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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

Surprised how sceptical all the comments here are. Dick or not the guy has a talent for building companies

Or Twitter was run incompetently since its founding. We wouldn't be in this shit show if Twitter wasn't a disaster to begin with.

Edit: Grammar

Twitter just took itself private for 42 billion dollars. I'd say it was run very, very competently. Hall-of-fame leadership, really.

I totally agree, Twitter’s old management pulled off one of the greatest moves in the history of corporate America.

They dumped a falling asset, at peak price and got Musk to sign terms that completely fucked him.

Honestly, it was completely brilliant and the only thing anyone learned is that Musk isn’t the business genius he claims to be.

He’s going to destroy that platform with utter stupidity and I’m looking forward to watching.

Their strategy was to piss really rich people off enough that they’d just buy the company outright?

I dunno, that seems like a pie in the sky.

What a ridiculous take. Twitter was run so competently that it has managed to grow to a company with hundreds of millions of daily active users and can’t figure out how to make a profit.

And they successfully baited a complete loon to buy it for 10X what it was worth.

How does profit help the shareholders in a way that an inflated stock price to exit at doesn't?

Plus, how many times were they hacked? Lately by a child.

Very broadly speaking, HN is the forum of choice for the 'Web 2.0' and VC backed startup culture that went along with it, i.e. what is commonly perceived now as Silicon Valley culture. This culture is becoming increasingly reactionary now that their power is threatened/fading. Musk, while part of the early rise of that culture in the late 90s is now well outside it (represented by his move from California to Texas) and is a favourite target of the cohort described above. See also HN's noted long-term antipathy towards Bitcoin.

As someone well outside that circle, has it ever occurred to you that some people just don't like Elon "Pedo Guy" Musk?

And same people double down on the dislike because his supporters are the kind of people to paint not liking him must actually be a sign that you're just upset that you're losing your non-existent grip on non-existent power?

Elon went from cool eccentric paypal/electric car/taking us to mars genius to arrogant "Great Value Joe Rogan without the social skills" very quickly with the general public.

Why are you assuming I am an Elon Musk supporter, or that I even like him? And it's fine if you don't like him; it's fine for anyone to not like him.

What I am commenting on is the reactionary attacks frequently made in this forum against Musk's business efforts, in this case his taking over of Twitter, with many ppl forecasting doom, despite his business success already across a wide range of domains. An objective observer would say that given his track record (truly extraordinary and historic in the case of SpaceX), he's probably got a decent chance of making a success of this twitter acquisition too. A decent chance, note, I'm not saying his success is guaranteed. (And obviously the way he pursued the acquisition of twitter showed impulsivity and some lack of strategic planning; that criticism is fine.)

There's a number of comments in this thread suggesting that Musk only surrounds himself with 'yes men'. I, like others, have noticed how he does favour a cohort of sycophants on twitter, so perhaps there is some truth in this direction. But it's a nonsense to think he would fully do this in business and succeed with extraordinarily difficult technological challenges like developing a re-usable rocket. This point was made in one of the few rebuttals to this nonsense in this thread:

> I guarantee Elon is surrounded by yes-men.

>> That's not how you build a spaceship.

So, to repeat, intelligent criticism of Musk's business decisions is fine; personal dislike towards him is fine (although I would suggest that people take care of how much they are being influenced by the highly hostile presentation of him in the corporate press). What is not fine is reactionary, frankly idiotic attacks on him, which is what we frequently and not at all usefully see in so many HN threads. And why these attacks? Again, I would suggest that it's because Elon has quite frequently stood up to Silicon Valley power or more specifically its celebrated causes (deplatforming for 'hate speech', work from home, lockdowns, 'pronouns', etc) and that is greatly resented.

It doesn’t seem very hard to build a space ship if you are a motivated billionaire

I'm not assuming you're a supporter, you're actively being a supporter of his right now.

You made the logical leap that people only dislike him because they're part of some landed gentry that feels their power is waning, then you followed up with a one page treatise on how people dislike him for the wrong reasons and clearly he's quite brilliant and also yeah they're just upset because he's getting so powerful.

You may be in denial about it, but you're supporting him.

And therefore it might be hard to see how easy it is to dislike the billionaire trying to play UN security council on twitter is disliked.

