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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

One of the things I admire about Elon (which is saying a lot...) is that for whatever reason, he's ready to bet the farm over and over. Whether he's some genius tactician or an impulsive moron, he just bought Twitter and is poised to drastically alter it.

"flies in the face of everything I understand about complex systems" indeed!

Forgive me for this analogy but it's in the news: Imagine if NATO just said one day, "you know what, !@#$ it. We're done managing this complex system. Let's assume Russia doesn't have or won't use nukes and change our entire doctrine overnight. Get ready to deploy everything."

There's a real possibility Elon buys Twitter for billions and runs it straight into the ground because he does not understand complex systems. Or maybe he gambles and is lucky. Or maybe he really does _get it_ and this is all in some absolutely bizarre way, calculated.

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I don't quite think it is luck - but a weird second thing.

Musk has a reality distortion field. I think he is a bloviating jerk but I know a lot of really really smart and dedicated engineers in software and in more traditional fields like mech-e and aerospace who would rather work for Musk than any other person and are willing to take pay cuts to work for him. This means he really can surround himself with very skilled people who can distill his "fuck it, we are doing FOO" commands into real plans.

What this tells me is not that Musk is a visionary but that a lot of shitty visions are nevertheless achievable if you've got enough smart people around you.

So why is he able to get smart people around him? Its not like he pays them a lot or offer a good work/life balance in their job.

Elon offers people a chance to operate at a true 100% on a thing that matters. Next to that, work-life balance pales. And comp? Comp follows company glory. Tesla engineers are rich, man.

Sells them on the mission. Things like a colony on Mars and full self driving are pretty compelling goals for some people.

Yeah but I feel like "work on twitter" is way less of a .... shall we say noble/socially fulfilling job. I'd value working on sending people to mars (not to live, just to do a walk on it), it'd make me part of something historic. One day people would write books and make documentaries about the work done to make it happen, and even if I weren't featured for the entire rest of my life if I could tell people "I worked on the software for the Mars shuttle" or whatever and have them go "Oh cool!". Hell, even before it succeeds I think it'd have social capital with the right crowd: pushing boundaries to put someone on mars is a cool job....

Twitter on the other hand... "Oh I work at twitter doing software". That's.... nowhere near as exciting or epic a thing to tell people that you do.

So he might have a harder time finding smart people willing to work for less than market rates at twitter compared to finding them for SpaceX and Tesla

I'm sure Elon will have a mission statement that will appeal to some people.

Imagine a new form of news and communication that solves all of our social woes, allows people to be informed, and have constructive discourse.

That would be world changing.

I'm not saying Twitter could ever be that. But maybe someone else could be convinced it is possible.

> Imagine a new form of news and communication that solves all of our social woes, allows people to be informed, and have constructive discourse.

I did imagine that happening once - I imagined the internet would lead to that. The state of things now is very different from what the me of 15 years ago imagined, in part because of things like twitter in fact. I now believe that social woes have significant parts that aren't just misunderstandings they are big problems that can't be solved only through dialogue. Further many of the misunderstandings are actually deliberate misrepresentations - how many people who are pro-choice have you seen making the incredibly bad faith argument that pro-lifers just want to control/punish women? (Note I am pro-choice myself, but that particular argument is a really shitty obviously untrue argument and I see it constantly and it really gives me the shits).

> I'm sure Elon will have a mission statement that will appeal to some people. This I do agree with, but I think the pool of people that are willing to work crazy hours at sub-standard pay is smaller when the work is making whatever Musk's improved version of twitter looks like than it is for putting someone on mars or making electric cars mainstream.

I don't think the communication problems are inherent to the internet but I'm sympathetic to your greater point.

I think the gamification of communication on the Internet is one of the worst inventions, feeding into a lot of very negative neural architecture. Encourages people to seek quick validation from there like-minded peers, and encourages a sense of superiority people can only get from knocking down strawman. This is exacerbated by brief and content without any Nuance or resemblance to reality. In a lot of ways, Twitter incorporates the worst aspects of this. Reddit is arguably worse in terms of gamification, but at least it doesn't have a 144 character limit and tools to curate your consumption.

