Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

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> he developed cold feet pretty fast after an impetuous decision

I don't think it was impetuous. I think he did this all on purpose and planned on using his usual tactics of improvisational manipulation and grandstanding to get what he wanted, whether it was Twitter at a cheap price, manipulating the Twitter stock price to make a quick buck off of his stock purchase, liquidate some of his Tesla stock, seed further discontent on Twitter, spur on rabble around bots (despite knowing full well that Tesla and himself have benefited from Twitter bots and potentially even controlled them), drone on about free speech in some sort of libertarian political play, or whatever else. And it has all failed. Now, he's just gonna let his dirty lawyers figure some way out of it all and move on to the next scam.

I think that requires a level of competence that Musk has failed to display in the past. Shotwell told an interesting story once, in response to a question like "what's it like to work for Elon?" She related an occasion when she got frantic calls from a meeting Musk was in. In the meeting he had decided to cancel Falcon Heavy to meet a schedule for something else. Shotwell went in and reminded everyone (Elon) they had customers who had already paid for Falcon Heavy and cancelling it wasn't an option and to find another solution. Elon responded like "oh yeah, ok well...."

Then there was BTC to purchase Tesla cars, then there was Doge. The point being I think these types of things indicate Musk, like a lot of smart people can be really, really dumb sometimes. Also a bit Hanlons Razor.

I agree with that. I don't consider him intelligent at all. My suspicion is that it's just a case of him having a loose collection of these outcomes that he considers wins, and then he just kicks it off, hoping he can manipulate things along the way towards one of his wins. I don't think he has an actual plan. He's an improvisational manipulator, very similar to a former president.

Then again, it seems the main "win" he often has in mind is just getting attention, so maybe his need for attention exceeds even what I thought.

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