahead of his supply lines and into Russia. And in his defense, taking the initiative had helped him in a number of previous battles and to secure his kingdom.

Elon has enough wealth and sold enough stock that this cannot possibly break him. He could just walk away and take the $25 billion hit (he's already down $10 billion probably) and still be the second or third richest person in the world. He's only on the hook for the $13 billion loan. The rest is paid for by him and business partners. But it's not a good look for him making such a blunder, assuming twitter fails.

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