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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Don't blame short sellers if you are helping them with every interview and public feud.

Just the fact that there is nobody strong enough in the company to talk sense to Musk and put PR people between him and twitter says a lot. That pedophile spectacle should have been the last time we hear unfiltered Musk.

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I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that if a leader has enough time to spend some on twitter they probably have their priorities wrong.

As much as I normally can't stand Twitter, the exact opposite is true. One of the primary responsibilities of a leader of a company is public relations, and Twitter is a useful conduit for that.

If the CEO is having to work 120 hours a week and sleeping at the factory, maybe Twitter PR isn't the most pressing concern.

Don’t forget that he’s taking ambien to sleep...

This isn’t going to end well if he doesn’t slow down.

While this is true, the guy lives, sweats and breathes his companies. If youve ever seen the interview when he talks about pouring his last dollars into spacex and tesla and having NASA come thru as well as his VCs at the 11th hour around xmas (close of fiscal year) he talks about stress. He said “if i was capable of an emotional breakdown, this is as close as i have ever come”.

He works for his goals 100% of the time and regardless of whether he is fucking up, he defends his companies like children. He goes on Twitter for both PR and defense. It is both emotional and tactical to different degrees. Like or hate the guy, he’s fucking all in all the time. It both helps and hurts his companies, but on balance i think it got him where he is.

Hallelujah. It's a little disheartening to me to see so many responses, especially on HN of all places, sort of arguing that Musk should be acting like a typical Fortune 500 CEO.

Musk's deep flaws are also the strengths that have allowed him to accomplish the near impossible in the first place.

> It both helps and hurts his companies, but on balance i think it got him where he is.

Everything gets people to where they are until it doesn't. My question is, what next?

See: @IridiumBoss and @ToryBruno for great examples of responsive social media savvy(ish) CEOs who've used Twitter to great (and no ill) effect - albeit both riding on the coattails of Musk.

Can you fill me in on what you mean by coattails of Musk in relation to Iridium? Iridium and their original satellites have been around for a long time (much longer than SpaceX) and while they now use some of the services of SpaceX, "riding on the coattails of Musk" seems a bit harsh?

I just mean their social media presences, not the companies themselves! Aside from the core group of us space enthusiasts who've been around no matter who's doing what, much of the new blood & energy has come from people who started paying attention because of SpaceX - and the latter have very much influenced everyone in the movement in terms of expecting more from our space CEOs on social media (like answers to random questions we bug them with on Twitter even if they're not directly relevant to their companies, e.g. Matt Desch telling us about the movements of SpaceX boosters for IRDM missions).

> One of the primary responsibilities of a leader of a company is public relations

Coordinating the strategy, yes.

Being a public face, also yes.

Participating in drafting the most important, and approving any important, releases? Sure.

Actually working the social media accounts on a daily basis while burning the midnight oil? Not so much. If Twitter PR is that important and Musk is so indispensable running it personally rather than delegating (which probably isn't the case, but for the sake of argument...), than he needs to offload some of the other stuff to a COO or co-CEO.

Firing off a tweet takes like 20 seconds. If your argument is that he needs to delegate this responsibility to become more efficient, it's not a good argument.

a CEO of a public company should know that saying anything in public after thinking about it for only 20 seconds is just going to create disasters... Or make you POTUS.

A CEO can talk frankly in his office or on the golf course. Perhaps even in front of the board. At any other time he should be scripted.

I occasionally had a call from the CEO's secretary to review any statements about systems in my domain. Usually that was distilled down to one bulletpoint on a slide, but it still had to be checked and approved. Too much at stake to let him ad lib from memory.

One of his predecessors did so in the late 90s and publically committed us to a Web retail presence within a year. That was not a fun year.

There was a time when Musk could accomplish more with a tweet than GM or Ford could with a multi-million dollar ad campaign.

and we will soon find out whether feeding the evening news cycle is enough of an accomplishment to keep a car company going that keeps burning money like nothing else. I'm not sure what Musk 'accomplishes' with these tweets.

So true. The exchange on twitter[0], between Atlassian's co-CEO Cannon-Brookes and Musk, that lead to the 100MW battery being installed in South Australia was only about a year ago.

0: https://twitter.com/i/moments/840050021521268736

It's called procrastination. Musk should come over to HN - there's the noprocrast feature, and dang will keep his comments in check.

wait there's a noprocast feature?

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=IIAOPSW

it's called noprocrast it's a dropdown, 'No' by default.

I see it now.

But what does it do?

Stops you wasting too much time on HN. It's deliciously wonderful at thwarting your attempts to read (and respond to) too many articles.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

>> If you turn it on you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours.

Not at all. This is what you get if you demand a leader have terrible work/life balance.

This is such a silly, blow-hardy meme (like Marissa Meyer suggesting that you can get ahead by limiting how often you use the bathroom [0]).

It doesn't take a meaningful amount of time to submit a tweet or use the bathroom. (And, even if it did, human effort isn't fungible.)

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2016/09...

If a tweet takes 30 seconds to conceive, type, and submit, Elon Musk has spent 45 hours of his life tweeting -- no way to estimate how much time spent reading, which is usually a higher proportion for non-egomaniacs. Judging by the way he talks, he could have used that time a little more productively by reading a couple books. Conveniently, also much harder to tank your stock price while doing.

Considering the influence of his Twitter account, Musk should be spending a lot longer than 30 seconds composing a tweet.

You'd think, right?

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