I don't think the problems are inherent to the internet... sadly I think they are inherent to human beings.

Twitter by design exacerbates a lot of these problems though IMO. Character limits, the way replies work and things are displayed such as to make any particularly active comment section practically impossible to follow, etc

EDIT: I do actually genuinely hope that Twitter dies, but I am scared that is a monkey paw where whatever the next thing happens to be it ends up being worse

Your mistake is looking at what twitter has been in the past and not what it could be with a fast moving entrepreneur driving the ship.

Twitter has been too complacent in the market of communication apps. By all reports, including from Elon himself, big changes are on the way.

Twitter is a social media platform, that space is never going to have the kind of social cache novel space exploration does. It doesn't matter how amazing of a communication app or social media platform it is, as a job it is less epic than working on getting a guy to mars - this is my documentary argument from earlier.

What would you rather have on your resume, Tesla or IBM?

Are those seriously my only two choices?

Mission, and there are a lot of smart people in the world. Also, some people identify with him because he acts completely the same as That One Guy in the university who had studied programming before getting to the CS classes.

I think that a lot of people also don't have to directly work with him, and there are a lot of assholes running companies. That being said, Musk's behavior personally turned me off from all of his companies' products, despite maybe 5 years ago thinking "if I ever buy a car, it'll be a Tesla"

>he acts completely the same as That One Guy in the university who had studied programming before getting to the CS classes.

I don't get this reference, how does a person like that act in uni?

Like a certain real gungho-ness and actual knowledge that then turns into their whole personality. Assuming they actually know everything the world has to offer because they figured a bunch of stuff out on their own in this one domain in the past.

Someone who ends up getting something done, but in the most chaotic manner possible and with loads of unforced errors because they are not absorbing information from their peers.

this is such a cynical take

The distortion field has been significantly fading over the past couple years. And it might be gone entirely soon enough depending on how poorly the Twitter acquisition turns out to be.

I think that's the reason behind the twitter purchase, to control the narrative around him (among other topics)

If that was indeed the goal then it's been going absolutely atrociously so far.

Tesla is making record profits right now and SpaceX is achieving things no other space company has come close to. Twitter is basically a vanity project.

Reminds me of Bill Burr's classic take on Steve Jobs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew6fv9UUlQ8

I don't understand Elon either, but I'm certain that he's not an impulsive moron who doesn't understand complex system, or that he's financing all this with his dad's emerald mine money.

For me, there is enough track record to prove he has some very unique business skills, and often succeeds by doing things that conventionally looks crazy.

That said, Elon's Twitter may well be a failure regardless. Pretty sure it won't be boring though :)

Def. won't be boring. Really we only get to see probably less than half of what he's planning. If the other half is more strategic, then he'll do fine, if the other half mirrors his public image, then I can't see it working.

The emerald mine claim comes from statements made by Errol Musk (Elon's father) who described it as a part share in an Zambian mine which resulted in a total lifetime revenues in the order of a few hundred thousand dollars. None of what Errol has said has been corroborated by anyone. No independent sources exist. It's also worth noting that Zambia is not a conflict gem country and an emerald mine in Zambia would not be morally problematic absent any specific evidence.

(And regardless of any of the above, I've never been particularly enamoured of criticism of a person because of who their parents are or what their parents did. Blaming Elon for being the son of white people in South Africa is kinda gross, actually.)

I saw a recent Twitter take that was like:

"Who payed for those computers in the 90s that Musk had access to?"

Its like yeah ok, he wasn't found in a dumbster during a civil war. Is that the level now, where nobody can get any credit because they were not born into abject poverty?

That just basically means that 99% of people who achieve anything don't deserve credit for anything.

Its basically materialist logic taken to an absurd degree.

Or those takes where it’s argued that because his companies have many hundreds of employees, it’s literally impossible for Elon to have contributed anything of value whatsoever.

