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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

It's simple, Elon Musk has no clue what he is doing.

Can he code.to save his life? Does he know anything about engineering from Tesla or SpaceX, beyond catchphrases?

All personal accounts I've heard of from people that work there are yes, he does know about engineering and is incredibly smart.

But that doesn't mean you know how to run a social media company, and trying to pivot Twitter's work culture on a dime is going to be chaotic.

FWIW I think he's a toxic asshole, but that doesn't mean he's an idiot.

He might not be an idiot but that doesn't mean he knows how software works either

Smart and idiot might not be mutually exclusive. I've known a lot of smart people who can act idiotic in certain circumstances. Elon could be very smart when it comes to engineering... but idiotic when it comes to running Twitter.

OK, so how do I square that up with a request to document programming prowess with screenshots?

That he doesn't have any other way to look at any code because he doesn't have a Phabricator account

He's unable to receive ASCII text strings over email?

He's not actually trying to document programming prowess with screenshots. They've already fired everyone they want to fire, this is some sort of "welcome to twitter 2.0" ritual

He lied about having a physics degree and he can't code. He knows nothing about engineering.

Everyone who actually worked for him say that he understands all the engineering intricacies. Karpathy said that.

Tom Mueller publicly defended Elon on multiple occasions: https://mobile.twitter.com/lrocket/status/151291923068914892...

Considering that he lashes out at the smallest slight, I'm rather unsurprised that people depending on him for their livelihood sing his praises.

Tom Mueller is a highly respected engineer, and just because what he says doesn't align with your narrative or belief doesn't mean he is singing praises.

Oh by the way, Tom Mueller made that tweet after he left SpaceX.

If I were at Twitter and received this email, I would be providing code and commits focused on business impact. Saliency is scoped to something, and without explanation that 'something' is likely the business. The context is engineering at twitter, not programming. In other words, not silly one liners that are not immediately obvious but instead business critical code that moved the needle -- however bland.

He used to be able to code. He created zip2 (predecessor to MapQuest) practically by himself apparently.

Without a source on that "apparently" I'm going to take that as the output of Musk's usual legend-building apparatus.

The guy has so much capacity to build his own legend (and have others believe it) that people refer to him as the founder of Tesla without even blinking.

He also pissed people off by insisting PayPal runs on Windows instead of Linux. Hey, I have fond memories of coding for the Windows platform for fun, but especially back in the day we kind of scoffed at those who wanted to run mission-critical systems on a Windows server.

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