(and case you still didn't make the connection, the attacks on his business acumen stem from the same dislike. You're calling them idiotic for not thinking he's as brilliant as you think he is. You can't pay for supporters that loyal (or well, you can but it costs approx. 54 dollars a share)

Yeah, the Musk haters are out in full force. Perhaps he simply paid them from his own pocket (eg consulting rate) when they were "off the clock" from their day-time job? Seems very logical to me.

It’s interesting to see technical people melt down and froth at the mouth like political hobbyists when some new piece of meat/news lands in their feed trough.

Well possibly, but you're honestly just making things up.

Making up what - the very plausible idea one company hired a team of experts from another company to come in and do an audit? Is that so unreasonable?

Again, the Musk haters are out in force.

And so are the fan boys!

There is someone at a company who could articulate the big-picture idea behind bizarre-looking activity, to maintain orderly calm among the employees, customers, and shareholders, and prevent wild speculation and panic. That person is the owner or CEO. Musk is both. Employees who don't trust their bosses don't do good work.

Can you elaborate on this argument? I don't really understand his companies as "well built" in any reasonable sense that I can identify.

"His companies make him and many of his investors wealthy" sure, no disagreement from me. But "well built" is a different metric, and I think that's highly arguable.

Well for one, they actually achieve meaningful change in the world.

Half the people here work for companies that do nothing but steal my latest PII from my grandma’s contact list “yes share contacts with recipe app” to sell me ads.

I have 3 cars in my garages right now that only exist because he pushed EVs. I have a boat with starlink.

The dude has done more to improve my life than any of the FAANG jerkoffs, and I’m thankful for that

I think it’s just nice that they’re all large successful companies _without_ an ad model.

You don’t think these companies have produced meaningful change? They’ve meaningfully changed the world far far more than Musk companies. Clearly you are a fan of the Musk companies more, but who cares?

Yes, his companies are completely sloppy and grossly incompetent. They only delivered 343,000 vehicles last quarter, which is way less than they should have, and the wait on a Model Y is close to a year, indicating extremely poor planning. Total joke of a company.

>I don't really understand his companies as "well built" in any reasonable sense that I can identify.

I didn't say well built despite your quotation marks. But close enough...what I meant is that he has two big companies doing impressive things.

e.g. I don't see anyone else regularly flying to the ISS

Maybe the companies are a toxic chaotic shitshow on the inside, I don't know, but from afar he seems to have done well with both Tesla and spaceX

Particularly interesting argument they’re making too, that Twitter is a bunch of write-only code, unreadable by any other engineers.

With time, reading, discussion, reflection, practice, and experimentation you can integrate into a team and grow to understand how things are, then why they are, then how that's working out, and finally how they can be improved. This process takes months, even years.

It's very unlikely that an outsider could be shown a random diff on a random component in a Twitter-sized architecture & even know what it's doing or why, let alone make a reasonable judgement on whether it's a good idea or the best way.

I’ve been coding for 39 years. I know how the process works. And yes, it does take time to get the deep understanding of any system. But it is not on the scale of impossible for a squad of 10x engineers to answer and/or develop some basic questions in a short time frame. And much more reliable than trusting the existing crew who has been quite publicly represented by persons hostile to their new boss. I do not in any way mean to cast ALL engineers at Twitter in this light. But it is quite clear the bullies there have grown quite accustomed to their pulpit.

Which parts are unnecessary and which people should be fired, is not one of the basic questions for which you're going to get a good answer in a short timeframe. Now it's clear that there's a lot of animosity for Twitter in this thread - maybe people don't particularly care of the decisions made in this process are correct or just because they all had it coming anyway - but imagine someone doing this to your shop. Come on. It's ridiculous. You'd be pissed.

Your scope of investigation is much larger than the one I stated. One thing neither you or I know at this point, was it a 2 hour visit or is it one of Musk’s marathon “pull up the couches cuz we ain’t going home till we figure this out” sessions.

I guess their point about it being more distributed is valid to some extent but yeah struck me as a little strange too.

Then again starlink is quite uhm distributed too...

All those hackers could better spend their time teaching children code or something if that not already the case...

Or, you know, just buying them...

Weird policy is weird no matter who you are.

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