Or even more hilariously, that Elon is some kind of marketing genius. Seriously, the guy is the opposite of a smooth communicator, and leans heavily into his autistic sense of humour. Yet apparently the only reason anyone ever bought a Tesla is because they were suckered in by a slick sales pitch.

Agreed. Though it does seem that Elon's family were quite well socially connected and that at least some of his early success in raising funds comes from that.

For instance, his connection to Roelof Botha, who in turn leveraged the connections made by his father when he was spending a lot of time in the US as South Africa's last apartheid-era foreign minister.

Speaking of impulsive, I didn't realize he fired the top exists for-cause blowing up their golden parachutes:

https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/elon-musk-fired-twi...

That'll be a fun half-decade of lawsuits...

One thing he seems to have estimated is the motivations of other wealthy folk he tries to take (or deny) money from.

Matt Levine has an interesting take on this [0], basically that nothing in that Musk claims of their behaviour meets the specification of "cause" in their employment contracts, and further that the golden parachutes are a good thing in that they prevent the C-suite from being focused on their continuing salary:

"The basic problem with Musk’s efforts to walk away from these severance agreements — beyond the lack of actual arguments — is that if he can stiff these executives then no golden parachute is binding. The point of a golden parachute is that a CEO with a golden parachute will sell his company to a buyer whom he doesn’t like, if that’s what is best for shareholders. If the buyer can stiff the CEO on the parachute payments because they don’t like each other, then no buyer will ever pay severance, and no CEO will ever trust it."

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20221031165639/https://www.bloom...

"And then Elon Musk showed up for his first day of work as Twitter’s chief executive officer — technically its Chief Twit — and said “hey, do you have any other contracts I could violate?”

Oh, this is going to be a fun read.

In response to your quote, I guess he did it as revenge for making him go through with it.

I really don’t want to live in a world in which so much depends on impulsive individuals. Your example sounds like a nightmare. That’s no way to make decisions.

Yeah. It does sound like a nightmare. And I'm glad that, for now at least, those who get to make the decisions are not as impulsive as countless people are online about the matter.

And when it comes to a $44 billon purchase, it sounds like a nightmare to affect it so impulsively.

At least, unlike the nuclear fallout, it's not my money, I guess.

But that's the world we all live in, and have for thousands of years.

If you read the stories of many "successful" CEOs (I'm thinking Jobs here, but there are others) the decisions they'd make often would come out as quite impulsive.

If you dig significantly you might find that they're not as impulsive as they seem, that the person was actually considering many aspects but playing their cards close until cut-off time.

This is true, and so far Elon is doing exactly the thing everyone says you can’t do with a social network. If he succeeds, it will completely change the space. Also interesting change of strategy during an economic downturn.

But I do think one difference at least from where I’m sitting, is usually the response is, that’s crazy, but if it works you’ll be rich!

I’m not even really clear on what the “if it works” is in this situation, I guess if he proves that people are willing to pay $8 per month for a social network?

Sure, but impulses among individuals like Putin, Biden and Xi Jinping have much bigger impact.

And that's why it's so important for world leaders to not act (or appear to act) impulsively! You might say the same is true for business leaders.

It’s also why governments that don’t give Kingly powers to the executive like America’s does might be a good idea.

It's easy to be impulsive and make risky decisions when those decisions aren't actually risky for you. He's the richest person in the world. Even if he made a terrible decision to "bet the farm" and lost 99.5% of his wealth, he'd still be a billionaire and in the top 0.00005% of net worth in the world.

> Forgive me for this analogy but it's in the news: Imagine if NATO just said one day

No, I definitely won't forgive you your 'analogy', because it's sneaking in a highly irresponsible argument for military escalation into a completely unrelated discussion.

Let me help you out: the point of the analogy _is_ to underline how highly irresponsible Elon’s approach is.

I think one could criticize that the analogy hyperbole, but I’m quite amused at the pearl clutching that somehow I’m trying to push for nuclear annihilation. Saying the words three times in a mirror doesn’t make it happen.

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