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non_radical_centrist  7mo ago (astralcodexten.com)   2053 thread views

Book Review: Elon Musk[Scott Alexander]

astralcodexten.com

Scott Alexander’s review of a 2015 biography of Elon Musk. Elon Musk, to me, is one of the world’s most confusing people. He’s simultaneously both one of the smartest people in the world, creating billions of dollars of value in companies like Tesla and SpaceX, and one of the dumbest, in burning billions on Twitter. Scott’s review I think is a good explanation of what’s up with Musk.

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I don't think Twitter was a mistake. Converting money into influence is very expensive. His timing was awful, and he probably could have gotten a better deal if he'd waited a few months, but I expect (at least when you consider the influence gained) that that purchase will turn out profitable in the end.

I’m skeptical of how useful the influence will actually be to him. If he was the Chinese government, Twitter servers would be worth their weight in gold. But I don’t see how he’d actually turn that influence into utility for himself, at least not given the way he’s currently running twitter

I’m skeptical of how useful the influence will actually be to him.

Being the only American citizen that the First Amendment meaningfully applies to is useful for the same reason freedom of speech was one of the original rights: if you don't have it, you can't effect political change, and nobody these days does.

He's also the only American citizen that the Second Amendment meaningfully applies to (private ICBMs) and the same is true for the Fourth (Starlink could trivially be used as an utterly uncensorable communications network; ensuring it's widely used throughout the West means Western powers can't turn around and jam it without financial or political consequences and the fact it's its own ISP means "just build your own Internet" is already done).

I think there's a solid argument to be made that Musk is well-positioned to, if not to actually be Caesar himself (he is certainly rich enough for this to be true!), at least be the key to power behind a Caesar it might serve Musk's aims to elevate.

I think you overestimate the power of Musk’s businesses.

He's currently facing politically motivated prosecution and persecution from the Biden government and has every reason to expect more of this treatment in the future. Twitter was one of the most effective tools for getting Trump elected previously, and the previous owners/administrators of twitter wanted to make sure this didn't happen again (like they did in 2020 with the laptop suppression). Given his extreme wealth, spending the amount he did on twitter and acquiring both cultural influence as well as the ability to influence the upcoming election gives a far greater return in actual utility than any sort of financial investment he could make (after your first 240 billion, how much utility do you get out of the next five?). While Trump doesn't particularly like Musk (and wrote a hilarious takedown of him) there's a world of difference between a mean tweet and prosecuting someone for not hiring enough illegal immigrants in a workplace where illegal immigrants are forbidden from working by law.

Of course he also claims to actually enjoy using twitter and posting in ways that the current censors/moral busybodies don't like (this seems true given his posting/liking history), and he could very plausibly have gotten a return on his investment in terms of enjoyment and fun that similarly blows any financial considerations out of the water.

He’s got too much money. This seems more like a gift to society. Right-wing boycotts have taken off since twitter became neutral.

He has indicated before that his goals for humanity were being limited by cultural changes.

He’s already made more than enough money to fund however many heirs he wants to have. Musks personal gains from spreading his genetics has long been maxed out. Unless he takes on 20k girlfriends.

Right-wing boycotts have taken off since twitter became neutral.

What's the proof of that?

Target bud light

Okay, but how do we know that Twitter was the primary problem?

I think Twitter just magnifies more. I don’t know everything starting working after musks bought

Okay, but where are the failed attempts at boycotts quashed by Twitter?

A far more likely explanation is that for nearly a decade now, right-wingers have been continuously pushing a narrative that seeks to cast LGBT people as crazies, pedophiles, and/or some kind of evil. Part of this has very much been focusing on the T in that acronym over the others. Far easier to get boycotts going over that than gay people. I don't think the particularities of the social media platform all these people congregated on is particularly important.

The Twitter throttling that Musk has detailed since he took over was worse than most "conspiracy theories".

He had Twitter add the public view count so to provide future transparency about throttling.

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but where are the failed attempts at boycotts quashed by Twitter?

Uh, quashed by twitter. Failed attempts are attempts whose reach is stifled, meaning if we can easily find them then they weren't quashed.

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He’s got too much money. This seems more like a gift to society.

I could imagine that becoming true, if he'd paid for Twitter with all his own money. But IIRC it was something like half his own money, leveraged with several billion dollars of other equity financing plus at least ten billion dollars of debt, under a plan which was set into motion in early 2022 (Fed interest rate and investment environment: "pay us back when you get around to it, borrow some more if you need it"), which he wanted to back out of when the environment changed over the year ("we have how much inflation now? okay, what to do..."), and which now has to be followed through in the current economy ("pay us back before Tuesday so we don't have to break any kneecaps"). A lot of the shakeup at Twitter was because they were legitimately bleeding money unnecessarily, but a lot of it is probably because he was expecting to have decades to get it far into the black, not years. If he has to choose between a public forum for the free exchange of conflicting ideas versus just something he can quickly monetize, he's got billions of reasons to go with "monetize".

He’s worth 250-300 billion depending on the day. He could eat his trading loss and be fine.

You can't eat market cap, especially not of companies where the stock price is based heavily on public confidence in predicted growth. If he tried to sell so heavily, specifically to bail out another of his companies failing, expect most of that price to evaporate.

He'd still be fine, sure, a decabillionaire instead of a centibillionaire [edit: hectobillionaire] at worst, but it's not what he thought he was signing up for.

I think the impact of general influence shouldn't be underestimated--it could be that even a somewhat small impact on culture could lead to Musk personally paying significantly less in taxes + regulation compliance--but I tend to agree. The only way I could see it being worth the price for him as an individual would be if he is personally interested in changing culture. He will for sure not make billions from the influence, but maybe improving Twitter substantially is worth billions to him.

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